Category: Top News

WordPress’ online economy is really big. It accounts for 20.8 percent of all websites on the Internet.

The graphic below, created by WhoIsHostingThis.com,  details interesting facts, such as top-selling themes and designers. Some of these themes have generated over a million dollars in revenue!

What about the idea of integrating content on a LMS?

This is what Blackboard and Discovery Education are doing.

Discovery’s Higher Ed offerings will be available through Blackboard’s learning management system, allowing faculty to search, preview, select and embed 90,000 learning resources directly into their courses. The emphasis is especially on content –videos, images, audio learning guides and writing prompts– for the 23 most enrolled higher ed courses.

Many students prefer to obtain their degree online. However, finding the best fit in the U.S. can difficult.

That’s where Ranku comes in. The site has partnered with public, private and state universities, to create a comparison shopping site for online degrees.

In my view this is a very useful website.

http://youtu.be/C2ducqPzESQ

The edX community celebrated on May 15th its two year anniversary.

This video can give you an idea.

People who participate in face-to-face-meet-ups complete their courses at significantly higher rates than the typical MOOC students.

In the Summer, the New York Public Library, following its public-serivce mission, and in partnership with Coursera, plans to organize at least half-dozen of free meet-ups in which students taking MOOCs can gather and discuss the courses with help from trained facilitators.

Coursera.com, the leading MOOC platform, plans to set up eight similar “learning hubs” in a number of locations.

In these sort of physical classrooms where students receive a more hands-on teaching approach, completion rates might surpass 30%, compared to 6.8% for all courses merely offered by Coursera.

On September, as part of Google’s Apps for Education lineup of products, the giant search engine will release Classroom— an education platform and app for teacher-student communication.

• It will use Docs, Drive and Gmail to create and collect assignments.
• It will create Drive folders for each assignment and for each student.
• It will let teachers make announcements, ask questions and field student responses in real time.

In other words, this free LMS will also provide:

• Assignments;
• Grading;
• Real-time questions and feedback on student work;
• Announcements;
• Commenting; and
• Homework collection and organization.

In a way, many folks are already using that process. Google is now basically streamlining this process.

So far, Google is keeping Classroom invite-only. First group of pilot testers will start in June.

http://youtu.be/zFrOUkp_gFo

There is a need for quality and unique learning pedagogy. But what are the best and next practices?

In order to seek answers, this week NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering organized a series of discussions. We had a great conversation about this topic at Poly’s Pfizer Auditorium, in Brooklyn, New York.

The video above can give you an idea.

The first session’s streaming video is here. Thoughts were shared through this Twitter account via #NYUonline.

(Below, Professor Peter Voltz during his keynote).

Google has announced this week in an online statement that it had permanently removed all ads from its Apps for Education, including its Gmail service. The search giant will no longer collect or use student data.

The change comes as Google is facing growing scrutiny over how it collects and analyzes data for advertising, particularly among students.

About 40 percent of nonprofit colleges use Google for institutional email.

Udacity, one of the big three MOOC providers, will no longer give learners free, “non-verified” certificates.

People will still be able to view Udacity’s online course materials without paying. However, those who want a credential will be charged.

Lately Udacity has been designing courses at a cost of $150 per month that include contact with human coaches, project-based assignments, and job-placement services.