Archive for October 2015

Flatiron School Guarantees Full-Time Web Development Job

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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">A fast-track learning program at the Flatiron School in New York offers web and mobile development courses through an online Learn-Verified Web Developer Program, a course which Flatiron says guarantees a full-time job within six months of graduation.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The courses takes 600 to 800 hours to complete and costs $1,000/month. However, there’s no fixed timeframe – the faster learners study, the less they’ll pay.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Up until now, Flatiron was exclusively offering its courses in a classroom, with 99% of its graduates getting full-time jobs and an average entry-level salary at $74,000. Now, thanks to Learn-Verified, the school is offering its complete curriculum online. The school provides an all-your-money-back guarantee if graduates don’t get a full-time job offer within six months of graduation.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Unlike many MOOCs, Flatiron’s online course revolves around community and communication. Adam Enbar, co-founder and CEO of  the Flatiron School says:</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">“The current field of online education resources is simply inadequate for people who want to develop the breadth of skills necessary to begin a new career. Community is where education succeeds and the lack of it is why MOOCs fail. We created a platform that facilitates personalized attention, high-quality curriculum and comes with a job placement guarantee.”</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Enbar added that current online learning platforms are ineffective due to their emphasis on content consumption:</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">“Online education today expects students to watch videos and post questions to forums or wait a week to speak to a mentor, which given available technology is equivalent to sending a letter in the mail rather than sending a text message.”</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The Learn-Verified curriculum offers 600 to 800 hours of web development content and a learning platform that facilitates learning through cutting edge tools and workflows. The course includes more than 100 videos and interactive quizzes and over 200 coding labs, TechCrunch says.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Learn-Verified students will have access to the school’s academics 18 hours per day and be able to reach and interact with other students on a 24/7 basis.flatiron’s curriculum is open-source and constantly improving, thanks to the feedback that learners, faculty and graduate provide.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Following their graduation, the school’s placement staff will seek appropriate full-time jobs for its graduates, the school says. Some of the most notable companies hiring Flatiron graduates include Intel, Microsoft and Google.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">“Thousands of people come through the doors at Flatiron School to learn to code and successfully launch careers,” Enbar says. “We have now created a platform that allows anyone in the U.S. at anytime of the day to develop those same hirable skills and then be placed in a well-paying job.”</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Flatiron was founded in 2012 and offers online and traditional mobile and web development classes taught by highly skilled instructors. The online course costs $1,000 per month – a heavy price tag considering that other schools offer courses at no cost, with competitors like Codecademy priced at $29/month, QZ.com observes.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; line-height: 19.6px;">Flatiron School trains creative, passionate people in web and mobile development.  Established in 2012 by founders </span><span class="xn-person" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #404040; line-height: 19.6px; margin: 0px;"><span itemprop="name" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px;">Adam Enbar</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; line-height: 19.6px;"> and Avi Flombaum, 99 percent of Flatiron School's adult graduates have launched careers companies like Google, Intel and Microsoft. All classes are facilitated by highly skilled instructors. Flatiron School is a recognized partner of NYC Department of Small Business Services, creating opportunities for all New Yorkers</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px;">.</span></span></i></div>
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Flatiron School Guarantees Full-Time Web Development Job

A fast-track learning program at the Flatiron School in New York offers web and mobile development courses through an online Learn-Veri...

Three Illinois Schools Close Due to Legionella Bacteria

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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">School officials in Elgin, Illinois have reported the evacuation of 2,900 students from three schools in the area after high concentrations of Legionella bacteria were found in the cooling towers for the facilities.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Higher than normal” levels of the bacteria that causes Legionnaire’s disease were found at Larkin High School in Elgin, Eastview Middle School in Bartlett and the administration building of Elgin School District U46, causing the closure of all three buildings.  Students were relocated until parents were either able to pick them up or the district was able to bring them home.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“While risk of exposure to the bacteria was low, we decided, in consultation with the Kane County Health Department, to evacuate staff and students to safe locations as a precaution,” the school district said.while students in classrooms heard a public address announcement asking everyone to leave the building, students who were eating lunch said they did not hear anything official concerning the school’s closure.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“All of a sudden somebody said, ‘Let’s go,’” said sophomore Jonathon Davis of Elgin. “We said, ‘Who’s fighting now?’ We didn’t know what was going on. They said to go out in single file but everybody ran out. In five minutes the school was empty.”</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Other students who had been in the lunchroom at Larkin said they thought it was either a fire drill or live-shooter drill.  It was not until they went outside that a Facebook announcement from school district CEO Tony Sanders explained the evacuation, writes Dave Gathman for The Chicago Tribune.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Some parents also reported that they had not heard of the evacuation and they were merely showing up at school to drop something off to their child.sanders said he made the decision close to 10:30 am on Wednesday after reading the annual report concerning the air quality testing of the school cooling towers, which described “higher than normal” levels of Legionella bacteria.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He added that Educational Services Center staff had been asked to report to either Bartlett High or Elgin High to help students there.  Because the central office was closed, key district leaders would be moved to district’s plant operations building where a news conference was held this afternoon.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A decision has not been made yet concerning whether or not the schools will remain closed.  In the meantime, all 19 towers are being thoroughly cleaned and sanitized.the state is currently dealing with an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia, which has already resulted in the deaths of 13 people.</span></i></div>
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Three Illinois Schools Close Due to Legionella Bacteria

School officials in Elgin, Illinois have reported the evacuation of 2,900 students from three schools in the area after high concentratio...

University of Michigan to Partner with edX

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<i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>The University of Michigan, which helped found the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider Coursera, will now be partnering with online education platform edX as well.the first of UM’s edX courses under the title of MichiganX will begin in April of 2016. There will be at least 20 courses from the the University over the next two years, and three that are scheduled to be released early on cover finance, learning analytics, and data science ethics.</b></i></div>
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<i><b>Laurel Thomas Gnagey of Michigan News quoted a statement by James Hilton, Vice Provost for the Office of Digital Education & Innovation this new partnership aligns closely with our mission and values. Our core commitment is about experimenting, learning and adapting in order to shape the future of higher education. EdX and Coursera provide very different models with different sweet spots for experimentation. We are thrilled that our faculty will be able to take advantage of both platforms to push the boundaries of discovery.</b></i></div>
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<i><b>The first course, “Finance for Everyone: Smart Tools for Decision-Making,” will launch on April 5th and last for six weeks of five to six hours each. It will be taught by Gautam Kaul, a professor of finance in the school of business, reports Diane Schaffhauser of Campus Technology. A certificate upon completion will be available for $49.</b></i></div>
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<i><b>Kaul, who is the Digital Education & Innovation department’s first “Innovator in Residence,” said:</b></i></div>
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<i><b>With the help of strategic investments UM has made in digital learning, I’ve been able to reach nearly a million global learners through MOOCs while transforming the way I engage students on campus. I’m excited to experiment with the edX platform to continue our quest to redefine residential learning.</b></i></div>
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<i><b>The second course on analytics will be taught by Timothy McKay, a professor of Physics and Astronomy and an Academic Innovation Fellow with the DEI. The third, which encourages students to “think about the ethical questions surrounding the use, integration and analysis of data,” will be taught by H. V. Jagadish, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science.</b></i></div>
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<i><b>EdX was founded in 2012 by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of offering free, high-quality education to anyone with an internet connection, writes Gen Hummer of the Michigan Daily. Coursera was co-founded in 2012 by the University of Michigan along with the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Princeton University, and two computer science professors from Stanford. Partnering with both, according to UM, will allow them to try different approaches to online learning.</b></i></div>
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<i><b>UM plans on growing their Coursera offerings as well. By December, UM says that they will increase from 20 courses on the platform to 50.james DeVaney, Associate Vice Provost of the DEI, reports that the university has reached 3.6 million people through their MOOCs since 2012. He says:</b></i></div>
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<i><b>If we continue to harness the best technology and deepen our use of learning analytics, we know the ripple effect of Michigan’s academic excellence and alumni network will be felt around the world.</b></i></div>
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<i><b>The university also is working with a third platform, NovoEd.</b></i></div>
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University of Michigan to Partner with edX

The University of Michigan, which helped found the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider Coursera, will now be partnering with onl...