Hack Education

Last fall, the Gates Foundation announced its Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, a multi-year project to help support programs that boost college preparedness and college completion. The first round of grants - $20 million worth - were aimed at developing tools for higher education. Applicants had to address one of...

A version of this is cross-posted at The Huffington Post I won't lie. I shudder when I hear President Obama talk about the challenges we face in education as a Sputnik moment. I'm not pleased that the new education technology agency he's proposing, ARPA-ED, deliberately echoes the name of DARPA....

There's a new app in BitTorrent's recently released App Studio today, one that really exemplifies the importance of the BitTorrent technology -- the ability to distribute large files to people with low-bandwidth: Khan Academy. The Khan Academy app will bring over 2000 educational videos to the BitTorrent community. Users can...

Blackboard announced this week that it was launching CourseSites, a way for professors to use its platform for free even if their universities haven't signed a campus-wide contract with the LMS. CourseSites is a cloud-based version of Blackboard's product, giving instructors 5 free course websites. CourseSites includes many of the...

There's a lot of muttering about whether or not college is "worth it" -- from tech investors like Peter Thiel who are encouraging students to stop out of school and become entrepreneurs instead, from the authors of Academically Adrift who argue that over a third of college students learn nothing...

One of the many drawbacks from a de facto ban on Wikipedia in school is that students then aren't equipped to understand how the collaborative encyclopedia project works. They still use it, of course, with college students accessing it far more regularly than other demographics. (46% of college students use...

Language-learning site busuu.com has announced a new partnership with The Guardian and Macmillan Education. The partnership integrates busuu.com's language learning community with a daily newspaper, arguably one of the best ways to improve your real-world English reading skills. This feature will be available for premium users of busuu.com, who'll be...

Educational analytics. Kids, this is gonna be big. As students perform more and more tasks with computers, as we sign-up, take classes, turn in papers online, there will be a wealth of data from which we will be able to assess learning and then, ideally, adjust and remediate course offerings...

One of the major challenges faced by alternative, free, and open educational endeavors is their inability to grant students formal credits or certificates for their studies. While it might not matter now for some students, degrees and diplomas are still important to many employers and institutions. Creative Commons updated its...

The 2011 Horizon Report (PDF) was released today. The annual report, a collaborative publication undertaken by the New Media Consortium and EDUCASE, assesses the emerging technology trends that will shape the next ten years of teaching and learning. This year, the report lists the following trends as up-and-coming:   2011...