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 launches program to combat unemployment among graduates

Indiana University is taking steps to ensure its students find jobs after graduating. (Photo courtesy of IU)

Indiana University’s 900 incoming business school students will have access to a program with web-based components designed to lay out three years of education—a measure intended to help recent graduates avoid joining the lengthy line of peers at the unemployment office.

Officials at IU’s Kelley School of Business on Aug. 28 unveiled the Kelley Compass, an initiative that will pair every incoming student with an adviser who will guide students through a series of objectives in their freshmen, sophomore, and junior years.

The Compass is meant to prepare each student for a specific job in the business world, making them as qualified as possible for in-demand positions. The program will use a raft of renovated student workspaces that will connect students virtually with Kelley graduates from around the world.…Read More

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IU professor teaching class with avatars

IU professor says Second Life could expand online learning.

This fall, an Indiana University Kokomo professor will teach an art philosophy class to students who might be disguised as robots, dinosaurs, or vampires.

Gregory Steel is the only IU professor to teach a course in the virtual reality world known as Second Life.

Instead of meeting on the IU Kokomo campus, students create avatars and log in to move their avatars through a virtual classroom, according to IU Kokomo officials.…Read More

Colleges taking a team approach to eTextbooks

Six in 10 students said in a recent survey that they forgo buying required books because textbooks are too pricey.

Reining in exorbitant textbook costs is no longer a campus-by-campus venture: A unified approach, powered by EDUCAUSE and the Internet2 consortium’s NET+ cloud-based collaborative purchasing program, could make low-cost electronic textbooks available now, ed-tech leaders hope.

Colleges experimenting with digital textbooks can take months—sometimes years—to negotiate with publishers before their school’s modest eBook program is introduced to students now paying upwards of $1,100 a year for books.

This fall, campus technology leaders will closely track the results of an expansive eTextbook pilot program ranging across 28 campuses, creating what many in higher education believe could be a model for quickly bringing low-cost textbook options to students who, in some cases, have stopped buying required texts because they cannot afford the books.…Read More

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IU professor to deliver free online course on online teaching

Curt Bonk, professor of instructional systems technology at the Indiana University School of Education, will deliver a free, five-week internet course about teaching online for a company that specializes in organizing online courses, the university reports. CourseSites, a site operated by educational software company Blackboard, is unveiling what it calls its “Open Course Series” by having Bonk lead a session titled “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success” on May 2, with four other sessions at 4 p.m. ET each Wednesday through May 30. Free online registration is now open for the “massive open online course,” or MOOC. Before registration opened, nearly a thousand people reportedly had indicated interest in the course.

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Virtual Symposium examines worldwide growth of online access

The Virtual Symposium focused partly on keeping open source technologies free.
The Virtual Symposium focused partly on keeping open-source technologies free.

Online learning, open courseware, eBooks, wikis, and many other innovative technologies have forever affected education by connecting any topic in any discipline to any learner in any place. Even individuals in remote communities now can access unlimited information free of charge, if they have an internet connection. This also provides more possibilities for international collaboration, knowledge building, and sharing of best practices.

Drexel University’s School of Education capitalized on these possibilities during its second annual live and online Virtual Symposium, in conjunction with Wainhouse Research and the World Bank Institute’s Global Development Learning Network (GDLN). This year’s Virtual Symposium built upon the theme Education for Everyone: Expanding Access Through Technology.

The symposium highlighted education technology innovations, and it examined challenges to access—for example, among poor and rural communities—and possibilities for overcoming them. A major feature of the symposium was the ability for participants to share experiences among peers in both developing and developed countries.…Read More

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