” Thrun is ditching a university. And not just any university, but Stanford, one of the most liberal and progressive universities in the world! Instead, he’s forging his own path. He told me that he’s not worried about his Udacity courses not being officially accredited because his personal brand replaces the value of a college degree.

This decision is huge.

What’s more is that Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, two of the other Stanford professors who taught online courses this fall, are leaving to start Coursera.

That means that 3 of the 4 professors who taught online courses this fall have left. Instead of relying on the validation of institutions, they are claiming their own authority.

I think this trend will become more common. Professors will leave universities behind and instead teach to the limits of knowledge, not to the limits of the admissions office.” – Dale Stephens, Uncollege.org

Teachers ‘flip’ their lectures, homework to reach more students
The idea is that by working on ‘homework’ in class, teachers and students get more out of their time together. – By ANGIE MASON
Daily Record/Sunday News

http://www.ydr.com/ci_19714230

“When I started teaching introductory physics to undergraduates at Harvard University, I never asked myself how I would educate my students. I did what my teachers had done – I lectured. I thought that was how one learns. Look around anywhere in the world and you’ll find lecture halls filled with students and, at the front, an instructor. This approach to education has not changed since before the Renaissance and the birth of scientific inquiry. Early in my career I received the first hints that something was wrong with teaching in this manner, but I had ignored it. Sometimes it’s hard to face reality. … I discovered that the students were right. My lecturing was ineffective, despite the high evaluations. …The traditional approach to teaching reduces education to a transfer of information. Before the industrial revolution, when books were not yet mass commodities, the lecture method was the only way to transfer information from one generation to the next.” – Dr Eric Mazur, Harvard University

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5910/50.short
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5910/50/DC1

“When I started teaching introductory physics to undergraduates at Harvard University, I never asked myself how I would educate my students. I did what my teachers had done – I lectured. I thought that was how one learns. Look around anywhere in the world and you’ll find lecture halls filled with students and, at the front, an instructor. This approach to education has not changed since before the Renaissance and the birth of scientific inquiry. Early in my career I received the first hints that something was wrong with teaching in this manner, but I had ignored it. Sometimes it’s hard to face reality. … I discovered that the students were right. My lecturing was ineffective, despite the high evaluations. …The traditional approach to teaching reduces education to a transfer of information. Before the industrial revolution, when books were not yet mass commodities, the lecture method was the only way to transfer information from one generation to the next.” – Dr Eric Mazur, Harvard University

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5910/50.short
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5910/50/DC1

“One of the first things [Steve] Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. `I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,’ Jobs later recalled. `People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to has things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.’”

– Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 337.

– Curt (at edwardtufte.com), October 26, 2011

See: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1

“One of the first things [Steve] Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. `I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,’ Jobs later recalled. `People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to has things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.’”

– Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 337.

– Curt (at edwardtufte.com), October 26, 2011

See: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1

According to Liz Dwyer at GOOD/Education:

“According to KQED/Mindshift, the camp will be modeled after the We Teach Science camp Khan co-organized two years ago in Silicon Valley. Far from the ‘flipped classroom‘ model Khan’s popularized, that camp took a hands-on, project-based learning approach to learning science, technology, engineering, and math, and Khan wants his upcoming camp to do the same. ‘The videos are great for learning things at an academic level,’ says Khan. ‘You can learn intuition for what a derivative is and about Newtonian mechanics through the online exercises, but this is another level of learning.’

Indeed, Khan says the kind of learning he wants to see at the camp ‘lets you rethink what the physical experience should be like, what I’d call deeper, higher order type of stuff that most schools don’t touch on right now.’ He hopes that the camp will give students a ‘more visceral, ingrained, intuitive sense of science and analytical thinking about the world around them than even most adults do.’ ” — Liz Dwyer, GOOD/Eduction

Interesting comments on the role of the inverted, or flipped, classroom and the value of project-based learning.

Please see the full post here.

“Khan Academy announced this morning that it has raised $5 million from the O’Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created by Irish engineer and investor Sean O’Sullivan). The money is earmarked for several initiatives: expanding the Khan Academy faculty, creating a content management system so that others can use the program’s learning analytics system, and building an actual brick-and-mortar school, beginning with a summer camp program.” – Audrey Waters, Hack Education

See: http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/11/04/khan-academy-gets-5-million-to-expand-faculty-platform-to-build-a-physical-school

“It was clear that the OU students (and most were mature adults) responded quite differentially to concrete or abstract representations of knowledge, to print and to television for study purposes.”

Regarding his work with the BBC and the Open University:

“It should be noted that the BBC producers did NOT replicate the university lecture by using talking heads, but focused instead on non-linear documentaries that were meant to illustrate the academic principles and ideas in the texts, and concrete examples of abstract concepts through cases, models and animation (see Bates, 1984, for more analysis of the role of TV and radio for teaching).”

Noting the different qualities of media used for instruction, he points out:

“In my research, the concept of ‘the medium is the message’ was beginning to roll out before my eyes, even though I did not connect the dots at the time. Students were learning differently from television. I find that academics still struggle to understand the potential of non-print media for higher education, because higher education has been defined by the concepts of ‘analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering’ which McLuhan argued were the result of print-based representations of knowledge. However, other media offer different ways of representing knowledge that can be as equal or even superior to knowledge represented through print.”

The full article can be found here. It is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in new media, technology and McLuhan in the classroom.

Marshall McLuhan and his relevance to teaching with technology

“Khan Academy has created a generic framework for building exercises. This framework, together with the exercises themselves, can be used completely independently of the Khan Academy application.

The framework exists in two components:

An HTML markup for specifying exercises.
A jQuery plugin for generating a usable, interactive, exercise from the HTML markup.”

See: https://github.com/khan/khan-exercises#readme