June 29, 2012
Bruno: It's OK When Online Courses Are Traditional
Paul Bruno,
This Week in Education, June 29, 2012.
Dan Butin offers a criticism of the (commercial mass-market) MOOCs. If MIT had done the job right, "MIT would have solved one of the truly difficult issues of higher education—the interlinkage of quality, accessibility, and cost—by giving any student from anywhere the chance to get any set of baseline knowledge and skills they need." But Paul Bruno isn't too concerned. "I haven't actually seen much research indicating that lectures are especially ineffective for learning. Indeed, some researchers have even found that 'traditional lecture style teaching is associated with significantly higher student achievement' compared to many alternatives," he writes. "Nor do I agree with Butin that it is "sad" that "much of teaching...is highly prescribed and structured".
How Google Pulled Off Their Live Video Skydiving With Glasses Demo
John Orlin,
TechCrunch, June 29, 2012.
We've all gone through the tech demo that goes wrong. So we can appreciate the special courage it took to do a tech demo that involved jumping out of an airplane streaming live video. Best. Live. Demo. Ever. Here's the video.
Welcome to The New Udemy!
Eren Bali,
Udemy, June 29, 2012.
Udemy has released an upgrade, it's first major release since launching. It has many more courses - it says its library is going by 100 courses a month - and so is also offering "personalized course discovery". It also has progress tracking and "full screen UI...easy transitions between lectures, a powerful Quora style question & answer feature, an extras section with additional lecture materials, time tagged note taking, and a course dashboard with all details to capture your experience." I see Udemy as discoverying what a lot of the early LMSs discovered, and as time goes by it looks more and more like (say) the original hosted version of Blackboard.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Personalization, Blackboard Inc., Experience]
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