Load up your new gadgets with free Yale lectures on Roman Architecture, Organic Chemistry and GameTheory from Open Yale Courses on iTunes U! itunes.yale.edu.
(via yaleuniversity)
NEA-Backed Omada Health Launches Its 16-Week Digital Health Program To Bring Diabetes Prevention Online | TechCrunch
Last December, Omada Health raised $800K in seed funding from a host of angel and venture investors, including NEA, Aberdare, Kapor Capital, TriplePoint Ventures and Esther Dyson — to name a few. A graduate of Rock Health’s first batch, the startup started out on a mission to take on diabetes (and prediabetes) by leveraging the latest research, design, behavioral science and digital technology.
Today, after nearly a year in development and testing, Omada Health is launching Prevent, what the company is calling the “first-ever online diabetes prevention program for the general public.” Why? Because Diabetes is one of the most widespread diseases in the U.S., with the CDC estimating that 79 million American adults have prediabetes. That’s one in three adults, and the majority of them people aren’t aware of their condition, as they have blood glucose levels that aren’t irregular enough to be considered diabetes yet indicate an extremely high risk.
The Smart Money Is on Big Data | AllThingsD
Big Data and online video analytics deliver extremely personalized media experiences that benefit both viewers and content publishers. Rather than “killing television,” the shift to mobile, multiscreen video viewing offers entertainment and technology companies a tremendous opportunity to create new and profitable digital distribution models. The key is for those companies to collaborate within a media universe that is changing dramatically, quarter by quarter.
How quickly is this space changing? Three years ago, only 2 percent of video consumption in the U.S. occurred online. Today, that number has jumped to 10 percent. And if current growth trends continue, it will reach nearly one-third by 2015.
What My 11 Year Old’s Stanford Course Taught Me About Online Education - Forbes
My 11 year old son just took a course at Stanford. That has a nice ring to it but it is actually meaningless because these days anyone can take a course at Stanford. You don’t even have to pay. All you need is access to a computer and a reasonable Internet connection. So what we can say is my 11 year old son just watched a bunch of videos on the Internet.
That doesn’t make for an interesting post except that this ‘bunch of videos’ is currently being heralded as the future of higher education. In the New York Times, David Brooks saw courses like the one my son took as a tsunami about to hit campuses all over the world. And he isn’t alone. Harvard’s Clay Christensen sees it asa transformative technology that will change education forever. And along with Stanford many other institutions, most notably Harvard and MIT, are leaping into the online mix. This is attracting attention and investment dollars. It has people nervous and excited. So I wondered, what happens when someone who has grown up online encountered one of these new ventures?
The course my son just completed was ‘Game Theory’ taught by Matthew Jackson and Yoav Shoham.
The best Professors from the world’s leading Universities are coming together to teach online FOR FREE!
The Faculty Project brings academia’s most outstanding professors to the computers, tablets and smartphones of people all over the world.
All courses will be free with open enrollment for anyone with an Internet connection.
Stanford Professors Launch Online University Coursera - Liz Gannes - News - AllThingsD
There seems to be something in the water at Stanford University that’s making faculty members leave their more-than-perfectly-good jobs and go teach online.
Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng are on leave to launchCoursera, which will offer university classes for free online, in partnership with top schools.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera is backed with $16 million in funding led by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell at NEA. It has no immediate plans to charge for courses or to make money in other ways.
Compared to Udacity, a similar start-up from former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrunthat’s creating its own classes, Coursera helps support its university partners in creating their own courses, which are listed under each school’s brand.
Some might doubt that universities would want to share their prized content for free online with a start-up, but Coursera has already signed up Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania as partners, with a set of classes launching April 23.
How Online Education Is Changing the Way We Learn
“A new capability in the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is a cloud-based office productivity suite, IBM Docs. Now in beta and planned for availability in 2012, IBM Docs is a social document platform that allows organizations, both inside and outside the firewall, to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents in the cloud”
Computer Science 101 | Free Online Stanford Course
Nick Parlante has been teaching Computer Science at Stanford for over 20 years, and teaches programming best practices at Google. Nick has also produced the Google Python Class and codingbat.com code practice site, and the infamous Binky Pointer Fun video. (Nick’s Home)
About the Course
CS101 teaches the essential ideas of Computer Science for a zero-prior-experience audience. Computers can appear very complicated, but in reality, computers work within just a few, simple patterns. CS101 demystifies and brings those patterns to life, which is useful for anyone using computers today.
In CS101, students play and experiment with short bits of “computer code” to bring to life to the power and limitations of computers. Everything works within the browser, so there is no extra software to download or install. CS101 also provides a general background on computers today: what is a computer, what is hardware, what is software, what is the internet. No previous experience is required other than the ability to use a web browser.
Here is another video Nick created for this class.
Khan Academy Blends Its YouTube Approach With Classrooms
Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 38 students.
He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.
Each student’s math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Roe carries as he wanders the room. He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures. For an hour, this crowded, dimly lighted classroom in the hardscrabble shadow of Silicon Valley hums with the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards, pencils scratching on paper and an occasional whoop when a student scores a streak of right answers.
The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month.
Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum — a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
via infoneer-pulse:
Clayton Christensen on disruption in online education | The Next Web
Earlier this year we discussed how the Internet is revolutionizing education and featured several companies and organizations that are disrupting the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom. The Internet has changed how we interact with Time. We can be learning all the time now, whenever we want, and wherever we want. And because of that, we’re seeing explosive growth in online education.
In October, Knewton, an education technology startup, raised $33 million in its 4th round of funding to roll out its adaptive online learning platform. In early November, Khan Academy, an online collection featuring over 2,100 educational videos ranging in intensity from 1+1=2 to college level calculus and physics, snagged $5 million in funding to add two new faculty members that will create lectures for humanities and art-intensive classes.
According to the 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, approximately 5.6 million students took at least one web-based class during the fall 2009 semester, which marked a 21% growth from the previous year. The Harvard Business School Review points out that this figure is up from 45,000 in 2000 and experts predict that online education could reach 14 million in 2014.
Free College: How to Audit Courses From 7 Elite Schools Online | Mashable
Getting accepted to a prestigious Ivy League school has its perks — and its price tag. But thanks to the Internet, you don’t have to take on mountains of debt to snag a piece of that educational pie.
The Rise Of The Online Degree: How 2011 Students Are Turning Their Bedroom Into A Classroom
Skype In The Classroom: An International Social Network For Teachers
Skype realizes full well its software is used by many school teachers and students from around the globe, and today announced that it has built a dedicated social network to help them connect, collaborate and exchange knowledge and teaching resources over the Web.
This morning, the company launched a free international community site dubbed Skype in the Classroom, an online platform designed to help teachers find each other and relevant projects according to search criteria such as the age groups they teach, location and subjects of interest.
The platform, which has been in beta since the end of December, already has a community of more than 4,000 teachers, across 99 countries.
Teachers need only sign up with their Skype account at the website, create a profile with their interests, location and the age groups they teach and start connecting with other teachers by exploring the directory, where they can also find projects and resources that match their skills, needs or interests.
A members-only community, Skype in the Classroom lets teachers easily add each other to their Skype contact lists or message one another.
Tomorrow's College
Jennifer Black isn’t a fan of technology. Until college, she didn’t know much about online classes. If the stereotypical online student is a career-minded adult working full time, she’s the opposite—a dorm-dwelling, ballet-dancing, sorority-joining 20-year-old who throws herself into campus life here at the University of Central Florida.
Yet in the past year, the junior hospitality major has taken classes online, face to face, and in a blended format featuring elements of both. This isn’t unusual: More than half of the university’s 56,000 students will take an online or blended class this year, and nearly 2,700 are taking all three modes at once.
As online education goes mainstream, it’s no longer just about access for distant learners who never set foot in the student union. Web courses are rewiring what it means to be a “traditional” student at places like Central Florida, one of the country’s largest public universities. And UCF’s story raises a question for other colleges: Will this mash-up of online and offline learning become the new normal elsewhere, too?
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
