Following last month’s article about reducing student costs in higher education through open access textbooks, Open Equal Free points to another open education resource in publisher Bookboon.com. The 2005 start-up entices self-motivated learners and educators with free PDF ebooks, encouraging learning without expensive traditional textbooks. Bookboon started in Denmark. It expanded rapidly to Sweden, Germany, […]
Creationism is no longer simply an American battleground in primary and secondary school education; it’s gone global. Raising questions about the nature of government involvement in education, both South Korea and Turkey made news this week in relation to moves against the mainstream scientific community’s support of evolution. South Korean publishers sidestepped scientific debate altogether by heeding […]
Higher education continues to get more expensive in the United States, but efforts like the Open Textbook Catalog at the University of Minnesota help organize and evaluate less expensive textbook options for professors to adopt. All books linked to the site are complete and openly licensed for free use, ready for use in English-language classrooms […]
The era of online higher education is upon us. Following efforts on other educational sites such as coursera.org, Harvard entered into an agreement today with MIT to bring its courses to the open web. Both schools have pledged $30 million apiece to the newly announced edX platform, which will bring courses online for both enrolled, on-campus students and […]
Although the Taliban banned women from formal education from 1996 to 2001, women and girls have been returning to school in recent years. Unfortunately, places with public support for the Taliban, especially in southern and eastern Afghanistan, perpetuate violence against schoolgirls and their teachers. A latest attack reaches into the northern province of Takhar, however, […]
It’s an old(ish) story: print newspapers are dying, and the Internet is the best chance for recovery. Problem with the Internet is that everyone wants something for nothing, but companies can’t afford to provide news without paying subscribers. Prevailing wisdom is to erect a paywall, letting visitors read some articles each month and requiring a […]
Give a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Similarly, give children laptops they have laptops, but teach them to use computing effectively and they develop useful skills. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) envisions providing laptops at low cost to children as both […]
How does one compete against FREE? That’s an interesting question for Blackboard, a company which creates learning management systems (LMS). Blackboard previously engaged in buying up and either dismantling or integrating the competition into its own products–such as Elluminate, Prometheus, or WebCT–but open source alternatives like Moodle and Sakai present a different issue. Going free with its […]
An experimental curriculum emphasizing non-fiction texts shows promising results in New York City. The new curriculum, known as Core Knowledge, hopes to use nonfiction to increase the base knowledge of children to make it easier for students to understand more complex texts and ideas presented in scientific and historical readings. Dr. Hirsch of the Core […]
Over at kickstarter.com, Peter Hyoguchi has some epic plans underway for a crowdsourced, CGI series of 5-7 minute episodes of a science fiction series called The New Kind. Inspired by a genre of anime that doesn’t resonate with Hollywood producers, the project aims at a niche seldom explored outside of Japanese animation. Harnessing the passions of […]