Security
Morpheus is a microprocessor that randomly changes its architecture to foil attackers: This is a fascinating idea. In a 3-month long trial, 525 attackers were unable to crack it.
Now, says Mazur, the results are in and he’s convinced: online teaching is better. Not in all circumstances, to be sure. But in his applied-physics courses, students showed larger learning gains and felt more supported than students had in in-person classes. In fact, they appear to have learned so much more effectively in this new format that he wonders if it’s “almost unethical,” to return to the classroom this fall.
“I have never been able to offer a course of the quality that I’m offering now,” he says. “I am convinced that there is no way I could do anything close to what I’m doing in person. Online teaching is better than in person.”
One benefit of this setup, says Mazur, is that students go at their own pace. He has thought a lot about how classroom-based work, even when it is student-led, is hostage to the clock and the instructor. Not every group works at the same pace, yet everyone has to wait until others are ready, or rush ahead when they fall behind. When groups set their own pace, it gives them the space to work through problems or get help as needed. The value of self-paced learning is also evident outside of class, says Mazur, who built more asynchronous work into his online course.
“I have never seen students work this hard for my course,” he says. “Never. And so consistently.”
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But he’s so convinced of how valuable this model is that he asked Harvard to allow him to keep teaching online this fall.
A Simple Guide to Four Popular Online Learning Formats— from blog.commlabindia.com by Nameera Sallum With the pandemic making in-person training a remote possibility, organizations relying on classroom training are now looking to online learning. This post discusses various aspects of four popular online learning formats – eLearning, microlearning, virtual classrooms, and social learning.
Leveraging EdTech: brilliant tools for student voice — from global-edtech.com by Cecilia Astolfi Cecilia Astolfi provides three very useful tips for any teachers wishing to promote student voice in the classroom
There are three tools I recommend in order to enhance the ability of students to express their views in a constructive and valuable manner.
5. Create Instagram Stories in PowerPoint Another social media app that has great traction with students is Instagram, specifically the Stories feature that allows you to share images or videos from the day, which are wiped for a fresh set each day.
Imagine doing this in class? Perhaps the students could carry on a story you were studying in class. Maybe they could tell the tale of a comet as it travels through space. The options are huge and it’s easy to do using this PowerPoint template as a starting point.
BBC School Radio Maths is an excellent educational resource we learned from MakeUseOf‘ s list of 10 Cool Math Games for Kids. School Radio Maths offers a wide variety of educational games to help kids develop their math skills. Kids will get to grapple with various numeracy challenges that involves a higher degree of mental skills. The games are entertaining enough to keep pupils motivated and focused on the learning task at hand.
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As a child, did you love math back in the elementary? Now that you are an adult, do you feel awkward with your Mathematic’s skills? Let’s admit it – not everyone is great at Math. Some find it fun, brilliant, stimulating others find it too difficult to comprehend.
However, the stigma associated with math learning is not always true especially knowing that Math is omnipresent and is being used in almost every facet of our life. The purpose of this post is to share with you some of the ways to help you strengthen your Math skills.
The world of Lego is timeless primarily because everyone, regardless of age or background, can build a wide variety of amazing things with the simple component blocks from the classic toymaker.
But now that Snapchat has brought that dynamic to augmented reality via the Rebuild the World Snapchat Lens the possibilities are truly endless.
Korean, one of the popular Asian languages for non-native speakers, is the official language of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).
This is an increasingly important language globally considering South Korea’s powerful economy, geopolitical importance, and growing presence in Asian pop culture; perhaps one reason for garnering a surprising amount of interest in people worldwide to learn the Korean language.
Selling art online is making a comeback. Artists have been selling their work on the Internet but as of late, there’s an increase in online art sales. You can of course build your own website to share your art, run your own marketing and promotional exercise via social media and other channels but you will probably gain more exposure with the following websites . Time to get your beautiful art out there.
Looking for some educational websites to help you with the management of your online (and also face-to-face) classroom teaching? The list below has you covered. It features a collection of some popular web tools you can use to perform a wide variety of educational tasks. These include: creating interactive video lessons, collect formative assessments and provide real-time feedback to students, enhance students learning through the use of digital games and flashcards, create online classes and share assignments and learning resources with students, organize students into appropriate learning groups and many more. Links to these websites are under the visual.
Record, transcribe, clip, and share video from Zoom in real-time. — This Grain tool/resource is from Jeremy Caplan’s Wonder Tools newsletter. Thanks Jeremy for passing this info along!
From DSC: These kinds of tools should make for interesting discussions in online-, hybrid-, and hyflex-based courses…as well as in microlearning-based streams of content perhaps.
AssistiveTouch, a new feature coming to the Apple Watch, will let users operate the device without having to touch the screen or controls. It was designed with people who have upper-body limb differences in mind.
PHOTO: APPLE INC.
Excerpt:
Later this year, Apple Inc. will introduce features that allow users to control an iPad with their eyes, and its smartwatch with gestures like a pinch or a fist clench.
The company announced the moves this week as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 20, an event established in 2011. Other big tech players revealed initiatives and commitments of their own, from automatic podcast transcriptions by Spotify Technology S.A to the updated design of a specific virtual block in Microsoft Corp.’s “Minecraft” to make it more visible to colorblind players.
From DSC: It will be interesting to see — post Covid19 — how vendors and their platforms continue to develop to allow for even greater degrees of web-based collaboration. I recently saw this item re: what Google is doing with their Project Starline. Very interesting indeed. Google is trying to make it so that the other person feels like they are in the same space with you.
. Time will tell what occurs in this space...but one does wonder what this type of technology will do for online-based learning, and/or hybrid/blended learning, and/or hyflex-based learning in the future…?
Learners, educators and policymakers understand that high school completion and education beyond high school are critical to thrive in the workforce. However, until recently an inventory of the number or type of secondary and postsecondary credential opportunities in the United States did not exist. This is the third annual report from Credential Engine that attempts to count all these credentials. The report identifies 967,734 unique credentials in the U.S. in 16 detailed credential categories across four types
of credential providers:
Postsecondary educational institutions—359,713 degrees and certificates
Massive open online course (MOOC) providers—9,390 course completion certificates, micro-credentials, and online degrees from foreign universities
Non-academic providers—549,712 badges, course completion certificates, licenses, certifications, and apprenticeships
Secondary schools—48,919 diplomas from public and private secondary schools
In The Newest Economy: Welcome to the Credential Currency Revolution, Gordon Freedman, NLET’s president, examines the discontinuity between high schools, community colleges, career and technical education, and workforce development programs and their alignment and linkages to high demand jobs and careers. The paper suggests moving beyond the current array of offerings and labor market tools to a marketplace solution using modern technology and data analytics to link credentials (badges, certifications, degrees) to hiring outcomes.
The paper is a collaboration among NLET, Credential Engine, Southern Regional Economic Board (SREB) and GoEducate, Inc. who together are building a Credential Alliance to further the work described in the report.
This school year, kindergarteners learned how to turn on and off their web cameras and mute buttons alongside spelling and reading fundamentals. Separated by distance and screens, kindergarten teachers soon faced the additional challenge of teaching their 5- and 6-year-old students to write on pieces of paper that instructors couldn’t directly see.
So kindergarten teacher Lynn Marie Glick began having her students tilt their computer screens, pointing cameras down to their work, so she could watch as they label drawings of stuffed animals, pets or family members with letters formed by colored pencils, markers and crayons. She pinned the screens of students on Zoom who wanted to share their work with their class.
When it was time to submit their assignments, her students uploaded photos of handwritten work to the online platform Seesaw.
The Coursera Product Innovation session was another conference favorite, as we shared learner stories and offered a glimpse into some of the key innovations we worked on over the past year to support learners, educators, and institutions:
Individual learners now benefit from personalized course recommendations, hands-on projects, improved accessibility options, and AI-powered support to help motivate and encourage them on their learning journey.
Educators and instructors can import videos, quizzes, and other assets to re-use across courses. They can also connect Coursera to their institution’s learning management system and repackage content to create new, stackable credentials such as Specializations and Professional Certificates.
Businesses, governments, and universities can help employees and learners develop in-demand skills to stay competitive in the workplace with smart solutions like SkillSets and Academies, which are designed to offer targeted skills development in every part of an organization.
The instructional studios started with a mobile standing desk, which serves as the command center for instruction. The desk has a room controller, document camera, and an interactive display with an adapter for laptop content sharing. Behind the desk is a whiteboard with a whiteboard camera. In front of the desk, we designed an AV cart that includes a shotgun mic pair, LED light panels, two large displays, one off-lens teleprompter, and PTZ camera.
The studios put the instructor in control of the meeting using a Zoom Rooms controller— allowing them to easily switch between and share multiple types of content simultaneously: main camera, document camera, laptop content, digital annotations, and whiteboard writing.
That’s why today we’re announcing the next phase of our accessibility journey, a new technology-led five-year commitment to create and open doors to bigger opportunities for people with disabilities. This new initiative will bring together every corner of Microsoft’s business with a focus on three priorities: Spurring the development of more accessible technology across our industry and the economy; using this technology to create opportunities for more people with disabilities to enter the workforce; and building a workplace that is more inclusive for people with disabilities.
Accessibility by design Today, we are announcing a variety of new “accessible by design” features and advances in Microsoft 365, enabling more than 200 million people to build, edit and share documents. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies, we aim to make more content accessible and as simple and automatic as spell check is today. For example:
A new background accessibility checker will provide a prompt to fix accessibility issues in content across the core Office apps and Outlook will nudge users to correct accessibility issues.
AI in Microsoft Word will detect and convert to heading styles crucial for blind and low-vision readers.
A new Excel navigation pane designed for screen readers will help people easily discover and navigate objects in a spreadsheet.
We’re expanding Immersive Reader, used by 35 million people every month, to help with the comprehension of PowerPoint slides and notes.
In Teams, high-contrast mode can be used to access shared content using PowerPoint Live which will reduce eye strain and accommodate light sensitivity with Dark Mode in Word.
New LinkedIn features that include auto-captioning for LinkedIn Live broadcasts, captions for enterprise content and dark mode later this year.
More than1 billionpeople around the world live with a disability, and at some point, most of us likely will face some type of temporary, situational or permanent disability. The practical impacts are huge.
Udemy has become one of the best-funded companies in edtech, having raised another $80 million at the end of 2020 bringing its total raised to nearly $300 million. So, what are its plans, and how does it see the market for online courses changing after the pandemic?
Those were some questions we brought to Udemy’s CEO, Gregg Coccari, in a recent interview.
“They become professional at this,” he says. “They have assistants that handle the questions. They work at this every day. They’re always looking for new publishing ideas, more courses, they’re upgrading the courses they have. And so these become very professional online teachers.”
But those millionaires are, by and large, the exception.
But many companies have hatched a postpandemic plan in which employees return to the office for some of the time while mixing in more work from home than before. The appeal of this compromise is clear: Employers hope to give employees the flexibility and focus that come from working at home without sacrificing the in-person connections of the office.
From DSC: There has been — and likely will continue to be — huge pressure and incentives put on companies like Cisco, Zoom, Microsoft, and others that develop the products and platforms to help people collaborate and communicate over a distance. It will be very interesting to see where these (and other) vendors, products, and platforms are 2-3 years from now! How far will we be down the XR-related routes?
How will those new ways of doing things impact telehealth? Telelegal? Virtual courts? Other?
Making VR a Reality in the Classroom — from er.educause.edu by Cat Flynn and Peter Frost Faculty and staff at Southern New Hampshire University piloted virtual reality in an undergraduate psychology course to see if it can be an effective pedagogical tool.
Excerpt:
Meeting the Learning Needs of Gen Z and Beyond
While this study was conducted with current SNHU undergraduates, our team aimed to understand the implications of immersive learning for both today’s students and future learners.
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Given Gen Z’s documented love for gaming and their desire for higher education to equip them with problem-solving and practical skills, VR provides a confluence of experiential learning and engagement.
From DSC: Cost and COVID-19 are major issues here, but this is an interesting article nonetheless.
I think Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Augmented Reality (AR) will play a significant role in the future of how we learn. It may take us some time to get there, but I believe that we will.
