Hack (Higher) Education

A new startup launches today to help make it easier for professors to create digital course packets for their students.

Degreed, a startup that promises to “jailbreak the transcript” launched into beta this week. Degreed asks users to list what formal and informal education they’ve pursued — what college did you attend, what major were you, what badges have you earned — and calculates an equivalency score in certain topics. That means that even if you never completed your bachelor’s or associate’s degree, Degreed will vouch for both your credit hours (ish) and your mastery skills (ish).

Everyone’s jumping on the MOOC bandwagon, it seems, with the announcement today of 17 more universities partnering with Coursera. But why the rush when it seems clear that these online experiments are just that -- experimental? Certainly universities see this as a marketing opportunity. I argue that it’s also “FOMO” -- the fear of missing out.

Google’s Summer of Code program gives college students hands-on experience (and a small stipend for) working on open source projects. I interviewed Eamon Ford, a junior at the University of Chicago, about his experiences with the program and why it offers a unique professional learning opportunity.

One of the most intriguing elements of the new online education startup Coursera was its use of peer assessment rather than automated grading software. But many students are taking issue with the peer feedback process in several of Coursera's courses. What's gone wrong here, and why?

MIT OpenCourseWare, Peer to Peer University, OpenStudy, and Codecademy are teaming up to launch the "Mechanical MOOC," weaving together existing educational resources (content, Web-based study groups, quizzes and so on) to offer an introductory course in Python. It's hoping to be a different sort of MOOC than the centralized ones we've seen lately from the likes of Stanford (Coursera and Udacity) or MIT (MITx, now edX). Rather than force learners onto a learning management system, this one recognizes that learning can happen in communities and on sites across the open Web.

Social reading startup Highlighter partners with the 20 Million Minds Foundation for an interactive and openly-licensed Introduction to Sociology textbook

Academia.edu has added an analytics dashboard so that scholars can see the "real time impact" of their scholarship.