Does Technology Reduce the Cost of Teaching?

Corinne Ruff has a nice article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Does Technology Ever Reduce the Costs of Teaching? and the answer is, as expected, whatever you want it to be to support your agenda.

One thing seems clear, however: using open-source content, open textbooks, and open-source platforms does save real money, especially for the student.

For more on the business side of ed-tech consider The Business of Ed-Tech (2015), Bundling Textbook Costs with Tuition, or this interview with Audrey Watters.

http://www.socialhacks.com/education/the-skinny-on-buying-cheap-textbooks

The Quantified Student

Adam Markowitz and Ryan Craig have proclaimed 2016 as the Year Of The Quantified Student. For context, Markowitz is the Founder and CEO of Portfolium and Craig a Managing Director at University Ventures. Here are two quotes:

Quantified Students will be able to map current skillsets against the requirements of target careers, evaluate the gap, and then select the educational program or path that gets them to their destination quickly and cost effectively.

As Quantified Students declare majors and continue to accrue skills, four years of academic work will find a permanent home in the cloud rather than in the trash. All of the underlying data will be indexed and eventually cashed in by students to prove competencies to skills-hungry employers.

Not surprisingly, Markowitz and Craig propose/promote e-portfolios for that 'permanent' home in the cloud - in some ways a logical extension of Claim Your Domain! and adaptive-learning tools like Knewton.

Of course, why would a Quantified Student spend 4-year on the campus of a small public college as opposed to filling the skill gaps identified by Big Data on the vast international private market of higher education? For a more nuanced discussion, consider From the Quantified Student to the Quantified Self by Audrey Watters.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-05-11

The Gameful Classroom

GradeCraft by the University of Michigan is a learning management system designed to support personalized 'gameful' courses - read more about it over at Wired Campus. The basic idea is to mimic learning as a video game where students chart their own path through the course material and mistakes don't come with any real consequences - you can simply start over and repeat the level.

Claim Your Domain!

And control your digital identity and digital citizenship!

• Problem: students and faculty lose control of their digital work once they upload it to the commercial LMS or E-Portfolio systems.
• Solution: claim your domain and put yourself in-control of your own digital academic or professional portfolio.
• Example: carstenbraun.us

And the institution can (and should) facilitate that by creating a Domains of One's Own initiative for students, faculty, and staff.

That's the short version of Audrey Watters new book Claim Your Domain - And Own Your Online Presence. This is a good and quick read, but you can also skim the Clif Notes version on her blog at The Web We Need to Give Students.

Going Google (Part 4): Google Classroom

Looking for an alternative to PLATO? Perhaps something lightweight without the bloated features of Blackboard, yet with some education-specific features? Google's Apps for Education have been around for a while and now we get Google Classroom. The initial reviews have been somewhat mixed, but why not try it yourself?

• Google Classroom: First Impressions (Profhacker)
• Google's Classroom tool open to teachers worldwide (CNET)
• Introduction to Google Classroom (Edudemic)
• Is Google's Free Software A Good Deal For Educators? (NPR)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/26/341943780/is-googles-free-software-a-good-deal-for-educators