2.11.13 Weekly Reads: Articles Worth Reviewing
Here are some of the articles that caught our eye recently.
Early MOOC Takes A Different Path. (http://www.informationweek.com | Information Week) Advance Learning Interactive Systems Online (ALISON), founded in 2007, focuses on languages, IT skills, project management, accounting, customer service, human resources, health studies and basic business skills. It has a growing presence outside the US.
A More-Radical Online Revolution. (http://www.chronicle.com | Chronicle) “Whatever the discipline, the new online world must find ways to help create new knowledge. Online education cannot run indefinitely, as it does now, on borrowed intellectual capital, disseminating what we already know. “
The End Is Not Nigh for Colleges, (http://www.chronicle.com | Chronicle) a commentary by Robert J. Sternberg in The Chronicle. “Second, students are not merely consumers of higher education; they also actively construct their college careers.”
NMC Horizon Report, 2013 Higher Education Edition (http://www.nmc.org/ | NMC) is now available to download. The NMC Horizon Project is “a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education. Six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over
the next one to five years, as well as key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning.”
Expanding Pathways to MOOC Credit. (http://www.insidehighered.com | Inside Higher Ed) ACE designates five MOOCs as creditworthy, leaving next steps up to the schools to decide how or whether to incorporate others’ MOOCs.
Value Evolution, Not Just Revolution, in Higher Ed. (http://www.chronicle.com | Chronicle) “Lost in the debate is that the MOOC phenomenon is an important evolutionary moment, not a revolutionary moment, for the future of higher ed. … Already the introduction of the massive courses has resulted in efforts to rethink how we deliver classroom instruction.”
MOOCs and Books. (http://byrnesms.blogspot.com | Byrnesms) The simple fact of education is this: it is hard. It is hard for teachers, it is hard for learners. It requires work. It is labor-intensive. There are no short-cuts. No new technologies, no trendy new techniques from self-styled educational innovators ever have or ever will alter those facts. In the end, a MOOC is an information delivery vehicle. So is a book.
Students Still Not Taking to E-Textbooks, New Data Show.
(http://www.digitalbookworld.com | Digital Book World) “While students may not be adopting e-textbooks, they are taking to what higher education publishing insiders are calling “integrated learning systems” (ILS), which are online learning platforms that include course materials, study groups and other interactive and social features.”
Antho-Logic: Information Wants to be Curated. (http://www.insidehighered.com | Inside Higher Ed) Overwhelmed with choice, we have gotten in the habit of curating personally-meaningful digital things. … If a higher court agrees with the publishers that there is no such thing as a fair use of anything that might in some circumstances have been included in a bookstore or copy shop coursepack, or which might someday be exploitable as “custom made-to-order textbooks or other innovative products,” as publishers state in their appeal, then faculty who want students to read selections of books will find it prohibitively expensive and will favor assigning material that’s available for free on the web or articles published in journals already paid for through the library’s licenses.