Education Technology

Is it just me, or has there been a shift lately in the way people talk about technology and young children? In addition to the still-lingering questions of "whether" screen technologies have any role in children's learning, parents and teachers seem to be hungry for more on the "how" -- How should iPads be used? How could apps fit with what I want to show or have children explore? How can I find out what works and what doesn't?

New America higher education experts Amy Laitinen and Rachel Fishman discuss policy reforms that could alter the higher education system for the better. Laitinen explains how to move past the credit hour and measure learning, not just seat time, and Fishman explores how public universities are collaborating on that and other issues to develop online courses. Fuzz Hogan hosts.

This blog post originally appeared on Higher Ed Watch, a blog fro

Guest post by Danielle Kehl and Benjamin Lennett from New America's Open Technology Institute.

For a kid growing up in rural northern Wisconsin, attending the state university offers a key avenue to broaden career opportunities or gain skills to better run the family farm. In recent years, as public institutions like the University of Wisconsin (UW) have increasingly embraced online courses and flexible degree options, the university’s resources may seem more accessible than ever—but only if you live in a part of the state that has adequate and affordable broadband.

UW has long been devoted to serving the public interest, cultivating one of the biggest and most ambitious extension programs in the country over the last century. “The Wisconsin Idea,” first articulated by Governer Robert LaFollette and University President Charles Van Hise, was a vision for the university in which its academic activities were connected to every local community. Van Hise declared in 1904: “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state.” It suggests that “the boundaries of campus are the boundaries of the state.”

On April 29, 2013, Lisa Guernsey was part of a panel at the Office of Head Start's 2nd Bi-Annual Birth-to-Five Leadership Institute, where she presented findings on what scientists know about the impact of electronic media on children's learning. Lisa focused on how early childhood policies need to bend to accommodate a "BooksPlus" view of children's learning environment, in which books remain critically important, especially for early literacy skills, but where children also have chances to learn from and engage with multimedia of all kinds.

This post originally appeared in New America's blog In the Tank

When I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took approximately 8-10 large lecture classes. I remember walking into my first lecture as a freshman—Introduction to International Relations—and choosing between a seat on the first floor or in the balcony. I chose the first floor, somewhere in the middle. The “classroom” that day was brimming with more than 500 students. As the professor went over the syllabus, it became evident that attendance at lecture was “strongly encouraged” as there would be no way to quickly take attendance. By the second lecture, there were many empty seats.

Many freshmen and sophomores who attend public universities find themselves stuck in these large, introductory courses. With no one to check up on them or give them personal attention, many fall through the cracks—they may stop attending class and then do poorly on exams, or they may fall behind and withdraw from the course.

With this in mind, when I began to research online courses and credentials at public universities for a policy report, I assumed I would find the same problems endemic to large lectures—high attrition and low success rates.  Instead, I found something that surprised me:  While some online courses may suffer the same problems as lectures, several universities have discovered simple ways to keep students engaged once they start exhibiting drop-out warning signs, like neglecting assignments or lectures. In many instances, the data collected about online students by some institutions create a safety net to prevent drop outs where none exists in a face-to-face lecture-hall setting.

Guest post by Mandy Zatynski

Officials at eCore, the University System of Georgia’s online curriculum, collect heaps of student data every year: individual course completion rates, withdrawal rates, and even the number of those identified as at-risk each semester.

Every day, Melanie Clay, dean of eCore, says she looks at the dropout rate and compares it to the rate at the same time last year. “If it’s not going in the direction we want it to be going in, then we … try to analyze why until we figure out why,” she told me when I visited her office at the University of West Georgia last fall. It could be the online platform (Is it user friendly?), the instructor (Is s/he responsive?), or the student success adviser – the person tasked with calling (yes, on the telephone – twice, then regular contacts by email) every student identified as at-risk. The student success adviser has to be caring, but convincing. Dean Clay knows online courses are just as important as face-to-face courses, even though it’s easier to forget about them.

Yesterday, my colleague Rachel Fishman released a new policy paper, entitled State U Online. Besides synthesizing a progression of steps for building and sophisticating a public online education model,the paper provides a compelling look back at distance education in the U.S. as a nearly 300-year-old phenomenon, not a 20-year-old blip. This historic perspective strongly suggests the answer to a question skeptics of online education continue to pose: Is technology-based education yet another passing fad? While State U Online shows technology-based education is here to stay, one reason the question has persisted may be that faculty themselves are reticent to face the pursuant question, which is whether there will be a place for them in the academic workforce of the future. The answer is that it depends on the structure of faculty work and, in public institutions, what the state hopes to gain from it.

Online learning has become a permanent fixture of our system of higher education. Yet, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of college students, have been visibly slow to embrace it.  Many of these institutions were founded with a mission to serve their citizens, including those unable to attend in residence. Yet even as the technological means to achieve this goal reaches new heights, public universities too often shy away from the challenge.

Today the New America Foundation and Education Sector released State U Online, a report that examines the history of distance learning at public colleges dating back to the eighteenth century.  This paper not only reviews the online offerings at many public colleges and universities, but it also identifies consistent patterns that can help institutional and state-system leaders chart a path forward for the online future. The analysis identifies five steps that institutions and states can take to build a coherent system-wide State U Online. Each step builds on those before it, leading toward increasingly integrated systems in which students can move freely among institutions within a state and eventually beyond state lines. The steps are (access the infographic here):

Welcome to the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

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California State U. System Will Expand MOOC Experiment, Steve Kolowich
Chronicle of Higher Education

Last fall, San Jose State, part of the California State University system, used material from a MOOC on circuits and electronics to flip the classroom for its own introductory course in electrical engineering. San Jose State offered three versions of the course—two were taught as they had been traditionally taught before, and one section replaced the lecture with videos from the MOOC so that students could participate in group work during class. The passage rates in the two conventional sections were 55 to 59 percent. In the flipped section, 91 percent of students passed. Now, a second semester of trials is under way.