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Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy

Hack Education

Many of these companies were launched circa 2013 — that is, in the tailwinds of "the Year of the MOOC" — with the belief that an increasing number of students would be learning online and that professors would demand some sort of mechanism to verify their identity and their integrity. That robot grading is degrading.

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Storms over liberal education: notes on the 2016 AAC&U conference

Bryan Alexander

Last week I participated in the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) 2016 conference. The event became much more dramatic than expected, once the hosting city, Washington DC, was clobbered by the great snowpocalyspe of 2016. Let me share some materials here, along with reflections on the conference.

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The Trends and Challenges Shaping Technology Adoption In Schools

MindShift

Achievement Gap and Personalized Learning: These are two issues that the 2016 Horizon Report identifies as thorny challenges — those that are “complex to define, let alone address.” This environment of stagnation frustrates many teachers and prevents good ideas from spreading.

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Education Technology and the Power of Platforms

Hack Education

” And I wondered at the time if that would be the outcome for MOOCs. 2012, you will recall, was “ the year of the MOOC.”) ” MOOCs looked – for a short while, at least – like they were going to pivot to become LMSes. billion for 2016, the largest loss in its history.

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The Business of 'Ed-Tech Trends'

Hack Education

Some of this is what Jane Mayer describes in her 2016 book Dark Money – the powerful and secretive networks of right-wing billionaire activists. Wonder Workshop (robotics) – $41 million. Robotics , with ~ $99 million in funding. Perhaps that name, Betsy DeVos, is familiar. But the results are not uniformly positive.

Trends 56
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The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release

Hack Education

This is the last public talk I’ll deliver in 2016, and I confess I am relieved (I am exhausted!) ” – that’s Sebastian Thrun, best known perhaps for his work at Google on the self-driving car and as a co-founder of the MOOC (massive open online course) startup Udacity. 2016 – the phones in their pockets.

Trends 40
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Online Classes Get a Missing Piece: Teamwork

Edsurge

MOOCs get social. Carolyn Rosé, an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has been exploring ways to add social engagement to MOOCs since 2013. In summer 2016 Rosé and her team used Bazaar to run a team-based project for a MOOC offered by the Smithsonian Institution.

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