Universities can be slow to embrace social media, and it’s to their detriment. Not only does having a weak social media presence open up a school to looking behind-the-times–it allows students to control a school’s image online. Unfortunately, the students who shout (or tweet) the loudest are often less-than-happy with a school. For prospective students [...]
Independent learning is an exciting experience. The wealth of knowledge available at your fingertips today is staggering. One day you can explore the entire history of WWII and the next day you can delve into the ever-changing world of computer science. The barrier to learning has nearly been destroyed in this era of rapid technological [...]
I recently met Dr. Diana E. E. Kleiner, a distinguished professor at my alma mater and director of the Open Yale Courses initiative. We were talking about “OpenStudying the Classics”—to my knowledge, the first use of “OpenStudy” as a verb.[1] This made me think—what does it mean to “OpenStudy” something? Some background first. In collaboration with Dean Preetha Ram [...]
One of the biggest challenges of online study is students’ need for real-time help. This is one of the things that education, right now, does not do very well–message boards, blogs, and even OpenStudy have a handle on asynchronous learning, but when a student needs to have their question answered right that moment because he [...]
We pushed several new features to OpenStudy today, and I wanted to give a brief rundown of a couple of them really quick. Public Access First off is what we call `public access’. Almost all content on the site is now accessible without logging on to OpenStudy. For a few months now, since we first [...]
Conventional wisdom holds that smaller classes yield better results for students. However, smaller classes (especially at the college level) also yield much higher prices. Online learning changes this formula by allowing one instructor to reach many people effectively (no worrying about fitting them all in a lecture hall!), but the question about how online learning [...]
Higher education is not known for its openness–the ivy-covered gates which adorn many campuses have a long tradition of keeping people out. However, with the advent of the internet and online learning, this is changing. With such big names as MIT (through MIT OpenCourseWare), the University of Michigan (through Open.Michigan), and a variety of others [...]
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