From YouTube Pioneer Sal Khan, A School With Real Classrooms | NPR Ed

Photo: Eric Westervelt

Eric Westervelt, Education Correspondent notes, "After some 10,000 online tutorials in 10 years, Sal Khan still starts most days at his office desk in Silicon Valley, recording himself solving math problems for his Khan Academy YouTube channel."

"OK, let F of X equal A times X to the N plus," he says cheerfully as he begins his latest.

Sal Khan works at his office in Mountain View, Calif. He still starts the day making video tutorials, which he's done for a decade, for his online academy.
Photo: Eric Westervelt/NPR

Khan Academy has helped millions of people around the world — perhaps hundreds of millions — learn math, science and other subjects for free.

But these days, just one flight of stairs down from his office, there is a real school that couldn't be more different in form and structure from those online lectures.

Most Fridays, the lunch option includes a Socratic dialogue with Khan himself on a wide range of issues, ideas and trends.

 
"So the last couple of seminars we've been talking about technologies that will potentially change the world," the 39-year-old Louisiana native tells the students. "We did self-driving cars, virtual reality; we talked about life extension, and robots."

Students high-five and share a laugh.
Courtesy of Khan Lab School

He's sitting on a picnic table with a small group of seventh- and eighth-graders, who are nibbling on their lunches. The seminar topic when I visited? The prospects and perils of artificial intelligence.
 
"What is artificial intelligence?" he asks. "How would you know something can think the same as a human being?" Khan asks.

They debate the ethics and delve deep into the anxieties of artificial intelligence.

"How do you know that it will listen to you?" a female student asks. "If it's a human brain, sometimes 

I don't listen when people tell me to do things and sometimes I make bad decisions. And this could make 10 times worse decisions!"

The discussion is quintessential Silicon Valley: self-referential veering toward self-important. 

Yet it's compelling, engaging — and genuinely different.

"Why can't you have an AI that is, like, completely peaceful and has no ego?" Khan asks the group, adding, "Do you think intelligence and ego is correlated?"

"If we eliminate all our bias and ego, I mean, I have some ego!" another female student replies, chuckling.

Just another lunch chat at the Khan lab school.

Inside, there's a big, open classroom. The school's ethos of playful, student-driven inquiry gives it a Montessori-meets-Willy Wonka feel.

The kindergarten through eighth-grade school currently serves some 65 students. There are no grades or grade levels; there's no traditional homework. Students are organized by independence level, with all ages mixed together much of the day.

The students shape their own schedules, craft attainable daily and term goals, and help direct how the place is run.

In one area, students talk politics while drawing flags and maps on poster board. Elsewhere, students are rehearsing a play version of Shrek.

I wander into an adjacent room and find 8-year-old Ben writing quietly in his journal, sitting comfortably in a beanbag chair.
Read more... 

Source: NPR Ed

What are we to make of the latest School Workforce statistics? | NFER Blog

Teacher retention has been the focus of a programme of NFER research, including our Should I Stay or Should I Go? report last November and forthcoming research examining the experiences and intentions of teachers. 

Yesterday’s School Workforce statistics show that the rate of teachers leaving the profession has jumped to the highest level since 2011, with 10 per cent of teachers having left between November 2014 and November 2015. In terms of teacher headcount, the proportion of teachers leaving is the highest since at least 2005. 

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Photo: Jack Worth

"More teachers are leaving but overall teacher numbers are stable" according to Jack Worth, Research Manager, experienced statistician and economist with particular expertise in policy evaluation and value for money analysis.

Photo: GraphicStock.com

There are some reasons to think this should not be a great concern. The leavers were replaced by even more joiners, as they have been every year since 2011, and the rate of teachers leaving is only one percentage point higher than it was four years ago. The overall number of teachers has increased again this year, suggesting that where vacancies arise they are largely being filled.

Pupil numbers are expected to grow fast in the next decade, especially in secondary schools 
However, there are good reasons for thinking this situation is concerning. What the overall number of teachers and the data above on teachers joining and leaving does not tell us is anything about the level of demand for teachers. One factor that will affect teacher demand is whether pupil numbers are changing. The number of pupils has been growing over the same period, and the pupil-teacher ratio has risen, albeit marginally, from 17.8 in 2011 to 18.1 now.

The growth in pupil numbers is expected to accelerate over the next ten years, particularly in secondary schools. The chart below plots the change over time in the number of secondary school pupils and the number of secondary school teachers, including the current projections of pupil numbers up to 2024 (dashed line). The level of each in 2005 is set to 100 and changes are relative to that initial level. Following an increase in the number of teachers relative to the number of pupils in the 2000s, the pupil teacher ratio has been relatively stable as teacher numbers have tracked pupil numbers since 2010.

However, it is secondary schools that have seen more teachers leave than join for the past two years despite pupil numbers that are growing again. The downward trend in teacher numbers will need to reverse quickly to meet the coming growth in pupil numbers...

What might we expect in future?
Research on the effect of wider economic conditions on teacher supply suggests the current strong situation in the labour market is bad for retention and worse for recruitment of trainees. Scotland and Wales are also reportedly experiencing problems encouraging enough new trainees into teaching, which suggests that common factors (such as the economic environment) are important as well as any factors that are unique to England (e.g. the changing system of different routes into teaching) at explaining under-recruitment.
Read more...

Source: NFER Blog

Master MBA Fundamentals with Boston University

"Announcing the Mini MBA for Tech Executives: Master MBA Fundamentals in One Week!
View the Brochure |Register by July 25 & Save $500." inform CIO and Boston University Questrom School of Business.

CIO and Boston University Questrom School of Business invite you to attend their newly designed program: Mini MBA for Tech Executives. In today’s competitive environment, the leaders who succeed, and rise out of technology roles and into executive responsibilities, are those with essential business skills.

Over four days, September 19 - 22, 2016, Boston University senior faculty will introduce you to key principles and techniques of executive management. You’ll enhance and sharpen your knowledge in critical MBA areas: accounting, finance, strategy, marketing, operations, organizational behavior, and more.

To join your peers, rising tech executives form organizations worldwide, and Boston University Questrom School of Business’s passionate and committed faculty, please register by July 25 to receive the early bird tuition rate and savings of $500.

For complete agenda and details, please visit our website or call The Executive Leadership Center at 617-353-4248.  
View the Brochure.

Register today to receive the early bird tuition rate and make this strategic investment in your future. We hope to see you in Boston this fall!

Source: CIO and Boston University Questrom School of Business

Sugata Mitra – the professor with his head in the cloud | Online learning | The Guardian

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Photo: Peter Wilby

Please take a closer peek at this article as below by Peter Wilby.
He was for many years an education correspondent on various newspapers.
 

Sugata Mitra at one of his schools in the cloud, at Greenfield Arts, Newton Aycliffe, County Durham. 
Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

The story of how Sugata Mitra put a computer in a hole in a Delhi wall at the end of the last century and how uneducated children used it to teach themselves all manner of things is now well known. So is the story of how Mitra’s work inspired the novel, Q&A, that became the film Slumdog Millionaire. But no government has taken more than a passing interest in his vision. Nor, although teachers have often tried his methods and reported miraculous results, have professional associations and university education departments responded with much enthusiasm. Seventeen years after Mitra conceived the idea that a computer could act as a kind of village well from which children could freely draw knowledge, the educational world treats him with deep scepticism.

So when I meet him over lunch at Newcastle University, where he is professor of educational technology, I intend to ask how he plans to get his ideas more widely adopted and what answers he has to critics who accuse him of “magical thinking”.

But Mitra launches into a speech about “what is happening to the world”. He says: “A generation of children has grown up with continuous connectivity to the internet. A few years ago, nobody had a piece of plastic to which they could ask questions and have it answer back. The Greeks spoke of the oracle of Delphi. We’ve created it. People don’t talk to a machine. They talk to a huge collective of people, a kind of hive. Our generation [Mitra is 64] doesn’t see that. We just see a lot of interlinked web pages.

“In India, I found two illiterate people texting each other. They had invented a language for themselves which you and I would not understand. I wonder: are there such things as illiterates at all? Yes, if we give them an examination on grammar, but maybe we’ve got the definition wrong and there’s a new literacy that we’re unaware of.

“You can ask nine-year-olds to find out about the entanglement of particles and they will come back to you and explain in their nine-year-old way – not as a graduate would of course – exactly what it is. Things can be in two places at the same time, they say.”

Mitra says all this with fluency, conviction and wit, laced with just enough self-deprecation and speculative doubt to win you over. He’s a star turn at conferences, even if audiences frequently shout “rubbish” at him. “I hate to say it, but I think they invite me for entertainment,” he says.

And what entertainment! He brushes aside all established thinking about education. Examinations as we know them will have to go, he says. In India, the army is needed to stop students taking their smartphones into exams. Before long, the soldiers will need to ban wristwatches and eye-glasses.

“Within five years, you will not be able to tell if somebody is consulting the internet or not. The internet will be inside our heads anywhere and at any time. What then will be the value of knowing things? We shall have acquired a new sense. Knowing will have become collective.”

The status of reading, writing and arithmetic as fundamental skills – that, too, must be questioned, Mitra argues. Though “not usually a particularly aggressive fellow”, he has become aggressive about this, he says. “I can find on my phone a piece of Japanese and the phone will read it to me in English. So can I read Japanese? No. But if you imagine me and my phone as a single entity, yes. Very soon, asking somebody to read without their phone will be like telling them to read without their glasses.”

Mitra with year 4 pupils at
St Aidan’s Church of England primary school, Gateshead.
Photograph: Mark Pinder 

Even Jean Piaget’s supposedly immutable stages of child development – familiar to every trained teacher – now need a rethink, according to Mitra. His iconoclastic approach is, I think, at least partly attributable to his having no experience of school teaching and no academic background in education. His visionary ideas are reminiscent of the de-schooling movement of the early 1970s. That, too, argued that the conventional baggage of education, such as teaching knowledge in classrooms, was outdated. That, too, was led by a man with no professional background in education: Ivan Illich, an Austrian Catholic priest and philosopher. It faded away within a decade. 
Read more...

Related links

Photo by it's learning

Professor Sugata Mitra talking at the it's learning conference 2008 in Bergen, Norway.

He delivered an inspiring and witty keynote where he presented his well-known Hole in the Wall experiments.

Beyond the Hole in the Wall:
Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning
(Kindle Single) (TED Books)

"Ten years ago, educator Sugata Mitra and his colleagues cracked open a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed a networked PC, and left it there for the local children to freely explore..."

Source: The Guardian

The growing case for nontraditional approaches to education | Laura Devaney, Director of News, K-12 and Higher Education

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Follow on Twitter as @eSN_Laura

"In this week's news, we examine the growth of nontraditional programs and approaches." summarizes Laura Devaney.

Catch up on the most compelling higher-ed news stories you may have missed this week. 

Each Friday, Laura Devaney will be bringing you a recap of some of the most interesting and thought-provoking news developments that occurred over the week. 

I can’t fit all of our news stories here, though, so feel free to visit eCampusNews.com and read up on other news you may have missed.
 
In this week’s news: 

Photo: eCampus News

Could these 3 burgeoning nontraditional pathways be a boon for traditional institutions?
Unconventional education organizations say recent high school grads flocking to nontraditional pathways; could this be good for college and university admissions?
Read more...

Could Microsoft’s LinkedIn revolutionize competency-based learning?
Higher education consultants say the Microsoft and LinkedIn pairing may change the competency game.
Read more...

Members introduce bipartisan bill to strengthen career and technical ed
Led by Republican and Democratic members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, policymakers today introduced the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act. Introduced by Reps. Glenn ‘GT’ Thompson (R-PA) and Katherine Clark (D-MA), the legislation reauthorizes and reforms the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act and will help more Americans enter the workforce with the skills they need to compete for high-skilled, in-demand jobs.
Read more...

New partnership to create low-cost, alternative pathway to college credit
Cengage Learning and Excelsior College announced a partnership to create an innovative, low-cost, alternative pathway to college credit. The core of the collaboration will be a set of self-paced digital courses – using Cengage Learning market leading content – each with integrated diagnostic and formative assessments.
Read more... 

Additional resources
Catch up on the most compelling K-12 news stories you may have missed this week. 

If you missed ISTE 2016 in Denver, don’t worry–we’re summarizing some of the conference news and developments below. And if you want to check out all of our ISTE news, click here for keynotes, product releases, new initiatives, and more.

Photo: eSchool News

Your ISTE 2016 recap | eSchool News 

Source: eCampus News  

E-learning is missing link in internationalisation | University World News

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Photo: Andrée Sursock

"Higher education institutions worldwide are subject to pressures that have grown in number and complexity." according to Andrée Sursock, senior advisor at the European University Association and the author of Trends 2015: Learning and teaching in European universities. 

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

They recognise that the quality of their activities – research, teaching and learning and societal engagement – is integrally dependent upon sound internationalisation and digitalisation strategies (among other factors).

This is particularly true given the general context in which they operate: an environment characterised by the exacerbated global competition of knowledge-based economies. This competition reverberates in higher education.

Trends 2015, a study by the European University Association or EUA, tracked the growing importance of competition and cooperation in the past 15 years. Based on longitudinal data, Trends 2015 revealed that the importance of both competition and cooperation has remained stable during the period 2000-15, but that both are expected to grow by the same value (about 18%) in the near future.

The report also noted the growing importance of ranking schemes (up 10% from 2010) and the expectations that this will continue to be a central and mounting concern in the future.

European higher education has had a robust history of cooperation, particularly during the period when the Berlin Wall split Europe between East and West. A spirit of cooperation across the Wall was maintained, despite the many political vicissitudes and twists and turns of the Cold War.

This spirit drove many institutions (including the most prestigious) to establish partnerships across the continent with other institutions (including the least prestigious). Has this spirit changed?...

MOOCs growth potential
A close look at the number of institutions interested in developing the bottom four activities might help anticipate future trends. Of the four, “MOOCs and other types of online learning” seem to have the most potential for growth: 29% of institutions are planning to develop them and this affects universities in a large number of countries.

This is followed by “capacity-building” (17%) and “offshore campuses” (13%), while “degree programmes taught in languages other than English” have the least potential for growth (11%).

Furthermore, Trends 2015 emphasised that strategic approaches to internationalisation should be supported by savvy use of information and communication technologies or ICT, but the link between the two is not as strong a trend yet and the strategic use of ICT is clearly under development.

When questioned about the objectives of e-learning, only 9% of institutions mentioned that it is being used to enhance internationalisation. A significant percentage of institutions do not offer online degree programmes (44%), MOOCs (40%), joint online learning offered with other higher education institutions (39%) or blended learning programmes (33%).

It may be the case that the link between internationalisation and e-learning has not been made yet because internationalisation strategies are now clearly in the hands of the institutional leadership while e-learning innovations tend to be with the faculties and even with individual academic staff. 
Read more...

Source: University World News 

A multidisciplinary future for university research | University World News

Photo: Paul Boyle

Professor Paul Boyle, vice-chancellor and president of the University of Leicester, UK summarizes, "Research in the United Kingdom is facing a time of great change, challenge and opportunity."

Photo: GraphicStock.com

Major reviews of the way it is funded, assessed and organised present universities with the chance to explore new avenues and approaches, as well as requiring many to make some difficult choices. The UK’s decision to leave the European Union will add further uncertainty to the situation.

As policy changes take shape in this new environment, further ambitions around multidisciplinary research seem very likely to emerge.

Of course, plenty of multidisciplinary work was supported across the Research Councils UK before the government adopted Paul Nurse’s recommendations for a fundamental shift in the research landscape. But one explicit aim of the proposal to bring the research councils under one umbrella organisation, UK Research and Innovation or UKRI, is to encourage and aid multidisciplinary research.

Since UKRI will also absorb Innovate UK, it might be reasonable to expect an increase in the amount of cross-working that has already been taking place between Research Councils UK and Innovate UK.

Here, it is important not to assume that research and innovation are independent and separate entities. In fact, the new structure represents an opportunity to move away from such linear descriptions and to adopt instead the language of an ecosystem approach that recognises that research/innovation interactions occur with most new ideas...

Multidisciplinary research institutes
At the University of Leicester, we are beginning to address this by launching four new multidisciplinary research institutes in Precision Medicine, Structural and Chemical Biology, Space and Earth Observation Science, and Cultural Media and Creative Economies.

Multidisciplinary research institutes are not new as a concept – there are plenty of examples in the United States and a growing number in the UK. But I believe the approach we will take at Leicester will be distinctive, and the timing of our launch is significant, given the current policy environment.

The word ‘institute’ has a certain cachet, but without careful management there is a risk that they can become little more than coalitions of the willing sustained by heroes. They should be ongoing ventures that are more targeted than research networks where people from various disciplines are simply encouraged to work together.

As our Richard III research has shown, Leicester already has a strong track record of multidisciplinary working, but we want to build on this and take it to the next level in our institutes, which will act as beacons of excellence across areas where we are particularly strong.

As we establish the institutes, we will also be grappling with the challenges of funding, governance and internal communication that other universities seeking to follow a similar route also face.

In order to deliver what we are asking of them, our institutes will have their own budgets and a good level of autonomy, underpinned by clear measures of performance. That does not sit well with the traditional structure of an institution where departments are like the vertical pillars through which research funding usually flows. The institutes need to be more like horizontal girders of research excellence spanning the university.
Read more...

Source: University World News 

Earn your Ed.D. online from Drexel University | eCampus News Partner

"Drexel University’s online Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Management equips ambitious administrators and instructional experts with advanced management competencies for a broad range of learning environments." inform eCampus News Partner. 

This elite program is designed for academic professionals who seek to make an impactful difference in the future of universities, colleges and lifelong learning institutions.

Choose the Ed.D. Concentration That’s Right for You:

• Athletic Administration
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Learn more

Source: eCampus News Partner

10 Rules to Be an Engaging Communicator on Any Social Platform | SiteProNews

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Photo: Julia McCoy

Julia McCoy, writer and entrepreneur writes, "What could be wrong?
You do all it takes to create impeccable content for social media, but your efforts barely make it on the social scene."

Worry no more because there’s something you can do to effectively communicate with and engage your prospects on social media.

Image courtesy of (jscreationzs)
FreeDigitalPhotos.net

10 Engaging Social Platform Rules to Communicate Effectively With Your Audience 
Social marketing is all about getting things done, and it’s not just one thing: It’s sharing posts, interacting with other sharers, solving problems, measuring outcomes and writing great content. Read on to find out how you can be an engaging communicator.

1. Communicate and Interact with Your Fans, Don’t Just Post  
As a social media manager, you need to communicate your audience to build loyalty. An effective communicator interacts with his audience — not at his audience. A successful communication is honest, transparent and genuine, both in the posts you make and responses you give to queries directed by your audience.

You build trust with your prospects in the long run and they can count on you as a reputable source of guidance and information.

You need to give your audience a voice by letting members participate in your social media activities.
Let members make candid comments openly as a way of expressing their opinions, interacting and sharing ideas with each other.

The result will be an active online community of a highly engaged audience.

2. Write Well and Share  
You need to share your content with prospects, not just as a way of giving them value and creating brand awareness, but also showing that you care. This is a perfect way for your post to go viral. 
Every piece of content you create and share should be unique to offer your audience an exceptional experience like no other.

Research and find out what practices and content type work best for different social media platforms. When your brand uses different social sites, experiment with your content and tailor it suit a given social platform. For instance, what might work for you on Facebook, might not work on Twitter.

3. Measure 
Measuring your success efforts on social media can be scary. You might fear falling short of your goals or that your statistics might not add up. If you are a first-time social media manager, you could even think that you’re doing it all wrong. What you need to remember is, you become better at your work when you track social data because you learn what works and what doesn’t. You experiment with different metrics and gain the confidence you need to take up your role as a successful social media manager. You learn from what does not work by evaluating previous results and gearing your efforts toward what does work.

Gauge your performance by measuring the channels through which users reached your site, social metrics like reach and followers, conversion and consumption, which entails page views and time spent on a page. Demonstrate your ROI. The guide published on Brand Watch should be your starting point to measuring social stats.

4. Create to be Engaging  
Videos and images are the cornerstones of social media and marketing design. It is easier for your audience to remember something in a visual form.  According to studies carried out by Adobe and another company, users are 1.81 times more likely to buy from a brand when they view its video than those who didn’t and memory increases by 65 percent when a person views an image, respectively.

Create videos to stand out from your competition. Experiment on different social sites. Borrow a leaf from Whiteboard Friday by Moz. You can learn how to create great videos on a budget on the ideas presented on Social Media Examiner.

5. Always, Always Be Original 
Great ideas are usually sourced from old ideas. Improving existing ideas is a perfect way for you as a social media manager to come up with great content to share with your audience. You don’t have to invent the wheel to make your audience happy and interested.

Master the art of content curation to give your audience something to read, discuss and share. Access the best content through the use of tools like Pocket, Feedly and Flipboard.  The RSS feed app on Buffer can pull the latest posts on your favorite blogs to your profile’s dashboard.
Read more...

Additional resources

Photo: Julia McCoy - Facebook

Julia McCoy the bestselling author of So You Think You Can Write? The Definitive Guide to Successful Online Writing. 
Follow her on Twitter and Facebook. 

Source: SiteProNews