By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News Two research questions were used to guide the authors during their research: 1) What are the common perceptions among college students about the nature of MOOCs; and 2) How do current college students’ perceptions and attitudes toward MOOCs compare with press discussions on MOOCs? Thematic analysis on the qualitative data (the [...]

by Kaila White, The Republic More than 12,500 people from 163 countries have enrolled in ASU’s first for-credit massive open online course, or MOOC, which launched Thursday. Arizona State University has launched the first class of its Global Freshman Academy, which gives anyone in the world the opportunity to earn freshman-level university credit online without having [...]

Earlier this year, Josh Bersin described what he sees as the importance of the human resources function today in engaging and quantifying employees. He argues that HR should be interested in people management rather than talent management. But what does … The post Moving from a Talent Culture to a People Culture appeared first on Bloomfire.

An important part of training and onboarding for all businesses is providing and communicating practical knowledge to new employees. With much to learn and a limited amount of time, training managers must strategically consider which pieces of information will be … The post How Top Producers Can Provide Valuable Training Content appeared first on Bloomfire.

Photo: Nicole Hemsoth"This week we will be delving into systems and architectures designed for machine learning, but since it’s Monday and there is quite a bit to come, it seemed worthwhile to take a step back and consider how architects and software developers are thinking about the current landscape." according to Nicole Hemsoth, Co-founder and co-editor Nicole Hemsoth brings insight from the world of high performance computing hardware and software as well as data-intensive systems and frameworks.Photo: The PlatformWith everyone from Intel touting the next generation deep learning and machine learning as a partial basis for their Altera buy, to webscale companies like Microsoft, Google, Baidu and others seeking ways to boost machine learning algorithms with hardware, accelerator, and of course, software approaches, the larger conversations tend to get lost in the mix. For instance, what does it mean to optimize for these codes—and what are the system design choices that seem to be the best fits?Photo: Joshua BloomIt may seem a bit odd to take machine learning systems guidance from the point of view of a UC Berkeley professor who specializes in gamma ray bursts and black holes, but when it comes to applied scientific algorithms across massive, shifting datasets, Dr. Joshua Bloom does have a view into the complexity—and the systems required to tackle it. This is true both in terms of understanding the machines required to process cosmological simulations (i.e. large-scale supercomputers) but for Bloom and his group at Berkeley, the equal challenge lies in the tradeoffs of that computation versus the requirements of the models. Sacrificing accuracy for performance, scalability for complexity, memory for model depth—the list goes on. But at the core, Bloom says, is an increased need for machine learning systems and people building them to understand the purpose of optimizations and apply those to both the hardware and software (and by default, the outcomes and implementation)Machine learning systems are alive, he says, both "influencing and responding to their environment. At best, they’re valuable, resilient, functioning systems composed of many imperfect parts with many weak contracts between them, built by fallible individuals with broken communication channels, all of whom are living a resource constrained world that’s constantly changing, with the results being consumed by exacting and capricious individuals." This definition, as he told a group at PyData Seattle, which was hosted by Microsoft, indicates what we already know. This is hard stuff.The difficulty lies in variability—and that variability means that there are never any standard tradeoffs that suit any algorithms, which is especially true since the same models, once applied to different datasets, can change performance-wise dramatically.Read more... Source: The Platform

A different way to present material. It might be fun to do this instead of the usual lecture. Quiz Yourself: How Good Are You at Teaching the Art of Learning? | MindShift | KQED News.

Monitoring who attends class is pointless unless it counts towards students’ grades Dana Ruggiero, Bath Spa University University lecturers rarely get 100% of students turn up to every lecture. Nor do we expect them all to. Those who have got … Continue reading →

An article about how a "gamified" interface to campus life is supposed to help low-income students (can you tell I’m skeptical?). Here’s what they do: Give out points and badges for doing stuff. Reward competing against their fellow students to earn … Continue reading →

APA Says Video Games Make You Violent, but Critics Cry Bias. It’s disappointing, but really not surprising to see the APA come out with a pronouncement like this.   It is pretty clear that the approach was (as it often … Continue reading →

Once I read what the Articulate's challenge #91 was about, I knew it's going to be super fun (hey, what a great chance to know other developers better!). And it took me quite quickly to mock-up the idea how I wanted to show 2 truths and 1 lie about myself: 3 article drafts as newspaper cuttings  pinned to a board   PowerPoint was the primary design tool before I moved to Storyline. Creating board's frame was easy to do with 4 trapezoids filled with an oak texture (board rectangle was filled with