Archive for the ‘Online Education’ Category
Capella Education Company Names Hilary Pennington, Formerly with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to Its Board of …
Posted: May 10, 2012 at 6:10 am
MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Capella Education Company (NASDAQ: CPLA - News), a provider of online post-secondary education through its wholly owned subsidiary Capella University, has announced that Hilary Pennington has been named to its board of directors. Pennington is the former director of Education, Postsecondary Success, and Special Initiatives for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation United States Program, where she led the Foundations Postsecondary Education initiative as well as efforts around one-time opportunities to respond to unique challenges and unanticipated events in the United States.
Capella Education Company is honored to have Hilary Pennington join our board of directors. She has done extraordinary work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation across higher education and has a well-earned reputation as a thought leader. Her specific focus on student success is an area of critical importance to Capella. Her depth of knowledge will greatly benefit Capella and help shape our work as we look to grow and play a major role in addressing the biggest challenges and opportunities of higher education in America, said Kevin Gilligan, chairman and chief executive officer of Capella Education Company.
Pennington has also served as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and as vice-chair of Jobs for the Future (JFF), a research and policy development organization that she co-founded. In her 22 years as president and CEO of JFF, Pennington helped the organization become one of the most influential in the country on issues of education, youth transitions, workforce development, and future work requirements. Pennington also served on the Presidential Transition Team for the first Clinton administration, and as co-chair of a presidential advisory committee on using technology to expand training opportunities.
Pennington is a graduate of the Yale School of Management and Yale College. She holds a graduate degree in social anthropology from Oxford University and was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2000.
About Capella Education Company
Founded in 1991, Capella Education Company is a leader in online education, primarily through our wholly owned subsidiary Capella University, a regionally accredited online university*. In addition, Capella Education Company offers online education through Resource Development International Ltd. (RDI), an independent provider of United Kingdom (UK) university distance learning qualifications; and owns Sophia, a first-of-its-kind social education platform that offers students many ways to learn by making free, credible, academic content available to anyone, anywhere, at anytime.
Capella University offers online graduate degree programs in business, counseling, education, health administration, homeland security, human resource management, human services, information technology, nonprofit management and leadership, nursing, psychology, public administration, public health, public safety, and social work; and bachelor's degree programs in business, information technology, nursing, psychology, and public safety. These academic programs are designed to meet the needs of working adults, combining high quality, competency-based curricula with the convenience and flexibility of an online learning format. Currently, Capella University offers 46 graduate and undergraduate degree programs with 144 specializations. More than 37,000 learners were enrolled as of March 31, 2012. For more information about Capella Education Company, please visit http://www.capellaeducation.com. For more information about Capella University, please visit http://www.capella.edu or call 1.888.CAPELLA (227.3552).
* Capella University is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission and is a member of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), http://www.ncahlc.org. Capella University, Capella Tower, 225 South Sixth Street, Ninth Floor, Minneapolis, MN 55402, 1.888.CAPELLA (227.3552), http://www.capella.edu.
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Capella Education Company Names Hilary Pennington, Formerly with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to Its Board of ...
Can the Net Save Education?
Posted: at 6:10 am
The Internet can save everything, even education. At least that's what tech companies would have parents and government officials believe. Too bad it's not true.
Incensed at the apparent lackluster performance of our students and our supposed lack of educational competitiveness on the global stage, proponents of the magical properties of the Web argue that we can save education if we just used the power of the Internet. Put up free classes and instruction online from the best teachers, they argue at conference after conference, and all our education ills will be cured.
In fact, all the leading educational institutions have been keen on the idea for years, with more jumping online every day. Just this past week Harvard and MIT announced a joint $60 million project called edX to offer free courses online. (You won't get academic credit, but students can earn completion certificates and a grade.)
The poster child for much of the online education movement is the Kahn Academy, which has roughly 3,200 educational videos available for free. But one has to wonder whether any of these online cheerleaders has ever watched a complete "class" on the site, because if they had they would immediately see the multitude of problems with this approach.
The first issue is what I like to call the talking hands problem. Like an extended version of a Seor Wences routine -- although not nearly as entertaining -- a hand or pair of hands gesticulates and writes on a smart board, explaining linear algebra or differential calculus. This is engaging for about 5 minutes, after which it's about as exciting as a Cnet video chronicling the unboxing of a smart phone.
- MIT President Susan Hockfield
While a pair of talking hands or simple step-by-step instructions online may help a student cramming for a math exam (you can replay and slow a lesson down), the process won't work for other subjects. Several history lessons about Napoleon that I watched on the Kahn site demonstrated what was wrong with the way history was taught many years ago: It was simply an endless litany of dates and events, completely devoid of any historical context or motivation.
Of course, there's no guarantee that a live teacher in the classroom can do any better, but at least in class a teacher can look students in the eye, show enthusiasm, and query pupils in the middle of a thought to generate new ideas. Without this contact, online videos can be absolutely deadening and end up doing a disservice to students rather than encouraging them to pursue further study.
In addition, there are large swaths of the curriculum in which the online model will not work. You cannot do lab work for biology or chemistry online. You cannot use the Socratic approach for a philosophy class in a video (even Skype won't help there). And students will inevitably suffer for a lack of discussion with other students. Facebook posts are no substitute.
What may be the real Achilles Heel of online video learning today, however, are the poor production values. To truly engage a student requires a whole set of skills involving how to tell a story through video, sound, and pictures. Those are not skills that everyone has, which is why "The Avengers" is a good movie, and "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol" is a stinker.
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Can the Net Save Education?
ArtistWorks Featured on China Central Television – Video
Posted: May 6, 2012 at 6:13 am
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ArtistWorks Featured on China Central Television - Video
Free Harvard, MIT classes for all? Yes and no.
Posted: at 6:13 am
Harvard and MIT jumped to the front of the free online education movement this week with edX, a $60 million partnership that promises online coursework to the masses from two leading academic brands.
The venture illustrates both the limits and limitlessness of online higher education.
On the one hand, the collaboration looks like an unprecedented gesture of intellectual largesse an altruistic giveaway, as Mary Carmichael put it in the Boston Globe. Or, as Harvard President Drew Faust noted in Wednesdays news conference, Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access. The Chronicle of Higher Education termed it part of an online education revival, following the collapse of earlier efforts that proved financially untenable.
It remains to be seen how many citizens of edXs vast global education community can walk away with credentials for completing a course, or what it might cost.
The venture will create access, starting this fall, for literally hundreds of thousands of potential students to some of the greatest minds in academia. There will be no admission gateway and thats a significant point, considering how hard it is to get into either Harvard or MIT. (The new undertaking is actually an outgrowth of MITx, a free-to-the-masses online education initiative announced by MIT separately last year.)
But no one taking edX courses will gain access to a credential issued in the name of Harvard or MIT, and that, too, is significant; the online platform will not allow students back-door access to those prized brands. Online learners who demonstrate mastery of subjects could earn a certificate of completion, the universities said in a statement, but such certificates would not be issued under the name Harvard or MIT.
Such credentials would also cost something the exact sum is yet to be determined. And its not clear that every student who wants a certificate from edX will be able to get one.
Herein lies one of the key limitations of online higher education: when it comes to grading papers or tests, and to assessing whether a student has mastered a course, human graders typically must be involved, and suddenly, the universe of students who can be served shrinks to a finite and very modest number.
University leaders say they will leverage the venture to spawn research on how students learn, and on how best to educate people online. These two schools and other national universities that have dabbled in online education tend to be picky about the online platforms they choose, and to differentiate fairly or not between the quality of their online coursework and everyone elses.
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Free Harvard, MIT classes for all? Yes and no.
GUEST COLUMN: edX is freeing education
Posted: at 6:13 am
Opinion: GUEST COLUMN: edX is freeing education
This could revolutionize the way we learn
May 4, 2012
This Wednesday, MIT President Susan Hockfield and Harvard President Drew Faust announced the edX platform for online education. I have been taking the pilot edX course 6.002x this semester, but it wasnt until I saw these two women speak that I realized just how big this initiative could be. 6.002x is already an incredible technological achievement that accurately replicates an introductory Course VI class on the Internet. After the announcement this Wednesday, this revolutionary online experience of MIT classes made the leap to become a multi-institutional platform that could transform the delivery of education worldwide.
edX is not the first foray into online education. Last fall, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun opened up his introductory AI class to thousands of students around the world. He then left the university to found Udacity, which offers a series of CS courses. There is also Coursera, a company started by Stanford professors, which has already partnered with Princeton, UMich, and UPenn to offer courses ranging from Mythology to Cryptography. However, these two products are both creations of for-profit companies. Perhaps the one resource most closely aligned with edX is the non-profit Khan Academy, started by Salman Khan 98 (commencement speaker for the class of 2012!). By staying non-profit, edX can honestly claim to make an MIT or Harvard education available to anyone with the will to pursue it.
The current model for post-secondary education is far from ideal and is often inefficient. Most course material is distributed only during lecture, which is limited in both time and place. The material remains largely unchanged from semester to semester and can even worsen if a weaker professor makes changes to a class. Similar classes use similar material from institution to institution, yet it is disconnected rather than synthesized into one best-in-class course. Most significantly, this education is limited to the select group of students admitted to colleges around the world. In many cases, this group represents only the students with the support and resources to win the college admissions game, despite ongoing efforts to the contrary.
What is stopping us from bringing the worlds best education out of the ivory tower and into the commons? One might propose that it is infeasible to teach all the worlds population at once. However, technology has made this a trivial obstacle. Lectures can be recorded with incredible fidelity and streamed to any connected machine in the world. Books, tutorials, and problem set solutions can all be served up on the web. Scripts can be written to generate unique homework problems and grade them in real time. Web applications are as dynamic as anything written for the desktop. The technology we have built over the last few decades not only makes online education feasible, it makes it the next logical step in improving the way we learn.
The other, more sinister, objection is that only the select group admitted into the worlds best institution deserves its education. If edX advances to the point where there is no distinguishable difference between an online education and a brick and mortar education, it may be that an online certification gains the same significance as an MIT degree. Laws of supply and demand tell us that a saturated market dilutes the value of each individual unit. However, it may be time to consider an entirely new paradigm for education. Rather than treating college degrees as credentials for future employment, lets treat them as foundations of knowledge that transcend any piece of paper. Let everyone have access to the same training, and let people be judged by the merit of their work rather than by the name of an institution.
This, of course, is a radical change. Colleges and universities around the world will need to rebrand themselves as something other than gatekeepers of education. Students might no longer need to proceed through the educational system in lockstep grade levels, but instead learn new things as soon as they are ready for them. Education might no longer be limited to a set curriculum of courses taken over four years, but could become a lifetime of learning in all kinds of different fields. Most importantly, education may finally become a resource as freely available as air or sunlight. And education deserves to be an open resource. The knowledge steadily accumulated by years and years of experimenting, failing, discovering, and learning belongs to all people.
Traces of the revolt against the current model of education can be seen around the world. In the U.S., primary and secondary educators desperately search for a better solution. The value of college is questioned in the face of tuition costs rising faster than inflation and federal loans being cut by the government. Successful entrepreneurs, such as Peter Thiel, are paying MIT students $100,000 to drop out to pursue their true ambitions. Successful students, such as my roommate, are leaving MIT to become successful entrepreneurs on their own. Perhaps the traditional four-year college experience is no longer necessary in our modern society. Perhaps there is room for a new way of thinking.
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GUEST COLUMN: edX is freeing education
Viewpoints: Elite universities envision their future with online courses
Posted: at 6:13 am
Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007.
But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.
This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, "There's a tsunami coming."
What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.
Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?
If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost gesture, mood, eye contact when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?
The doubts are justified, but there are more reasons to feel optimistic. In the first place, online learning will give millions of students access to the world's best teachers. Already, hundreds of thousands of students have taken accounting classes from Norman Nemrow of Brigham Young University, robotics classes from Sebastian Thrun of Stanford and physics from Walter Lewin of MIT.
Online learning could extend the influence of U.S. universities around the world. India alone hopes to build tens of thousands of colleges over the next decade. Curricula from U.S. schools could permeate those institutions.
Research into online learning suggests that it is roughly as effective as classroom learning. It's easier to tailor a learning experience to an individual student's pace and preferences. Online learning seems especially useful in language and remedial education.
The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper.
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Viewpoints: Elite universities envision their future with online courses
Brace for the online education tsunami
Posted: at 6:13 am
Originally published May 4, 2012 at 11:10 PM | Page modified May 4, 2012 at 6:01 PM
Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007.
But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.
Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, "There's a tsunami coming."
What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.
Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?
If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost gesture, mood, eye contact when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?
The doubts are justified, but there are more reasons to feel optimistic. In the first place, online learning will give millions of students access to the world's best teachers. Already, hundreds of thousands of students have taken accounting classes from Norman Nemrow of Brigham Young University, robotics classes from Sebastian Thrun of Stanford and physics from Walter Lewin of MIT.
Online learning could extend the influence of U.S. universities around the world. India alone hopes to build tens of thousands of colleges over the next decade. Curricula from U.S. schools could permeate those institutions.
Research into online learning suggests that it is roughly as effective as classroom learning. It's easier to tailor a learning experience to an individual student's pace and preferences. Online learning seems especially useful in language and remedial education.
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Brace for the online education tsunami
Dade Medical College Launches New School of Online Education
Posted: at 6:13 am
MIAMI, May 4, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Dade Medical College launches its new online campus as the college continues to expand its offerings of specialized allied healthcare and nursing education programs for the community.
The college launched their new Bachelor's of Science Degree in Nursing (BSN) program and their Associate of Science Degree in Medical Billing and Coding program to their online education students on Monday, April 30.
The college's Bachelor's of Science Degree in Nursing comes at a time when many healthcare institutions are requiring more advanced degrees from their nursing staff. "The best part about offering our BSN program is our ability to address a driving industry need and further help the community by offering the working healthcare professional the flexibility and convenience of earning their advance degree online," says Enrique J. Lopez, Dade Medical College's Dean of Continuing and Online Education. "And with major reform set to take place in 2014 when all hospitals will be required to switch to electronic medical/health records, the Medical Billing and Coding program will be essential to finding and hiring qualified coding specialists," continues Lopez.
Online classes will be taught by the same fully-licensed and certified faculty currently teaching the accredited, on-ground programs at the college. The students' computers will serve as their virtual classroom as they interact with their instructor and fellow students in completing their course work, assignments and examinations. Special metrics will be used to ensure and measure class participation and attendance, two key factors in maintaining a quality program and producing the outcome-based results the college is known for.
"In order to meet our mission of giving access to a quality, outcome-based education to each and everyone, we felt it was important to enhance our program offerings and grow into the online education revolution," says Ernesto Perez, President & CEO of Dade Medical College. "It's the wave of the future and as our tag line reads, at Dade Medical College, your future begins today!"
About Dade Medical CollegeWith close to 400 full-time employees staffing Dade Medical College's six Florida campuses and corporate office, the school features a fully-licensed and certified faculty whose commitment to excellence in education are unmatched by other area colleges and institutions. A majority of the faculty and administrative staff originates locally, with many having been educated at other prestigious local and national institutions. The college offers Associate of Science and Bachelor's degrees in nursing and Associate of Science degrees in other programs such as radiology, diagnostic cardiac sonography, medical billing and coding and more. Classes start every four weeks. Online course offerings also available.
Dade Medical College is accredited by the Accrediting Bureau of Health Education Schools, the Joint Review Committee on Education in Radiologic Technology (Miami and Hollywood Campuses) and is licensed by the Florida Commission for Independent Education. Dade Medical College has also been approved by the Florida Board of Nursing and the Florida Board of Massage and is a member of the Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools and Colleges and the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association.
For more information, visit http://www.DadeMedical.edu, like them on http://www.facebook.com/DadeMedicalCollegeor call 305.644.1171.
Media Contact: Elizabeth Martinez Dade Medical College, 786-374-4997, liz@dademedical.edu
News distributed by PR Newswire iReach: https://ireach.prnewswire.com
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Dade Medical College Launches New School of Online Education
Myths and Facts of Online Learning – Video
Posted: May 2, 2012 at 4:13 am
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Myths and Facts of Online Learning - Video
Paying for Post-Secondary #Education 101: New online guide by @FCACan
Posted: at 4:12 am
New online material offers tips on everything from saving to budgeting to finding sources of money
OTTAWA, April 30, 2012 /CNW/ - Students and parents have a new one-stop location to find free, objective information about paying for post-secondary education. In this new addition to its suite of "life events", the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) has put together a comprehensive online guide that can help anyone looking to fund their post-secondary education.
"Coming up with the money to pay for university, college or specialized trade training can be a challenge," says FCAC Commissioner Ursula Menke. "The cost of post-secondary education can have a major impact on a family's finances, and it helps students and parents if they are able to prepare themselves financially and learn more about the different options available to them."
Paying for Post-Secondary Education not only provides an outline of the costs, but also suggests ways to save and find other sources of financial support. The Student Budget Worksheet lists possible expenses which you can compare to the money available to pay for them (it also does the math for you). You can learn more about programs that can help your education savings grow, such as Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs), the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG) and the Canada Learning Bond (CLB).
The guide also covers:
Students will find other tips on earning and saving money while at school, and paying down student debt after they finish their studies.
About FCAC
With educational materials and interactive tools, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) provides objective information about financial products and services to help Canadians increase their financial knowledge and confidence in managing their personal finances. FCAC informs consumers about their rights and responsibilities when dealing with banks and federally regulated trust, loan and insurance companies. FCAC also makes sure that federally regulated financial institutions, payment card network operators and external complaints bodies comply with legislation and industry commitments intended to protect consumers.
You can reach us through FCAC's Consumer Services Centre by calling toll-free 1-866-461-3222 (TTY: 613-947-7771 or 1-866-914-6097) or by visiting our website: itpaystoknow.gc.ca.
FCAC celebrates its 10thanniversary! Follow @FCACan on Twitter Subscribe to FCACan on YouTube
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Paying for Post-Secondary #Education 101: New online guide by @FCACan