How a 574-year-old school is preparing for a world without classrooms

What people think of when they think of Eton. Reuters/ Eddie Keogh

What does a nearly six-century-old private school that charges $54,000 a year in tuition do when confronted with start-ups with bright ideas about how education should work? If you’re Eton College, alma mater to much of the British establishment including the serving prime minister and the mayor of London, you work with them. 

Along with Oxford University’s Said Business School, Eton College—a high school for boys between the ages of 13 and 18—has partnered with Emerge Venture Lab, a London-based accelerator, to support educational technology, or “edtech,” start-ups. The first cohort of six start-ups will start the program in London with a party on Jan. 17. Eton will not provide financial support or take equity (though it does not rule that out), but its teachers will help guide the start-ups in the program and may also try the new products with their students. “It’s quite easy for the technology to dominate and the way we’re interested in getting involved is to make sure there is a pedagogical influence as well,” Eton’s Serena Hedley-Dent told Quartz.

Behind this ancient institution’s embrace of the modern is an intense awareness that things are about to change, and dramatically. “Nobody knows for sure where this business is going to be in five to ten years’ time. It would be very foolish of us to bury our heads in the sand and assume that education in schools will carry on in the traditional way,” says Percy Harrison, head of information technology at Eton and executive director of the newly-formed Eton Online Ventures.

Even the oldest institutions must serve modern needs. Eton College

Two trends are driving the change.

1. The first is that old culprit—mobile devices such as tablets. If students are used to interacting with information on tablets at home, it seems strange to them to not use one at school. But schools and universities need to figure out how best to use them. 
2. The second trend is more structural: While education is often seen as the process of teaching children facts and skills, another important aspect is learning to grow up and dealing with life’s ups and downs. 

Harrison says that is the most important aspect of what Eton does, but one that existing education technology companies have not focused on. That is the area the school is interested in promoting.

Eton would not reveal the names or nature of the start-ups the program has accepted in advance of a formal announcement on Jan. 17, but Harrison says the products he is most interested in are those that help people work in groups. “The MOOC [online courses] world for example can be a rather lonely one. And if you get stuck how do you get unstuck? So it’s those kinds of features we’re really looking for,” he says.

Education technology is still very much in its infancy, as anybody who has experienced some of the widely-used platforms such as Blackboard can tell you. But it is a rising sector. Mendeley, a London start-up for academic collaboration, was bought last year for £65 million ($100 million) by science and academic publisher Reed Elsevier. Other areas of focus are learning analytics, which give educators the tools to monitor student performance and, the idea is, predict which ones are lagging behind or likely to fail. The way education technology is advancing, however, suggests no reason to believe that the social aspects of education and the skill-acquiring aspects of education need to be in the same place. That is why, says Harrison, “it’s important to us that if technology is going to play a bigger part, both in the classroom or indeed in replacing the classroom, [that it] drives people towards a good teaching style rather than a bad one.”

ORIGINAL: QZ

By Leo Mirani @lmirani 

January 16, 2014

Redefining Blended Learning

In over a year of writing about blended learning—largely defined as using an online delivery of content to augment face-to-face instruction—I’ve heard the same, tired criticism from too many well-meaning critics. They associate the approach with 

• all parties needing to master overly intricate programming and Web 2.0 skills, 
• cheapening the traditional classroom environment and t
• he sacred student-teacher relationship.

Certainly, an advanced familiarity with all things technical comes in handy with blended learning. But set aside the 

• most engaging screencasts, 
• inspiring flipped classroom models, and 
• nifty online teaching and assessment tools. 

At its core, blended learning enhances and promotes entrepreneurship and risk-taking, while giving students the skills they need to succeed in an increasingly flat, competitive, and digital 21st century. That’s it. It doesn’t really matter how “tech savvy” you are, as long as you feel inspired to rethink how you approach teaching.

With the Internet at my students’ fingertips—with smartphones, quite literally—I’m not the only or even the best source of knowledge. What I do possess, though, and what no computer could ever replicate, is a deep passion for my subjects. I’m excited and energetic about history and journalism, and I do whatever I can to infect my students with a similar love of learning and discovery. To the best of my ability, I allow and encourage self-directed learning (which is a large component of blended learning), and I don’t penalize failure harshly, so long as I see a clear passion for improvement.

How else do I define blended learning, and how do I employ it in my classroom? Here are five approaches that every teacher should consider.

1. A large component of blended learning is self-directed learning. Whenever I assign a project or an essay, I allow students to propose their own topics. Too often, students are dependent on adults for guidance and direction. More often, we need to allow and encourage students to make their own decisions, even if that sometimes means seeing the consequences of their actions. After all, we learn equally from success and failure. At home and during class, my students explore online resources to inform their understanding. As challenging as it sometimes is, I refrain from offering immediate answers and solutions. If students can use the Internet to figure something out for themselves, they do. I might look like the bad guy, but I know it’s for their development.
2. Along these lines, I also coach and encourage students to think about what constitutes “credible information,” and where to find it online. This is a crucial skill for students to master, no matter what profession they ultimately pursue. At home, students use the Internet to learn about their own subjects, whether from videos, articles, or other media. This is blended learning, but it’s also self-directed learning. As online learning tools advance, teachers will become increasingly responsible for guiding students to appropriate sources, rather than teaching material directly themselves.
3. As I see it, a crucial part of the blended classroom environment includes teachers and students working and learning together. In my experience, this often involves using online tools. Three years ago, I worked with a former student to launch The Falconer, an online student news site. I can’t recount how many hours he and I spent watching “how-to” YouTube videos, learning not only about coding and maintaining a website, but also about recording podcasts, editing video, and streaming live events.
4. Blended learning also calls for rethinking how we assess, with or without online tools. In the near future, competency-based learning, where students progress at their own pace to master a predetermined set of skills, will lead the way. Grades will become less and less significant, eventually vanishing completely. Higher education is already making this a reality. At College for America at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), students demonstrate mastery of 120 “competencies” rather than earn class credit. “Students show their mastery by completing tasks,” SNHU President Paul J. LeBlanc told me last May. “These are real-world hypotheticals. They’re not exams, they’re not the kind of isolated assignments you might get in a college class. They’re meant to be hypothetical, which mimic more closely how that competency is used in the real world.” I give grades because I have to, but in most cases, I allow students an infinite number of retakes.
5. Similarly, blended learning also calls for rethinking how we teach, with or without online tools. Students want to see the relevance in what they learn, and that’s hard to accomplish by studying subjects in isolation. On that front, I admit that my own teaching needs improvement. I should do more to reach out to teachers in other fields who are interested in having students work on a shared project. After all, students might be told that learning about the Civil War or the quadratic formula is important, but unless they can put such knowledge to practical use, they will eventually forget it. But if students can see that a concept has multiple applications, especially to real-world scenarios, they will be much much likely to remember.

What are your thoughts on blended learning, and how it’s defined? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

ORIGINAL: Spin Edu

IBM reveals its top five innovation predictions for the next five years

IBM. IBM director of education transformation Chalapathy Neti.

IBM revealed its predictions for five big innovations that will change our lives within five years.

IBM. Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at IBM.

The IBM 5 in 5 is the eighth year in a row that IBM has made predictions about technology, and this year’s prognostications are sure to get people talking. We discussed them with Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at IBM, and he told us that the goal of the predictions is to better marshal the company’s resources in order to make them come true.

“We try to get a sense of where the world is going because that focuses where we put our efforts,” Meyerson said. “The harder part is nailing down what you want to focus on. Unless you stick your neck out and say this is where the world is going, it’s hard to you can turn around and say you will get there first. These are seminal shifts. We want to be there, enabling them.”

In a nutshell, IBM says:

• The classroom will learn you.
• Buying local will beat online.
• Doctors will use your DNA to keep you well.
• A digital guardian will protect you online.
• The city will help you live in it.

Meyerson said that this year’s ideas are based on the fact that everything will learn. Machines will learn about us, reason, and engage in a much more natural and personalized way. The innovations are being enabled by cloud computing, big data analytics, and adaptive learning technologies. IBM believes the technologies will be developed with the appropriate safeguards for privacy and security, but each of these predictions raises privacy and security issues.

As computers get smarter and more compact, they will be built into more devices that help us do things when we need them done. IBM believes that these breakthroughs in computing will amplify our human abilities. The company came up with the predictions by querying its 220,000 technical people in a bottoms-up fashion and tapping the leadership of its vast research labs in a top-down effort.

Here’s some more detailed description and analysis on the predictions.

IBM. In five years, the classroom will learn you.

1). The classroom will learn you. Globally, two out of three adults haven’t gotten the equivalent of a high school education. But IBM believes the classrooms of the future will give educators the tools to learn about every student, providing them with a tailored curriculum from kindergarten to high school.

“Your teacher spends time getting to know you every year,” Meyerson said. “What if they already knew everything about how you learn?”

In the next five years, IBM believes teachers will use “longitudinal data” such as test scores, attendance, student behavior on electronic learning platforms — and not just the results of aptitude tests. Sophisticated analytics delivered over the cloud will help teachers make decisions about which students are at risk, their roadblocks, and the way to help them. IBM is working on a research project with the Gwinnett County Public Schools, the 14th largest school district in the U.S. in New York State with 170,000 students. The goal is to increase the district’s graduation rate. And after a $10 billion investment in analytics, IBM believes it can harness big data to help students out.

“You’ll be able to pick up problems like dyslexia instantly,” Meyerson said. “If a child has extraordinary abilities, they can be recognized. With 30 kids in a class, a teacher cannot do it themselves. This doesn’t replace them. It allows them to be far more effective. Right now, the experience in a big box store doesn’t resemble this, but it will get there.”

IBM. In  years, buying local will beat online as you get online data at your fingertips in the store.

2. Buying local will beat online. Online sales topped $1 trillion worldwide last year, while many physical retailers have gone out of business as they fail to compete on price with the likes of Amazon.com. But innovations for physical stores will make buying local turn out better. Retailers will use the immediacy of the store and proximity to customers to create experiences that can’t be replicated by online-only retail. The innovations will bring the power of the web right to where the shopper can touch it. Retailers could rely on artificial intelligence akin to IBM’s Watson, which played Jeopardy better than many human competitors. The web can make sales associates smarter, while augmented reality can deliver more information to the store shelves. With these technologies, stores will be able to anticipate what a shopper most wants and needs. And they won’t have to wait two days for shipping.

“The store will ask if you would like to see a certain camera and have a salesperson meet you in a certain aisle where it is located,” Meyerson said. “The ability to do this painlessly, without the normal hassle of trying to find help, is very powerful.”

This technology will get so good that online retailers are likely to set up retail showrooms to help their own sales.

“It has been physical against online,” Meyerson said. “But in this case, it is combining them. What that enables you to do is that mom-and-pop stores can offer the same services as the big online retailers. The tech they have to serve you is as good as anything in online shopping. It is an interesting evolution but it is coming.”

IBM. In five years, doctors will routinely use your DNA to keep you well.

3. Doctors will use your DNA to keep you well. Global cancer rates are expected to jump by 75 percent by 2030. IBM wants computers to help doctors understand how to a tumor affects a patient down to their DNA. They could then figure out what medications will best work against the cancer, and fulfill it with a personalized cancer treatment plan. The hope is that genomic insights will reduce the time it takes to find a treatment down from weeks to minutes.

“The ability to correlate a person’s DNA against the results of treatment with a certain protocol could be a huge breakthrough,” Meyerson said. “You’ll be able to look at your DNA and find out” if there are magic bullet treatments that will address your particular ailment.

IBM. In five years, a digital guardian will protect you online.

4. A digital guardian will protect you online. We have multiple passwords, identifications, and devices than ever before. But security across them is highly fragmented. In 2012, there were 12 million victims of identity fraud in the U.S. In five years, IBM envisions a digital guardian that will become trained to focus on the people and items it is entrusted with. This smart guardian will sort through contextual, situational and historical data to verify a person’s identity on different devices. The guardian can learn about a user and make an inference about behavior that is out of the norm and may be the result of someone stealing that person’s identity. With 360 degrees of data about someone, it will be much harder to steal an identity.

“In this case, you don’t look for the signature of an attack,” Meyerson said. “It looks at your behavior with a device and spots something anomalous. It screams when there is something out of the norm.”

IBM. In five years, the city will help you live in it.

5. The city will help you live in it. IBM says that, by 2030, the towns and cities of the developing world will make up 80 percent of urban humanity and by 2050, seven out of every 10 people will be a city dweller. To deal with that growth, the only way cities can manage is to have automation, where smarter cities can understand in real-time how billions of events occur as computers learn to understand what people need, what they like, what they do, and how they move from place to place.

IBM predicts that cities will digest information freely provided by citizens to place resources where they are needed. Mobile devices and social engagement will help citizens strike up a conversation with their city leaders. Such a concept is already in motion in Brazil, where IBM researchers are working with a crowdsourcing tool that allows users to report accessibility problems, via their mobile phones, to help people with disabilities better navigate urban streets.

Of course, as in the upcoming video game Watch Dogs from Ubisoft, a bad guy could hack into the city and use its monitoring systems in nefarious ways. But Meyerson said, “I’d rather have the city linked. Then I can protect it. You have an agent that looks over the city. If some wise guy wants to make the sewage pumps run backwards, the system will shut that down.”

The advantage of the ultra-connected city is that feedback is instantaneous and the city government can be much more responsive.

ORIGINAL: Venture Beat, IBM

Dean Takahashi

December 16, 2013 10:30 PM 

One brilliant idea... HIGH-QUALITY, FREE, OPEN TEXTS AND RESOURCES.

ORIGINAL: OpenStaxCollege

One brilliant idea... HIGH-QUALITY, FREE, OPEN TEXTS AND RESOURCES.

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Education is priceless, but who can afford it? In just a few months, OpenStax College's free and openly licensed textbooks have already had a huge impact on students. You can make a difference for your students today. Adopt. Adapt. Recommend.

Revolución educativa con sello colombiano

ORIGINAL: El Espectador
Por Marcela Díaz Sandoval

2013 Agosto 02

Más de 15 millones de personas han aprendido con TareasPlus.com, el portal que suma 80.000 visitantes al día y está en el top 20 de aplicaciones más descargadas.

Hernán Jaramillo y Roberto Cuartas son dos paisas de esos que llevan en las venas el éxito, en la mente el emprendimiento y que saben que a la cima se llega de la mano con la perseverancia. Ingenieros industriales de la Escuela de Ingeniería de Antioquia y ahora creadores de TareasPlus.com, el portal para jóvenes y adultos que está revolucionando la educación en línea de América Latina.

Por ahí dicen que de la necesidad nacen los emprendedores. Y sí, la frase toma vida en esta historia. Bajo esta premisa creció el proyecto hace 14 años en un barrio de Medellín, cuando los entonces estudiantes de quinto semestre buscaban alternativas para generar dinero extra y empezaron a hacer tutorías de matemáticas presenciales cobrando $7.000 por hora.

La amistad creció de la mano con el proyecto. “Tenía una red de estudiantes y en ciertas ocasiones, cuando no podía cumplir la cuota de demanda, lo que hacía era subcontratarlo. Ahí nació la amistad”, asegura Hernán, el socio fundador. Y fue en esa rutina temprana que les surgió una idea para que el negocio entrara en una nueva fase: “Nos dimos cuenta de que al hacer estas tutorías teníamos la posibilidad de resolver uno de los problemas más grandes de educación. La clave consistía en no restringir el tiempo en las explicaciones que dábamos, pero para lograrlo necesitábamos de tecnología”.

En esencia, TareasPlus.com pertenece al Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), las plataformas de cursos en línea diseñadas para que cualquier persona en el mundo pueda acceder a ellas a través de internet. Un fenómeno que surgió en el año 2007 y cuya filosofía es que el conocimiento traspase las fronteras.

La historia de TareasPlus.com se resume en un tablero que deja ver los tachones del ensayo y el error. Relatos, diseños y cálculos hacen parte del proyecto que nació en 1999 y que tomó vuelo hace dos años rumbo a California: “Duramos dos o tres años desde que empezamos y lo dejamos en el olvido. A pesar de que tuvimos apoyo en Colombia, las condiciones no eran propicias”, dice Hernán desde California, Estados Unidos, y en su voz entrecortada puede sentirse que echa de menos el país: “Siempre estábamos buscando este sueño y un día, con mi socio, reunimos los ahorros y nos fuimos para Silicon Valley”. Sueño que ya es realidad. TareasPlus.com tiene su equipo de desarrollo en Medellín, pero la compañía está instalada en San Francisco.

“Siempre había tenido claro que era más fácil conseguir recursos en Silicon Valley para una idea de estas características. Porque a los inversionistas de acá no hay que evangelizarlos. Fue más sencillo conseguir aquí los US$2 millones que necesitábamos”, asegura Hernán Jaramillo. Él mismo reconoce que el entorno lo ha llevado a creerse el cuento de la oportunidad: “Ahí es donde uno tiene que sacarla del estadio. Uno sale a la calle y empieza a ver que los otros emprendedores son niños de 18 años”. Después de 115 intentos fallidos, la presentación del proyecto fue aprobada en la zona sur de San Francisco.
TareasPlus.com es hoy la respuesta a uno de los problemas más grandes de educación: el tiempo limitado para aprender. La comunidad cuenta con más de 7.000 lecciones o tutoriales y ha entregado lo equivalente a cien años continuos de clases. “Roberto, mi socio, agarró su tableta y empezó a crear tutoriales de cinco y siete minutos donde se explica una materia completa como cálculo diferencial; es uno de los matemáticos más interesantes que yo he conocido en mi vida”, reconoce Hernán.

El portal comenzó con asesorías en matemáticas y ciencias, pero ahora están incursionando con negocios y tecnología. Todos los cursos y materias van ligados al mundo de los números. La idea de los jóvenes colombianos ha dado pasos agigantados en el mercado virtual y el panorama actual de TareasPlus.com se muestra así: más de 15 millones de personas han aprendido con ellos; las visitas diarias oscilan entre 80.000 y 100.000. Del total, el 30% corresponde a Colombia, y le siguen México, Perú, Chile y España. Tienen repercusión en 23 países hispanoparlantes y reciben visitas, incluso, de Brasil (aunque los cursos están en español).

Y por si fuera poco, su aplicación para ipad fue aprobada hace ocho días. “Hemos tenido resultados muy interesantes. Acompañamos a los estudiantes desde cualquier lugar”, asegura. Aunque el futuro es impredecible, ellos ya tienen en mente lo que quieren alcanzar en unos años: “La idea es que la persona que quiera obtener un título profesional vea el portal como destino. Nos queremos convertir en el verdadero Amazon del conocimiento. Lo haremos primero en español, después en portugués y, posiblemente en, inglés”.


 | elespectador.com

Introducing a List of 50 Free Courses Granting Certificates from Great Universities

ORIGINAL: Open Culture

October 15th, 2012

Earlier this year we began telling you about a potential revolution in education — the birth of MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. As explained above, these courses let students, thousands at a time, take courses from great universities for free online. What’s more, most of these courses offer students a credential — something like a certificate of completion — if they master the material covered in the class. Some of the MOOC providers are well known: 

• Coursera, 
• Udacity, and 
• edX. Others, like
• Class2Go, 
• Google Course Builder and 
• Venture Lab, are just emerging. 

But, together, they’re producing courses at breakneck speed, and we thought it was time to start organizing a list for you.

Today, we’re rolling out a list of 50 Free Courses Granting Certificates from Great Universities. The list organizes courses chronologically by start date, and it indicates the kind of credential the courses offer — for example,

• Certificates of Completion, 
• Statements of Accomplishment, or 
• Certificates of Mastery. 

The list, which happens to include another 25 courses not bearing certificates, will be regularly updated. You can expect it to grow rapidly, and you can always access it by clicking Certificate Courses in the top navigation of our web site. Below we have listed a number of online courses starting this week:

• Finance - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (10 weeks)
• Introduction to Computer Science - Harvard on edX – October 15 (24 weeks)
• Startup Boards: Advanced Entrepreneurship - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Designing a New Learning Environment - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Technology Entrepreneurship - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Experimental Genome Science - Duke on Coursera – October 15 (12 weeks)
• A Crash Course on Creativity - Stanford on Venture Lab - October 17 (10 weeks)

Get the full list here. It includes 75 Massive Open Courses in total.

UC Berkeley joins edX

ORIGINAL: MIT News

July 24, 2012

UC Berkeley joins Harvard and MIT not-for-profit online-learning collaborative; edX broadens free course offerings into public health, computer science and solid-state chemistry; opens registration

The following is adapted from a press release issued today by edX. More information on fall course registration, as well as FAQs, can be found on the edX website. 

EdX, the online-learning initiative founded by Harvard University and MIT and launched in May, announced today the addition of the University of California, Berkeley to its platform. UC Berkeley, ranked No. 1 among public universities in the United States in 2012 by US News & World Report, will collaborate with edX to expand the group of participating “X Universities” — universities offering their courses on the edX platform. 

Through edX, the “X Universities” will provide interactive education wherever there is access to the Internet and will enhance teaching and learning through research about how students learn, and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. EdX plans to add other “X Universities” from around the world to the edX platform in the coming months. 

UC Berkeley will offer two courses on edX this fall, and the university will also serve as the inaugural chair of the to-be-formed “X University” Consortium.

Robert J. Birgeneau, the chancellor of UC Berkeley, announced: “We are committed to excellence in online education with the dual goals of distributing higher education more broadly and enriching the quality of campus-based education. We share the vision of MIT and Harvard leadership and believe that collaborating with the not-for-profit model of edX is the best way to do this. Fiat Lux.”

Meanwhile, edX announced two new courses each from HarvardX and MITx to be launched on edX this fall, along with MITx’s 6.002x Circuits & Electronics. All of the courses will be hosted from edX’s website, www.edx.org. 

MIT launched its MITx online-learning initiative in December 2011, with 6.002x as its prototype course, and more than 150,000 students worldwide enrolled. EdX was announced by Harvard and MIT in May, with each university committing to contribute $30 million toward the online partnership.

“We are very excited that UC Berkeley is joining us in this effort,” said Anant Agarwal, president of edX. “EdX is about revolutionizing learning, and we have received a tremendous outpouring of excitement and interest from universities around the world. UC Berkeley is an extraordinary public institution known not only for its academic excellence but also for its innovativeness. With this collaboration, edX is now positioned to improve education more rapidly, both online and on-campus worldwide.”

“From the outset, we have imagined edX as a platform to be shared with other educational institutions,” said MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “Berkeley's decision to join the effort is great news: MIT is already seeing the benefits of its collaboration with Harvard, and we look forward to working with our remarkable colleagues at Berkeley as we explore the future of online education. Together, we are sure to learn much about how to enrich residential education even as we reach new learners far from our campuses.”

In addition to the funding commitments by Harvard and MIT, edX has already garnered outside financial support, including two individual leadership gifts. MIT alumnus Philippe Laffont, founder and chief investment officer of Coatue Management, LLC, has made a gift to support MITx in honor of MIT Professor Stephen A. Ward, Laffont’s thesis advisor at MIT. Harvard alumnus Jonathan Grayer, former chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc. and co-founder of Weld North LLC, has made a gift in support of HarvardX. 

Foundation support has also begun to flow in. Earlier in the summer, MIT received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Grant funds will go toward developing an introduction to computer science course on the edX platform and partnering with a postsecondary institution that targets low-income young adults to offer this introductory course in a “flipped classroom” setting, where students watch course videos at home and work together in the classroom. 

“Interest from other institutions in collaborating with edX has been enormous from the outset and we are delighted that the partnership announced today by Berkeley has come together so quickly,” said Harvard President Drew Faust. “Since the beginning, our goal has been to broaden edX offerings by partnering with other universities who are equally committed to both expanding access to education and improving research about teaching and learning. Today’s announcement is an important step in that direction.”

UC Berkeley will bring significant, new, open-source technology to the edX platform. Developers from UC Berkeley are working directly with the edX team to integrate the technology. 

EdX will release its learning platform as open-source software so that anyone around the world can adopt and improve this shared tool. Timing of the release has not yet been determined. 

The classes to be offered on edX this fall are: 

HarvardX — “Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical and Public Health Research” is a course in Biostatistics and Epidemiology focused on teaching a diversity of health care practitioners and other students from around the world how to design rigorous clinical and public health studies and analyze complex health data, thereby furthering the school’s mission of improving global health. The course is taught by Professors E. Francis Cook and Marcello Pagano. Dr. Cook is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and at the Harvard Medical School and he has won citations for Excellence in Teaching from the Harvard School of Public Health on four occasions. Dr. Pagano obtained a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and has spent the last 35 years on the faculty at HSPH teaching biostatistics and advising students.

HarvardX — “Computer Science 50” (CS 50) is Harvard College’s introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science and the art of programming for majors and non-majors alike. An entry-level course, CS50 teaches students how to think algorithmically and solve problems efficiently. Topics include abstraction, data structures, memory management and security. Languages include C, PHP and JavaScript. The course is designed for students with or without prior programming experience. As of Fall 2011, CS50 was Harvard College's third-largest course. It is taught by Harvard Senior Lecturer David J. Malan. He received his A.B., S.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard in 1999, 2004 and 2007, respectively.

MITx — “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming” provides an understanding of computational approaches to scientific problem solving for students with little or no prior programming experience. It is based on the most popular course on MIT’s OpenCourseWare platform and provides a tour of the major features of the Python programming language and object-oriented programming, algorithmic design and analysis and computational approaches to generating and understanding data, with examples drawn largely from the sciences and social sciences. The principal instructors for the course are John Guttag, W. Eric Grimson, and Chris Terman. John Guttag is the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT, and currently heads the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Data-driven Medical Research Group. Christopher J. Terman has taught computer science courses in the EECS department for many years; his research has been in the areas of programming languages, compilers, computer-aided design tools and educational technologies. W. Eric Grimson is the Bernard Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering and Chancellor of MIT.

MITx — “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry” is a first-year college course where chemical principles are explained by examination of the properties of materials. The electronic structure and chemical bonding of materials is related to applications and engineering systems throughout the course. The on-campus version of the course has been taught for more than 40 years and is one of the largest classes at MIT. The instructor for the course is MIT Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Michael J. Cima. Cima is author or co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications and 45 patents.

MITx — “Circuits and Electronics” is an introductory undergraduate electrical engineering course taught by visiting MIT Associate Professor Khurram K. Afridi and developed by edX president MIT Professor Anant Agarwal, MIT Professor Gerald J. Sussman, MIT Senior Lecturer Christopher J. Terman and edX Chief Scientist Piotr Mitros.

BerkeleyX — "Artificial Intelligence” is a course in the basic ideas and techniques underlying the design of intelligent computer systems, with a specific emphasis on the statistical and decision-theoretic modeling paradigm. By the end of this course, students will have built autonomous agents that reason in uncertain environments and will have developed machine learning algorithms that will classify handwritten digits and photographs. The on-campus version of the course is one of the most popular computer science courses at UC Berkeley. It will be taught by UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Pieter Abbeel and Associate Professor Dan Klein, a recent recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley's highest teaching honor.

BerkeleyX — “Software as a Service” teaches the fundamentals for engineering long-lived software using highly-productive agile techniques to develop Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails. The topics include test-driven development, behavior-driven/user-centric design, design patterns, legacy code, refactoring and deployment. It will be taught by UC Berkeley Adjunct Associate Professor Armando Fox, who has received teaching and mentoring awards from Stanford University, the Society of Women Engineers and Tau Beta Pi Honor Society, and Professor David A. Patterson, winner of the ACM Karl Karlstrom Teaching Award and the IEEE Mulligan Medal in Education.For this introductory set of courses, certificates of mastery will be available at no charge for each of the courses to those learners motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.

No apueste en contra de la idea de Neeru Khosla para salvar a nuestras escuelas

ORIGINAL: Mercury News (Silicon Valley)

Por Mike Cassidy

Publicado: 22/01/2012 07:00:00 AM PST

Neeru Khosla, Co-Fundador y Director Ejecutivo de CK12 Foundation habla con Trisha Chen, de 11 años, una estudiante de 6to grado en la Escuela Nueva, antes de su conferencia de hablar en la Conferencia de aprendizaje innovadores en la Escuela Nueva en Hillsborough el viernes, octubre 21, 2011.La Fundación sin fines de lucro Khosla CK-12 ha producido docenas de libros de texto de código abierto en línea. (Li-Po Ching / Mercury News). (Li-Po Ching)

Desde una pequeña oficina a lo largo de la carretera 101 en Palo Alto, Neeru Khosla está en silencio tratando de poner de cabeza la forma como los profesores enseñan y cómo aprenden los estudiantes.

Es una tarea difícil para una mujer que no es una política, educadora o administradora. En lugar de eso, podría llamarse una guerrera cruzada - una cruzada que ha adoptado la urgencia, la innovación y el talento típico de una empresa de Silicon Valley en un esfuerzo por impulsar la educación escolar (K-12) en el siglo 21.

Neeru Khosla, Co-Fundador y Director Ejecutivo de CK12 Foundation y Todd McPeak, relacionista de aliados de CK-12 FlexMath preparan el material en su stand en la Conferencia de aprendizaje innovadores en la Escuela Nueva en Hillsborough el viernes, octubre 21, 2011. La Fundación sin fines de lucro Khosla CK-12 ha producido docenas de libros de texto de código abierto en línea. (Li-Po Ching / Mercury News). (Li-Po Ching)

En un momento en que los presupuestos de las escuelas públicas están por los suelos y de mayor tamaño de las aulas están haciendo que sea más difícil para los profesores para ofrecer ayuda individual, sin fines de lucro La Fundación Khosla CK-12 mantiene la promesa de una solución de dos armas: libros en línea de texto digitales sobre todo de matemáticas y ciencias, y ejercicios que se pueden personalizar, complementados con videos y otras características interactivas, y que no les cuesten nada a las escuelas.

Maestros a nivel nacional se han descargado los libros de texto y otros materiales del sitio web sin fines de lucro, que pasa a lo largo de millones de estudiantes, por CK-12 del presupuesto.

"Es como ir del pergamino al papel y del lápiz a la computadora", dice Khosla. "Si no les damos a los estudiantes lo que necesitan para tener éxito, vamos a perderlos".

Neeru Khosla, Co-Fundador y Director Ejecutivo de CK12 Foundation habla acerca de su iniciativa sobre libros de texto de código abierto en la Conferencia de aprendizaje innovadores en la Escuela Nueva en Hillsborough el viernes, octubre 21, 2011. La Fundación sin fines de lucro Khosla CK-12 ha producido docenas de libros de texto de código abierto en línea. (Li-Po Ching / Mercury News). (Li-Po Ching)

El proyecto significa que todas las escuelas, no importa cuán pobres sean, pueden darse el lujo de tener material educativo que involucra a los estudiantes si tienen hambre de trabajo más avanzado, o para luchar con los fundamentos. Los libros, que pueden ser descargados a las computadoras y dispositivos móviles, ayudar a los estudiantes construir sus habilidades de lectura y lenguaje, incluso a medida que enseñan matemáticas y conceptos de la ciencia.