Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

University team competition focuses on crowdsourcing

A handful of universities are studying how crowdsourcing can be used.

Maybe you’ve got a hunch Kim Jong Il’s regime in North Korea has seen its final days, or that the Ebola virus will re-emerge somewhere in the world in the next year.

Your educated guess may be just as good as an expert’s opinion. Statistics have long shown that large crowds of average people frequently make better predictions about unknown events, when their disparate guesses are averaged out, than any individual scholar—a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds.

Now the nation’s intelligence community, with the help of university researchers and regular folks around the country, is studying ways to harness and improve the wisdom of crowds. The research could one day arm policy makers with information gathered by some of the same methods that power Wikipedia and social media.…Read More

New website a crystal ball for college applicants?

Parchment.com has information from 100,000 college applications.

Are you a high school senior with a 3.0 grade point average, an above-average SAT score, and a handful of extracurricular activities under your belt? Want to know which colleges have accepted students just like you? Parchment.com might have your answer.

Parchment, a company that has helped high school students transmit their academic records online, introduced a new website Sept. 12 that uses crowd sourcing and predictive analysis to help college applicants get a better grasp of where they should apply.

Read more about application websites in higher education……Read More

Competition offers $10K for 21st-century education ideas

The Economist and InnoCentive hope to solicit ideas that will bring education to children in developing countries.
The Economist and InnoCentive hope to solicit ideas that will bring education to children in developing countries.

How can technology be leveraged to deliver a world-class education affordably to students in developing countries? That’s the question a new competition asks, and the best idea will earn $10,000 for its creator.

Many school-age children in developing countries need access to educational opportunities, and the publication The Economist and InnoCentive Inc. have turned to “crowdsourcing” for help.

The two organizations recently partnered to create the 21st Century Cyber-Schools Challenge, calling on participants from any discipline or background to submit ideas.…Read More

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Crowdsourcing start-up aims to change the world

Set to launch in beta form on April 6, Armchair Revolutionary is a web-based social activism platform designed to harness large-scale crowdsourcing and the boom in social gaming in a bid to support a wide variety of science and technology ventures that could benefit the world at large, CNET reports. The site aims to bring people’s interest in helping support worthwhile causes and the iTunes-era simplicity of spending 99 cents on something intriguing together with innovators who need funding to get potentially world-changing projects off the ground. Built around a series of eight social activism tasks—gifting, VoIP phone calling, eMailing, uploading, downloading, voting, forms, and quizzes—Armchair Revolutionary is seen by its creators as a one-stop shop for today’s web savvy and altruistic communities to make a big difference, one small step (and a dollar) at a time…

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…Read More