It’s tricky for schools to keep up with the pace of innovation. Handing every student a tablet or laptop will not magically usher our classrooms into the future. Instead, the future of education will be created by learners themselves.
The very students and learners who are so plugged in outside the classroom — texting, chatting, and using the latest apps — will steer the way towards harnessing technology more effectively. When learners walk into the classroom, they don’t become different people. Their likes and preferences, including applications and interfaces, follow them.
The Landscape of Competency-based Education: Enrollments, Demographics, and Affordability American Enterprise Institute
Competency-based education (CBE) is starting to gain traction with colleges and educators. The American Enterprise Institute released a paper where they explore the landscape of CBE providers.
Still, few researchers have actually taken an in-depth look at the wide range of competency-based education providers. Many questions have emerged around the various ways students can earn credit. Additionally, although the list prices of CBE models appear very cost effective, no one has comprehensively examined the true affordability of CBE programs.
A Bright Idea: Teaching Educators To Be Entrepreneurs Forbes
The National Science Foundation surveyed the small businesses that had won its innovation research grants to see how they were progressing. Of those companies that failed, the most common reason was that companies made products no one wanted.
Perhaps similar reasons exist when education innovations don’t get widely disseminated? Can educators be taught to be entrepreneurs? That is the question the new National Science Foundation I-Corps L program is asking.
Three False Dichotomies in Blended Learning Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation
With the rise of blended learning, skeptics are quick to point out why students may miss out if some of their learning happens in front of a computer. Indeed, blended-learning implementation is not always synonymous with its potential benefits.
Debates about the merits of these models, though, can fall into a trap of erecting false dichotomies that simply don’t have to pose tradeoffs to schools considering going blended.
EdX CEO Lays Out Disruptive Vision For Higher Ed Here and Now
EdX is the largest non-profit MOOC provider in the country, and its CEO Anant Agarwal believes MOOCs can be a disruptive force for good in higher education.
“I talk about unbundling in time, function and content [...] Why should it be the case that a professor who teaches a course writes a textbook, teaches a course, writes the exams, the whole thing. Instead, a blended course is an unbundled course, where you might use a MOOC from a professor from another university as a new age textbook [...] Why can’t we increase that? Why is it that every student has to learn in college when they are 18? Why four years? How about unbundling time?" said Agarwal.
The Other 21st Century Skills: Educator Self-Assessment User Generated Education
I’ve posted about The Other 21st Skills and Attributes. This post provides links and resources about these skills as well as an educator self-assessment. This assessment contains questions to assist the educator in evaluating if and how s/he is facilitating these skills and attributes in the learning environment.
Keywords: Educational Technology, Ed Tech, Higher Ed
Humanities Open Book: Unlocking Great Books National Endowment for the Humanities
Over the past 100 years, tens of thousands of academic books have been published in the humanities. But the majority of these books are currently out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the public.
The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to “unlock” these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or mobile phones at no charge.
The Rise of the Medical Humanities The Times Higher Education
Recent research that claims to show that reading novels promotes empathy would be an example of literature’s utility, particularly for medical students. There’s money in medicine and not so much in the humanities.
This is not new. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates claimed that “wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity”. What is new is the bringing of writing and the arts more broadly into a formal, institutional relationship with medicine. So what does mainstream medicine think about this?
Associate Dean of What? The Chronicle of Higher Education
The School of Social and Clinical Medicine at the University of Bristol is hiring a new “associate dean of eureka moments.” This is a real job, not a satire. What’s going on here?
Too often, academic administrators and leaders take outmoded or inappropriate ideas from the business world and casually apply them to our institutions. But language matters and these terms cannot just be applied casually.
Tecnológico de Monterrey's Observatory of Educational Innovation: We identify and analyze the educational innovation trends that are shaping the future of learning and education.
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