Word + Quiz: empyrean

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September 16, 2019

empyrean ˌem-ˌpī-ˈrē-ən adjective and noun

adjective: inspiring awe
adjective: of or relating to the sky or heavens
noun: the apparent surface of the imaginary sphere on which celestial bodies appear to be projected

_________

The word empyrean has appeared in one article on NYTimes.com in the past year, on April 1 in the book review “A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers” by Nellie Bowles:

In his new book, “Coders,” the longtime Wired magazine writer Clive Thompson works to describe those humans and exactly what their hands do. With an anthropologist’s eye, he outlines their different personality traits, their history and cultural touchstones. He explores how they live, what motivates them and what they fight about. By breaking down what the actual work of coding looks like — often pretty simple, rote, done in teams rather than by loner geniuses — he removes the mystery and brings it into the legible world for the rest of us to debate. Human beings and their foibles are the reason the internet is how it is — for better and often, as this book shows, for worse.
… Coders themselves like to buttress the idea that some among them are magical. There is the notion of a 10x coder, a genius who can do the work of 10. One of those famous in Silicon Valley is Max Levchin, who built PayPal. Thompson describes the brutal hours it took Levchin to build something that never existed before, the work and obsession it required to make a thing that now seems obvious. “Empyrean feats of coderly productivity,” he calls it.

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MOOCWatch 20: Coursera’s Acquisition; Udacity’s New CEO; Top 100 MOOCs of All Time

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September 16, 2019

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MOOCWatch 20: Coursera’s Acquisition; Udacity’s New CEO; Top 100 MOOCs of All Time

With many MOOC stories focussing on careers, this article written by a professor at Tsinghua University is a reminder that MOOCs can fill different roles in people’s lives. Even with the limitations of Google Translate, it’s an interesting read. Thanks to our newest team member Rui from China for this link.

While MOOCs are often not accredited courses, more and more universities are releasing MOOC-based degrees. In India, some MOOCs can be used for transferable credit through SWAYAM and there are plans for Europe’s largest MOOC platforms to create a MOOC framework for portable, credit-bearing microcredentials.

The last time we published MOOCWatch, Udacity was looking for a new CEO and finally, the search is over. Class Central’s Manoel reports on the drastic changes Udacity made under Sebastian Thrun’s leadership between the two CEOs.

Earlier this year, Class Central made a small but significant change to our domain name when www.class-central.com became www.classcentral.com Any links you have bookmarked should continue to be functional indefinitely.

New MOOCWatch Editor

Hi, I’m Pat. I have been an obsessive MOOC-taker since late 2012. Dhawal (founder of Class Central) thought I might like another challenge after completing more than 100 MOOCs, so asked me to edit MOOCWatch. With the last issue published on November 2018, Dhawal also hopes I can be more punctual than he was and bring the publication out regularly.

Quick Navigation

MOOC-based Degrees

La primera maestría virtual en Ingeniería de Software en Latinoamérica que desarrollará @Uniandes y @coursera ayudará a abordar la demanda crítica de profesionales para TI en América Latina https://t.co/UH7udlSg66 pic.twitter.com/UYM4tVP7hl
— Uniandes (@Uniandes) September 12, 2019

Online master’s degree in Spanish is coming via Uniandes
Universidad de los Andes is working with Coursera to produce the first online Master’s Degree in Software Engineering in Spanish.

Online MBA with Boston University and edX via Class Central
10 MOOC-based master’s degrees are now available through edX.

Teaching ethics in Georgia Tech CS courses via TechCrunch
Georgia Tech is emphasizing the ethics of AI and related fields under their new computer science dean.

Some numbers below.

Georgia Tech OMSCS:

Launched: 2013
Enrollment: around 9,000
Graduates: > 2,000

University of Illinois iMBA:

Launched: January 2016
Enrollment: >2,500 representing 47 states in the US and 90 different citizenships
Age: 22 to 61 years
Average work experience: 12 years
The iMBA is set to replace the on-campus version

Conferences

Coming up:

Learning with MOOCs VI (LWMOOCs) October 23-25 Milwaukee, WI, USA. Look out for Class Central’s presentations on India’s SWAYAM platform and MOOC Monetization.

The World Conference on Online Learning Nov 3-7 in Dublin, Ireland will focus on how online learning can transform lives and societies.

Open Education Global Conference November 26-28 Milan, Italy. This year’s conference theme is Open Education for an Open Future.

2019 edX Global Forum November 11-13 in Hong Kong is open only to edX partners. If your institute partners with edX, you may be eligible to attend.

Class Central News

As Class Central grows, we are including some behind-the-scenes information. Here are some stories from the last few months.

Monthly course reports have been a big part of Class Central since the early days and now they have a new home. Bookmark them for easy discovery of the latest courses.

We set up the Class Central Help Center to answer common questions about MOOCs, Class Central and some large providers.

MOOCWatch is a digest of information related to MOOCs meant for professors and administrators, or others who are involved in education and want to stay up-to-date in the MOOC space. In addition to broad coverage, MOOCWatch also contains unique data, such as course popularity rankings, sourced from Class Central. Tell your colleagues about MOOCWatch.

Writer’s Voice: ‘Intolerance and Love in Jamaica’

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September 14, 2019

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Writer’s Voice: ‘Intolerance and Love in Jamaica’

What makes your point of view unique? For instance, how does your identity — your gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexuality, where you live, what you’re interested in or anything else important about who you are — affect the way you see the world? How do any of these influence your “take” on the topic you’ve chosen?

Keep in mind that while advice like that given to Lives writers — “Go to the outer limit of your comfort zone in revealing something about yourself” — might sound scary, it is our experience, after a decade of running contests for teenagers, that as long as students keep in mind that they are writing for a family newspaper, taking risks and being honest on the page only improves their work.

For some examples, take a look at the winning pieces from the 2018 Show Us Your Generation contest. These students were all trying to express the same thing — what it’s like to be a teenager today — yet each comes at the challenge differently, revealing something interesting and real about themselves in the process.

To practice, try this: Write a first draft as if you are telling a story to an ideal reader with whom you can be completely yourself, whether that person is a close friend, a respected mentor, or even someone imaginary you invent just for this purpose. Keep in mind that you don’t have to actually show this rough writing to anyone, and push yourself to tell the truth about what you experience, think, feel, notice and wonder.

Another approach? Try telling your story out loud and recording it to capture your own unique use of words, as well as your cadence, the way you emphasize certain words or phrases, and how you naturally structure the story as you tell it. Again, tell it as honestly as you can.

Then, remember the useful adage that “writing is rewriting” and take this raw material and edit it. What works? What doesn’t? Who will your audience be? How, if at all, does your draft — your tone, your word choice, or anything else — need to change to appeal to and make sense for that audience? How can you shape your writing into an essay that gets across a story and a message, but still retains what is unique about your voice?

Finally, have someone who knows you well read your piece. Does the final essay still sound like you? Ask them to tell you where, specifically, your real voice and personality come across best.

More Mentor Texts for Writer’s Voice

Below each title, an excerpt from the piece.

“My So-Called (Instagram) Life,” a finalist in the 2017 Modern Love College Essay Contest, by Clara Dollar

Like an allergic reaction to becoming unloved, my Instagram account went into overdrive, all aimed at one audience member: Joe. Through hundreds of screens, I was screaming at him: “I’m here! I’m funny! I’m at that fish taco place I showed you!”

“Why Can’t Men Say ‘I Love You’ to Each Other?,” a finalist in the 2019 Modern Love College Essay Contest, by Ricardo F. Jaramillo

I’m having L-word troubles, but my troubles don’t involve a lover. There’s no romance or sex in this. No flowers, candles or dancing. My L-word troubles are with my boy, my best friend, Kichi. I’ve told him I love him probably five or six times now, but he never says it back.

“The Terror and Humiliation of Learning to Ride a Bike at 33,” a 2013 essay from the Lives column, by Mary H.K. Choi

I crashed into a fence. I crashed into a garbage can filled with extra pedals. I crashed into a woman whose jeans had a design that caught my eye. Evidently, staring at an obstruction guarantees you’ll steer into it. I wish one of the teachers had pointed this out, because it seems important. Pro tip: Engaging your core does nothing. Bonus tip: Spin class is wrong.

“My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants,” a 2013 essay from the Lives column, by Mark Maron

I thought the whole pitch was ridiculous, but of course I was secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect pants. I am secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect anything. I am weak and searching and desperate, just once, to have a perfect thing. So I bought the pants.

“Proving My Blackness,” a 2015 essay from the Lives column, by Mat Johnson

I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia, during the Black Power movement. I put my dashiki on one arm at a time like every other black boy, but I was haunted by the moments I’d be out with my mother and other black people would look at me as if I were a cuckoo egg accidentally dropped in their nest.

Questions About Voice for Any Narrative Essay

Imagine this same topic or story as if it were written in an entirely different voice, or from a different point of view. What could it sound like? How do voice and point of view affect a story or essay?

Word + Quiz: specious

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September 14, 2019

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specious ˈspē-shəs adjective

1. plausible but false
2. based on pretense; deceptively pleasing

_________

The word specious has appeared in 42 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on April 24 in the book review “Mental Illness Is All in Your Brain — or Is It?” by Jennifer Szalai:

In an age of glowing brain scans and plentiful pharmaceuticals, it can be hard to remember that psychiatrists — not exactly known for their aversion to dispensing medication — were once derided for not taking medicine seriously enough.
But as Anne Harrington reminds us, it wasn’t all that long ago when psychiatrists were pilloried as a bunch of woolly Freudians in thrall to specious ideas about absent fathers and smothering mothers. (Or absent mothers — there were apparently any number of ways for mothers to impair the mental health of their children.) In her new book, “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness,” Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard, says that psychiatry’s biological turn took place sometime around 1980, and it was so revolutionary that before the decade was up, the profession’s “transformation into a biological discipline seemed complete.”

_________

Striking Out

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September 14, 2019

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What story could this image tell?

Tell us about a memory from your own life that this illustration makes you think of — or use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem inspired by what you see.

Post it in the comments, then read the related article to learn the real story behind this image.

Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan. You can find all our Picture Prompts in this column.

Should Students Get Mental Health Days Off From School?

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September 14, 2019

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Should Students Get Mental Health Days Off From School?

Have you ever felt so overwhelmed, stressed, anxious or depressed that you thought you needed a day off from school to reset?

Does your school allow you to take a sick day when you’re feeling mentally unwell? If so, have you ever taken one? If not, do you wish you had the option?

Depression and anxiety. The state of the country. Climate change. Mass shootings. Today’s students are grappling with a variety of issues beyond the classroom.

To that end, lawmakers in two states have recently recognized the importance of the mental health of their students by allowing them to take sick days just for that. The measures “empower” children to take care of their mental health, one expert said.

On July 1, a law in Oregon went into effect giving students five mental health days in a three-month period. In 2018, Utah changed the definition of a student’s “valid excuse” to miss a day to include an illness “which may be mental or physical.” According to a recent study, teenagers named depression as a problem among their peers. Others blamed their anxiety on politics or climate change.

In Oregon, the bill was supported by several teenagers. One recent graduate, Hailey Hardcastle, told The Associated Press that the bill was inspired by politically active students in Parkland, Fla., and that she and her peers wanted to address mental health issues in schools.

Another former student, Derek Evans, voiced his approval. “Dealing with anxiety throughout high school has always left me tired, exhausted up against some weeks, and the difference one day makes is honestly life-changing,” he told Fox 12 Oregon.

Ms. Hardcastle said some parents had opposed the bill, raising concerns that students could take mental health days by pretending to be sick. But other parents cited a real need for the days.

The parents of Chloe Wilson, who died by suicide in 2018, told The Associated Press that their daughter, who had faced bullying after coming out as bisexual, had pretended to be sick in order to stay home from school.

“Because she lied to get her absences excused, we didn’t get to have those mental health conversations that could have saved her life,” her mother, Roxanne Wilson, said.

The new laws are “a huge win, especially for individuals and families that are affected by mental health conditions,” said Jennifer Rothman, senior manager for youth and young adult initiatives for National Alliance on Mental Illness.

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.

Custom Design Feature | Chew Chew Mama

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September 13, 2019

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We love doing custom designs for people with passion! Cindy, also known as Chew Chew Mama, is one of them. She’s a return customer who needed to upgrade her blog to a website to better support the growth of her site. Here’s a look at the original blog design we created for her:

It was a blog design full of fun colors and featured a simple recent post slider. Cindy wanted her upgraded website to have a more minimalistic and modern look.

Finding the perfect style

We started the project by finding colors and fonts that complimented Cindy’s vision. She loved her logo and but decided, in keeping with her new modern look, that she wanted to change it to a simple sleek font, possibly mixed with a handwritten font. We played around with a few font options and tried a pink/mint color comibination for the site colors. Here are the first three options we created:

Once Cindy saw the previews, she decided she wasn’t loving the color combos. This is why previews are created–to help put the clients vision down onto paper so that the vision can be tweeked until we get it just right. It’s a wonderful and necessary part of the design process. Sometimes a clients vision doesn’t translate into something they actually like once it’s put onto paper and so it then gives them the opportunity to try alternative options that maybe they hadn’t thought about before. Mood boards help to fine tune the vision into something the client can’t wait to have brought to life.

Finally, after a few revisions, we were able to help Cindy find a color palette and logo style she loved. Here is the final mood board version:

Creating the website design

Building Cindy’s new website took us a few months because it was such a huge overhaul, which required building custom content pages and custom functionalities for her site. We strongly recommend that you hop over to her site to check out the live version.

Here is a full-length view of the final website design:

Click here to view larger

Final thoughts

We love how clean, tidy, and modern the site ended up looking! Because she went with a more subtle color palette, it really allows her beautiful photos to shine and stand as strong focal points.

If you are looking for a custom blog or website design, visit our Custom Design Services page for more info and to request a quote.

What Are Your Hometown’s Shortcomings?

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September 13, 2019

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Find all our Student Opinion questions here.

What are some things about your hometown that bother you most?

Is it too cold? Are there too many people? Is there not enough going on?

Do these drawbacks make you consider leaving one day, or are they things you hate-love and would secretly miss if they were no longer present in your life?

In “Let’s Hear It for Your Hometown Shortcomings!” Victor Mather writes:

When a group in Minneapolis-St. Paul started an ultimate Frisbee team, it could have chosen a nickname to honor the two cities, like the Twins. Or something about the region’s heritage, like the Vikings. Or a celebration of the great outdoors, like the Timberwolves or the Wild.
Instead, the Minnesota team in the American Ultimate Disc League is called the Wind Chill.
It’s a curious thing that some professional teams choose nicknames not from their city’s best features, but instead, arguably, from their worst. It doesn’t seem like the wind chill, which regularly dips deep into negative territory in Minneapolis, would be a local selling point.
Ben Feldman, a team co-owner, had an explanation: “In Minnesota, we experience some of the most brutal wind chill temperatures in the winter months, and we want our opponents to feel that very same pain when they step onto the field to play against us.”
Fair enough. But what about the New York affiliate of Premier Ultimate League? With so many great things to choose from in the city, the team picked … the New York Gridlock. Perhaps the logic is wanting opponents to feel pain similar to being stuck in stop-start rush-hour traffic.
Surely these teams could have done something nice for their tourism boards by trying to sugarcoat their nicknames? But it’s the Miami Heat of the N.B.A., not the Miami Sunshine or the Miami Delightful Beach Weather.
And then there are the teams named after potentially deadly natural disasters endemic to their regions. The San Jose Earthquakes, the Colorado Avalanche, the Miami Hurricanes and the Iowa State Cyclones. What attracted you to Ames? The chance of a deadly twister!

The article concludes:

As teams seek more and more colorful nicknames to stand out in a crowded marketplace and sell merchandise, the trend of highlighting the worst of a region may continue. Perhaps we can look forward to the Los Angeles Mudslides, the New York Noise and the San Francisco High Cost of Living.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

What are your hometown’s shortcomings? How do these shortcomings affect you personally? Is there one that bothers you most? Tell us about a time when you directly experienced this.
Do others share your opinion of this local defect? Are there any local jokes or sayings about this aspect of your town?

Do you, your friends and family spend a lot of time complaining about these shortcomings? Or, have you come to accept them? Have you or has anyone you know ever tried to address, change or improve these features of your town?

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.

Lesson of the Day: ‘It’s Slime. And It’s Satisfying.’

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September 13, 2019

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Lesson of the Day: ‘It’s Slime. And It’s Satisfying.’

Find all our Lessons of the Day here.

Lesson Overview

Featured Article: “It’s Slime. And It’s Satisfying.”

“Slime content has invaded the satisfaction internet and oozed into the American middle school. Slime is an art form, a community and an industry: sensory gratification tubbed and sold,” Amanda Hess writes about that sticky substance between liquid and solid.

In this lesson, students explore the appeal of slime among young people and then write their own pieces about the trends and fads they think symbolize modern childhood.

Warm Up

Do you or have you ever played with slime? What do you like (or dislike) about it?

Before you read, watch the video below and scroll through some of the other videos and images in today’s featured article. Take note of the different sensations you have as you look at them. What do you see, hear, feel, taste and smell when you see these images? How do they make you feel?

Questions for Writing and Discussion

Read the article, then answer the following questions:

1. Amanda Hess begins the article by writing, “One of the internet’s greatest features is satisfaction on demand.” What does she mean by that? How is slime an example of that?

2. What role do the five senses — sight, sound, smell, taste and touch — play in the experience of slime?

3. How does Chloe Park, the creator of Slime New York, wield these senses to market and sell her product? Are her efforts successful?

4. How is slime “a symbol of modern childhood, and in particular, girlhood,” according to Ms. Hess? Do you agree with her assessment? Why or why not?

5. Ms. Hess argues that part of slime’s appeal is that it is an “escape” from our screens and other worries intensified by the internet. She ends the article by writing:

It is probably not a coincidence that slime has risen just as we have come to define ourselves by our anxieties, our food issues, and our efforts to fend it all off with practices of self-care. The internet can replicate and exacerbate these stressors, but slime can work in the opposite way, as a kind of timeline cleanse. The word “satisfy” comes from the Old French satisfaire, which meant to repay or make reparations. Perhaps that is what slime is: the internet’s atonement for everything else.

Do you agree? Why do you think slime is trending at this moment?

Media Literacy

Going Further

Amanda Hess, the author of this piece, is an adult writing about a fad that is largely popular among children and teenagers. Does her assessment of modern childhood and young people’s love of slime speak to your own experience of being a teenager today?

If not, try your hand at writing an article about a trend or fad that is popular among your peers. It can be short — just a paragraph or two — or as long as the one you read today.

Use Ms. Hess’s piece as a model for your own writing. Like her, you might:

Choose a trend that you think is a “symbol of modern childhood.”
Describe it and explain why you think young people find it appealing.
Then, analyze it: What does it say about the world or teenage life today?

If you have more time, you might incorporate some other good journalism practices: Conduct research online to see what others have written about the trend. Interview your classmates or other experts and include their quotes in your article. Add images, videos, tweets or Instagram posts that help illustrate your point. Finally, share your piece with your classmates or another audience.

Online Free courses Central

Word + Quiz: empyrean

empyrean ˌem-ˌpī-ˈrē-ən adjective and noun

Protected: Expert Network FAQ

MOOCWatch 20: Coursera’s Acquisition; Udacity’s New CEO; Top 100 MOOCs of All Time

New MOOCWatch Editor

Top Stories

MOOC-based Degrees

Conferences

Class Central News

Writer’s Voice: ‘Intolerance and Love in Jamaica’

More Mentor Texts for Writer’s Voice

Questions About Voice for Any Narrative Essay

Word + Quiz: specious

specious ˈspē-shəs adjective

Striking Out

Should Students Get Mental Health Days Off From School?

Custom Design Feature | Chew Chew Mama

Finding the perfect style

Creating the website design

Final thoughts

What Are Your Hometown’s Shortcomings?

Lesson of the Day: ‘It’s Slime. And It’s Satisfying.’

Lesson Overview

Warm Up

Questions for Writing and Discussion

Going Further

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Word of the Day: unseemly

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