The higher education online learning gloves are now officially off. Let’s first recap the dizzying pace of change, announcements and launches that have occurred since the Fall of 2011 between Udacity, Coursera, MITx and the latest free-learning darling, edX. October 10 – Official launch of Introduction to AI (origin of Udacity) as well as Introduction to Databases and Machine Learning (origin of Coursera) December 19 - MITx is announced January 1 – Charles West Ventures invests $5m into Udacity (or is it Know Labs?) January 23 – Professor Thrun officially announces Udacity thus breaking away from Stanford February 20 – First official Udacity courses launch - CS 101: Building a Search Engine and CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car March 5 – MITx launches first course 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) April 18 –
higher education Archive
The name Sebastian Thrun may not mean much to you, but it should. And if it doesn’t now … it probably will at some point. Last year, Professor Thrun of Stanford University and his colleague Professor Norvig opened up an otherwise closed AI university course to the world. Instead of 200 students (tuition paying Stanford pupils) they ended up with what is arguably the world’s largest MOOC when they opened up enrolment to citizens of Earth. 160,000 students enrolled in their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” online version. For free. Oh, and those 200 paying customers? About 170 left the face-to-face version in favour of the ‘free’ online one. Amazingly, 20,000 people stuck around the course through to the final exam. Wherever you sit on the
On the dates of 25 January through 26 January, 2012, I had the opportunity to participate for the first time in the Learning Without Frontiers “Future of Learning Conference and Festival” held at Olympia in London, England. As the title of this post suggests, I believe it truly is the TED of all Learning Conferences. And since 1990, I’ve attended roughly 100 different conferences of all shapes, forms and sizes so my sample size is relatively good. Over the duration of the two days, there were several keynote addresses sprinkled from a rich ocean of speakers. To complement the main event, several indoor igloos (termed ‘experience domes’ at the conference) housed vendors and sidebar discussions from other speakers and organizations. Why am I so smitten
According to Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice-President of Worldwide Marketing and Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice-President of Internet Software and Services, there are: over 1.5 million iPads in use in education institutions over 1,000 one-to-one iPad deployments in K-12 schools over 700 million downloads at iTunes U over 500,000 audio or video offerings available on iTunes U over 1,000 universities and colleges around the world using iTunes U over 20,000 ‘education and learning’ applications available for iPad Today’s announcement by Apple launching iBooks 2, iBooks Author and an iTunes U App had me thinking all along … we’ve come full circle. If you think back to the late 80’s, through the 90’s and arguably at the onset of the new millennium, Apple was primarily an