4.0 schools is accepting applications for their exciting summer programs in New York and New Orleans. Please forward this to anyone who might be interested! (Flyer attached as well)
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4.0 Schools is a design lab and community where people test and launch new solutions to solve tough problems in education. Applications for summer programs are due on May 10 for the Cohort and Launch, and rolling for Essentials. Learn more and apply here.

- Essentials - a day-long exploration of three skills: Empathy (designing solutions for actual users), Unbundling (taking problems apart to attack them at the core) and Prototyping (testing solutions through interaction and feedback from users). This summer in New Orleans and New York.

- The Lab Cohort - a three week intensive program to equip people passionate about specific problems with the skills to test solutions out in actual schools. This summer in New Orleans.

- The Launch Program - a six- to eight-week program for entrepreneurs ready to launch proven solutions in the real world. This summer in New Orleans.

In September 2012, I shared a story on why Facebook moved to building a native app. The title of the post was Betting on HTML5 for Mobile Was the Biggest Mistake Facebook Ever Made.

After seven months, the next player who has dumped HTML5 is Linkedin. Linkedin, who just released their newest mobile app, has gone from HTML 5 to native.

The primary reason for the switch as cited by Kiran Prasad, senior director for mobile engineering, is the lack of critical support for debugging and performance tools in mobile web apps.

"The primary reason for that is, we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory. There is no tooling support — having a debugger that actually works, performance tools that tell you where the memory is running out".

Read more here.

Watch here now.

Data: 24 MOOC's, 19 coursera, 3 from edX, 1 from Udacity, 1 from MITx. Prepared by Katy Jordan, a graduate student at the Open University in UK.

Findings:

- Most MOOC's have completion rates of less than 10%.

- Automatic grading vs. Peer Grading Course completion rate 4.6 -19.2% VS 0.7% - 10.7%.

- No negative correlation found between course length and completion rate.

- The outlier course with 19.2% completion rate is "Functional Programing Principles in Stata" offered by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne on Coursera. The course ran for 7 weeks.

Other research questions that I think might be interesting to investigate in future studies:

• Is course completion a useful parameter for evaluating MOOC's?
• Isolating the profile of students in the system and using that to understand the activity in MOOCs
• It would be interesting to see when students start dropping off. Does the drop off correlate with the complexity in the course material, lack of personalized attention by instructor or the platform, lack of interesting material in the course, lack of peer support etc.

Hi Everyone,

I plan to attend the following Product Group Meetup for March 2013 this Thursday, March 7, from 7-9pm.

I have not been to this meetup before so I don't know what to expect, but hopefully it should be fun and informative.

Let me know if you're interested and we can go together!

Below is a question on Quora asked by a user to which another user replied with the EdSurge blurb on ResearchBroker.

I think it is exciting to see that people can relate ResearchBroker to solving the same problem for which it was built: i.e. to bridge educators and technologists. I am happy to see that people can get that without us speaking to them on the phone necessarily or sending them some fancy product blurbs. This should motivate us to continue to make that value even more obvious on the ResearchBroker website by adding case studies, testimonials and streamlining the user experience. At the same time, we should be fearless in talking about ResearchBroker to other people for feedback and outreach.

If you can, please upvote the answer on Quora. You can login with your quora account or facebook or Google.