education

When you’re working online and you access a text heavy web-page that scrolls for 5 pages, what is your initial reaction? To most of us, a text-heavy page filled with a long list of resources and activities is not inviting or enticing. The same is true for students and online courses. But with a little sleight of hand, plus use of the right resource formats and labels, you can design an aesthetically pleasing online course and avoid the long scrolling webpage syndrome. » Read more

Last month, we put the Raspberry Pi, a tiny $25 Linux computer, in our open source gift guide. It led overwhelmingly as your favorite on the list. But other similar options have been popping up, like the Allwinner A10 ($15) and the CuBox (quite a bit more). » Read more

When I spent some time going around North Carolina recently visiting POSSE professors, I had a realization: We encourage professors to be productively lost, to go out and feel immersed in a community, admit that they can't solve all of the problems themselves, and act more as a facilitator in the classroom. That helps them identify the right questions to ask--and the right places to ask them--online.
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One of the biggest concerns students have when it comes to online education is losing the experience of interacting with their peers and professors because collaboration is often so integral to success in their future workplaces. In the past, online learning platforms have struggled to recreate these interactive environments that students value so much in traditional classes, but new technologies are now addressing the issue and created a collaborative online environment.  » Read more

Cable Green, director of learning at Creative Commons, gave the final morning's opening keynote at the 2011 Open Education Conference on the seeming obviousness of open policy as a necessity for education.

"I'm interested in the policies that prevent us from providing an education to anyone in the world who might want one," Green said. That worldwide demand for education outpaces our ability to meet it. » Read more

My experience with the open source way of doing things dates back to my university days in India. During those days, I had a very narrow view with regards to what exactly open source is and what its true meaning is. This view was limited only to the question “why should one give away his work for free to anyone?" I was ignorant about the beauty of the open source methodology that rests on the principle of creative collaboration. » Read more

One-size-fits-all is vanilla ice cream.  It’s plain white athletic socks. It’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with a recorder.  One-size-fits-all is an assembly line and a Model-T Ford and a straight line of school children marching to their class.   It’s industrial.  It’s lock-step.  It’s mechanistic.

And it just might save public education. » Read more

Microphone static crackles.

Hi, everyone–Mel Chua here, reporting in. I'm recovering from POSSE, the Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, where we just kicked off our our 2011 cohort of professors over in Raleigh, North Carolina. Each of the faculty members here has committed to getting the students in at least one of their courses involved in open source community contribution during this coming school year, and they're off and running now after a weekend of intense cultural immersion. Let's recap the high points of POSSE Basics 2011, shall we?

Going-back-in-time sound effect, hazy visual shimmers. » Read more

According to recent international comparisons, the US is ranked 35th in math education and 29th in science education worldwide. This downward trend is not a new revelation. Over the past several decades we've seen the quality of public primary and secondary education decline continuously due in no small part to an overall lack of financial and societal support.
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