At the BbWorld conference taking place this week in Orlando, Blackboard introduced a new version of CourseSites, a free platform for individual instructors to deliver e-learning.
The majority of people in education believe that video usage on campus increases student satisfaction with their learning experiences; more than nine in 10 respondents (92 percent) said just that to a recent research project on the topic. The survey was done by Kaltura, a company that sells products and services for capturing, creating, managing and hosting videos.
Coursera is now allowing for A/B testing on its MOOC platform. This lets instructors and researchers test a single variable to see how it affects some aspect of the course, such as participation. As a Coursera blog article explained, the testing is done by "randomizing enrollees into different versions of the same course" and then seeing what impact the change-up makes on the "learning outputs."
McGraw-Hill Education and Follett have concocted two new agreements. In the first, Follett's current rental offering will cover McGraw-Hill's new textbook rental program for copyright 2019 titles; in the second, McGraw-Hill's digital learning products and e-books will be incorporated into Follett's includED "inclusive access" program, which gives students access to their course materials on the first day of class.
What do students want in the learning activities for their online STEM courses? They'd prefer more real-life problems to solve and instructional resources such as simulations, case studies, videos and demonstrations, according to a research project from the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida
As colleges and universities seek innovations that will allow them to address their current crop of challenges — a growing number of non-traditional students, a bigger emphasis on workforce preparation, the use of data and new technologies to improve learning — accreditors can help or hinder those efforts. A new report from the Christensen Institute has suggested that until accreditation bodies do a better job across the board of helping their institutions by supporting innovation, they're just getting in the way and allowing unaccredited schools to hold the competitive advantage.
Five organizations with expertise in online education have collaborated on a new resource for students looking for online programs. Together, Berkeley College, the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements, the Online Learning Consortium, Quality Matters and the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies formulated a list of questions students should ask themselves in order to find an online program that best fits their needs.
A project newly funded by the U.S. Department of Education will focus on the creation of a prototype of a web-based coding progression tool for high schoolers and college students.
Starting this fall, Google's IT Support Professional Certificate will be available through more than 25 community colleges in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas, California and New York. The company's charitable arm, Google.org, is funding workforce development nonprofit J.F.F. to help community colleges integrate the certificate into their IT education programs.
In spite of the fact that nine in 10 people believe online and distance learning programs will grow in popularity over time, seven in 10 don't think that students can a get a "true college experience" from an online-only program. That drops to five in 10 for those students who have attended a blended learning course. Those results surfaced in "Online Education Trendspots," a survey intended to understand experiences and perceptions of online or distance education programs.