Bring your digital classroom when you're on the move! Coursera’s free iOS and Android app gives you access to Coursera's list of available courses. The Khan Academy app on iOS allows you to run course videos on the screen with a rolling transcript underneath. There's also an unofficial viewer for khan academy app for Android. The MOOCs4U iOS and Android app lists thousands of different MOOCs available from providers like edX, Coursera, Udacity and more. GroupMOOC's iOS app helps you build study timetable plans in a calendar-like format. Omni Study iOS's app ($1) allows also to organize your study schedule. On Android, the free app My Study Life is a similar study planner. Write, $2 on iOS, will allow you to make notes on what you're learning while you watch a MOOC video on your computer. If you’re on Android, take notes with SomNote. (Note: We did this summary after a NYT article.)
The edX community celebrated on May 15th its two year anniversary. This video can give you an idea.
People who participate in face-to-face-meet-ups complete their courses at significantly higher rates than the typical MOOC students. In the Summer, the New York Public Library, following its public-serivce mission, and in partnership with Coursera, plans to organize at least half-dozen of free meet-ups in which students taking MOOCs can gather and discuss the courses with help from trained facilitators. Coursera.com, the leading MOOC platform, plans to set up eight similar "learning hubs" in a number of locations.
On September, as part of Google's Apps for Education lineup of products, the giant search engine will release Classroom— an education platform and app for teacher-student communication. It will use Docs, Drive and Gmail to create and collect assignments. It will create Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. It will let teachers make announcements, ask questions and field student responses in real time. In other words, this free LMS will also provide: Assignments; Grading; Real-time questions and feedback on student work; Announcements; Commenting; and Homework collection and organization. In a way, many folks are already using that process. Google is now basically streamlining this process. So far, Google is keeping Classroom invite-only. First group of pilot testers will start in June.
There is a need for quality and unique learning pedagogy. But what are the best and next practices? In order to seek answers, this week NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering organized a series of discussions. We had a great conversation about this topic at Poly's Pfizer Auditorium, in Brooklyn, New York. The video above can give you an idea. The first session's streaming video is here. Thoughts were shared through this Twitter account via #NYUonline. (Below, Professor Peter Voltz during his keynote).
