Ridiculous Education Headlines 2013

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

Top 10 Most Ridiculous Education Headlines in Techcrunch


1. How California’s New Online Education Pilot Will End College As We Know It
2. Online Education is Replacing Physical Colleges at a Crazy Fast Pace
3. Why Obama’s Radical Education Plan Could Finally Disrupt Higher Education
4. Does Higher Education Have a Future?
5. Free Massive Online Education Provider, Coursera, Begins To Find A Path To Profits
6. Amazon’s Kindle FreeTime Becomes An Even Better Babysitter, With New Educational Feature That Tells Kids To “Learn First,” Play Later
7. News Corp’s Education Tablet May Be the Bureaucractic Fit Schools Need to Adopt Tech
8. Gibbon Launches A Different Kind Of Education Startup, With User-Generated Learning Playlists For All
9. OMG! Cursive Education on the Chopping Block
10. Codecademy - Best Education Startup


Source: Techcrunch and hackeducation.com

Most Important Educational Technology in the Last 200 Years

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

ecole

Do you agree with D'Arcy Norman?



Giving people access to didactic lectures by a handful of elite professors at a handful of elite institutions is not the most important educational technology in the last 200 years.

Not even close. Sure, it’s good. It’s fantastic that I can have access
to the lectures and resources of some of the biggest and most famous institutions. Awesome.

But the most important ed tech in two centuries? Bull. Shit.

Actually, I know a lot of educators who agree. So what does he think are the important technologies? Personal computer, Internet, software and tools that let students create & explore & collaborate & share. And "Waaaaaay down the list… MOOCs."


An LMS Canvas in the Cloud

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

I read online that 34 Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges had migrated to a cloud-based LMS from their legacy learning management systems. This followed a consortium-wide faculty review process. All of the institutions had been using Angel, which was acquired by Blackboard back in 2009.

I feel like I have spent every year since 2000 in higher education evaluating learning management systems. I am quite tired of it. And I am convinced that a good teacher can teach well using almost any LMS they are given. It's more important that a school use one and stick to it. If that means going open source to avoid takeovers and companies disappearing after a few years, then so be it.

Those colleges are moving to Instructure Canvas, an LMS available in both proprietary and open source editions.

The proprietary version is a cloud-based LMS hosted by Instructure in partnership with Amazon Web Services that includes "premium" features not found in the open source edition. Otherwise, it offers the tools common to almost any learning management systems: discussion, outcomes management, a rubric tool, automated grading, groups, a test generator, chat and video, and mobile tools.

The company is looking to K-12 as well as higher education.

Cloud services (certainly a big buzz topic the past year or two) has advantages: automated provisioning that can bring new servers into play as needed; no dedicated IT resources on campus to maintain the software or to setting up and configuring your own servers.

Of course, for a price, that has always been offered by the big commercial LMS companies that offered hosted services.

Online reviews of Canvas have generally been positive and, according to Instruction, Canvas has been adopted by more than 200 organizations since January 2011.