Discover the world of computing, learn software design and development while solving puzzles with world renowned lecturer Richard Buckland.
UNSW Computing 1 is presented by OpenLearning with original content derived from UNSW COMPUTING’s first year computing course. Take the course for online for free, the next cohort starts on December 3rd 2012.
via UNSW Computing 1 – The Art of Programming – (OpenLearning).
Those details are what will make the new CourseSmart service tick. Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.
The idea is that faculty members can reach out to students showing low engagement, says Sean Devine, chief executive of CourseSmart. And colleges can evaluate the return they are getting on investments in digital materials.
Online education isn’t new—in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time “distance learning” programs. What’s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this month’s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”).
via Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business | MIT Technology Review.
Will they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we’ll have the answer to our question: online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years.
From: MOOCs will eat academia
MOOCs will almost certainly hollow out the teaching component of universities as it stands today. I don’t see anything on the horizon that will reverse this tide. In most technical fields, the nuts and bolts technical interview and on-the-job learning and performance monitoring long ago replaced any faith in degrees as credentials. That leaves very few fields, such as law, where you absolutely do need the degree as a credential.
This is an introductory course on computer networking, specifically the Internet. It focuses on explaining how the Internet works, ranging from how bits are modulated on wires and in wireless to application-level protocols like BitTorrent and HTTP. It also explains the principles of how to design networks and network protocols. Students gain experience reading and understanding RFCs (Internet protocol specifications) as statements of what a system should do. The course grounds many of the concepts in current practice and recent developments, such as net neutrality and DNS security.
via Stanford Online | An Introduction to Computer Networks | Preview.
This is a free course for online but the first class starts tomorrow.
Prerequisites
Students need an introductory course in probability, a strong understanding of bits and bytes, and knowledge of how computers lay out data in memory.
A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish.
TeachersPayTeachers is the world’s first open marketplace where teachers buy and sell original teaching materials.
via About Us – TeachersPayTeachers.com.
Join us as a buyer or seller or both to make your teaching career even more rewarding. We call it Free Market Merit Pay for Teachers.
But the latest textbook enhancements, which require individual access codes to get to bonus materials online, threaten to displace all of those alternatives. Most access codes are good only for a limited time, and once they are activated they can’t be used by other students.
via What Is an Access Code Worth? – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The University of Cambridge has released a free 12-step online course on building a basic operating system for the Raspberry Pi.
The course, Baking Pi – Operating Systems Development, is aimed at students of 16 and over with some prior programming experience, “although younger readers may still find some of it accessible, particularly with assistance”.
via Cambridge offers free online Raspberry Pi course | News | PC Pro.
The Baking Pi course was compiled by student Alex Chadwick, and is just one of a growing series of tutorials by students working as summer interns at the university.
The annual Association for Computing Machinery ACM A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” recognizes Pearl for his advances in probabilistic and causal reasoning. His work has enabled creation of thinking machines that can cope with uncertainty, making decisions even when answers aren’t black or white.
via Judea Pearl, a big brain behind artificial intelligence, wins Turing Award.
Congrats UCLA.