Top 10 Real Life Open Education Success Stories new 2015

Top 10 Real-Life Open Education Success Stories

It’s been more than a decade since MIT shook the education world to its core by announcing it would publish most of its course materials to the Internet for free usage by anyone and everyone in the world. Today there is almost no limit to what a person with an Internet connection can learn. Although hard data is scarce because the environment is still developing, there are many personal stories surfacing of people whose lives have been changed for the better thanks to open education.

1. Mark Halberstadt, USA:

   
   What began as the brainchild of one educator has become a worldwide phenomenon, providing more than 150 million free educational lessons to date to people like Mark Halberstadt. Having earned a music degree in 2007, Halberstadt later decided he wanted to become an electrical engineer. The problem was he had “never gotten above a B+ in math.” So over the course of three years, he used the materials posted on the Khan Academy website to learn trigonometry, calculus, and basic math principles he needed to brush up on. After his first year at Temple in 2010, he had a 4.0 GPA, which he credits entirely to the unique and instructive format of Khan Academy.

2. Jean-Ronel Noel and Alex Georges, Haiti:

   
   Entrepreneurs Jean-Ronel Noel and Alex Georges “wanted to create a small revolution in the way of conducting business in Haiti.” Their idea was to outfit the country with solar-powered streetlights. When they discovered a need for some training in electrical engineering, Noel turned to MIT’s OCW website. The knowledge he gained there helped them launch their small business and ultimately bring light to streets in all 10 provinces of Haiti, some of which had never before been artificially lit. In the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake, the business is back to work, providing much-needed employment to 18 technicians and light to thousands of citizens.

3. Juan Eduardo Leal Lara, Mexico:

   
   After his father instilled in him a love of engineering at the tender age of 8, Juan Eduardo Leal Lara found himself surfing the Internet for help with his college courses. After finding MIT OpenCourseWare, he kept coming back to study the materials posted there to enhance what he was learning in class at Tecnologico de Monterrey. Ultimately, first-year students at Lara’s university have also benefited from the open education material. Lara helped start a program for students to create projects and practice what they’ve learned, and he based all the material on MIT OCW knowledge.

4. Robin Neal and Darren Kuropatwa, USA:

   
   In 2006, Canadian calculus teacher Darren Kuropatwa posted on his blog about having students build a wiki solution manual together. He found that the collaborative nature of wikis appealed to girls, while the element of a race to solve certain problems interested the boys. At a conference three years later, English teacher Robin Neal of Beaver Country Day School in Brookline, MA ran into Kuropatwa and explained to him that Kuropatwa’s informative blog post had inspired him to create his own wiki to educate his students on the poetry of Keats.

5. Tim Lauer, USA:

   
   Open education success stories are not always grand in scope, or even from recent years, for that matter. In this video, elementary school teacher Tim Lauer of Portland shares a story from 1995 about a young student stung on the foot by a bee. After viewing the bee under a microscope, the students put the pictures on their class webpage. One of the emails they received was from a doctor in the state of Arizonawho was a bee expert. He told the class what they had was actually a yellow jacket wasp, not a bee. His email reignited the kids’ desire to know more about bees and wasps, so Mr. Lauer led them through a two-week study on the subject.

6. Kunle Adejumo, Nigeria:

   
   At the time Kunle Adejumo was attending Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, the computer lab did not even have Internet access. What computers it did have were so in demand by the school’s 35,000 students, they could only be secured for 20 minutes a week by students signing up for them. Luckily, Adejumo was able to reach MIT’s OpenCourseWare site from his home computer. Because a metallurgical class he was taking had no notes, he found some review questions online from an MIT course and had his teacher answer them, helping him better understand the material.

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   2. Jonne, Finland:

      
      Finland high school senior Jonne says that he loves math from the bottom of his “cold, Finnish, Arctic heart,” but he was never good at exams. Using Khan Academy math and physics videos, he has been able to supplement and sometimes even substitute material given to him in class by his teacher who is “sometimes not that good.” The result was grades good enough to get him into the Harvard Class of 2016. During the summer, he plans to study through the algebra, pre-cal, and calculus  courses on the Khan site to prepare for his freshman year.

   3. Delft University of Technology OCW Initiative, Netherlands:

      
      The World Health Organization hopes to cut the percentage of the world’s citizens without sustainable access to clean water in half by 2015. To contribute to this goal, the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands stepped up around 2010 and began publishing its water management course materials for free on the Web. Since that time, universities in South Africa, Pretoria, Curacao, Singapore, Indonesia, and other developing countries have accessed the material and enhanced them for utilization in their respective geographic areas. The result is a collective resource of the world’s top water management knowledge that has the potential to improve millions of lives around the world

7. Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, USA:

   
   In 2011, a course taught by Norvig and Thrun called “Online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” was made freely available. More than 160,000 students in 40 languages took advantage of the course, with 23,000 graduating in 190 countries. Many of them left feedback describing how much the course helped them. Lynda says she joined with her daughter to build the daughter’s resume, and ended up studying for hours each week and loving the material. Home-schooled student Jack learned he could handle a collegiate-level course by taking the class. Pedro says he now wants to have a career in the AI field after he graduates as a result of the free class.

8. Sam, USA:

   
   The beauty of open education is that the instruction moves as slow as the student desires, or in the case of Sam the second-grader, as fast. His father says that Sam is exceptionally bright and was testing at junior high levels, but all his school could do was offer to move him up to third grade. Even a charter school was ill-equipped to handle his needs. Sam’s dad tried teaching him at nights, but it wasn’t a long-term solution. Now that they’ve found Khan Academy, Sam can challenge himself “” soon he’ll finish the calculus class

Does Online Education Sacrifice Quality ?

Does Online Education Sacrifice Quality ?

There are certainly two camps when it comes to the notion of open courseware and its ability to educate tomorrow’s students. Some, like Mark Pesce, see the concept as breaking down the ivy-covered walls in both the literal and figurative sense. For them, open courseware would eliminate current admission barriers, allowing the common man with access to a computer and an Internet connection a world class education.

Others see the notion quite differently. They note that an exceptionally high college dropout rate is even higher in online programs. They further insist that online education, considered by most to be the tool to a more cost-effective course delivery system, actually is more expensive currently as schools cover the cost of specific software (that does not come cheap) on top of having to pay someone to hover over the students enrolled.

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The Real Challenge

Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University, is a veteran when it comes to teaching courses online. Writing about the release of Walsh’s book and the future of the open courseware movement, Stross yanks more than a few chains with his opening assertion.

“When colleges and universities finally decide to make full use of the Internet, most professors will lose their jobs.”

But his chain doesn’t seem to come with a noose. Despite the prediction of the end of the teaching profession as we know it, Stross goes on to calmly insist he is not worried.

“Amid acute budget crises, state universities like mine can’t afford to take that very big step — adopting the technology that renders human instructors obsolete.”

Indeed, Stross does a great job of articulating one critical fundamental. While he is a veteran online educator, he insists the descriptor currently being used is misleading.

Stross teaches what educators now refer to as a hybrid course. It does feature some elements that make use of software. But it also features a full-fledged teacher, a “hovering human” as Stross describes.

To one day replace teachers, an online course would have to remove the need for the hovering human. It would be 100% software based and would handle all tasks that the aforementioned human (including assessing students and providing relevant feedback on their performance) previously handled.

Of the open courseware movement, Stross notes the costs involved.

“Developing that best-in-the-world online course — in which students would learn as much, or more, than in an ordinary classroom or a hybrid online class — requires significant investment. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, which has developed about 15 sophisticated online courses, mostly in the sciences, spent $500,000 to $1 million to write software for each. But neither Carnegie Mellon nor other institutions, which are invited to use its online courses, dares to use them without having a human instructor, too.”

Those costs have Stross confident that his job is safe, especially given the current shortfall of funds most institutions currently face

Two Schools of Thought

Steve Kolowic recently took a look at the current state of the open courseware movement at Inside Higher Education. In discussing the likes of the so-called elite institutions (Columbia, Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kolowic indicates that these schools have defined their value “by exclusivity as much as by excellence” and that “the classrooms and curriculums that ostensibly transform talented high-schoolers into cardholding members of the adult elite have been walled off from the general public.”

But elsewhere on the University front, Kolowic writes that online education has been “all but cleansed of its original stigma” and thus become commonplace.

“The University of Massachusetts and Penn State University rake in tens of millions of dollars each year from their online programs,” explains Kolowic. “The University of California is considering using online education to help recoup the revenue lost to massive cuts in state funding

 

Delivering Open Courseware

Truth be told, the two views are entirely valid. Open courseware has the power to transform the national curriculum, increasing rigor and creating up-to-date, content-rich courses where lectures are delivered by the best the profession has to offer. It should also eliminate the need for those impersonal, 500 seat lecture halls. In this way, the materials offered students could nearly match those currently offered at the so-called elite institutions.

But there will always be a need for that facilitator, the person with the ability to poke and prod, to provide the timely pats on the back and the occasional kick in the seat of the pants. It is for this reason that public school teachers are talking about the transformation from “being sages on the stage” to “guides on the side.”

Open courseware should provide the sage – but the learning process will still need that orchestrator. My guess is that the elite colleges came to this realization a long time ago.

So those course materials are indeed available in an effort to further that brand recognition. But those schools are banking on that critical fundamental tenet, that education is first and foremost a people-business

  

Increasing College Why Wisconsin Matters to All Americans

 Increasing College Why Wisconsin Matters to All Americans 

Why Wisconsin Matters to All Americans

Barack Obama has been surprisingly silent regarding the turmoil taking place in Wisconsin. His muted response contrasts noticeably with his constant support for education in general and particularly his belief that America’s economic future is tied to increasing college attainment rates.

The importance of messaging can be seen by the changing view underway in households across the country. A recent MetLife survey (pdf) reveals that 75 percent of middle and high school students currently plan on going to college. That percentage represents a significant increase over similar polls taken in 1988 (57%) and 1997 (67%). Furthermore, 84 percent of students believe that there will be “few or no” career opportunities for those who fail to complete some higher education.

Sadly, these aspirations conflict with two emerging trends. First, only 69% of high school students are enrolling in two- or four-year programs following graduation and just 57% are completing their degree program within six years.

But perhaps more importantly, there is now a growing concern that the “college for everyone” mantra may well be a bad policy initiative.

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A More Appropriate Policy Initiative

In conclusion, Krugman is anything but unequivocal in his assertions:

“The notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.”

Rather than push higher education as a policy initiative, Krugman insists our nation ought to venture in a different direction. According to Krugman, a society of broadly shared prosperity has really nothing to do with expanding educational opportunities for all.

Instead, it has everything to do with the ability for all Americans to “bargain for good wages” and to have “access to health care.” Which is why the developments in Wisconsin are so important to each and every American

False Assumption

The notion that education continues to be the critical component for future economic success went unquestioned for quite some time. With some data indicating (pdf) that over an adult’s working life a bachelor’s degree is worth a million dollars in additional earnings, the push for higher education attainment is a central theme of most government officials, not just President Obama.

Yet today there is emerging evidence to the contrary. The idea that all the jobs of the future will require even higher levels of skill is now being questioned by a number of individuals

Open education in Usa online - Latest Study on Retention

  Open education in Usa online - Latest Study on Retention

 

Open education in Usa online

Open education is a collective term[1] to describe institutional practices and programmatic initiatives that broaden access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems. The qualifier "open" of open education refers to the elimination of barriers that can preclude both opportunities and recognition for participation in institution-based learning. One aspect of openness in or "opening up" education is the development and adoption of open educational resources.

Institutional practices that seek to eliminate barriers to entry, for example, would not have academic admission requirements. Such universities include The Open University in Britain and Athabasca University in Canada. Such programs are commonly distance learning programs like e-learning, mooc and opencourseware, but not necessarily. Where many e-learning programs are free to follow, the costs of acquiring a certification may be a barrier, many open education institutes offer free certification schemes accredited by organisations like UKAS in the UK and ANAB in the USA where others offer a badge.

Latest Study on Retention – No New Information New study

Latest Study on Retention – No New Information

New study consistent with prior research on retention.

A new study, from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC)Early Grade Retention and Student Success: Evidence from Los Angeles, has some public officials wondering if it is time to revisit the practice of retention.

It shouldn’t.

Retention is the name given to the practice of repeating an entire grade level. According to the study, having students repeat a year in the early grades helped numerous failing students reach proficiency in math and English.

The study reports that 41 percent of those retained reached full proficiency in math and 18 percent in English Language Arts (ELA). These percentages represented significant increases over the recorded proficiency levels of these students prior to repeating their year: 6 percent in math, and only 1 percent in ELA. Ultimately, the researchers insist that blanket school district policies prohibiting retention are misguided and that the practice might be more cost-effective in certain instances than ongoing interventions.

While this may seem to be news and ultimately positive support for the practice, the fact is that this latest study is consistent with prior findings. Repeating material has always been a method for helping students increase their proficiency.

The issue is that retention does not fix a fundamental issue – some students are much slower learners than others. Give these slower learners more time and they will demonstrate positive gains over time.

But unfortunately the issue of pacing remains an issue for these learners. Students who attend summer school or repeat a grade will demonstrate greater levels of proficiency entering the new school year. And when asked to perform the tasks that they have been practicing will generally match the performances of their peers.

But the discrepancies soon begin anew when the teacher begins covering new material. Unless the retained students are given additional time, they soon begin to lag behind their peers, once again unable to match the pace of their on-grade classmates. Not too surprisingly, at year’s end the slower learners demonstrate lower levels of proficiency than their peers.

Therefore, the practice of retention has little in the way of lasting educational benefits for the students being held back. One or even a second additional year does not “fix” these students, especially if the teacher continues to utilize similar instructional techniques.

Furthermore, the negative impacts of retention on the social development and self-esteem of youngsters is well-documented. Retained students have higher dropout rates, increased behavior problems and greater absenteeism.

According to educational researcher Linda Darling-Hammond, the social issues are easily understood. Ultimately, most retained students begin to get discouraged with school and over time, give up on themselves as learners.

Sadly, in the standards era, retention is once again being used by school districts. In some cases liberally. And the latest study that offers some short term gains will likely allow those already implementing the practice to continue to use it.

But of course, retention, in and of itself, is simply not the answer. Instead, schools need to find ongoing answers for dealing with the slow learner.

In all fairness, additional ongoing interventions that seek to help slow learners remain with their grade peers often prove more costly monetarily than simply retaining individual students. But given the overall negative impact of retention long-term, investing in rigorous, ongoing intervention is the right way to ensure children make appropriate progress, socially as well as academically

Open education Technology - Open education History online

 Open education Technology - Open education History online

Available technologies for Open Education are important in the overall efficiency of the program. After available technologies have been found, there needs to be appropriate applications on the technologies for the specific online education program.

 

 

Since Open Education is usually a different time and different place for most individuals across the world, certain technologies need to be utilized to enhance the program. Technologies that can be used are primarily online and serve a variety of purposes. Web Pages and other computer based trainings may be used to 

provide lecture notes, assessments, and other course materials. Videos are provided and feature speakers, class events, topic discussions, and faculty interviews. YouTube and iTunesU are often used for this purpose. 

Students may interact through computer conferencing with Skype or Google+, e-mail, online study groups, or annotations on social bookmarking sites. Other course content may be provided through tapes, print, and CD’s.

Open education History online

Even before the computer was developed, researchers at public universities were working at educating citizens through informal education programs. In the early 1900s, 4-H clubs were formed which taught youth the latest in technological advances in agriculture and home economics. The success that the youth had in utilizing 'new' methods of farming and home economics, caused their parents to adopt the same practices. As the 4-H club idea was spreading across the country, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act which created the Cooperative Extension Service in the United States Department of Agriculture. The Cooperative Extension Service is a partnership between the USDA, land grant universities in each state, and counties 

throughout the United States. Through the work of the Cooperative Extension Services and 4-H, people throughout the United States have easy and inexpensive (most often free) access to the latest research done at the land-grant universities without having to visit a college campus or attend college courses. The educational programs and resources offered by 4-H and the Cooperative Extension Service meet people where they are at and offer them the opportunity to learn what they want to know when they want to know it. In order to meet the changing needs of citizens and the use of new technology, the Cooperative Extension Service has created eXtension. eXtension provides research based, non-biased information on a wide 

variety of topics to people through the use of the internet.

The ability to share resources on the web at little cost compared to the distribution of hard copy means that it can be used to facilitate Open Education. An early example of this is the opencourseware program, which was established in 2002 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which was followed by more than 200 Universities and organizations. Similar to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities from the Open Access movement, are the goals and intentions from Open Education specified in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. MOOC is a more recent form of online course development getting more attention since the fall of 2011 which was followed by a number of non-certificate-granting programs, including edX, Coursera and Udacity. [2]