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 –
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Víctor García-Morales, Francisco Lloréns-Montes and Antonio Verdú-Jover published a paper in the British Journal of Management (December, 2008, Vol. 19 Issue 4) entitled, “The Effects of Transformational Leadership on Organizational Performance through Knowledge and Innovation”. In it they set out to prove the following hypotheses: Transformational leadership will be positively associated with knowledge slack (prior knowledge), absorptive capacity, tacitness, organizational learning and innovation. Knowledge slack will be positively associated with absorptive capacity. Absorptive capacity will be positively associated with tacitness. Tacitness will be positively associated with organizational learning. Organizational learning will be positively associated with innovation. Tacitness, organizational learning and innovation will be positively associated with performance. Size will be positively associated with strategic variables that affect organizational performance. In summary and at its core,
Yes, I do believe badging has a place inside the enterprise. If you’re not familiar with badging as a concept, you would be wise to visit the fantastic HASTAC community entitled “Badges for Lifelong Learning” for a primer and then further your understanding with information provided by Mozilla’s Open Badges; one of the pioneers in the fledgling badging field. How can badges play an effective role inside an organization? 1) Credibility When an employee is able to demonstrate levels of knowledge, experience or acumen to others in the organization via badges, they are instantly gaining credibility with their peers. Employees might not otherwise know that someone has a certain intellect, however, badges can provide this and in return, a level of credibility is gained in
Are you a tweet king or a pretty thing? The crux of that argument is whether you believe micro-blogging is an active behavior or whether you treat it as passive oversight. Micro-blogging — to truly become effective whether personally or organizationally — ought to become both a personal and an organizational habit. “Habit refers to the extent to which behavior has become automatic as a result of prior learning.” Limayem, M., Hirt, S.G., and Cheung, C.M.K., “How habit limits the predictive power of intention: The case of information systems continuance,” MIS Quarterly (31:4), 2007, 705-737. The intention of micro-blogging, ergo, is to share. The act of sharing, therefore, should become a behavioural habit, irrespective of where you sit on the chain of command hierarchy. Quite