TrainingMagazine.com

The High-Level Group on the Modernisation (they're European) of Higher Education held a press conference on June 18, 2013, to announce a new report on the state of teacher training in Europe. The report calls for the establishment of certification training and teacher academies to address the current lack of such resources.

The group observed:

The textbook rental firm Chegg is making progress in its quest to go public, as reported by Reuters (via 4-traders.com) that it's selected financial firms to support the initial public offering of stock.  

The site began as a place where students could rent textbooks, much like people could rent DVD's to watch movies.  In recent years the company has expanded into other areas, such as homework note-sharing, and seems to be positioning itself as a something of an academic social network site.

One savvy corporate giant is testing its lawyers for simple technical competency, and finding those skills lacking.  This translates into higher bills to the company, or so goes the thinking of automobile maker Kia's corporate counsel D. Casey Flaherty.  As reported by the Connecticut Law Tribune (May 22, 2013), Flaherty told an audience at the LegalTech conference in Los Angeles:

There's an interesting article at the Harvard Gazette about the Khan Academy, which we've reported about here before at TrainingMagazine.com.  It's featured in the Harvard Alumni Gazette email newsletter, sent to alumni of Harvard University.

The U.S. government requires certain of its employees to maintain relevant skills, and to periodically demonstrate evidence of that training.  For example, continuing education units (CEUs) are accepted as proof of training the government recognizes.  

Most of the excitement and interest in eLearning has been in the ability for technology to connect students with teachers, and to automate elements of the teaching process - like the grading of exams online, for example.  But there's a key element of the eLearning experience that is somewhat lacking overall, and that's the serendipitous networking that occurs in any physical in-person educational experience.  In some schools, particularly the most prestigious, it's often the people you meet and the contacts you make in school that are almost as valuable as the education itself, pe

Here's a funny video of a teacher using his computer to play an April Fool's joke on his class.  Watch his "shadow" closely...

The hot TED conferences came to PBS this week, for their first-ever television broadcast of one of their legendary conferences, and they chose the topic of education for the broadcast.

(TED, for those who don't know, is the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference series.  Many TED talks can be found online, it's a great series.)

A company called CAD Training Online announced this week that they are offering instructor-led training via online delivery for students of AutoCAD, software created by the company Autodesk.  The intent is to fully recreate the in-class student experience via an online delivery platform.  This is Autodesk's first official authorized online delivery training center.

A report this morning from the South China Morning Post states that a recent the trial surrounding a sex scandal in China has inadvertently revealed that non-Chinese teachers are given preferential hiring in China to an extreme degree.

The deputy director of the Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute, Xiong Bingqi, is quoted in the article as saying "in many cases, foreigners with only a travel visa become teachers."