EdTech

3 Signs of Quality You Should Look For In Instructional Content

The future will bring amazingly better instructional content for teacher and student use. If the market notices key signs of this, then more effective, comprehensive content will be broadly and rapidly adopted, to the benefit of teaching and learning. I believe there’s three signs the market should be looking for.

Personalized Learning

Trustees Want Big Bucks, But We Deserve a Better Bargain from Higher Ed

Yesterday, Jeff Selingo, editorial director at The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote an editorial in the NYTimes called Fixing College where he lamented the “lost decade,” from 1999 to 2009 where most institutions of higher learning were fat and happy and produced few productivity gains. He urged "better use of technology in the classroom" and "more online learning." Selingo said "We can’t afford another lost decade."

EdTech

Informal Learning for a Better World

nformal learning should not be seen as a threat to the formal education system, but as a challenge, model, and important counterpart. With the rise of the open content movement, some of the world’s best educational content — from TED talks to MIT’s OpenCourseWare — is now freely available online.

Personalized Learning

Zspace: The Future of 3D Learning

Zspace is an impressive immersive environment with obvious learning benefits. These workstations will be pricy for a while, so Zspace is not an education 1:1 solution just yet. But every young person needs to experience an immersive design and learning space like this. These workstations should be in high school and college STEM labs and public libraries. Virtual dissections, field trips, and design projects must be part of every high school experience.

Personalized Learning

Hewlett Foundation Launches Prize for Short Answer Scoring

The Hewlett Foundation launched a $100,000 prize for scoring short answer student responses today on the Kaggle platform. After successfully tackling essay scoring, this prize takes on the more difficult challenge of scoring, with a high degree of accuracy, constructed responses of less than 150 words.