Distance education or long-distance learning is the education of students who may not always be physically present at a school. Traditionally, this usually involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via post. Today it involves online education. Courses that are conducted are either hybrid, blended or 100% distance learning. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering large-scale interactive participation and open access through the World Wide Web or other network technologies, are recent developments in distance education. A number of other terms are used roughly synonymously with distance education.
Blended learning is an approach to education that combines online educational materials and opportunities for interaction online with traditional place-based classroom methods. It requires the physical presence of both teacher and student, with some elements of student control over time, place, path, or pace. While students still attend "brick-and-mortar" schools with a teacher present, face-to-face classroom practices are combined with computer-mediated activities regarding content and delivery. Blended learning is also used in professional development and training settings.
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland.
Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. There is no universal usage of open file formats in OER.
Educational technology is the use of both physical hardware, software, and educational theoretic to facilitate learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources.
The Hasso Plattner Institute(Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Digital Engineering gGmbH), abbreviated HPI, is a German information technology institute and faculty of the University of Potsdam located in Potsdam near Berlin. Teaching and Research of HPI is focused on "IT-Systems Engineering". HPI was founded in 1998 and is the first, and as of 2018 the only entirely privately funded faculty in Germany. It is financed entirely through private funds donated by its founder, Prof. Dr. h.c. Hasso Plattner, who co-founded the largest European software company SAP SE, and is currently the chairman of SAP's supervisory board. President and CEO of HPI is Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.
Founded in 1997, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics working towards advancing understanding of living systems through computation and for communicating scientific advances worldwide.
John Clifford Mitchell is professor of computer science and electrical engineer at Stanford University. He has published in the area of programming language theory and computer security.
A massive open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive courses with user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs), as well as immediate feedback to quick quizzes and assignments. MOOCs are a recent and widely researched development in distance education, first introduced in 2006 and emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012.
MITx is the massive open online course (MOOC) program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A constituent program of MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, MITx produces MOOCs from MIT departments and faculty that appear on the edX platform. MITx also supports residential experiments with scalable learning technologies and research on digital learning. MOOCs offered through edX by MITx are open-enrollment and free to take. In September 2012, edX and MITx introduced the option to receive an ID verified certificate on some courses.
OER Commons is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.
The DO-IT Center is based at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1992, DO-IT’s mission is to increase the successful participation of people with disabilities in postsecondary education and careers, in STEM fields and careers, and in computing fields and careers throughout the U.S. It directs the national AccessSTEM program, and co-directs the national AccessComputing Alliance focused on engaging people with disabilities in computing fields.
FutureLearn is a digital education platform founded in December 2012. The company is wholly owned by The Open University in Milton Keynes, England. It is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) learning platform, and as of May 2018 included 143 UK and international partners, including non-university partners.
Rosalind is an educational resource and web project for learning bioinformatics through problem solving and computer programming. Rosalind users learn bioinformatics concepts through a problem tree that builds up biological, algorithmic, and programming knowledge concurrently or learn by topics, with the topic of Alignment, Combinatorics, Computational Mass Spectrometry, Heredity, Population Dynamics and so on. Each problem is checked automatically, allowing for the project to also be used for automated homework testing in existing classes.
Pacific Open Learning Health Net is a non-profit established in 2003, focused on distance education for health professionals working in the Pacific. Since 2004, it has provided free online courses for continuing professional development in a wide range of health and science related disciplines. These include self-directed, blended learning, instructor-led and hybrid courses.
Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open educational resources (OER) and open education established nationally and provincially in Canada, and with international collaboration.
France université numérique (FUN) is the French national platform to promote the use of massive open online courses (MOOCs).
The 'German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure – de.NBI' is a national, academic and non-profit infrastructure supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research providing bioinformatics services to users in life sciences research and biomedicine in Germany and Europe. The partners organize training events, courses and summer schools on tools, standards and compute services provided by de.NBI to assist researchers to more effectively exploit their data.
