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MOOCs enrich education for rich-world students, especially the cash-strapped, and those dissatisfied with what their own colleges are offering. But for others, especially in poor countries, online education opens the door to yearned-for opportunities. Most traffic came from five countries: America, India, Britain, Colombia and Spain. 
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San Francisco-based online learning startup Udemy says that a quarter of its approved instructors will finish the year with more than $10,000 from sales of their self-created courses on subjects ranging from web development and entrepreneurship to yoga and photography.
Peter John Baskerville's comment,
December 11, 2012 2:20 PM
More evidence of teachers being able to make money outside of the institutions and of people teaching what they know who were not previously allowed to.
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Online video education is a hot space right now, thanks to the likes of Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, StraighterLine, Lynda.com, CreativeLIVE (and many more), which are collectively on a mission to democratize education and bring affordable, online learning tools and courses to a global audience.
Finding ways to empower educators with technology and digital learning tools is becoming all the more important, and sites like TeachersPayTeachers that offer teachers supplemental compensation for the work they do every day (with the additional time-saving benefit of not having to reinvent the wheel every night, which then frees them up to focus on, say, how to personalize instruction) can play a key role in improving learning outcomes — and the system as a whole.
Like TeachersPayTeachers, Bali tells us that Udemy recently had its first instructor reach $1 million in sales, an important milestone in terms of demonstrating the value of the marketplace model — along with validating Udemy’s approach.
The million-dollar milestone and the redesign of its teacher-facing UI come on the heels of strong growth for the startup over the last year. Over the last nine months, the co-founder said, the company has been seeing steady 20 percent month-over-month growth. To date, instructors have published 5,000 courses on Udemy in subjects ranging from self-help and design to photography and programming, with 1,500 of those being paid courses — a number that has increased 7-fold since last year, Bali said.
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An article by the academic, public speaker and author with extensive international experience in leadership in the global research arena, Dr Stefan Popenici looks at the new data and analysis that increase the anxiety that the current monopoly of higher education will be lost and just few universities will survive.
The article looks beyond the obvious and massive impact of Internet and online education and identifies an increasing number of othe disruptive factors that are leading the higher education sector into the perfect storm.
he covers in detail these other disruptive forces including: the significant increase of youth isolation and marginalization, graduate unemployment and persistent underemployment, a concerning economic forecast of a constant slowdown of global growth (with implications for numbers of international students) and issues evolving from the global ageing population (and implications on lifelong learning strategies and numbers of local students).
The author concludes: "In the middle of this storm, universities that continue to glorify mediocrity and impose compliant thinking are condemned to perish. These victims of the storm may still consider that is safer to shut their eyes and stay comfortable within the limits of the status quo. After all, this is what has worked well for the last century. However, on the day after the storm, higher education will be anything but comfortable. The era of compliance and contentment is over!"
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Disrupt Education is a blog written by edu-preneur Kirsten Winkler that connects the dots between the tech space and education. Whilst always ahead of the curve, the topics and examples covered here are based on existing technology and services, showcasing the digital learning revolution that is changing the way people gain knowledge. You can connect with Kirsten by following her on Twitter @KirstenWinkler or by signing up for her weekly newsletter.
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Berry envisions 600,000 well-compensated teacherpreneurs in classrooms by 2030, the year children born in 2012 graduate from high school.
He expands upon the teacherpreneurs concept in Teaching 2030: What We Must Do For Our Students and Our Public Schools, the book he penned with 12 teachers from around the country. During his lecture, Berry points out that everything that needs to be done in America’s public school system is already being done somewhere on the planet.
“There are schools where the highest pay in the building is for a practicing teacher,” he said. “What if the highest paid person at your school was the teacher?”
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edX's mission is to educate the world and revolutionize the way people learn. We are building a global community of learners, and community colleges are an important part of our vision, using a blended classroom model.
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While massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are still in their early days, the race has begun to integrate them into traditional colleges — by making them eligible for transfer credits, and by putting them to use in introductory and remedial courses. Students who want to take the free classes for credit would have to pay a fee to take an identity-verified, proctored exam. If the faculty team deems the course worthy of academic credit, students who do well could pay for a transcript to submit to the college of their choice. Colleges are not required to accept those credits, but similar transcripts are already accepted by 2,000 United States colleges and universities for training courses offered by the military or by employers.
Anne-Christin Tannhäuser's curator insight,
January 8, 2013 1:05 PM
NY times article from Nov 2012. Anyway, just heard about it now... 
Score Project's curator insight,
January 9, 2013 5:00 AM
NY times article from Nov 2012. Anyway, just heard about it now...
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A further sign that industry are entering the education market and competing with existing academic institutions for job preparation skilling and accreditation.
Microsoft has launched a new skills programme in the UK to improve young people's IT skills and digital literacy. The programme is set to help 300,000 16 to 24 year olds take steps toward work and the start of a career over the next three years, through a combination of education and training, apprenticeships and work experience. Apprentices gain job-specific skills including Microsoft certifications whilst earning a wage at a Microsoft Partner business.
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A lot has to happen in education before tablets can reach their potential. Most important, the people who run schools have to overcome their deep-seated fear of students in possession of connected devices. Yes, they can facilitate cheating and distractions, but teachers have always had to deal with cheating and distraction in classrooms and this is a terrible reason to deny students the advantages to students of everything from a library at their fingertips to instructional materials enabled by the tablet. The upfront cost of the tablets will be an issue, though savings on textbooks and other educational materials that will no longer be needed in physical form could allow a rapid recovery of the investment.
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So what’s the tipping point for deciding to start something? Nicole Tucker-Smith, a teacherpreneur at LessonCast, said, “I decided to stop talking about what would make a difference in education and start building it.”
Mike Metzger describes realizing we aren’t just fighting an achievement gap but an opportunity gap. As a second-year teacher in Arizona, he started an ACT test-prep program and advocated to make his school a testing site, helping to eliminate test-taking barriers. Sheer drive, but also luck (such as the right time and place) contribute to taking the leap.
One cautionary note for starting a venture: it helps to step outside of your own experiences. Meredith Ely of Learnboost wrote, “Being able to iterate on the thoughts, suggestions, and real-world use-cases of teachers practicing in a variety of settings is much more meaningful than building a product that would have helped me.”
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It is easy to imagine a few years from now looking at a chart similar to the one above, only seeing the numbers of people taking individual courses exploding as the complete-degree programs careen towards zero.
To be explicit, in seeking to evolve beyond the four-year degree we need not be anti-college. iTunes didn’t render the musician irrelevant just the album. But just as Napster, YouTube, iTunes and Spotify evolved the paths, careers, and distribution of musicians and their music, the role that the university plays will evolve dramatically.
Jailbreaking the degree and making courses the “unit” of education will unlock a flood of unmet demand and a new wave of possibilities in how we learn and consume education. Where Jailbreak verb means 1 To get out of a restricted mode of operation. 2 To enable use of a product not intended by the manufacturer.
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Whether you are looking for a master’s degree program, computer science classes, a K-12 curriculum, or GED study program, this list gives you50 Top Sources Of Free eLearning Courses - Via Dr. Susan Bainbridge, Gust MEES
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Following the lead from US based Coursera and edX, Open University, which has been in the "distance education" space since 1963, will launch FutureLearn in 2013 with 12 UK universities.
Peter John Baskerville's insight:
Drawing on content from institutions like the BBC, British Library and the British Museum, Martin Bean, vice chancellor of the Open University, says that FutureLearn will have a “distinctly British” twist.
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1 - Code Year - If learning computer programming sounds way out of your reach, best left to the geniuses of the world, you're wrong. According to Code Year, anyone can learn the basics of computer programming in just one year.
2 - W3Schools - The largest site on the Internet for Web developers, W3Schools is a fantastic resource for those interested in brushing up on their Web development skills—or learning them for the first time.
3 - TED - We're guessing most of you have seen at least one TED Talk by now. The nonprofit started out as a conference in 1984 with the intention of "bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design."
4 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Brush up on your college-level writing and reading skills without paying an exorbitant amount.
5 - iTunes U - iTunes U hosts content from more than 800 universities and distinguished organizations. Stanford, Yale, and Oxford are on the list, as well as MoMA, the New York Public Library, Public Radio International, and PBS stations.
6 - Khan Academy - Sal Khan, former hedge fund analyst and creator of the nonprofit Khan Academy, has made over 2,700 free educational videos and aims to continue until the day he dies.
7 - Peer 2 Peer University - Peer 2 Peer University, otherwise known as P2PU, is a grassroots open education project. Creating a "model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education," P2PU uses the Internet to make educational materials openly available for free.
8 - University of the People - Affiliated with the United Nation's Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development, the Clinton Global Initiative, and the Yale Law School Information Society Project, University of the People is the world's first tuition-free, non-profit, online academic institution
9 - Academic Earth - Academic Earth, an online video education site, offers courses and lectures from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Princeton in a user-friendly platform.
10 - CK-12 - Intended for kindergarteners through twelfth graders, CK-12 is a non-profit organization whose mission is to reduce the cost of textbook material in the K-12 market.
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When New York-based Skillshare launched in April of 2011, the idea was to let anyone teach local, in-person classes on specific creative and professional skills based on their expertise. “The original thesis was to turn every city into a campus,” said founder and CEO Michael Karnjanaprakorn. And since its launch, Skillshare has expanded to cities around the country, including San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia. But as global demand for classes grew, Karnjanaprakorn said they decided to scale more quickly by adding the online classes in August.
The online classes also give instructors a chance to get in front of a bigger group of students and earn a bigger payout. Before launching the online classes, the top paid local classes made about $500. But now Skillshare says its top paid online classes (about 20 percent) earn $3,000 to $5,000. (For both online and offline classes, Skillshare takes 15 percent of the earnings.
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The rising cost of education, even in a bad economy, and the students loans that are incurred are a huge issue for young people. The average college graduate has $25,000 in debt and the total student loan debt is now greater than a trillion dollars.
These debts are a huge burden because there's nothing you can do to shake them, even filing for bankruptcy. We've heard colleges advertize that a college degree will yield a few million dollars over the course of a working career, but that's not true anymore.
PayScale.com, a compensation data provider for both employees and employers, found that in 2012 the cost of a college education and graduate earnings decreased the 30-year college ROI, falling 2.3 percent to an average of $353,182 when comparing the same set of schools in 2011. Knowing this, young people are looking towards alternatives to offset the education they could have had or enrolling in programs that enable them to graduate without loans.
Here are a few: - Peter Thiel's "20 Under 20" Fellowship. - College work programs. - University of the People. - UnCollege. - Self-education. - Start a company.
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Harsh economic realities mean trouble for college leaders. But where administrators perceive an impending crisis, investors increasingly see opportunity. In recent years, venture capitalists have poured millions into education-technology start-ups, trying to cash in on a market they see as ripe for a digital makeover. And lately, those wagers have been getting bigger.
Investments in education-technology companies nationwide tripled in the last decade, shooting up to $429-million in 2011 from $146-million in 2002, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The boom really took off in 2009, when venture capitalists pushed $150-million more into education-technology firms than they did in the previous year, even as the economy sank into recession.
"The investing community believes that the Internet is hitting education, that education is having its Internet moment," said Jose Ferreira, founder of the interactive-learning company Knewton. Last year Mr. Ferreira's company scored a $33-million investment of its own in one of the biggest deals of the year.
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Simply getting into college is the goal for many, but two young entrepreneurs think learning should be. They've built a business that aims to put learning first. Here's how they've managed to communicate that vision to staffers, educators and everyone in between.
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In the six months that I've covered education technology, I've talked to more than two dozen educators who are leveraging their skills and experience to contribute to their field both in and out of the classroom.
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Badges are gaining currency at the same time that a growing number of elite universities have begun offering free or low-cost, noncredit courses to anyone with access to the Internet and a desire to learn. Millions of students have already signed up for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. By developing information-age credentials backed by a wide array of organizations outside the education system, creators of badge programs may be mounting the first serious competition to traditional degrees since college-going became the norm.
If digital badges infiltrate the credential market, they could shake the economic foundations of a higher education industry that over the last 30 years has consistently increased prices much higher than inflation and family income, resulting in over $1 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. Colleges have gotten away with this in large part because the gap in earnings between people with and without degrees significantly widened during that time. Degree holders were less likely to lose their jobs during the recent recession, and the number of jobs requiring degrees grew faster during the recovery. Degrees are valuable, and only colleges can sell them. So students and parents pay and, increasingly, borrow, because they feel they have no choice.
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Sal Khan on AirTalk talking about his new book with Larry Mantle about "The One World School House"
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Ernst & Young’s view is that the higher education sector is undergoing a fundamental transformation in terms of its role in society, mode of operation, and economic structure and value. To explore these themes and future directions, we have conducted an industry-wide study of the main forces impacting the higher education industry globally and locally, and the opportunities, challenges and implications for Australian universities. We conducted a mix of primary and secondary research, including interviews with more than 40 leaders from public universities, private universities, policy makers and sector representative groups. Our interviewees included representatives from more than 20 universities, including 15 Vice-Chancellors. The topic attracted immense interest around Australia.
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The biggest challenge in getting ready is understand where your money is going to come from. With my line of work, you never really have one source of income. While you may assume sticking to one thing and doing it well would create the least amount of work, there are also amazing ways to make additional income that doesn’t require much effort.
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Most teachers are happy doing their job — helping kids understand and make sense of the world around them. But there’s a growing number of educators who are wading into entrepreneurship, frustrated at the lack of tools they need, and wanting to extend their sphere of influence. As technology becomes more widely used and accepted in the classroom, teachers are taking their ideas about how to improve learning environments, sharing them online, and creating web-based tools to benefit teachers and students.
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MOOCs are transforming higher education. Not necessarily for the elite and the privileged, but for the multitudes currently barred from access to higher education because of cost and geographic constraints. The raise of platforms in 2012 such as edX, Udacity, Coursera and soon to start Futurelearn have seen outstanding levels of engagement.