Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Do online charter schools measure up?

A three-part research study indicates that online charter school performance may be underwhelming

online-charter-schoolsNew research offers evidence that online charter schools post weaker academic performance and struggle more to maintain student engagement than their conventional brick-and-mortar peers.

The National Study of Online Charter Schools, released Oct. 27, analyzed online charter school operations, policy environments, and their impacts on student achievements.

The three-volume study, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, and the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, describes the achievement effects of online charter schools.…Read More

Experts: UVa.’s Coursera partnership far from an embrace of online learning

More than 680,000 students have taken a Coursera class.

The University of Virginia will make four of its courses available for free online in 2013 after the campus’s governing board last month cited a lack of web-based courses in its controversial ouster of President Teresa Sullivan.

But advocates for online education said the university’s partnership with for-profit internet learning site Coursersa—which announced partnerships with 12 universities July 17—should be seen as a tepid embrace of nontraditional courses, not as a momentous shift toward a new learning model.

UVa. will post courses in physics, history, and philosophy to Coursera, part of the massive open online course (MOOC) movement that includes other free educational websites like edX, Udacity, and the Khan Academy.…Read More

Colleges appeal to students with green policies

Universities are touting green initiatives to draw eco-conscious students.
Universities are touting green initiatives to draw eco-conscious students.

Small private colleges and large research universities alike have adopted green policies in recent years in an effort to trim energy bills, encourage sustainability, and lure environmentally conscious students to their campuses. Now, a college counseling company has named five schools in particular as the most eco-friendly.

Such lists could carry weight among prospective students. In fact, nearly seven in 10 high school students surveyed by the Princeton Review last year said they would evaluate a college’s environmental policies and commitments before attending classes there. And with Earth Day approaching on April 22, schools are touting green credentials in the annual springtime recruiting blitz.

IvyWise, a counseling company based in New York City and headed by admissions expert Katherine Cohen, released its list last week of schools that appeal to the greenest of prospective students: the University of Washington at Seattle, Arizona State University, Bates College, Emory University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.…Read More

New application could make all software ‘open source’

Imagine controlling Apple iTunes from inside Microsoft Word without having to switch applications. That could be possible, PC World reports, thanks to the efforts of researchers at the University of Washington who are working on a project that could essentially make any proprietary software act like open source. “Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all their stuff. But they all create programs that put pixels on the screen. And if we can modify those pixels, then we can change the programs’ apparent behavior,” said James Fogarty, a University of Washington assistant professor of computer science and engineering. Almost everything seen on a display is made of prefabricated blocks of code, and the tool, called Prefab, looks for those blocks as often as 20 times per second and alters their behavior. Prefab doesn’t actually reveal or manipulate the source code for programs, because it can’t see this in proprietary software. It can only manipulate and combine what’s visible on the computer screen. “Even if it’s in a menu six layers down, if your eyes can see it, so can Prefab,” Fogarty said. Making changes to software from Microsoft, Apple, and other companies could lead to legal problems, but Fogarty argued that “there’s a lot of value we can provide these companies.” He plans to show the software on April 14 in Atlanta at the Computer Human Interface conference…

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