Hack Education

It’s Day 1 of Ed Startup 101, an open online course in education entrepreneurship being offered by David Wiley, Richard Culatta, Todd Manwaring, and Aaron Miller. I’m pleased to see this class happen as the gulf between educators (theorists, researchers, and practitioners) and entrepreneurs (founders and developers at companies big...

Politics and Policies The California State University system – the largest public university system in the U.S. – is outsourcing its online education offerings to Pearson. Ugh. Some days, I just want to give up. But before I do, I’d like to echo Dr. Tony Bates’ questions: who will own...

OER Repositories, Part 2 The data below is drawn from OER Commons, a site that provides one of the best directories for finding open educational resources. OER Commons makes it easy to search by resource provider, topic, grade level, media format and license type – all important for teachers and...

Quick update:  I thought I’d kick off my new “State of OER” research by compiling a list of all the available OER repositories -- a sensible place to start. I thought about just compiling everything in a long list-like blog post at first, and then, as one is wont to...

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed MIT OpenCourseware, OpenStudy, Peer to Peer University, and Codecademy are teaming up to launch a “Mechanical MOOC” – a free and open introductory course in the programming language Python that weaves together existing resources (content, Web-based study groups, quizzes and so on). Unlike some of...

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. I always find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking exchanges I have all week. Well, it's actually been 2 weeks since we've recorded an episode, what with busy travel schedules, unreliable...

No More Red Ink High school teacher Jeff Scheur tells a pretty familiar story for anyone who’s taught writing: you spend a lot of time grading essays, doing your best to provide personalized feedback on what the students are saying and even how they’re saying it. But that feedback can often...

Politics and Policies Last weekend, Republican Party Presidential nominee Mitt Romney named his running mate, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. While some folks are saying that the selection “doesn’t matter a lot for education,” others point to Ryan’s record and suggest otherwise. In particular, Ryan has gone after Pell Grants and...

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed I underline and highlight as I read and scribble copious notes in the margins of books (or sometimes, particularly in a book that I used for teaching, on a color-coded series of sticky notes that serve a dual purpose of bookmarking particular passages). But as...

I’m starting a new research and writing project today that examines the current state of open educational resources. My interest isn’t simply identifying where the repositories of OER lie or what they contain. Nor am I just looking at adoption or usage (although yes, the research will address all these...