A small study out of the University of Texas, El Paso recently explored whether social communications can help boost the outcomes of students in particularly challenging STEM courses. The bottom line: There was a link between heavy usage of social software and better grades.
Coursera has introduced Coursera Labs, a new offering that allows learners to work hands-on with almost any third-party software application, without any environment setup or software downloads.
ClearOne's cloud collaboration application has been updated with new classroom functionality. COLLABORATE Space now includes question and answer participation, providing each student with an electronic "hand raise" capability, as well as moderator control over audio and video for up to 100 participants.
Dropbox Education and Klaxoon have partnered to add Dropbox integration to Klaxoon's collaborative tools for teams.
Nonprofit Hypothesis is offering an app that allows for “open annotation” of web content. The organization is especially interested in wooing educational users (both K-12 and higher ed) to serve as test pilots.
A look back at the topics that resonated most over the last year
California State University Long Beach is turning to online crowdsourcing to help map out its future. Using a platform developed by game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal, "Imagine Beach 2030" invited participants to share their ideas and provide feedback on others' ideas during two days in November.
A joint study involving researchers from MIT, the University of Michigan and the Wikimedia Foundation has identified why so many Wikipedia disputes unresolved and developed predictive tools to help improve editorial deliberations.
As the deadline for voting in the mid-term elections approaches, people now have access to a new online tool to help monitor the prevalence of fake news on the big social media sites. The University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility, housed in the School of Information, created Iffy Quotient as a "platform health metric" to track "iffy" news in real time.
Some of the University of Michigan's most innovative strategies for online learning are based on values held throughout its 200-plus year history. Here, U-M's associate vice provost for academic innovation explains why Michigan Online — a relatively recent initiative — brings communities of motivated learners together, both to learn together and to apply their knowledge to solving significant problems.