The teaching score: a new metric?

This article from the New York Times present the Open Syllabus Project

The Syllabus Explorer tool lets users search 1 million syllabi, used in the past 10 years, mostly in the US and English speaking countries, and presents a teaching score metric:

"Teaching Score’ (TS) is a numerical indicator of the frequency with which a particular work is taught. Overall Teaching Score is based on the rank of the text among citations in the total collection;"

Top 3 textbooks for Business:

Top 3 textbooks all fields combined: 

PNAS 100th anniversary

2015 marks the 100th anniversary of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). January 1915 was the first issue, click below to view an animated timeline:

PNAS timeline

Top Non-Fiction Books: a consensus cloud

From Information is Beautiful, another visualization of top non-fiction titles from various sources

Non-Fiction Books everyone should read:

See Novels everyone should read.

The state of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education

Educause has released a report this month: 'The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education: Student, Faculty, and IT Perspectives" 

"On average, LMSs have been in place for eight years, and 15% of U.S. higher education institutions are currently planning to replace their LMS within the next three years."

One year with MOOCs, research findings from the first 17 edX classes

Courtesy of: MOOCs.com

Professors from MIT and Harvard report on their first year in MOOCs and the edX project: 

MITx working papers
HarvardX Working Papers

• There were 841,687 registrations from 597,692 unique users
• Only 5 percent earned a certificate of completion.
• One-third of users never viewed any course materials.
• More than half of those who completed at least half of the course went on to earn a certificate of completion

See also:
Education Week article from one of the authors, 

The First Year of edX: Research Findings to Inform Online Learning

Information is Beautiful - 2013 awards

The Kantar Information is Beautiful site has posted its winners for 2013

Social Media for Teaching & Learning - Pearson report 2013

Pearson has released its 2013 Social Media in Higher Education survey [free registration required]

Infographic

edX+Google = mooc.org

A new alliance in the ever growing field of MOOCs was announced on the Google Research blog:
The platform mooc.org is set to go live in the first half of 2014.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform. We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

edX press release. 

Infographic: World's Biggest Data Breaches

The Information is Beautiful site has released an infographic showing the World's Biggest Data Breaches (losses greater than 30,000 records) overtime, click on the bubbles to read more.

Registry of Research Data Repositories lauched

"The goal of re3data.org is to create a global registry of research data repositories. The registry will cover research data repositories from different academic disciplines. re3data.org will present repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. In the course of this mission re3data.org aims to promote a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data."

 

9 Useful Educational Tools

Ned Potter is an Academic Liaison Librarian at the University of York and has created this great Prezi to suggest 9 educational tools to be used in research or teaching by academic (including Prezi itself).

Read the full article from the LSE blog

Google updates its Transparency Report

The latest update reveals more government removal requests than ever before.
From the official blog post:

"...for the seventh time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove content from our services. From July to December 2012, we received 2,285 government requests to remove 24,179 pieces of content—an increase from the 1,811 requests to remove 18,070 pieces of content that we received during the first half of 2012."

Google Transparency Report

The National Digital Public Library is now live

Launched on April 18, 2013 the Digital Public Library of America aims to "make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge" .

This ambitious and long time in the making project (see this post), is discussed at length by Robert Darnton, main leader of the initiative and Professor and University Librarian at Harvard, in this NY Review of Books article.

Faculty Survey on Research & Teaching Practices

The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey focused on research and teaching practices broadly, as well as the dissemination, collecting, discovery, and access, of research and teaching materials.

Download PDF Report

Major topics covered by the survey include:

• Research processes
• Teaching practices: 
• Scholarly communications:
• The library: 
• Scholarly societies

Business Schools and Big Data

Two articles from the FT discuss potential uses of big data by business schools:

1. Business schools’ big data revolution 
2. Business schools should embrace big data 

170 billion tweets archived

The Library of Congress has "an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012."

Click to view a a white paper [PDF] that summarizes the Library’s work to date and outlines present-day progress and challenges.

How today’s higher education faculty use social media

Pearson and the Babson Survey Research Group have released a survey on higher education faculty use social media. View the whole survey here (free registration required)

Highlights from the Executive Summary:

• Young faculty members use social media at rates much higher than the rates for older faculty,a pattern that holds true for personal use, professional use, and use in teaching. 
• Faculty match different sites to their different needs; the sites they visit most often for personal use (Facebook), professional use (LinkedIn), and for use for in teaching (Blogs and Wikis) are all different.
• The use of social media among faculty is fluid and evolving. The mix of sites being used is changing over time. In 2011 Facebook was the most visited site for faculty professional purposes; by 2012 this has been replaced by LinkedIn. 
• One area where adoption is almost universal is in the use of video for classes. Whether it is used in a class session or assigned for viewing outside of class, faculty are enthusiastic adopters of video. 

Data visualization - awards posted!

The site Information is Beautiful has released its award winners for 2012:
View the list and runners up here

Google starts Course Builder an open source project

From the post: The Course Builder open source project is an experimental early step for us in the world of online education.

Data visualization

Information is Beautiful has released its visualization award list.
Here is a sample, view the full list

SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN WORLD CITIES