Get Educated About Online Learning

Acupuncturist Courtney Wallace was struggling to pay off $60,000 in student debt. Seeking more lucrative work through tapping skills she’d learned as a kid building websites, she went to TrainSignal Inc., which provides web-based computer training for $49 a month. A month later, she was hired as a systems specialist at a consulting company in Chicago.

From Bloomberg: While online courses have been around since the early days of the Internet, job training has remained the purview of community colleges and vocational schools, requiring students to spend thousands of dollars to learn word processing, financial spreadsheets and web development. Withunemployment hovering at 7.6 percent, companies likeTrainSignal and Lynda.com Inc. are pitching what they call a more efficient and affordable route for people who need retraining on their own schedule.

There are a lot of little-known Twitter tools that don’t see the light of day on sites like Edudemic. So I thought this would be a good time to start fixing that.

A comprehensive collection of ideas showing how ordinary summer activities can be turned into learning opportunities.

From Educators Technology: There are several ways teachers can benifit from this digital boom in education. One of them is digital reading. This is a kind of reading that is completely free of any charge and can take place anywhere, anytime. I am talking about a set of great websites that provide free ebooks for all kinds of learners and covering a plethora of different subject areas from literature and arts to science and technology. I have been researching into some of these resources and came up with the list below. Enjoy

There’s a big difference between using projects in the classroom versus project-based learning in the classroom. What are those differences, you ask?

From Edudemic: Project-Based Learning is a fluid technique to enhance learning that really looks nothing like projects as they’re described below. For example, in a PBL scenario, the teacher’s work is typically done prior to the start of the project, it’s graded on a clearly defined rubric, and has driving questions that keep the learning going.

From Blogging About the Web 2.0: For many teachers the traditional textbook just doesn’t cut it any more. Between the rapid pace at which information changes and rising cost, many are looking for alternatives. Believe it or not, there are lots of options out there, if you know where to look and you are willing to get your hands dirty. The best part? Kids can create these using any of the tools below.

From Education Technology: With the embrace of Augmented Reality there appeared a new concept of learning called “augmented learning”. This is basically  an on-demand learning technique where the learning environment adapts to the needs and inputs from learners . Broadly speaking, “environment” here does not have to be constrained into the physical learning environment such as classroom, but could refer to such learning environment as digital learning environment, through which learners can stimulate discovery and gain greater understanding.

In this post I review a recently completed Coursera course using a quality scorecard approach to measure and quantify five key dimensions of the course. I’m in the final week of a Coursera MOOC, Sp…

From Online Learning Insights: I see an opportunity to share here with readers what contributed to a mediocre MOOC learning experience. To provide an illustrative framework for this review, I’ve created a MOOC quality scorecard review, that is [loosely] based on a quality scorecard approach and my course design experience.

Best online teaching jobs and instructor positions hand-harvested weekly from colleges, schools, corporations

Freshly posted online teaching jobs from Colorado State University, Western Governors University, American Public University, and more!

Online courses in veterinary science from TAMU prepare rural kids for careers as vet assistants in animal health and medicine.

The curriculum features 100 lessons: 75 core lessons in veterinary science with 25 lessons in clinical science. TAMU has slated the development of fifty additional lessons to cover topics such as the interface between human and animal health.

TAMU is currently developing a fee-based version of the online courses for high school graduates who aspire to a career as a veterinary assistant and those who wish to receive reliable field training under the supervision of a licensed vet.

Gamification is hot, but many attempts at educational games fall flat. Designers, parents and teachers should keep these three success factors in mind.

From Information Week: Whatever the game is supposed to be teaching must be essential to the game; the power of gamification is exactly that you can’t play without learning or learn without playing. A game that could be used to teach anycontent, like Jeopardy, bingo, or charades, has a great big seam. Students can (and will) avoid the content either by trying to figure out how to game the system, or by just accepting their low scores and agreeing that they’re “not good at this.” Either way, the game loses its point.

This can be a subtle difference. An addition-and-subtraction flash-card deck could be used to play any simple “racetrack” game, with players advancing a number of steps equal to the highest number on each card they get right, but the kids who hate math can treat it as a gambling/guessing game, memorizing facts in isolation. The same kids will learn far more math skills (and have much more fun) playing Monopoly, where addition and subtraction are not the point of the game but essential to measuring your progress.

If you have to spell a word correctly to unlock a door in a dungeon, but the game is just to see how many doors you can get through by spelling randomly chosen words, that’s a seam. But if the word is vital to whatever you must do beyond the door, so that winning depends on understanding those words better, that’s seamless.

List of online community colleges allows students to find and compare schools with affordable online associates degree

Community colleges offer the best deals in online associate degrees if cost concerns you. Online community colleges, which are funded by your tax dollars, are dedicated to providing work training, continuing education and online certificates in hot careers such as health care, medical coding and records, legal assisting, and computer programming. 

State residents typically pay the lowest tuition for online courses, though some states also allow non-residents to enroll in classes online at a reduced rate. 

Cost can be as low as $75 per credit — often two to three times cheaper than online associate degrees and certificates offered by private two-year college systems.

If you can’t find the online course, certificate or associate degree you need in the Get Educated directory check the list below to see if your state offers online courses or online associate degrees via a public community college system.