Powered by the Open edX platform and financed by the Queen Rania Foundation, Edraak.org is the first not-for-profit Arab platform for MOOCs. This initiative is aimed at "intellectually hungry Arab youth and Arab-speaking students worldwide", according to edx.org.
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).
Google has announced this week in an online statement that it had permanently removed all ads from its Apps for Education, including its Gmail service. The search giant will no longer collect or use student data. About 40 percent of nonprofit colleges use Google for institutional email.
Udacity, one of the big three MOOC providers, will no longer give learners free, "non-verified" certificates. Lately Udacity has been designing courses at a cost of $150 per month that include contact with human coaches, project-based assignments, and job-placement services.
A great LMS (Learning Management System) can improve the teaching and learning of teachers and students. The K12 Director of Instructure / Canvas LMS has come up with some tips. Let us summarize them while we add our view. The perfect LMS platform should: Open doors for teaching and learning in a way that is intuitive and easy. Amplify schools' strengths, accelerate progress toward goals and support future needs. Integrate blended and online delivery models easier. Suggest new ways of designing and teaching online courses. Engage users by encouraging interaction and empowering to take ownership of their own learning. Feature fresh navigation and custom toolset. Reduce the impact on faculty of IT. Be highly scalable and flexible to adapt and grow with your district. Integrate with third-party tools through an open API, as well as an app center –such as EduAppCenter.com– "with hundreds of technology tools that teachers can install and use without ever having to talk to IT. Be extremely reliable, with 99.9% uptime possible. Having an LMS down for maintenance, an unexpected outage, causes great stress for students and teachers. Have a partner and service provider that is responsive, supportive and collaborative. Test it previously in a sandbox environment in order to have a first-hand look at the platform's capabilities.
