The disappearing virtual library – Opinion – Al Jazeera English
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html
For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation.
(via Instapaper)
The edX announcement comes after four top-tier institutions??teamed up??last month with a for-profit company led by two Stanford computer-science professors to offer a similar array of free online courses. Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced the partnerships with Coursera, a company that sprouted from Stanford???s early experiments with massive open online courses.
all it takes is six months of pretty surprising announcements in terms
of open-course initiatives, and all of a sudden you can start to
picture that education seems to be at the threshold of a very dramatic
change.???
At a news conference, the leaders of edX described it as a tool that colleges can use to experiment with online courses and study how students learn. For example, Mr. Agarwal said, in the prototype MITx course ???Circuits and Electronics,??? researchers ???gather huge amounts of data??? on students??? use of the platform, including how much time they spend watching videos.
Since edX courses have the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of students, the data sets could be ???very statistically significant in a very short amount of time,??? he said.
mattlumpkin 