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A software engineer’s review of Coursera

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A software engineer’s review of Coursera

Emmanuel is a recent graduate from Berea College who works at Morgan Stanley as a software engineer. In his own words, he shares how Coursera sparked his love of learning.

My learning journey with Coursera has been a long and fruitful one. It consisted of hours spent trying to figure out Andrew Ng’s labs, redoing various quizzes after 8-hour wait periods, going on the forums to join in conversations, and working on real-world projects like chatbots, recommendation engines, and my first product road map.

Why does Coursera hold a special place in my heart? Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be able to take courses from top universities or companies like Google. Coursera provides anyone with access to education that used to be reserved for a select few. Coursera democratizes education.

I’ve completed over 100 courses and Specializations on Coursera. Here are a few of my favorites:

Learning on Coursera gives me the opportunity to experiment with subjects that interest me at my own pace. I’m given the chance to tackle topics that might intimidate me in a traditional school setting.

Connecting with the Online Community

One of the things I absolutely love about Coursera is the supportive online community. Most people assume that online courses lack human interaction, but this is not true for for Coursera. With real people reviewing projects and giving authentic feedback, fellow students opening discussions and answering questions in the forums, and course instructors sending out meetup invites and other resources — these things that set Coursera apart. Coursera has brought human interaction to online learning, and that’s what really keeps me coming back here to learn.

A Pathway to the Future

My courses taught me skills that I wouldn’t have learned at my liberal arts college and helped me stand out during the recruitment process. That helped lead me to an MBA.

My certificates allowed me to demonstrate my love of learning and set me apart as a candidate when I applied for jobs. Now, I’m starting my first job at Morgan Stanley as a software engineer!

Through courses from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, I found out about the Future Year Scholars Program. This program helped me get admitted into the MBA degree program with deferred enrollment, which is thrilling! 

I’ve learned a lot on Coursera, but the most important takeaway from this experience was being reintroduced me to a childlike joy of learning where I’m excited whenever I find out I don’t know something. I hope to always be learning.

 

Introducing New Tools and Features as Demand for Online Learning Grows

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Introducing New Tools and Features as Demand for Online Learning Grows

By Shravan Goli, Chief Product Officer

Learners around the world are turning to online learning at this particularly challenging time. Overnight, universities have switched to remote teaching in order to provide academic continuity to their students. In the past month, 5.9 million learners enrolled in courses on Coursera and nearly 2,700 institutions launched Coursera for Campus programs. As the community of online learners and educators grow, we are doubling down on our efforts to serve them with top-quality content, delivered through a high-quality learning experience. Today we’re excited to introduce several new tools and features for our learners and educators. 

Serving our learners

It’s vital that we continue to help learners develop and showcase job-relevant skills. This starts with the right content for specific goals, and support to help learners make progress. 

Matching learners with the right content

With a broad range of courses, Specializations, degrees, and certificates, learners have a lot to choose from on our platform. They should be able to easily discover the most relevant content to develop the skills they need. To help, we’ve introduced:

  • PERSONALIZED BROWSING – Built on machine learning models, this feature ensures learners receive tailored suggestions for the most relevant learning content based on their learning journey so far. 
  • PERSONALIZED HOMEPAGE  – When logged in, learners can resume a course in one click, see personalized recommendations on courses to pursue next, and view the certificates they’ve earned so far. 

Helping learners make progress

We recognize that learning takes time, commitment, and motivation. We’ve continued to improve our in-course help system that provides AI-powered nudges to help learners stay on track. As learners develop skills, it’s important for them to understand their own proficiency relative to their career objectives. We’re excited to introduce: 

  • GOAL SETTING – Once a learner starts a new course, a prompt will appear to create learning goals from the get-go. These goals can be seamlessly synced with Google Calendar and other calendar apps, integrating learning into a daily routine. 
  • SMART REVIEW MATERIAL – This machine learning tool helps unblock learners when they fail a quiz. It serves targeted review material recommendations based on the specific questions they missed, providing learners with a structured path to succeed on the next quiz attempt.
  • LEARNER SKILL TRACKING – This data-driven tool tracks learner skill development, sharing updated competency scores as a learner takes more assessments on Coursera. Through a centralized dashboard, learners can monitor their progress toward career-specific skills and see how their competency scores compare to other professionals on the Coursera platform. 

Serving our partners 

While universities needed to quickly go online due to the disruption from COVID-19, this is also a catalyst for the digital transformation of higher ed. We’re here to support our partners in their efforts to provide online learning at scale with a number of new tools and features. 

Helping educators move online faster

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing global experimentation with remote teaching. We’ve heard from many partners who are looking for tools and resources to provide academic continuity for their students. With these educators in mind, we’ve launched:   

  • Live2Coursera – Thousands of instructors are using Zoom to deliver lectures to millions of students worldwide, and this resource should be turned into a long-term digital asset. Live2Coursera allows seamless integration of these live lectures into a private course. Zoom recordings are added automatically to an instructor’s course as they teach, so they can build a library of content to reuse in future private or open courses. Launching later in 2020.
  • CourseMatch – On the heels of our Coronavirus Response Initiative, which provides universities with free access to Coursera for Campus, we’ve launched CourseMatch: a machine learning solution that automatically matches a university’s on-campus courses to courses in our catalog, enabling institutions to quickly deliver the most relevant online courses to their students. 

Easily create and manage content 

Our partners are dedicated to creating high-quality courses and Specializations for learners everywhere. We’re rolling out a number of new innovations to help partners swiftly create and manage content on our platform:

  • CLOUD IMPORT – Seamlessly import cloud assets directly to the Coursera platform from any publicly available URL and after signing in to a Dropbox or Google Drive account. 
  • ASSESSMENT IMPORT – Efficiently author assessments by importing documents directly to the Coursera platform from Google Docs, Sheets, Microsoft Word, and Excel. Launching later in 2020.
  • QUESTION BANKS – Create a question bank, tagging questions based on objectives and difficulty to efficiently leverage a core set of questions across several assessments. Launching later in 2020.
  • MACHINE-ASSISTED PEER REVIEW – This tool enables grading at scale. Learners struggling to get an assignment peer-graded can have their work automatically assessed by a machine learning model trained on previously peer-graded submissions from the course.  
  • ITEM LINKING – When a partner makes changes to an item in one course, they can apply that change across all linked copies of the item in other courses, increasing content efficiency, consistency, and stackability. Learner quiz grades from an open course will automatically carry over to a degree where that quiz is also used, preventing learners from needing to retake the assessment.
  • CUSTOM ROLES – Managing the roles and permissions associated with a course typically requires the combined efforts of teaching assistants, faculty, and university administrators. Custom Roles provides additional control and flexibility, with partners now able to create new staff roles with any combination of permissions and access. Especially with for-credit content, this offers an additional layer of protection for student privacy. 

Empowering our degree partners with data and APIs

As we work with our partners to bring more top-quality degrees online, we’re also focused on helping our degree partners manage their content more efficiently: 

  • DEGREE APIs – Partners can integrate with Coursera via APIs, enabling a near real-time exchange using standards-based technology. This will start with key operational data for the degree programs and course enrollments, with more APIs set to launch throughout 2020. It will help identify and resolve errors faster, provide increased flexibility for partners to use their own tech stacks, and enable testing both before and after launching content to proactively monitor any issues. 

Our learner and educator community represents a wide range of needs, and we’re committed to responding to those with rapid innovation. No matter where you are in the world, we’re here to help with your teaching and learning goals. Check out our learner and partner communities today. 

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Launching New Content As More Learners Move Online: 2 Degrees, 8 MasterTracks, and 100 Guided Projects

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Launching New Content As More Learners Move Online: 2 Degrees, 8 MasterTracks, and 100 Guided Projects

By Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO Coursera

The profound impact of COVID-19 has forced us to rethink many aspects of our lives. Overnight, the global education system had to find ways to mitigate the impact of more than 1.5 billion students seeing their campuses closed. Since then, it has been heartwarming to witness the heroic efforts of institutions around the world to restore teaching and learning using technology, innovation, and collaboration. We are also grateful for the global response to our Coronavirus Response Initiative that has enabled nearly 2,700 colleges and universities around the world to minimize student disruption using Coursera for Campus. 

Over the past few weeks, our partner community has had a lot to deal with. Yet, their unwavering commitment to launch high-quality content — particularly at a time when learners around the world are relying on online learning to continue their progress — inspires us all. Today, we are excited to announce two new degrees, eight MasterTrack™ Certificates, 100 guided projects, and a number of new product innovations to support learners and partners during this time and beyond. 

New online degrees from top universities

We continue to expand our offering of top-tier degrees to serve learners with the most transformative credential for career mobility. At a time of economic uncertainty and social distancing, learners will find tremendous value in high-quality, affordable degrees from top institutions delivered fully online. The two new online programs are:

  • Master of Science in Population and Health Sciences from the University of Michigan — This public health degree from the No.1 public research university in the US will enable students from around the world to research today’s toughest public health challenges while mastering concepts like data analysis and epidemiological methods through a multidisciplinary curriculum. Applications for the fall 2020 cohort will open at the end of April. 

“Now more than ever we need population health scientists, and our new online Master of Science degree will help us reach and educate passionate learners across the globe.”

– Sharon L.R. Kardia, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Education and Director of Online Programs at the University of Michigan

  • Master of Data Analytics Intelligence* from Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes) — Designed for non-STEM professionals with basic programming knowledge, this Spanish-language degree will train students to become data-driven leaders and decision makers. The curriculum will offer a blend of mathematical modeling, organizational management, and IT. The first cohort is expected to launch by August 2021.

“The current pandemic proves how important meaningful data is in today’s interconnected world. This degree will provide students with the analytical methods and tools needed to interpret large amounts of data to make informed decisions on time.”

– Alfonso Reyes, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Uniandes.

New MasterTrack™ Certificates provide a pathway to a full degree

For learners who may not be able to commit to a full degree program, especially during this challenging time, MasterTrack™ Certificates on Coursera split Master’s programs into modules so learners can affordably earn a university-issued career credential online within a few months. If a learner is accepted to the full Master’s program, this certificate and accompanying credits typically count toward their degree. Today, we’re announcing eight new MasterTrack™ Certificates from top universities, doubling our portfolio of MasterTracks on the platform: 

  • AI and Machine Learning from Arizona State University — Learners will build foundational AI skills including statistical machine learning, deep learning, and supervised and unsupervised learning to advance their career in the field.
  • Cybersecurity from Arizona State University — This program will focus on essential skills in cybersecurity through the lens of cryptography, software security, network security, and more. 
  • Software Engineering from Arizona State University — Learners will work on real-world projects to apply skills in software development, engineering, computing, and project leadership. 

The three MasterTrack™ Certificates above will provide students with ASU credits and can be used toward ASU’s online Master of Computer Science degree if accepted to the program. 

  • Blockchain Applications from Duke University — Learners will explore how blockchain is revolutionizing financial transactions and develop their own practical applications. Completers of this MasterTrack™ Certificate will be able to accelerate their application to Duke’s Master of Engineering in Financial Technology and will be eligible for a degree scholarship if accepted to the full degree program.
  • Social Work: Practice, Policy, and Research from the University of Michigan — Learners will explore fundamental concepts of social work and social justice through an advanced series of courses from the No. 1 ranked school of social work in the US. This MasterTrack™ Certificate will serve as a pathway to the University of Michigan’s Master of Social Work. 

Guided projects offer hands-on learning opportunities

As the pandemic continues to disrupt on-campus education, students and institutions have been forced to quickly move online. This lack of face-to-face instruction and limited or no access to on-campus labs has resulted in an even more immediate need for hands-on learning in an online environment. Research shows that project-based learning can help learners develop contextually relevant skills, and guided instruction can mimic one-to-one tutoring sessions. 

We’re launching 100 new guided projects that enable learners to gain job-relevant skills in less than two hours without requiring any software installation. A side-by-side interface allows learners to watch visual instructions on one side of the screen while following along on the other side of the screen. Learners can practice high-demand skills with data science tools like TensorFlow, scikit-learn, Plotly, and more. As we continue to build our portfolio, we plan to add guided projects in areas like computer science, business, and personal development. Global companies like Novartis and academic institutions like Manipal Education are already using guided projects to help their learners develop skills of the future.

Platform innovations to serve our learners and educators 

We’ve seen an unprecedented demand on our platform from learners across the globe — enrollments from learners new to Coursera are up 15x when comparing the past 30 days with the same period one year ago. We are accelerating our platform innovations to serve rapidly evolving learner and educator needs, and are excited to announce a number of new tools and features. Most notably, learners can now develop and track new skills with features like goal setting, smart review material, and skill tracking.

Similarly, we are rolling out a number of new tools to help instructors swiftly create and manage content on our platform. Live2Coursera enables instructors to integrate Zoom lecture recordings into private or open courses as they ramp up efforts to produce online content. Our Coronavirus Response Initiative provides impacted universities with free access to our course catalog through Coursera for Campus, but finding the most relevant online courses was still a manual process for faculty and staff. Last week, we launched CourseMatch: a machine learning solution that automatically matches a university’s on-campus courses to courses in our catalog, helping universities go online faster. To enable grading at scale as more instructors teach online, our machine-assisted peer review solution, which will be released later in 2020, uses a machine learning model to automatically assess peer review submissions. 

Learn more about our product innovation efforts in a post by Shravan Goli, our Chief Product Officer.

As education and learning move more rapidly online, it’s more important than ever to continue serving learners with high-impact content and a superior platform experience. We’re honored to work alongside our partners to be a valuable resource for learners and institutions everywhere during this tough time. 

* The online Master of Data Analytics Intelligence from Universidad de los Andes is subject to approval from the Colombian Ministry of Education

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Coursera White Paper Details the Pedagogy Underlying Guided Projects on Coursera

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Coursera White Paper Details the Pedagogy Underlying Guided Projects on Coursera

Hands-on Projects that Approach the Effectiveness of Tutoring Sessions

By Adam Hodges, Ph.D.

Educators have long faced the fundamental challenge of how to provide the instructional equivalent of one-to-one tutoring to large groups of learners. In a seminal paper, Benjamin Bloom (1984) demonstrated that learners involved in individual or small-group tutoring performed two standard deviations above the level achieved by students in a traditional class. Bloom termed this the “2 sigma problem.” As learning has moved online, the challenge has remained: How to provide instruction at scale in a manner that approaches the effectiveness of one-to-one tutoring? 

Coursera has always embraced this challenge, embedding mastery learning principles into the platform — for example, with in-video questions that turn the passive watching of videos into an active learning experience and through the use of actionable feedback tailored to learner responses on quizzes. 

Coursera now offers Guided Projects to help learners acquire job-relevant skills in under two hours by working on an interactive project guided by a subject matter expert. The dual-screen interface allows learners to watch the instructor’s explanation and demonstration on the right side of the screen while performing the same steps in the same software environment on the left side of the screen.

Guided Projects epitomize active learning by involving learners in doing the things they are striving to learn while receiving valuable guidance and feedback along the way. The learning experience revolves around authentic, real-world projects that relate to learners’ professional goals and interests.

Today we’re publishing a white paper — “Guided Projects on Coursera Facilitate Hands-on Acquisition of Skills” — that synthesizes the academic research and findings that underpin the efficacy of guided instruction as a learning tool. 

Central to the Guided Projects learning experience is the work learners do on authentic, real-world projects. Instructors provide appropriate scaffolding to assist learners as they develop the knowledge and skills required to complete the project, allowing learners to work beyond what they could accomplish on their own without instruction. 

This approach to direct guided instruction is supported by research on the efficacy of “worked examples” as a means of scaffolding the learning experience for novice to intermediate learners. 

Although novice to intermediate learners benefit from direct guided instruction, learners more advanced in a domain benefit from more open-ended challenges — an approach that Guided Projects provide through the “challenge mode.” Guided Projects thereby differentiate instruction based on the learner’s ability level.

The white paper provides the foundation for effective instructional design that takes advantage of the unique learner interface of Guided Projects on Coursera. 

—

Download the full white paper (PDF)

 

Lesson of the Day: ‘The Lost Diaries of War’

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Lesson of the Day: ‘The Lost Diaries of War’

Find all our Lessons of the Day here.

Featured Article: “The Lost Diaries of War” by Nina Siegal and Josephine Sedgwick

Volunteers have begun an effort to transcribe the pages of more than 2,000 diaries written by ordinary people during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Their voices, filled with anxiety, isolation and uncertainty, resonate powerfully today.

In this lesson, you’ll consider the value that first-person accounts like diaries and letters can have when it comes to understanding history. Then, you’ll be invited to start your own journal that may one day help future historians learn what it was like to live through the coronavirus pandemic.

Have you ever read diaries or letters to learn about history? For instance, maybe you’ve read “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” to learn about World War II and the Holocaust or studied Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.

What can you learn about history through first-person accounts like these? How is the experience of reading them different from, say, reading a textbook or a newspaper article?

Spend a few minutes viewing the images in the featured article, which includes photographs and diary entries by ordinary people during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. What makes these different from other historical sources? What insights might they give us into what life was like during this time?

Now, read the featured article to find out.

First, read the introduction and answer the following questions:

1. Why did the Dutch minister of education tell citizens to preserve the diaries and letters they had written during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands?

Then, choose two diary entries to read in full and continue to respond to the questions:

2. What did you learn about the Nazi occupation from these entries that you might not have learned from a more formal source, like a textbook or newspaper article?

3. Which lines or images from the entries that you read resonated with you the most? Why?

4. The authors say that these diarists’ words “register with particular power today in another unsettled time.” Do you agree? What, if anything, did you read that resonates with your experience today? Why?

Finally, scroll to the end of the article to read the conclusion, which begins after the diary titled “Liberation in Zwolle.” Then, respond to the last question:

5. According to the article, experts say that “diaries, once thought to be too subjective to be historical sources, are now regarded as more reliable.” What advantages and disadvantages might there be to using diaries to learn about history? Do you think they have value as historical sources? Why or why not?

You are living through history now, too — and future historians might turn to personal diaries to learn about this uncertain time.

Have you been keeping a diary, or thought about keeping one, to record your experiences of living through the coronavirus pandemic? What unique insights and perspectives do you think you might have for future historians who will study this time period?

Try writing a journal entry modeled after the ones you read. You can write about anything — the ways your life has been upended, the acts of kindness you’ve witnessed, the struggles and joys of distance learning — but, like researchers in the article suggest, you might focus primarily on your thoughts and feelings.

For more inspiration, see the “Journal” project in our lesson plan “12 Ideas for Writing Through the Pandemic With The New York Times.”

Should We All Be Able to Vote by Mail?

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Should We All Be Able to Vote by Mail?

Find all our Student Opinion questions here.

In the April 7 article “Voting in Wisconsin During a Pandemic: Lines, Masks and Plenty of Fear,” Astead W. Herndon and Alexander Burns write:

MILWAUKEE — Even before voting began, there were lines outside polling locations that stretched for several blocks. Some poll workers wore hazmat suits. Nearly every voter wore a face mask, removing it only to make small talk that reflected a combination of determination and grim humor about the extraordinary experience of voting amid a deadly pandemic.

For thousands of people across Wisconsin on Tuesday, fears of the coronavirus outbreak did not stop them from participating in the state’s elections, where critical races such as the Democratic presidential primary and a key state Supreme Court seat were being decided.

“It feels bad to have to choose between your personal safety and your right to vote,” said Dan Bullock, 40, as he waited to vote at Washington High School on Milwaukee’s North Side. “But you have to be heard.”

What is your reaction to the primary vote in Wisconsin? Was it wrong for those voters to have to choose between their safety and their right to vote? Should the primary have been canceled or postponed?

Would you have voted at a polling site in Wisconsin if you were of voting age? Or would you have decided to stay home?

What do you think should be done in the remaining state primaries and in the November presidential election to protect the integrity of elections and to ensure voter safety?

Carl Hulse writes about the growing political debates over how to avoid another Wisconsin in the article “As Pandemic Imperils Elections, Democrats Clash With Trump on Voting Changes”:

WASHINGTON — A showdown is taking shape in Congress over how far Washington should go in expanding voting access to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, with Democrats pressing to add new options for voters and President Trump and Republicans resisting changes they say could harm their election prospects in November.

Democrats are determined to add new voting requirements for November’s general election to the next stage of coronavirus relief legislation, a move that Mr. Trump and Republican leaders have vowed to oppose. But it is one that Democrats believe is necessary and all the more urgent in light of the confusion and court fights surrounding Wisconsin’s elections on Tuesday.

With public health officials encouraging social distancing and staying at home to slow the spread of the virus, the prospect of millions of voters congregating at polling places around the country to cast their ballots this fall appears increasingly untenable and dangerous. But the fight over whether the federal government should require states to offer other options — by allowing voting by mail, extending early voting and instituting other changes to protect voters and voting rights — is emerging as a major sticking point as lawmakers look to pass a fourth emergency aid measure in the next few weeks.

Michael Wines describes the daunting financial, logistical and personnel challenges to making mail balloting the norm in “Voting by Mail Could Be What States Need. But Can They Pull It Off?”:

When Colorado’s 3.5 million voters help select a president this fall, their choice will be made almost entirely by mail, via ballots in postage-paid envelopes dropped off in mailboxes or, more commonly, in bins scattered statewide.

Not so in Alabama. As the law now stands, all voters must cast their ballots on Election Day, at their designated polling places, unless they vote absentee. And getting an absentee ballot is so hard that fewer than 55,000 of 1.7 million voters cast one in the last election.

The article continues:

“Switching to voting by mail, even in states with no history of it, can absolutely be done, and quite likely it may need to be done,” said Judd Choate, the state elections director in Colorado, which made the change six years ago. “It’s just a matter of how bumpy it is.”

Those potential bumps are vividly illustrated by a sample timeline prepared for states by the federal Election Assistance Commission. It lays out scores of steps, like procuring software, training staff and getting federal post office approval of ballot envelopes, that would have to be completed between April 1 and Election Day on Nov. 3.

For a number of states that already allow a large share of voters to vote remotely, the road would be considerably smoother. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — conduct elections almost entirely by mail. Twenty-eight others and the District of Columbia allow voters to cast absentee ballots by mail without providing a reason, though participation is dampened in states that make voters apply for ballots in every election instead of providing them automatically.

Some of those states have impressive rates of balloting by mail, including big states like Arizona, California and Florida and smaller ones like Montana and North Dakota. But for Alabama and others accustomed to handling only trickles of mail ballots, a quick transition to voting by mail would be wrenching. Most of those states are in the Southeast, but not all: In New York, only 3.5 percent of ballots in the 2018 midterm election were absentee.

Students, read the entire article “As Pandemic Imperils Elections, Democrats Clash With Trump on Voting Changes.” If you have additional time, you can also read “Voting by Mail Could Be What States Need. But Can They Pull It Off?” Then tell us:

  • Should all states offer voting-by-mail options? Tell us why or why not. Which arguments in favor of and against it do you find most compelling?

  • How do you think states should balance the need to hold elections with protecting people’s health and safety? How concerned would you be about voting in person during a primary or a general election during the pandemic?

  • Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri says, “I’m philosophically opposed to the federal government taking over elections. It is a bad idea. I’m pretty flexible about the amount of money, but I’m not flexible about a federal takeover of the election process itself.” Do you agree? Should the federal government require all states to provide vote-by-mail options or should it be a state-by-state decision?

  • Do you think the challenges to voting by mail described by Mr. Wines outweigh its possible advantages? How concerned should we be about the possibility of voter fraud?

  • What other ideas to address holding elections during a pandemic discussed in the articles do you find viable or attractive? What do you think of calls for states to “allow at least 20 days of early, in-person voting to enable people to spread out their trips to polling places rather than lining up on Election Day”? What other ideas would you recommend?

  • What election procedures does your state currently have to address the coronavirus? (You can check here.) What specific changes would you like to see your state enact?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Free Seamless Polka Dot Pattern Backgrounds

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Free Seamless Polka Dot Pattern Backgrounds

Free Seamless Polka Dot Pattern Preview

Who doesn’t like the classic polka dot? Add some pastels to it and I’m sold! For all those who also love this pattern, we have created a free seamless polka dot pattern.

The download contains polka dot pattern backgrounds in 6different colors available as Photoshop patterns file. For those of you who don’t have Photoshop, the file also includes a .jpg file of each background ready for you to upload and use.

Download Seamless Polka Dot Pattern

FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY.

We would appreciate if you can share this freebie. It is really easy! Just click on the buttons below. It is completely free for you but helps us grow and produce even more content.

Share and help us grow. Thanks!

There are almost no limits for using this seamless polka dot pattern! Use them to decorate your blog, for printables or any digital project you are currently working on.

Remember that they are for personal use only which means you can’t sell them or use them in any work you intend to sell.

For more Freebies make sure to visit our free printables library or check our monthly wallpapers! if you would like to see more seamless patterns option on our blog, make sure to let us know in the comments below.

Word + Quiz: marzipan

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Word + Quiz: marzipan

: a confection made of almond paste and egg whites, often formed into shapes

_________

The word marzipan has appeared in 14 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Dec. 30 in “A King Cake With a Raspberry Twist” by Florence Fabricant:

This year Judith Norell, an owner of Silver Moon Bakery on the Upper West Side, has added a new twist, raspberry preserves, to her galette des rois, or king cake, the confection served for Epiphany on Jan. 6. It’s usually fashioned from puff pastry and filled with marzipan, with a good luck token hidden inside. Her slightly nubbly homemade marzipan interior now has the added richness of raspberry and includes a tiny ceramic figurine embedded in it. She noted that some people serve the cake for New Year’s Eve.

_________

Film Club: ‘This Video May Not Be Real’

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Film Club: ‘This Video May Not Be Real’

2. After watching, think about these questions:

  • What questions do you still have?

  • What connections can you make between this film and your own life or experience? Why? Does this film remind you of anything else you’ve read or seen? If so, how and why?

3. An additional challenge | Respond to the essential question at the top of this post: Can we trust what we see and hear?

4. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)

5. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.

6. To learn more, read “This Video May Not Be Real.” Claire Wardle writes:

In the video Op-Ed above, Claire Wardle responds to growing alarm around “deepfakes” — seemingly realistic videos generated by artificial intelligence. First seen on Reddit with pornographic videos doctored to feature the faces of female celebrities, deepfakes were made popular in 2018 by a fake public service announcement featuring former President Barack Obama. Words and faces can now be almost seamlessly superimposed. The result: We can no longer trust our eyes.

In June, the House Intelligence Committee convened a hearing on the threat deepfakes pose to national security. And platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are contemplating whether, and how, to address this new disinformation format. It’s a conversation gaining urgency in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

Yet deepfakes are no more scary than their predecessors, “shallowfakes,” which use far more accessible editing tools to slow down, speed up, omit or otherwise manipulate context. The real danger of fakes — deep or shallow — is that their very existence creates a world in which almost everything can be dismissed as false.

More?

• See all the films in this series.

• Read our list of practical teaching ideas, along with responses from students and teachers, for how you can use these documentaries in the classroom.

• Want to make sure you never miss a film? Add Film Club to your Google calendar to receive weekly reminders and see our full publishing schedule for the 2019-20 school year.

Time Management: What is it, who has it, and can you improve it?

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Time Management: What is it, who has it, and can you improve it?

Time management can refer to a wide range of behaviors and can look very different from person to person. There are lots of different systems and approaches to time management. Making a to-do list, keeping a planner, setting event reminders in your phone, setting goals, prioritizing tasks, and marking events on a calendar can all be part of time management. It’s therefore a little tricky to define time management. However, in general when we talk about time management we are referring to a skill that involves assessing your use of time, planning ahead, and monitoring your activities and use of time (1) .

Effective time management is linked to a number of personality traits. People with better time management skills tend to have higher self-control, which means that they are able to control and refrain from acting on impulses (2). People who are better at managing their time also tend to be high in self-efficacy, which is your belief in your ability to handle challenges and complete tasks successfully  (3, 4). Time management is also linked with conscientiousness, which is a personality trait that describes someone who sets a high priority on completing obligations and doing tasks well (5). However, it should be noted that all of these studies on time management used surveys and self-reports. This means that we cannot determine causality. For instance, we do not know if higher self-efficacy leads to better time management or if better time management leads to higher self-efficacy – or if there is some other factor that influences both of these things. But, these studies do indicate that there are reliable differences between people who are good at managing their time and those who are not.

Interestingly, some of these same factors (high self-control and self-efficacy) are often linked with higher levels of satisfaction and happiness (3, 6, 7, 8). Again, while we know these relationships exist, it’s difficult to determine causality. Are people happier because they have higher self-efficacy (or, by extension, time management)? Or does happiness lead to better self-efficacy and time management? It’s hard to say. But it is reasonable to assume that managing your time can help reduce your stress and help you to be more productive. So that leads to the next question: Can you improve your time management or is this just a trait that some lucky people have and some people don’t?

The literature on time management interventions is somewhat mixed (1). Some studies have found improvements in time management after an intervention. For example, Burrus, Jackson, Holtzman, and Roberts (2017) found an improvement in time management after an intervention for high school students who were low in time management skills (9). In this quasi-experiment half of the students were assigned to be in the intervention condition and half were in the control condition. The intervention involved an assessment of time management skills, feedback on their individual skills (e.g. if a student scored low on goal setting they were told “Remind yourself regularly of your goals. Goals are an investment in your future.”), and homework assignments over the course of 5 weeks. Homework assignments involved goal setting exercises, accounting for how they spend their time, and learning how to use a planner. Students who were in the control condition (and did not receive the intervention) took the assessment of time management skills, but did not receive feedback or homework. One month after the intervention ended all students were rated on their time management skills by their academic advisors. Importantly, the academic advisors did not know which students received the time management training and which students did not. Burrus and colleagues (2017) found that time management improved after the intervention, but only for students who scored low on time management to begin with. 

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