Tuesday, April 28, 2015

New DropBox Feature Might Make Grading Easier

DropBox has introduced a COMMENTS feature that lets you look at a shared file in your browser (Microsoft office docs and PDFs all seem to work) and make comments in a sidebar.  Anyone who can see the file can make comments and you can notify folks that there are comments just by mentioning them.

Potentially useful for feedback on student papers and for group work or committee work where downloading document or group editing in something like Google docs is either too intrusive or too slow a process.


Thursday, April 23, 2015

ASU and EdX offering Freshman Year Online

ASU will offer a freshman year program  - all online - that will likely be fully transferrable and will cost around $6000. This latest iteration on MOOCs includes a focus not on isolated courses but a coherent program of courses - a freshman year foundation. The innovation here is the co-design of the courses (12 of them).  Of course the experience will be a far cry from what students get at a residential college, but but will it be $12,000 less? Or $40,000 less? 

Promising Full College Credit, Arizona State University Offers Online Freshman Program

By TAMAR LEWINAPRIL 22, 2015

Arizona State University, one of the nation’s largest universities, is joining with edX, a nonprofit online venture founded by M.I.T. and Harvard, to offer an online freshman year that will be available worldwide with no admissions process and full university credit.

In the new Global Freshman Academy, each credit will cost $200, but students will not have to pay until they pass the courses, which will be offered on the edX platform as MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses.

“Leave your G.P.A., your SATs, your recommendations at home,” said Anant Agarwal, the chief executive of edX. “If you have the will to learn, just bring your Internet connection and yourself, and you can get a year of college credit.”