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5 Ways to Make Your Videos Binge-Worthy

A faculty member at New York University’s Stern School of Business entered Amanda Justice’s office, apparently after binge-viewing Breaking Bad. “He asked me if we could end [his videos] with a cliff hanger,” recalled the educational technologist. She remembered thinking, “This is an operations course. I don’t really know off the top of my head how we could get Breaking Bad-level engagement and trauma into it.”

On the other hand, that’s just the kind of challenge Justice and her colleagues on Stern’s Learning Science team within the W.R. Berkley Innovation Labs like to tackle…

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Online Course Enrollment Sees Relentless Growth

According to the Babson Survey Research Group’s latest annual report on distance education in the United States, online student enrollment has grown for the 14th year in a row. Nearly a million additional students took distance education courses in 2016 compared to 2012, a count consisting of both people who took online classes (or other forms of distance ed) exclusively as well as those who took a mix of online and face-to-face courses. That translates to more than 30 percent of colleges students — 6.4 million in total — who took at least one distance education course during the 2015-2016 academic year.

Conversely, a million fewer students came to campus for their college education in 2016 than in 2012.

Read the rest of the article on Campus Technology…

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Personalized Learning Is Not about Planting Students Behind Computers

Digital Promise has issued a new report on personalized learning that dives into the policies and practices that should be pursued at the district, state, and federal levels to help individual learners master content and skills. This is the fourth report in a series on the topic of personalized learning.

Why is personalized learning getting so much attention? For several reasons, suggested Barbara Pape, co-author of the paper, on the Digital Promise blog…

Read the rest of the article on THE Journal…

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Yes, Charters Do Hurt Public School Funding

Does the proliferation of charter schools hurt public-school funding? Yes, it does, according to a new working paper from Duke University.

Two researchers, Helen Ladd from Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and John Singleton, from the Economics Department, based their research “on detailed balance sheet information” for a sample of school districts in their own state of North Carolina, which saw significant charter entry when a statewide cap of 100 charters was lifted in 2011.

Read the rest of the article on THE Journal…

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Report: NAEP Setting Bar Too High

Has NAEP set the bar too high for American students? That’s the implication in a new report from the National Superintendents Roundtable and Horace Mann League. According to “How High the Bar?” when results from “nation’s report card” proficiency assessments are compared to results from two international assessments and the Common Core, researchers found that the proficiency benchmarks of the National Assessment of Educational Progress would knock out students in almost every country.

NAEP, which issues assessments in multiple topics to students in grades 4, 8 and 12, defines “proficient” as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed. Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter….”

Read the rest on THE Journal…