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.

Killing Big Data, About Time

Killing Big Data, About TimeThat sounds like a very good idea. At The Next Web conference I was talking to an investor about a project I was involved in, I laughed and said it was a Big Data project. I brought out the cliché: I was in Big Data before it was called Big Data. The main issue I said with many of the Big Data projects I was being told about that they were actually Data Warehouse projects. Why We Need To Kill Big Data It’s the New Year and along with resolutions about eating healthier, being kinder and exercising more frequently, I’d like to add one more to the list. Let’s banish the term big data with pivot, cloud… View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

XBMC BlastDav by Adrianus Warmenhoven

XBMC BlastDavAdrianus Warmenhoven wondered what the minimum that XBMC needs to use a WebDAV server. So he scaled back all the unneeded functionality to create an easy media server for broadcasting te XBMC on any of your devices. XBMC Blastdav Adrianus Warmenhoven  Company Ever since the original XBox with a modchip was capable of running XBMC I used and recommended XBMC to friends and acquaintances as the nicest media player. Now Android and the Raspberry Pi have come … View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

They tried to make me go to Rehab

They tried to make me goto Rehabhttp://unbounce.com/landing-pages/landing-page-rehab/ View or comment on Dani??l Crompton’s post »

It’s the incentive structure, people! Why science reform must come from the granting agencies.

I discussed this same issue in Medicine sometime ago, if it were so that a solution is thought te have been found them the sampling rate should increase. This is a case of search satisfaction – you expected to find something found something so you stop searching rather than finishing your search. While in a larger sample set or more regression to the mean takes place, which means the results come closer to the average..

What is wrong with ICT?

A day ago I read PHP: A fractal of bad design, and it made me sit down and think about writing this entry, of which the kernel has been gestating for quite a long time.

I see this a lot; pro’s ranting about an aspect of our ‘craft’ that has gone totally pear-shaped; programmers complaining about the languages or the quality of code they are asked to fix and/or maintain, systems administrators that just can not believe the insanity that is brought down on them because of either laziness of the in-house personnel or management-made bylaws.

Cryptographic specialists (even mildly spoken ones like Bruce Schneier), hackers nee security specialists, software designers… the whole palette of people that actually are proficient in their work gripe and complain.

Red Hat Open Cloud Tour #RHCTams #conference [UPDATED]

Today I spend my day at the Red Hat Open Cloud Tour, this is what happened today:

Just heard the opening by Rajiv Sodhi, who is here despite having a baby due any moment.

Margaret J. Rimmler’s keynote was interesting. One of the key takeaways being openness RedHat customers should have the choice to remain portable and replace RedHat, if that is what they want.

Proof of Concept: Shopper App

I often get people ask me to develop phone applications based on an idea and with little other input besides the idea itself. I usually ask them to write me a proposal and send that to me, knowing that most people will procrastinate – as it turns a fun idea into work – I rarely hear anything back. Not so in this case, a friend brainstormed a shopping application and we made the following rough mock ups using OmniGraffle.

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Image source: me

Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form with Text and HTML #wordpress

I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something” again.In a similar way to the last time I did it in Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form

As I explained before I have set up a system to automatically mail somebody when the enter their address in the form, my issue was that I wanted to add a unique blogpost which they would only be able to get by signing up. Naturally I wanted to style it in the same way the posts are styled in this blog. Again I turned to the documentation, specifically the Class MailApp which I was using to send the mail. Using this documentation I had a starting point. I wanted three changes to the current script:

1. keep the plain text
2. add HTML message
3. add inline images