by Eric Rabkin, Cisco

We live in an increasingly mobile world and Americans are particularly mobile, changing “permanent” residence about 14 times in their lifetime. Instead of putting together a string of courses from a single university, like UMUC, modern transplants can now present a portfolio of courses from many schools, and even life experiences, to institutions the like fully accredited Thomas Edison University in New Jersey to undergo centralized review and the receipt of degrees.  Given the growth of comparatively traditional class-size pedagogy in online environments, like the public Western Governors University and the private Kaplan University, people can change schools without ever changing residences, becoming mobile learners intellectually as well as geographically, to seek the educational experiences that suit them best.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/feature-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1166026

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By Education Portal

Education Portal, a Silicon Valley start-up that develops free online courses that lead to real college credit, today added 13 Advanced Placement (AP) courses to its roster of over 40 college courses. The AP courses are designed to help high school students pass the upcoming AP exams in May. Students can save thousands of dollars on the cost of their education and reduce student loan debt by taking AP courses. Research shows that students who perform well in AP courses are more likely to graduate from college in four years. AP courses allow students to acquire the skills and habits to be successful in college as well as earn college credit that is accepted by more than 90 percent of U.S. colleges and universities. With AP exams fast approaching, students are forced to cram an entire school years’ worth of information to prepare for the exam. Education Portal’s courses offer an easy way for students to review important information.

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/02/5309657/education-portal-offers-13-free.html

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by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOM

Since launching in 2010, online learning startup Udemy has offered learners the opportunity to take online classes from home. On Tuesday, the company upped the convenience factor with an iOS app that lets students take classes directly from their smartphones. With 600,000 users enrolled in the company’s paid and free classes, Udemy is attracting a strong following. But given competition from longtime online learning company lynda.com, as well as startups Skillshare and Codecademy, Udemy clearly wants another way to hook and keep students. While lynda.com does have a mobile app for users, several other Udemy rivals do not.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/02/udemy-lands-on-mobile-so-students-can-learn-on-the-go/

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By Ollivier Dyens, Montreal Gazette

Educational technology encompasses a whole range of possibilities, everything from PowerPoint to immersive virtual reality. Is online instruction any good? An analysis of 50 studies performed in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Education found that university students and adult learners taking online courses “performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.” Do online courses foster isolation? Apparently not. The most common complaint from our professors involved in online education is the amount of work involved in answering and managing the endless stream of emails, comments, debates and questions from and among students.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Opinion+have+much+learn+about+educational+technology/8178732/story.html

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by the Live Mint (India)

Two recent reports in the Financial Times and Nature say that India is emerging as one of the biggest markets for what have come to be known as massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Indian students are the second biggest group in two MOOCs initiatives, edX and Coursera.

Online education is the wave of the future. It may not necessarily replace classroom teaching in all cases, but it does offer a wider range of education options for students. One possible reason Indian students have taken to online courses with such enthusiasm is that the Indian university education system is, with some exceptions, broken.

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/TUo5fB2q7LRMzmXHwhiYJJ/Click-to-learn.html

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By LARRY MITCHELL, the Mercury Register

A type of online college course known as a MOOC has great potential but also presents challenges for higher education, according to Mike Ward, dean of the College of Engineering, Computer Science and Construction Management at Chico State University. MOOCs — massive open online courses — are being offered by some large universities and private companies, Ward said. Anyone can sign up to take them. Ward talked about the promise of MOOCs for a campus like Chico State in an email he wrote. “There is interest in them because, think about it: anyone sitting in Chico can listen to lectures from one of the world’s foremost authorities in a given subject matter, from Stanford or MIT or Harvard. Who wouldn’t be interested? This is the up side.”

http://www.orovillemr.com/news/ci_22913950/can-moocs-be-harnessed-help-higher-ed

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by Katie Lepi, Edudemic

We know that many schools are leveraging digital technologies to enhance student learning, improve professional development, and streamline administrative tasks. But the truth about the internet (which I think most of us understand by now) is that lots of people talk about lots of things, and we don’t always get to see what is actually happening in real life. Thus, we always like to check out handy infographics like this one that cover trends and developments in the use of technology in K-12 among students, teachers, and administrators.

http://edudemic.com/2013/03/technology-in-k-12/

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By ANNE EISENBERG, NY Times

The key to these new robots is the ability to respond more flexibly, anticipating and adjusting to what humans want. That is in contrast to earlier generations of robots that often required extensive programming to change the smallest details of their routine, said Henrik Christensen, director of the robotics program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Researchers in labs worldwide are building robots that can predict what you’ll do next and be ready to give you the best possible assistance,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/business/robots-and-humans-learning-to-work-together.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

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by Bart Copeland, GigaOM

Today’s IT departments face an identity crisis. Technology is an integral part of every single business process, and has come to dominate the lives of consumers who are routinely shopping online, downloading information, and browsing the Internet. Yet ironically, in an era when technology rules, IT departments are losing ground fast:  The forces of cloud computing, social media, and information management are evolving rapidly, and business managers are discovering and adopting new technology before IT departments even have a chance to master it. Gartner Research predicts that by 2015, 35 percent of most companies’ technology-related expenditures will be managed outside the IT department’s budget.

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/31/technology-is-king-so-why-are-so-many-it-departments-playing-backseat-roles/

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By JOSHUA BERLINGER, Associated Press

Some educators and politicians, including Gov. Sean Parnell, want to even the playing field for students in Takotna and every other of the state’s approximate 500 schools by giving each student a tablet computer and establishing a unique digital learning infrastructure. It’s part of a push for digital learning initiatives as a way to improve the classroom experience, better engage students, and help teachers become better instructors. Takotna is one of the smallest communities in the Iditarod Area School District, which covers nine schools situated along the famed Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Interior Alaska about 225 miles northwest of Anchorage. There are no roads leading in or out of the village; planes come in twice a week to deliver mail or groceries. McGrath is the closest community to go grocery shopping. It’s only 18 miles away, but a round-trip flight costs upward of $200. Takotna’s school is very much like those throughout rural Alaska.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/24f0e8d615094b24b9c22908c7ac7d08/AK-XGR–Digital-Learning-Initiative

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by Cathy Davidson, Hastac

For my proposed Coursera course on the History and Future of Higher Education–intended for high school and college teachers, students, parents, and students themselves–I am designing every segment not only to give history and analysis of the forms of education we have inherited from the Industrial Age that invented so many of them, I also plan to pass on concrete advice I’ve gleaned from the thousands of teachers I’ve met of how to learn with, through, around, and often despite the clunky apparatus of contemporary education. I’ll be giving advice on ways to be creative within structures that seemed designed to squelch creativity and how to workaround some of those structures. And I’ll be giving totally non-cynical advice about how to use the testing that is required in so many schools around the world to actually help learning, critical thinking, and creative thinking. Thousands of teachers do it. I want to pass that on to those taking my course.

http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2013/03/30/how-use-multiple-choice-testing-learning-not-assessment-tool

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by Andrew Wind, WCF Courier

After a week of practice, Bunger Middle School eighth-grader Blake Thompson has become adept at designing small objects with the help of a computer program. He quickly created plans for two doughnut-like interlocking rings during an industrial technology class earlier this week. Thompson started with a circle from the menu of geometric shapes included in the Autodesk Inventor Pro software used by Bunger students. Designing on three planes, he input measurements and soon displayed the three-dimensional object on the computer screen. The 3-D printer industrial tech teacher Wayne Lidtke purchased after receiving a grant from the Waterloo Schools Foundation last spring is allowing his eighth-grade students to create the object they’ve designed. Yellow thermal plastic filament is fed into the printer from a spool, melts and is extruded through a nozzle. The liquid plastic is layered on a Plexiglas surface until the design is complete.

http://wcfcourier.com/news/local/d-printer-turns-designs-into-reality/article_b1b7c216-724c-5255-8a2a-893cc46eb643.html

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by Hal Hodson, new Scientist

It was the largest online attack ever reported. Over the course of the past week, servers belonging to an international non-profit company called The Spamhaus Project, which fights email spammers, were inundated with up to 38 gigabytes of traffic each second. That’s about 10 DVDs’ worth of data. The company ground to a halt, and another firm that tried to come to Spamhaus’s online aid was also drawn into the battle. News reports suggested the onslaught was so big that the internet itself slowed down during the worst of it. Such accounts may have been overblown, but in the aftermath it has become clear that the attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in just about anything – from software to the infrastructure of the internet itself – to devastating effect.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23334-huge-online-attack-exposes-internets-vulnerability.html

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by Lauren Roth, Orlando Sentinel

When a student at a Florida public school takes a course with Florida Virtual School, the district doesn’t have to share any of its per-pupil funding — the online school gets money per class directly from the state. That funding setup may change under bills being considered in both the House and Senate. The new plan would result in less money for both public school districts and the official state virtual school, which enrolled about 33,000 students statewide last year.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/blogs/school-zone/os-blog-state-virtual-school-could-see-14-to-17-percent-funding-cut-under-lawmakers-proposal-20130329,0,6234396.post

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By Angie Angers, Chris Raia, Chantee Lans – WPRI

A high school unlike any Rhode Island has ever seen is set to open in September. The Village Green Virtual Public Charter High School will use a “blended learning” model of online curriculum and in-classroom teaching. This fall, 136 students will make up the inaugural class of this first-of-its-kind high school.

http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/local_news/charter-school

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Building an effective online training program requires packaging the right content with the right type of learning experience. However that often doesn’t happen because it’s easier to pull a lot of information together, create some slides, and then publish a course.

To top it off, many of these types of online courses are merely repacked content that already exists on the organization’s network. So instead of building a real learning experience, we’re just repurposing existing content.

Do You Need Online Training?

Do you you really need to build an online training program if all you’re doing is repurposing existing content? Is this adding real value? Most likely you don’t need the course (or at least not that type of course). But often those courses get built anyway and that wastes the person’s time and the organization’s money.

How to Avoid Wasting Time & Money for Online Training?

When I consult with a client I always try to determine if the training program has a direct link to the organization’s business goals. If so, then it’s easier to find the right training intervention (assuming it’s needed) and then aligning it to the correct measure. That’s how you get your return on investment, by the way.

Become a Performance Consultant

For those new to this, follow a simple performance consulting model where you can determine where things are currently, where they should be, and how to bridge the gap that exists. I always recommend the Performance Consulting book because it’s straightforward explanation of the process and easy to implement.

In an ideal world, you and your client come up with a solution that works. Unfortunately, often the client wants to build an online training course regardless of whether or not it’s linked to the organization’s goals.

The first step is to avoid building the wrong course (if any). That’s why you wear the hat of performance consultant. But sometimes you still have to build a course. Is so, what’s the best plan?

Three Ways to Save Time & Money with Online Training

Going back to the original scenario, you have to build training but the content already exists online. Here are a few viable options.

Create an abstract of the existing content and publish as a PDF. Don’t waste time building a “course” that’s merely content easily accessed in other places. In those cases, focus on simple job aids that can be used at work. This contents the content to the learner, but doesn’t overwhelm them with a bunch of information.

Another option is to create a summary or abstract of the key information. Then point them to the more detailed information online. This way they have a simple overview and access to more information if they need it. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Some clients will still want to create something and a PDF isn’t the solution for them.

Build a simple interactive multimedia module. When I have a customer who has to have “elearning” but was just repurposing the online content, I’d use something like the process or tabs interactions in Engage. They looked like a training course, but they really were more like multimedia documents.

Because they’re form-based they’re easy to build and maintain. In some ways, they’re even easier to build than a PDF because the software does all of the visual design and formatting. Another advantage is that they can easily be tracked in an LMS. So you get the benefit of a “course” but the speedy production.

Change the focus of the training. Since most of the training content is already online change the focus of the training. Instead of online training that covers the subject matter, do training on how to find and use the online resources.

This also gives you an opportunity to build a community of practice around that training content. You can combine training on using the resources with a peer community of others in the organization who use the same resources. A community lets you capture activity that may be valuable to future learners.

The truth is that a lot of online training wastes time because it’s just content that already exists. However, if you have to build online training like this, the tips above should help make it meaningful and more valuable to the organization.

How do you get around this type of training? Share your thoughts with the community.

If you’re passionate about Articulate software, please take a minute to vote for your favorites. Every vote matters. Plus a good showing means I can keep my kids fed.

Upcoming workshops for 2013:

David and I are really excited about the workshop in the London. If you’re interested, make sure to sign up before it sells out.

Also, if you’re an Articulate user in Austin, check out the free jam session on April 18.

• April 16 & 17: Austin, TX. Two workshops.
  Day 1 – Rapid E-Learning Workshop.
  Day 2 – Articulate Storyline Workshop
• April 18: Austin, TX. Free jam session with the Central Texas Articulate User Group. It’s a great time to get answers and meet your peers. Here are the details. Seating is limited so RSVP to reserve your spot.
• May 14 & 15: London, UK. How to Become a Rapid E-Learning Pro: Two-day master class filled with lots of hands-on activities.
• June: Philadelphia, PA. Details coming.
• June 26-27: Portland, OR. BlueVolt eLearning Conference. Join the Articulate community team for a series of how-to sessions using the Articulate elearning applications.
• June 12 & 13: Miami, FL. Two workshops. Details coming.
  Day 1 – Rapid E-Learning Workshop.
  Day 2 – Articulate Storyline Workshop.
• September: Greensboro, NC. Details coming.
• September: New York, NY. Two workshops. Register here.
  Day 1 – Rapid E-Learning Workshop.
  Day 2 – Articulate Storyline Workshop. I’ll also be presenting at the evening chapter meeting.
• October: Baton Rouge, LA. Details coming.
• October: Los Angeles, CA. Details coming.
• November: St. Louis, MO. Details coming.

Download your free 46-page ebook: The Insider's Guide to Becoming a Rapid E-Learning Pro

by Mike Lenox, Forbes

I predict that we will see a bifurcation in the higher education market. A cost leader (or leaders) will emerge catering to the mass market. They will leverage technology to provide an effective and efficient education. They will cater to the population who may not have had access to higher education thirty years ago. The emergence of the cost leader position will be bad news for the many for-profit online universities that have arisen in recent years and for numerous non-selective residential universities. This is where the shakeout will be most disruptive. The entry of high reputation universities into the MOOC space where they (currently) provide courses for free could be a game changer for this tier of players if someone figures out accreditation and degree granting. This disruption will play out over years, if not decades, as struggling colleges fight to stay alive and student attitudes towards online education evolve.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/darden/2013/03/29/the-imminent-shakeout-disruptive-innovation-and-higher-education/

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by Stanford University

Online technology is not just for distance learners. It can be used to enhance education for on-campus students, too, because providing lecture material by video in advance can free up classroom time for more interactive discussion. “When I heard about online education, my first reaction was to say, wait a minute, that’s so impersonal,” said Maya Adam, a lecturer in human biology. “The magic for me is the performance of a great lecture and that inspiration you get from a really great teacher. What was surprising to me was the fact that I had more of that. I had the ability to engage the students more.” Charles Prober, senior associate dean in the Stanford School of Medicine, said this realization was incorporated into the very name of his school’s online effort.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/march/online-education-faculty-032913.html

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by Vivek Wadhwa, Washington Post

We are headed back to the one-to-one model with instruction geared towards the individual rather than the group. Adaptive learning platforms, such as the one Knewton is developing, start by understanding a student’s strengths and weaknesses and then suggest an appropriate learning path. These keep improving their recommendation engines by keeping track of what videos students with different backgrounds and strengths watch and how they perform on tests. There are thousands of apps that teach subjects such as history, geography, music, mathematics, and science. Adaptive technologies stand to make these standalone apps more effective and personalized. One app that I tested on the Aakash tablet is by a company with offices in the U.S. and India called Mango Learning. It teaches students math through games, which grow more challenging at each level.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/in-education-innovation-moocs-are-only-the-beginning/2013/03/29/88d77ae6-97ef-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html

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by Cyrus Farivar, ars technica

Goodreads, the literary social networking site, has just been acquired by Amazon for an undisclosed price. Users of the site share what they’re reading and discuss books with other users. In an announcement on Thursday afternoon on the Goodreads website, the small San Francisco startup’s founders gushed about the giant book retailer. “We truly could not think of a more perfect partner for Goodreads as we both share a love of books and an appreciation for the authors who write them,” wrote the company’s co-founder, Otis Chandler. “We also both love to invent products and services that touch millions of people.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/03/in-further-effort-to-conquer-the-literary-world-amazon-buys-goodreads/

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