Online Education is a Tsunami Coming

According to Theresa Johnston, in the Stanford magazine, “Online technologies are shaking up the Farm’s [Stanford’s] classrooms....” In the last school year 100,000 people decided to take an online course that focused on applied machine learning which in plain English is “getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed.” Taped lessons, assignments, and exams were all free to anyone all over the world. Students didn’t receive Stanford credits for completing the course, but they did receive congratulatory letters.  Although some Stanford professors worry about the trend to make lectures available online both to their enrolled students and to others, the university’s president John Hennessy believes that online learning can transform education, and refers to it as a “tsunami coming”.  The problem is getting ready for the storms which, like tsunamis, aren’t noticed until they hit shore. What part do universities play in offering courses for all, and how will high schools deal with this? How will online education affect what we think of as a university and what we think of as a high school? Is education, as we know it, going to be a thing of the past?

Collaboration: Competitive Advantage

The tools of technology allow for collaboration with others all over the world. Businesses see collaboration as a way to give them a competitive advantage now and into the future.  With mobile devices, communication among groups is possible from just about anywhere. If you think about this in terms of education and schools together with students’ love of social networking, think of what collaboration through technology can do for learning.

Helping All Students Through Teacher Websites

Chris Alper-Leroux’s Best Practice piece, Using Instructional Websites to Differentiate, provides suggestions for teacher sites that go beyond the usual “class syllabi”. As a Grade 8 Earth Science teacher, she and her co-teacher have found that using multiple methods for students to access content through their website is engaging for students and results in fewer behavior problems. They use online texts and texts on CD and post “textbook audio clips to the site....”  Their site also features chapter introduction videos; text chapter sections complete with audio, images and vocabulary videos; mid-chapter reviews, and practice tests.  According to Alper-Leroux, [T]he anywhere, anytime availability of a learning-goal based instructional Website, organized to match the sequence of a chapter or unit, allows in-depth, structured remediation for a student working with adults in resource rooms, study skills classes, support periods or outside of the school environment.”