Hack Education

Sal Khan’s History of Education Sal Khan recently sat down with Forbes’ Michael Noer to record a mini-lecture, Khan Academy style, about the history of education. It’s the history of education “from 1680 to 2050” in 11 minutes, so needless to say it’s a rather abbreviated version of events. Of...

Not content with being the young upstart in the LMS industry taking on the aging giants of Blackboard and Desire2Learn, Instructure has now decided to enter another market and take on some of the upstarts there, namely Coursera and edX. That is, tonight it launches the Canvas Network, which in...

In May, I decided to re-institute a new monthly feature here, something that I used to write for MindShift: a post highlighting some of the new and updated educational apps that have been released over the past 30 days or so. I’m not sure if it’s worth continuing, frankly, as...

This post is part of an ongoing series in which I try to explain the tech industry to educators. Today’s lesson: Define “Bubble.” Discuss. Hype Frank Catalano recently suggested in his GeekWire column that we could be on the cusp of another tech bubble, this time in education. “There are...

It's been a couple of weeks since Steve Hargadon and I sat down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news and record our podcast. That means that this episode is pretty lengthy as we had two weeks' worth of news and analysis to discuss. Topics include opening versus open education,...

Law and Politics Following a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education noting that Coursera’s Terms of Service ban those in Minnesota from taking classes from the online education startup, the state has clarified its law. "No Minnesotan should hesitate to take advantage of free, online offerings from Coursera," says Lawrence...

As part of the research I’ve been doing on open educational resources — their creation and adoption — I’ve been talking to a wide variety of educators about their own OER usage. It’s hardly been a formal survey, but rather a Google survey and a handful of casual conversations. But...

Coursera found itself in the middle of a Terms of Service-related firestorm last week when The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the startup had recently changed its TOS to prevent Minnesota citizens from participating in its online courses. Notice for Minnesota Users Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota...

I wasn’t planning to write anything about Apple’s media event yesterday. I tuned in to the livestream, but when all the announcements were made, it seemed clear to me that nothing that was revealed on stage in San Jose was that significant to education. That hasn’t stopped the technology press...

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed Opening Educational Resources The "killer apps" for education, argued Stanford University professor John Willinsky at last week’s Open Education Conference, will be built when we apply our lessons to our communities “so that the learning I do in school contributes to the public library and...