OldHawk777 writes with news that MITx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's online learning initiative, has opened free enrollment for its first course: 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics. "Modeled after MIT’s 6.002 — an introductory course for undergraduate students in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) — 6.002x will introduce engineering in the context of the lumped circuit abstraction, helping students make the transition from physics to the fields of electrical engineering and computer science. ... 'We are very excited to begin MITx with this prototype class,' says MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif. 'We will use this prototype course to optimize the tools we have built by soliciting and acting on feedback from learners.' To access the course, registered students will log in at mitx.mit.edu, where they will find a course schedule, an e-textbook for the course, and a discussion board. Each week, students will watch video lectures and demonstrations, work with practice exercises, complete homework assignments, and participate in an online interactive lab specifically designed to replicate its real-world counterpart. Students will also take exams and be able to check their grades as they progress in the course. Overall, students can expect to spend approximately 10 hours each week on the course."

Originally posted here:
MIT's Online Education Prototype Opens For Enrollment

China Telecom and ClevrU Corporation signed a Memorandum of Understanding today in Beijing China witnessed by the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, to jointly work together to develop the mobile online education market in China and in 50 other countries.

Waterloo, Ontario (PRWEB) February 10, 2012

It is the intention of ClevrU and China Telecom to develop a long-term strategic partnership relationship to research and develop a business model for the mobile online education market in China and 50 other countries that China Telecom has operations.

China Telecom and its subsidiary China Communication Services Corporation Limited and its subsidiary’s will support ClevrU’s market development with assistance in market research, business model development, platform deployment and operational implementation.

ClevrU agrees to support China Telecom and its subsidiaries with adapting ClevrU’s education platform and applications to the needs of the Chinese market and 50 other countries supported by China Telecom.

“ClevrU is excited with the opportunity to work with China Telecom and its affiliated companies to jointly study and develop the mobile online education market and the need to provide greater access to quality education services both in the enterprise training market and the consumer education market.” said Dana Fox, CEO and President of ClevrU Corporation.

About ClevrU Corporation

ClevrU is focused on WEB 3.0 applications that intelligently leverage Cloud Computing in a mobile environment. ClevrU has developed an e-teaching content delivery platform with advanced tools to assist in interactive teaching and student/instructor collaboration. This application uses an intelligent engine to adapt course content to users personal needs in a mobile environment. ClevrU is initially focused on international education markets. ClevrU's technology combines video e-teaching with semantic based intelligent social network tools for educational institutions universities and colleges, cellular phone/ tablet computer manufacturers and cellular carriers to deliver course content to students anywhere, anytime. ClevrU branded the platform ClevrU EDU and registered a patent pending on its Intelligent Collaborative Platform Technology.

About China Telecom

China Telecom Corporation Limited is the world's largest wireline telecommunications and broadband services provider and the world's largest CDMA mobile operator. Serving as a full services integrated information service operator, China Telecom provides basic telecommunications services, such as wireline telecommunications services and mobile telecommunications services, and value-added telecommunications services, such as Internet access services and information services in the PRC. As of the end of March 2011, the Company has wireline access lines in service of about 173 million, wireline broadband subscribers of over 66 million and mobile subscribers of more than 100 million. The Company's H shares and American Depositary Shares ("ADSs") are listed on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited and the New York Stock Exchange, respectively.

###

Dana Fox
dana@clevru.com
519 575 1477
Email Information

Read more here:
ClevrU and China Telecom Sign Memorandum of Understanding to Jointly Work Together in Developing the Mobile Online ...

Administrators are skeptical about the trajectory of online education after a startup company made a splash last month by offering free online courses taught by universities’ top professors.

Udemy, a for-profit company that allows users to create and sell courses, tapped into professors’ knowledge base with the launch of The Faculty Project Jan. 26. Twelve professors at universities like Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Colgate have developed free courses in subjects ranging from public health to Russian literature and music.

The Udemy courses – which are offered for no academic credit – are presented through a combination of media, often including video mash-ups in which the professor is seen talking and outlining graphs next to a presentation. Students can post comments and questions under the lectures to which professors might respond.

GW professors are not offering any courses through the project, which cost about $500 each to develop, director of The Faculty Project Tim Parks said. The company has to select professors to participate.

Academic administrators have yet to jump on board with free online courses, citing their costly upkeep as a deterrent.

Provost Steven Lerman said the University is looking closely into the online education marketplace, which “has a lot of different models floating around,” including Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare, which Lerman helped launch 10 years ago when he was a professor there. After a decade of offering free lecture videos to students around the world, MIT will start granting certificates to students who take the courses this spring in a new program called MITx.

“The hard question is how do you sustain those [courses]. Even if you get some money to help do it at first, there’s a care and feeding cost to these things,” Lerman said. “The courses have to be updated, certainly if you want to do something like give examinations to students and give them certificates.”

The University is making strides in offering more hybrid courses – taught partly in the classroom and partly online – as a way to mitigate dwindling classroom space and the pinch of the city-imposed population cap for on-campus student enrollment. GW also offers 60 degree and certificate programs that use a standard distance learning model where students never have to set foot on campus.

To keep up with the expenses of developing online options and help subsidize free course materials, some universities rely on grants or donations.

Stephen Ehrmann, vice provost for teaching and learning, said the separation between GW and elite institutions that are taking up free online education models comes from the significant grants pulled in yearly from foundations.

“GW has no plans to offer free online non-credit courses comparable to the ones offered by MIT and Stanford,” Ehrmann said. “When we get large gifts or foundation support, I’d like to see us use it to improve the education of GW students who are working hard to earn a degree,” instead of outside students seeking free online courses, he said.

Likening free online courses to “public television or the New York Public Library,” Ehrmann said, “You have to have a lot of money to offer them. If you can do it, it can be a real public service.”

Especially as tuition costs are spotlighted nationwide, Robert Garland, a Colgate professor who is teaching ancient Greek religion through Udemy, said no-cost courses open doors for people who cannot otherwise afford higher education.

“This is an important issue for all institutions of higher learning, that online learning is here to stay. What format classes will be in and how they’ll impact higher learning is not clear at this moment,” Garland said. “I certainly believe in trying to promote learning to a wider group of people.”

Other online education issues, including the costs of courses, will be on the docket for GW’s six-month-old Teaching and Learning Collaborative this spring, the advisory board’s lead faculty member Rahul Simha said.

The 19-person board was created to examine teaching strategies toward boosting student engagement in the classroom.

“It’s exciting that today’s technology allows certain kinds of scaling and cost efficiencies, so institutions of higher education need to figure out how to make use of that,” Simha, who is also a computer science professor, said.

Read this article:
GW wary to adopt free online courses

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES: Pasco senior Mike Larry survives all that life throws at him — including the murder of his mother, his father and brothers being jailed — to raise his grades at an alternative center, make a football team and win a college scholarship. (Times photo, Stephen Coddington)

LET THEM ANSWER: The Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association complains that some teachers were left out of the district's annual climate survey. 

FOUR-DAY WEEK: Pasco parents raise multiple concerns about a proposal to have students attend fewer, longer school days.

NO SUBSTITUTE: Online education isn't the same as a classroom experience with good teachers and classmates, Eckerd College president Donald Eastman writes in a column for the Times.

WHAT MATTERS MOST: Lake County teachers ask to be freed of extra duties so they can focus more on academics, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

UNFAIR: An Orange County principal says schools serving poor students won't get fair treatment in the state's merit pay system, WKMG-6 reports.

STRAIGHT TO STUDENTS: The Florida Department of Education studies the Lake Wales Charter Schools model of directing grant funds straight to schools, the Ledger reports.

COLLEGE CREDIT: A growing number of Miami-Dade and Broward high school students take dual enrollment college courses, the Miami Herald reports.

LIBRARY FINES: Palm Beach schools fail to collect about $2 million in lost book fees, the Palm Beach Post reports.  

FOLLOW THE RULES: A finalist for Palm Beach superintendent withdraws after the School Board allows the interim superintendent, who was contractually barred from applying, to be considered for the job, the Palm Beach Post reports.

SUE YOU: Two ousted Brevard maintenance workers file a lawsuit saying their were wrongfully terminated, Florida Today reports.

PAY UP: Former Monroe superintendent Randy Acevedo, ousted and found guilty of public corruption, has yet to pay his criminal fines, the Keynoter reports.

Visit the Gradebook at noon for an interview with Monica Verra-Tirado, newly appointed director of the state's Bureau of Exceptional Education.

Originally posted here:
Florida education news: Success story, four-day school week, online education and more

OTTAWA — Many young people remain vulnerable to online predators because they are dangerously unaware that privacy on the Internet is an illusion, experts say.

And the Internet has opened so many avenues for young people that they've become blissfully ignorant it can also be used to harm them.

Teenage girls in particular tend to be easy prey because they see the Internet as part of their living space and consider — incorrectly — whatever they do online as private, said Shaheen Shariff, an associate professor of education at McGill University, who specializes in cyber-bullying and online social networking.

The reality is that the Internet has no boundaries — once an image leaves a home computer or cellphone, it becomes universally available.

What makes teenage girls who are frequently online even more vulnerable is the fact that many are at an age where they are experimenting with their sexuality, and it's easy to take advantage of them, experts add.

They say the case of a 20-year-old Ottawa man who used threats and extortion to lure young women into performing online sexual acts reinforces the need for more Internet-usage education.

"Young people today see the Internet as part of their lived space . . . and when they send photographs, or are seduced by people to do it online, they consider that to be private space," Shariff said.

"They do not understand that what they send is available to an infinite audience and the information can be permanently damaging to them."

Michael Hoechsmann, another McGill University expert in education, media and new technology, says the Internet is not to blame.

Young people have always experimented, he says, but what has changed is that the Internet offers an avenue for mass distribution, especially for images.

And since it has become such an integral part of the culture and personality for young people, abuses are inevitable. But malicious acts are seemingly becoming more the exception than the rule.

"Increasingly, young people are living virtual lives and using the Internet as a form of expression and meeting place. The fact that many young people carry cameras with them on a daily basis has made them broadcasters," Hoechsmann said.

"When people bring whatever element of their identity to that meeting place, you're going to have some that are going to express it in a hateful manner," he added.

Shariff says that while a number of incidents involving predators has created a "moral panic" in the media, making the Internet seem "bad" for girls, the contrary is true.

The Internet, she says, remains a positive instrument for young people — but the challenge is to identify those who are vulnerable, and put in measures to protect them.

She says the problem is that "the lines between public and private" are blurred for teen girls, and it is important to get them to understand the limits of online privacy.

It is a task that requires the combined effort of parents, teachers and everyone involved in teenagers' lives.

"The advent of the Internet has posed a whole new series of challenges to our society and the youth in particular," said Alex McKay, research co-ordinator of the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada.

"Clearly, there are some kids who are not aware of what can happen to their communications and images that are posted on the Internet. It is extremely important that schools as part of the education they provide, include information and skills that will help young people navigate the Internet safely."

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

See the rest here:
Teens need education in online privacy

SHCOE to provide career-based high school diploma program to inmates in several Florida correctional facilities.

Pensacola, FL (PRWEB) February 09, 2012

The Florida Department of Corrections has formally announced its intent to award a contract to Smart Horizons Career Online Education (SHCOE) for the provision of online career training and high school education services to Florida inmates. According to Dr. Howard Liebman, CEO and Superintendent of SHCOE, the initial pilot program is scheduled to begin March 1 at the Madison Correctional Institution and either the Lowell Correctional Institution or the Hillsborough Correctional Institution.

Based in Pensacola, Florida, SHCOE is the world’s first AdvancED/SACS accredited online school district. SHCOE offers an instructional program that enables students returning to the education process to earn an 18-credit high school diploma while also completing coursework for a credentialed career certificate. SHCOE forms strategic alliances with school districts, post-secondary institutions, community organizations and non-profit foundations in an ongoing effort to reach an ever-widening circle of adult learners.

“We are excited that the Department of Corrections will use SHCOE’s online academic program to provide inmates with an innovative career-based online high school education,” Dr. Liebman said. “We have specifically developed a career online education and training model for the corrections industry that is flexible, cost-effective and readily adaptable to prison populations.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, approximately 75 percent of America’s state prison inmates are high school dropouts. “Equally telling is the fact that only 20 percent of adults who have been in prison education programs are re-incarcerated as compared to a 49 percent rate of re-incarceration for adults who did not participate in those programs,” said Dr. Liebman. “SHCOE offers the State of Florida an ideal means of lowering recidivism rates, reducing costs, and preparing prison inmates for careers in various occupational areas.”

According to Florida Department of Corrections data, the state’s current prison population exceeds 100,000 individuals.

________________________________________________________________________________

Smart Horizons Career Online Education, founded in 2009 and located in Pensacola, Florida, is a private, AdvancED/SACS accredited online school district. AdvancED/SACS District accreditation signifies that SHCOE and all of its schools are fully accredited and that SHCOE is recognized across the nation as a quality school system. Smart Horizons Career Online Education offers 18–credit, career–based high school diploma programs that are designed to prepare students for entrance into the workplace. Career certificate offerings include Childcare Education, Office Management, Protection Services, Homeland Security, Healthcare (coming soon), Transportation Services, and Professional Skills.

For more information, visit our website at http://www.shcoe.org, call our office at 855–777–4265 or email us at info(at)smarthorizonsonline(dot)org

Contact: Dr. Howard Liebman, Smart Horizons Career Online Education, CEO & Superintendent, 305–962–6489 or hliebman(at)smarthorizonsonline(dot)org

###

Howard Liebman
Smart Horizons Career Online Education
305-962-6489
Email Information

More here:
Florida Department of Corrections Announces its Intent to Award Smart Horizons Career Online Education Contract to ...

The first person hired by Google's founders is leaving the Internet giant to devote himself to an innovative online education website called Khan Academy.

Google on Thursday confirmed that Craig Silverstein is departing the California company he helped Larry Page and Sergey Brin build into the world's most popular search engine.

"Craig's been with Google since the early days," Google said in an emailed response to an AFP inquiry.

"He was instrumental in the development of search and made numerous contributions to Google over the years.

"We wish him all the best at the Khan academy and know that he will do great things to help them promote education around the world," Google said.

Silverstein was "Googler number 3," joining graduate students Brin and Page about 14 years ago after they launched the service in a Stanford University dorm room.

The engineer planned to join Salman Khan at the nonprofit Khan Academy, which provides online video classes. Google and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are listed among the academy backers.

The rest is here:
First Google hire leaving for online academy

Bridget Baldwin is working toward her online bachelor's in business management from Champlain College.

College education takes all sorts of shapes these days, as students more often choose nontraditional routes to a degree. Many people of different ages, backgrounds, and career goals are now looking to online education programs. Here's why one person chose an online degree.

Bridget Baldwin has had quite the relationship with Champlain College, a small, private school in Vermont. She graduated high school, and then earned her associate degree in retailing and fashion merchandising at Champlain in 1992. After a few jobs, she circled back to her alma mater, where she's worked for the last dozen years, first in alumni affairs, and then in the Division of Continuing Professional Studies, where she is now the director of enrollment management.

About a decade ago, Baldwin began working toward a bachelor's degree from Champlain, by taking part-time evening classes when she could. Though Baldwin spent a lot of time at her job in the Division of Continuing Professional Studies talking adult learners into taking online classes, Baldwin admits that she was skeptical of the idea. She finally gave in and figured she ought to try the learning method she promotes, so, six years ago, Baldwin started taking online classes from Champlain and hasn't looked back. She says that if she hadn't switched from on-campus to online learning, she probably wouldn't have completed her degree.

Age: 39

Online program: Champlain College

Degree pursuing and graduation year: B.S. in business management, expected May 2012 (20 years to the day after earning her associate degree)

Why an online degree: "It really came down to time management around my family and quality time with them," says Baldwin. She was already spending more than 40 hours per week on campus for work, Baldwin says, and she didn't want to spend any more time away from her two children and husband. Instead of attending class on campus for three hours around dinner time, Baldwin says she now studies early in the morning before her kids awake, and late at night after they go to bed.

Degree impact: Baldwin has just been promoted in her job at Champlain College because of her nearing degree completion. She says, too, that she has more "drive" to learn than ever before, thanks to fighting negative thoughts. "As an adult learner, I think there can be a lot of things in life that tell you can't: not enough time, not enough money, not enough confidence," says Baldwin. "But you get that confidence as you learn." She adds that, "you start to become part of this community of adult learners that is really engaging and motivating."

Biggest challenge of earning an online degree: Baldwin, who spent a decade earning her degree (the first four years on campus, and the last six online), cites time as her most daunting struggle. "That's a big commitment, not just by me, but by my family."

Advice for future online students: "Be open to online [education]," says Baldwin. "You can do it. There are ways to manage everything in life and make that commitment to yourself."

Searching for an online program? Get our complete rankings of Top Online Education Programs.

Here is the original post:
Why I Chose Online Education: Bridget Baldwin

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmfFbOh3o58

08-12-2011 13:28 techbookonline.com Techbook Online Corporation® celebrates Black History with COON™ Awareness Month http://www.techbookonline.com 2.1.12: Global News -- (Education/Black History): Techbook Online Corporation®, an integrated internet, multi-media publishing and sustainable marketing organization, announced today that throughout the month of February it will recognize the early contributions of African-American's in entertainment with a month long social media campaign called COON™ (Caricatures Once Observed as Naive). With the majority of content being published on the organization's Facebook and Twitter pages, the goal of the campaign is to raise awareness of caricatures such as "Coon" "Mammy" and "Black Sambo", while educating the public on their role, relevance and importance in African-American history. To read the official Press Release visit http://www.facebook.com 12.13.11: Global News--(Drum Education): "Educators launch marketing campaign intended to empower Drummers" TRX Cymbal Co® Artist Flood the Drummer®, a vocal advocate for Education reform and the CEO of Techbook Online Corporation® and InteractiveMusicTeacher.com, an innovative online subscription service that offers live streaming drum education in HD, announced today the launch of the #KICKEARS Solo and Grow™ campaign. Described as a weeklong internet campaign designed to build a community of drummers who will play loud, play fast and PLAY, drummers are encouraged to tweet YouTube videos of them soloing with the hastag ...

Go here to see the original:
Gospel Chops: Flood the Drummer w/ band plays Drum Solo ft. TRX Cymbals! #KICKEARS - Video

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uruT6BaReQ0

25-01-2012 18:01 On January 30, President Obama will answer your top-voted questions in a special post-State of the Union interview from the White House. To participate, visit http://www.youtube.com/whitehouse and submit your question. YouTube videos you submit will drive the interview and will be used to select a few lucky people to join a live Google+ Hangout with the President. The deadline to submit is January 28 at midnight ET. NOTE: The White House and President Obama will not review any of the questions submitted before the interview and will not know which questions will be asked.

Go here to read the rest:
Ask President Obama - Video