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Ed News Ticker #8Education gets Shaq Attacked
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Shaquille O’Neal Becomes Receives Doctorate Degree
Barry University in Miami Shores, Fla., will award O’Neal a doctorate in education this weekend after more than four years of graduate school work, including one-on-one class sessions O’Neal arranged to have as he traveled around the country, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
The former L.A. Lakers and Miami Heat champion successfully defended his dissertation at the Roman Catholic university earlier this month after completing 16 courses, 54 credit hours, and finishing with a 3.8 GPA.
Source: ABCNews
Princeton Review Founder Launches Noodle, A Search & Recommendation Engine For Education
Noodle Education is a search and recommendation engine that helps refine the process and suggest educational opportunities based on what’s important to the learner.
Like Google, Noodle is attempting to organize an enormous amount of data, aggregating information on a wide range of learning options. As it is today, the search and discovery process for education is fragmenting, as learners and parents navigate to one resource for test prep, another for pre-K schooling options, another for guidance counselors, and so on.
Noodle is attempting to create the first education discovery engine that combines aggregated data with socially-enabled search to help find formal and informal educational opportunities — from tutors and schools to study abroad programs and guidance counseling.
Source: TechCrunch
How Lynda.com Hit $70M In Revenue Without A Penny From Investors
Very interesting article by Rip Empson about the “old school” education platform Lynda. Founded in the ’90s, the company Lynda.com offers a virtual video library of over 1,200 educational, how-to videos. The video courses are taught by industry experts, working professionals, and veteran teachers, served up in installments for a monthly subscription fee of about $25 and 90 percent of its content is produced in-house.
In 2010, Lynda delivered over 1,000 hours of content, and while it provides its paid online learning content to individuals, today it also works with nearly all of the Ivy League schools as well as companies, like Disney, Time Warner, Sony, Pixar, ABC, and HBO to supplement their learning content.
Source: TechCrunch
LinkedIn Acquires Professional Content Sharing Platform SlideShare For $119M
SlideShare recently deepened its integration with LinkedIn, and the two companies have compared their relationship to Chocolate and peanut butter for professionals. Nearly 7.4 million presentations hosted by SlideShare are embedded across more than 1.4 million unique domains.
Source: TechCrunch
MIT and Harvard say open-source edX can educate a billion people
Starting next fall, both schools will offer free courses using a platform based on MIT’s previously announced MITx technology. MITx enables the creation of online classes that knit together video segments, embedded quizzes, interactive feedback, online labs and student-ranked Q&A.
One inspiration for the effort was the not-for-profit Khan Academy founded by Salman Kahn.
MIT and Harvard have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration.
Source: GigaOm
The Clear Consensus on Education Reform: Voters Want Major Change
The poll found that an overwhelming majority of the nation’s electorate — 81 percent – believe the quality of public education would greatly improve if school system bureaucracy was cut down and teachers and principals were given more flexibility to do their jobs.
Other findings are that
- voters believe giving principals more authority to make decisions would improve, not lower, the quality of schools.
- 65% believe that lack of classroom discipline is a “big” problem in public schools
Source: The Atlantic
40% of Teens Video Chat With Their Friends
According to a new study by Pew, teens of various ages are equally likely to use web chat services. About 34% of online 12 to 13 year olds use video chat, while 39% of 14 to 17 year olds do the same. Teens who are more active online, text frequently and use social media often are, not surprisingly, more likely to video chat.
About 27% of teens who use the Internet say they actively record and upload video online. However, girls are just as likely as boys to upload clips.
About 77% of all teens between the ages of 12 and 17 use Facebook, while just 16% use Twitter. Teens who use Facebook and Twitter are more likely to use video chat, with 41% of Facebook users web chatting (compared with 25% of non-users) and 60% of Twitter users using video chat, compared with 33% of non-Twitter users.
Source: Mashable
