More Top Universities to Offer Free Online Courses - ABC News: "More top universities outside the United States are joining the rush to offer "massive open online courses" that are broadening access to higher education. Coursera and edX, two leading providers of so-called MOOCs, on Thursday announced major expansions that will roughly double the number of university partners offering free online classes through their websites. Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera said it will add 29 institutions, including 16 outside the U.S. Over the next several months, they will offer about 90 new courses, including some taught in French, Spanish, Italian and Chinese. . . Coursera currently offers 220 courses from 33 institutions and has nearly 2.8 million registered users who have signed up for nearly 10 million courses, Ng said. The new partners include Chinese University of Hong Kong, Technical University of Denmark, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico as well as the universities of Copenhagen, Geneva and Toyko. Cambridge, Mass.-based edX said it's adding six new institutions, including five outside the U.S., which will provide at least 25 courses. EdX, which was launched in May by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently offers 25 courses from six universities and has 700,000 registered students. The new partners are Australian National University, Delft University of Technology, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, McGill University, Rice University and the University of Toronto. Delft University in the Netherlands will be the first edX partner to provide courses as "open content," which means other universities are free to incorporate the materials into their classes, said edX President Anant Agarwal. . . ."
New Guide to Starting Online Schools | Pioneer Institute: " . . . “The mission and student body will determine the appropriate academic content, teachers and technology,” said Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios. “On the practical side, they also help founders create cost estimates.” For “Online Learning 101,” author Bill Donovan interviewed researchers, academics and educators to develop a guide for those seeking to start a school in which students access instructional materials and interact with teachers via the Internet. The paper features a preface, “The Lessons We Learned,” by Julie Young, co-founder of Florida Virtual School, which is the largest and among the highest-quality virtual schools in the country. According to one estimate, 1.5 million students had an online learning experience in 2010, up 50 percent from 2007. There were about 275,000 full-time students in online schools during the 2011-12 school year. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia now have at least one full-time online school operating statewide. Taking at least one online course is now a high school graduation requirement in four states. . . . "
World class: a superschool for the global age - Telegraph: " . . . All 5,000 digital devices in the school are controlled from a room on the top floor nicknamed 'the laptop garage’. Children can take their iPads and laptops there to be mended (pupils are allowed to take their appliances home from the age of nine, and every device will be upgraded by Apple after two years). The school can also locate lost equipment from a GPS tracking system on the wall. 'All the children’s devices are tracked,’ Whittle beams. 'This screen will tell you where a laptop is, whether it’s in the Starbucks on 14th Street or anywhere else in the US. And because the school is run in the “cloud”, the systems didn’t even go down during Hurricane Sandy.’ This all sounds eerily efficient, but how does the school protect its pupils from the dangers of the internet? 'Oh, we can see what’s going on on every iPad,’ Whittle tells me. 'It might sound Big Brother-like,’ he laughingly pre-empts, 'but this is a school. And what we didn’t want to do is turn off the internet, because if you do that you’re turning off this enormous resource.’. . . "
Proposed charter school would offer 'blended learning' | charter, proposed, school - Colorado Springs Gazette, CO: "James Irwin Charter STEM Academy would be a “blended learning” school, where students attend classes two days a week and work online, either at home or in the school’s library, the rest of the time. Courses would be “flipped” so students would learn new content online, then come to class for experiments, dialogue and collaboration."
Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer science professor, spoke Wednesday at the Education School about the future of online learning and ...
www.cavalierdaily.com/.../coursera-founder-discusses-online-l...
