Archive for the ‘personal’ Category
Crowd-Funding Campaign to Reform Higher Education on a Global Scale
Oplerno—a groundbreaking online educational institution—has launched a crowd-‐ funding campaign on Indiegogo to raise $100,000 to further the mission of redesigning higher education from the ground up.
“Much of the current system is out of control, with skyrocketing administrative costs, interfering corporate interests, and lack of faculty empowerment,” says Robert Skiff, founder of Oplerno. “Furthermore, student debt is increasing at an alarming and unsettling rate. By allowing students to connect directly to their instructors and giving instructors ownership and control of their teaching content—as well as at least 80 percent of the tuition they bring in—we are removing the excesses of the modern educational industry. Let’s give students the skills they seek, the credits they need, and an entirely new way to think about education,” stated Skiff.
The centerpiece of Oplerno’s redesign of the higher education model is the way that teachers and students are treated. At Oplerno, faculty own and control the course content they create. They decide how many students they will teach (though no more than 30 per class, guaranteeing a personal learning experience) and what to charge students for their services. Faculty members take home at least 80 percent of the tuition dollars they generate—between $5000 and $36,000 per class, depending on class tuition and enrollment. Students control their education through a degree of choice unavailable at traditional institutions. They choose their own teachers based on the types of skills they want to learn, outside reviews of classes, and affordability of class tuition. Typical costs for students will range between $500 and $1,500 per class. Using proprietary software, Oplerno will allow for the creation of an open and transparent marketplace, where learning can occur without the limitations imposed by many of the traditional structures of higher education. Oplerno will use the money raised by the Indiegogo campaign to pay for various start-up costs associated with accreditation, faculty support, and student advising. If Oplerno reaches its goal of $100,000, the organization has promised to donate one percent of its net profit—forever—to projects proposed by faculty and students that focus on education, ecological restoration, and economic development. As part of the crowd-funding campaign, Oplerno is offering a ten percent discount on tuition for 10 years to individuals who donate $1,000 or more.
“We have already created the foundation for massively increasing access to higher education on a global scale, while lowering costs for students and increasing pay for faculty,” Skiff says. “Now we need some help financially to bring our vision to scale. We want everyone to benefit from the work we have done to this point, so we have created some long-term value for people who are willing to help us build a new kind of learning organization.”
Oplerno currently has more than 50 faculty from all over the world, creating graduate and undergraduate courses in fields ranging from engineering and the sciences to the liberal arts and humanities. Courses are being developed in English, Spanish, and Chinese to meet the needs of the global marketplace. Oplerno is committed to seeking regional and national accreditation as soon as possible. It plans to offer classes early in the first quarter of 2014 that will be available from any location on the planet with Internet access.
My State of E-Learning #elearning #coursera #udemy #udacity
Recently I’ve gotten the online learning bug back, not that it’s ever away for long, so I’ve been busy again on Coursera. And thanks to a HTML 5 course I also started to use Udemy. An Eric Ries course is waiting on Udacity for me to start it. In the past I used to use iTunesU to follow online university courses, such as Yale’s Game Theory Lectures by Benjamin Polak.
Coursera
I’m currently enrolled in 6 courses, and I’ve followed a number of courses here, yet none to completion within the time period set by the tutor. Often the amount of time I would need to set aside for the course can be between 6 and 12 hours each week, this is entirely possible and I often do manage to do a couple of hours in the evening. Another issue is that to receive course credit these Problem Sets need to be in at a certain date, or courses which have been running over 1 week it is often impossible to submit these on time to be eligible for course credit.
Coursera does allow you to download all the video’s, so it is possible to view these at a later date, or even from the beach somewhere. And they sometimes offer the course multiple times, so in the example of Model Thinking I have enrolled a second time so I can complete easier.
Posterous Migration [UPDATE]
I just migrated all my posterous posts to here, it decided to post all the drafts I had in posterous. This might take a little time to fix. 🙂
UPDATE: if it isn’t all fixed respond to this post and I’ll fix it.
Unless I was Unclear
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ThinkGeek
Merry Christmas from all of us at ThinkGeek. Now get back to fixing your relatives’ computers!
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To put it all in perspective!
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To put it all in perspective!
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Star Trek: The QR Borg
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Clayton Morris
Awesome Borg Star Trek T-ShirtsTaylor Morgan has come up with a use for the QR code that’s actually quite clever. He’s printed it on the side of a Borg Cube, and when you scan the code, it reads, “We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.”http://society6.com/TaylorMorgan#11=49&4=75
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Scrum Masters as Sri Ganesha’s pundits #agile #xp
You would probably not associate a god from the Indian pantheon with an Agile methodological, and there are many things that can be learned for Scrum masters from Ganesh.
In Scrum the Scrum Master focuses on 4 key areas:
- remove impediments
- buffer against distracting influences
- enforcer of rules
- focusing team on tasks
Ganesha is the Lord of Obstacles, both material and spiritually. And is worshiped as the remover of obstacles, although he also places obstacles in the path of worshipers. The Scrum Master also removes the impediments and places obstacles in the path of the team members. Ganesha fans his ears constantly to symbolize that often words are spoken, but one is not receiving inside. This is what happens when the length of the meetings is too long, or it digresses off-topic. This is also what the broken tusk is said to symbolize, with oneness of mind and single-minded devotion you can achieve everything. In your team you can keep your focus by focussing the energies on the ability of the team to create results, and allowing the members to achieve.
Image source: Vijay Bandari – Wikipedia, Anamika S
How large is a Two-Pizza Team? #scrum #xp
After reading about 2 pizza teams in Wired UK 03.12, I read that the comment came from Werner Vogels, the Amazon CTO. He says prefers two-pizza teams; “technology teams working on a given project typically can be fed by no more than two pizzas—usually eight or fewer people.” This makes no sense to me, and I’m sure you may find the same.
I can easily eat a 13″ pizza at one sitting. A 13″ pizza has an area of approximately 856.3 cm2, the largest size that Dominos Pizza makes is 16″ with an area of approximately 1297 cm2. This means that I would be full at approximately 66% of the 16″ pizza, when I split it evenly the pizza only feeds two and leaves us both a little hungry.
Read more articles on Agile, SCRUM or XP…
How does Vogels think he can feed up to 8 people with 2 pizzas?
Image source: VirtualErn
Google Analytics for WordPress with @CloudFlare
You can set up you DNS to point to cloudflare, although it’s far more powerful you can view this functionality as a High Availability proxy. Cloudflare then accepts the connections for http and requests the requested page from wordpress.com. This file is manipulated to inject the GA script into the site. There is NO need to perform any modifications on wordpress.com.
Read more articles about wordpress…
As it says in the blog:
Since CloudFlare is optimizing and delivering your site’s content to your visitors, it inserts the Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code in the proper place as your site’s visitors pass through our network. Your site now benefits from both WordPress.com site analytics and Google Analytics.
Source: Enabling Google Analytics on Your WordPress.com Blog
Image source: CloudFlare
Google +1 In My WordPress SideBar
I was playing with adding the Google +1 button to my blog and added the icon you see below this blog, then I realized by adding the following HTML block in the sidebar I can add a page button.
<div class="g-plusone"></div>FYI
Image source: Google
General Musing 