Posts tagged College
Overstock Coupon SEO Scam Targets College Kids – King of How To News
Feb 8th
 King of How To News |
Overstock Coupon SEO Scam Targets College Kids
King of How To News That said, a recent report involving an Overstock coupon SEO scam is showing that even major corporations are guilty of shady marketing strategies. According to an article published in the Wall Street Journal, the company offered at least one Overstock … |
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College Students Choose Facebook Over Other Social Networks For Coursework
Jan 17th
College students appear to have gotten over the creep factor of connecting with their professors on Facebook and would prefer to use the 800-million member social network for formal class assignments and discussions over other platforms, including Twitter.
Those are the preliminary findings of Dr. Rey Junco, a college professor who has been studying social media in the college classroom. Not too long ago, students often bristled at the idea of using Facebook in classes because it meant connecting with their professors. But Junco’s more recent research shows students prefer Facebook because they’re already using it.
“I think [using Facebook] would’ve been easier and a little more comfortable for people because I think pretty much everyone in my class had a Facebook and nobody had either one of these thing,” one student in the study said of a class that gave students the option of using Twitter or Ning, a service that lets people create closed social networks.
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[Full disclosure: The author is a part-time college instructor who teaches courses on writing, journalism and social media at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and requires students to use Twitter for certain class assignments].
Several studies have suggested that students are more engaged and get better grades when social media is a component of their college classes. Junco surmises that students preferred Facebook because it’s easier to use. Previous fears about over-sharing with professors appear to have been eased by easier-to-understand privacy settings and groups that allow professors to keep course-related discussions on topic.
Junco finished crunching data for a paper he plans to publish later this year. The bottom line, he said on his blog, is students “overwhelmingly” prefer Facebook when given a choice beween social networks for use in class.
“Since students are ‘always’ on Facebook, it’s easy to see when new comments are made to a post from a class,” he wrote. “Some of my research has shown that how students use Facebook is sometimes more important than time spent on the site in terms of grades and student engagement.”
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You Don’t Need A College Degree to Be a Great Coder
Jan 7th
Okay, so we all know that both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never finished their Harvard degrees, and look where they are now. But for the rest of us who just aspire to have a full time job, let alone an equity share in a hot startup, is a college degree really necessary to code? Maybe not, according to this blog post from Good Technology.
Erin Biba, who wrote the post back in November, asks: “Programming isn’t accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?”
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Exactly. And she cites a recent study by Dice.com that puts the number of available tech jobs at more than 84,000. While not all of them are programmers, certainly a good portion of them are. It is a good time to be a nerd.
The stories about the perks at Google and Facebook are now the stuff of urban legend. I was recently in the trendy SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, and visited a typical 200-person tech firm that had the required bicycles, snack room, and catered lunches and dinners. So why do hiring managers insist on the sheepskin (that means the actual diploma, for those of you too young to remember the reference)? Tradition, perhaps?
I went shopping around a few typical college Web course catalogs, looking for the kinds of software engineering classes that would teach kids today how to do a Hadoop cluster or learning CSS/XML. I came up empty-handed. Granted, I didn’t spend hours on this research.
Take a look at this course listing from the University of Texas at Austin’s Computer Engineering Department. Disappointing, from a place that has an active software community. Or how about this list of classes offered at the University of Urbana-Champaign, where the Web browser was invented? You can find plenty of advanced computer research happening on campus, but teaching something practical to undergrads? Not in the catalogs that I could find.
Both Vatterott and ITT Technical Institute teach Java programming as part of their certificates, so there is some hope for those who have the time and money to afford these expensive programs. But not on every one of their campuses.
As the software market heats up (and you have noticed that it is heating up, right?), the idea of a degree becomes less and less necessary, especially if you can prove your coding chops and demo what you have actually built. As you can see from my brief exploration, sometimes a CS degree doesn’t mean that you can actually program, and many schools are woefully behind on teaching the sorts of tools and techniques that the bread and butter of modern Web apps.
Granted, teaching programming skills is a lot more than offering a course in Java. But you need both the theory of software design and the actual language instruction too. It would be like teaching French by only showing what art you can find in the Louvre and d’Orsay museums. In the meantime, we need a better match between courseware and software practice, and better understanding by hiring managers of what is important.
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Facebook 101: New High School and College Social Media Classes Help Train Next … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Dec 15th
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Facebook 101: New High School and College Social Media Classes Help Train Next …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) SEO.com is hiring some of these graduates as growth rates in social media marketing are expected to increase about 33 percent each year, from $400 million in 2010 to $2.3 billion in 2015, according to a forecast by BIA/Kelsey. … |
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Campus Smoking Bans May Help College Students Quit – U.S. News & World Report
Sep 29th
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Campus Smoking Bans May Help College Students Quit
U.S. News & World Report Seo and his colleagues released their findings online in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of the journal Preventive Medicine. About one-fifth of American college students smoke, the authors noted in the news release. … |
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New Amazon iPhone App Eases the Pain of Buying College Textbooks
Aug 16th
As anybody who’s had to purchase college textbooks in the last several years knows, they can be quite the hassle. Not only do their already-steep prices keep rising, but getting rid of them at the end of the semester isn’t always easy.
Amazon Student, a new iPhone app that launched today, aims to help ease some of that pain by giving students a way to shop for textbooks and other items and sell them back via their smartphone.
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These are things that have long been possible through sites like Amazon and Half.com, but this mobile app makes the process even easier by putting a barcode scanner and price comparison database in the pockets of students, including while they’re in the campus bookstore, where prices tend to be the highest.
The Amazon Student app will look and feel very familiar to customers who have used the company’s standard iPhone app. It’s essentially the same thing, but with a more student-specific focus and an emphasis on selling items through Amazon’s Trade-In program.
As with purchasing items, the reselling process utilizes a barcode scanner so students can take a picture of the barcode of the item they want to sell and quickly add it to their queue of items to trade in. Students can then print a shipping label, send the item out and will then receive an Amazon gift card for the amount the item sold for.
The app isn’t just for textbooks. Students can buy and resell just about anything, including DVDs, video games and electronics.
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College Graduates Aren’t Ready to Be Big Data Workers [Infographic]
Jun 27th
Employers want workers with hands-on business intelligence experience, and experience working with large data sets. We’ve looked at the demand for business intelligence and data skills before, so this isn’t surprising. But students aren’t learning those skills in college according to a survey commissioned by Business Intelligence Congress II co-hosted by data warehousing vendor Teradata and the Special Interest Group on Decision Support, Knowledge and Data Management Systems.
Of the 129 schools polled, only three had BI or data analytics as an undergraduate major. That’s probably not, in itself, a big deal – but schools that want to prepare students for the workforce will need to do better at providing opportunities for students to gain experience working with business data.
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Photo by Aldo Gonzalez
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Gates Foundation Distributes $10M to Build Tech Tools to Boost College Graduation
Apr 7th
Last fall, the Gates Foundation, along with the ed-tech non-profit EDUCAUSE announced its Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, a multi-year, multi-million dollar project to help support programs that boost college readiness and college completion.
Today, the Next Generation Learning Challenges has named the 29 projects that will receive the first round of funding.
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Using Tech to Boost College Graduation Rates
These first award recipients are developing tools and programs for higher education, all in order to boost college graduation rates.
Although the country’s abysmal high school graduation rate that often get the most attention, college graduation rates in this country are pretty lousy too. According to recent Department of Education numbers, only 29.0% of students at public colleges and universities graduate in the traditional four-year time frame. “Tradition” is fast becoming six years to get a degree, and when you look at that time frame, graduation rates do jump to 54.7%. That’s still no good, and even with degree in hand, those extra two or more years are pretty costly.
The Challenges, The Grant Winners
The Next Generation Learning Challenges program wants to tackle this issue by supporting various innovative technology efforts at colleges and universities. Applicants for the grants had to address at least one of the following areas:
Blended Learning: programs that combine face-to-face instruction with online learning
Better Engagement: apps like games, video, simulations, and social media that will encourage deeper learning and more engagement
Open Courseware: free and open-licensed educational content, particularly for introductory courses in math, science and English (which often have low rates of student success)
Learning Analytics: real-time monitoring of students’ progress, with customized student support
Winners included Arizona State University’s simSchool, a game-like simulation that develops teaching skills, Marist College‘s Open Academic Analytics Initiative, that will develop an open-source learning analytics tool, and OpenStudy, which has built a social learning network around open courseware.
“The Next Generation Learning Challenges and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation share our goal of making topflight education accessible to the masses by leveraging technology,” OpenStudy’s CEO and co-founder Chris Sprague told ReadWriteWeb, describing the plans to build out the peer-to-peer teaching and study groups on the site and transform open educational resources into “the world’s biggest, most diverse, equal-access classrooms.”
You can read the full list of winners here.
Next Generation Learning Challenges received more than 600 applicants for the program, and the 29 chosen will receive grants ranging from $180,000 to $750,000. The organization is currently reviewing the applications for its second round of funding, with grants targeted at middle school students. Look for an announcement of those winners in June.
Image credits: Flickr user John Walker, alamosbasement
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College Grads Looking for Work at a NYC Startup? Try the NYC Startup Job Fair
Mar 18th
It’s that time of year again, when college seniors start thinking about the next phase of their lives. In other words, that means it’s time to start looking for a job, polishing up the resume, and hitting the campus career fairs.
As we’ve discussed here before in relations to internship programs, many campus events and recruitment efforts still cater primarily to large, established companies. This can make it challenging for startups looking to hire new talent and difficult for graduates hoping to find work opportunities at small or new companies.
The NYC Startup Job Fair – scheduled for the afternoon of April 8 – hopes to address this with an event expressly aimed at matching graduates with startups.
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Now in its second year, the job fair is hosted by the Columbia Venture Company and the NYU Venture Company. Over 50 startups have already applied for booths, which certainly puts it on track to outdo its last year’s sell-out event.
According to organizer Alex Horn, the NYC Startup Job Fair is trying to attract a diverse group of companies this year, including green tech, fashion, and food startups. But says Horn, “Our goal continues to be bringing more awareness of the growing NY startup scene especially among young qualified job seekers. We hope the fair leads to resume exchanges and converting some would-be bankers and lawyers into the entrepreneurial path.”
Job seekers and startups can still apply for a spot, but the event did sell out last year, so you might want to do so soon.
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1 in 4 College Textbooks Will Be Digital By 2015
Mar 16th
Sales of digital textbooks still only account for a small fraction of the U.S. college market. But according to the latest report by the social learning platform Xplana, we have reached the tipping point for e-textbooks, and the company predicts that in the next five years digital textbook sales will surpass 25% of sales for the higher education and career education markets.
That figure is a revision from the company’s report last year, which predicted that one in five college textbooks would be digital by the year 2014. Due to the rate at which colleges are embracing digital textbooks, Xplana now projects that sales will grow by 80 to 100% over the next four years.
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Factors Leading to The Adoption of Digital Textbooks
One of the major reasons why Xplana’s report has more optimistic figures for textbook adoption is the popularity of the iPad. Xplana’s 2010 report was published before the impact of the iPad could really be assessed. No doubt, the success of the iPad has fueled the consumption of digital content in general. But the iPad has also spawned a number of new digital textbook companies, such as Inkling.
Along with their embrace of the iPad, consumers have also bought e-readers in higher-than-expected numbers. Only about 5% of millennials own e-readers according to a recent Pew Study on the adoption of electronic gadgetry, but undoubtedly, the exploding popularity of trade e-books will impact the acceptance of e-textbooks.
Just as new devices have helped spawn the growth in e-books, Xplana also points to some significant developments around open educational resources (OER) and open textbooks. States and institutions have embarked on a number of OER initiatives to help address the affordability and availability of textbooks, including Washington State’s Open Course Library project, a program that aims to make core college materials available on the Web for less than $30 per class.
But Do Students Really Want E-Textbooks?
Making textbooks affordable addresses one of the major complaints that college students have about the cost of their education. But are e-books available at the right price yet? And even if they are, do students actually want digital textbooks?
An oft-cited study by the Book Industry Study Group found that 75% of college students say they prefer print textbooks. But Xplana says that rather than take that study as a sign that students will refuse use digital books, we should instead marvel that, at a time when only 1% of college textbooks are available in an electronic format, that already 25% of college students say they prefer to study this way.
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