A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. Such courses have received a lot of attention during the past four years, and huge amounts of money have been spent in their development. Quoting from Ellen Wexler’s article, MOOCs Are Still Rising, at Least in Numbers (Wexler, 10/19/2015):
My 10/21/2015 Google search of the expression Openly Licensed Educational Resources produced more than 640 thousand results. Openly Licensed Educational Resources (usually referred to as OER) are defined as:
Teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. [Bold added for emphasis.] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_and_Flora_Hewlett_Foundation.
I enjoy browsing the Quora website https://www.quora.com/. A wide variety of questions are posed, answers are submitted, voting occurs to determine the most liked answers, and an answer is posted on the site. Readers can provide responses to the answer. Some of the topic areas covered include Wisdom, Intelligence, Education, and Psychology of Everyday Life.
The following question recently caught my attention:
Parkinson’s disease is devastating to the people who have it, and to their families and other loved ones. However, significant progress is occurring in the treatment of this disease.
Quoting from a Mayo Clinic Staff website (2015):
Imagine you are reading, viewing, or listening to information about some educational research that is relevant to your interests in education. The material seems to you to be both credible and valid. You think to yourself: “That seems reasonable to me.”
Now what? You might think, “They should do something about that.” The they in this case is someone other than yourself. It might be students, teachers, parents, schools, school districts, the state, the country, or the world.
Kindergarten is now well entrenched as a component of precollege education in the United States.
“Since 1977, the percentage of [U.S.] kindergartners enrolled in full-day (in contrast to half-day) programs has nearly tripled, increasing from 28 to 77 percent between 1977 and 2013” (Child Trends Data Bank, n.d.).
The MIT Review is one of my favorite sources of STEM information. This IAE Blog entry is based on an MIT Review article that discusses some of the difficulties encountered by Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist and educator, as he attempted to use computer technology to improve India’s educational system (Bergstein, 4/15/2015). You can learn more about Toyama and his Microsoft-funded research in educational uses of technology by viewing his TEDx-Tokyo Talks (Toyama, 5/15/2010).
Since his 2010 presentation, Toyama has joined the world of academia and devoted his research and teaching efforts to help inspire more research on effective educational uses of computer technology. Toyama is now an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
How do you rate yourself in terms of your general knowledge of science? Compared to other people, do you think you are below average, about average, or above average?
The Pew Research Center developed a list of a dozen multiple-choice science questions and used them with a nationally representative group of 3,278 randomly selected U.S. adults. The adults were surveyed online and by mail between Aug. 11 and Sept. 3, 2014 (Pew Research Center, 2015).
Ann Lathrop, guest author
Information Age Education works to improve the informal and
formal education of people of all ages throughout the world.
Many people working to improve our educational system appear to be backward looking. They fix on measures of success that were deemed worthy in the past, and strive to have our schools perform still better in meeting these measures.
However, the world is changing, and many of these past measures of success are becoming less important for today’s children. Tony Wagner is one of my favorite authors currently writing about needed changes. Quoting from a 2010 IAE Newsletter (Moursund & Sylwester, June, 2010):
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