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Ward's article touches on seven key points influencing the future of technology in higher education. Following the description of the seven points, Ward suggests where technology may be going in the future of higher education. The seven key areas listed by Ward include: - Technology is changing how we learn, college costs are ever increasing without necessarily justifying the increases - Online and hybrid courses are attracting students with convenience - Students are expecting faculty to connect with them digitally - More students than ever are able to access education online, including foreign and domestic students - For-profit colleges continue to compete with non-profit colleges for students and market share - Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are gaining in popularity and scaring college and universities into thinking about their own online programs - College budgets continue to decrease Ward believes these seven issues will be the most influential on the use of technology in higher education moving into the future. Online and hybrid classes will continue to grow, but Ward expresses a need for better programs and teaching aids to improve the quality and access to such courses.  The article focuses on technology, but credits the value of an on-campus educational experience within the final paragraph. After all of his points are made, Ward explains while online and hybrid courses continue to develop, many are still invested in the on-campus model of learning. The reader is left wondering, will the technological advances ever become fully adopted within the higher education world? Or will our antiquated model for learning continue to be used in most educational settings?

Jeffery Young, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, explains a new business venture for Internet2, a company providing superfast networks to colleges and universities. Internet2 recently announced partnerships with a variety of new companies in an effort to offer colleges and universities cloud services at reduced prices. The premise behind the new services, called Internet2 Net + Services, is to allow the 235 participating colleges and universities to access cloud services for a lower cost than they would normally receive as an individual institution. Companies involved in the new venture include Hewlett-Packard, SHI International, and Box. While Hewlett-Packard and SHI International are providing special offers on licensing terms and time bought on high-speed computers used through the internet, Box offers storage within the cloud.  The long-term cost savings for colleges and universities using Internet2 Net + Services could be rather substantial. Instead of having to invest in the services permanently, institutions can purchase additional capacity during peak times. Short-term rental of cloud services, at discounted rates, may have real financial impact on higher education, perhaps even enticing some to transition to using the cloud.

The author focuses on the use of blended education at two institutions: Wesleyan University and Bryn Mawr College. Both institutions are Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative (OLI) to enhance courses previously taught solely face-to-face. Wesleyan University is using the OLI modules to tutor less-prepared students in introductory courses. The OLI course modules allow students to gain material at a faster pace than in a traditional classroom alone. Administrators at Wesleyan believe the blended model will reinforce the hands-on teaching practices their liberal arts program promotes.  Bryn Mawr as allowed faculty members to adopt OLI modules at their own initiative. Not only to the OLI modules assist the students in learning material faster, but the program also collects data on the student's learning patterns, personalizing the program through each use. Using personalized learning assistance will allow an elite institution, such as Bryn Mawr, to admit a wide range of students, with confidence less academically prepared students can be successful.  In initial research, students enrolled in blended courses using the OLI module learn as much, if not more, as students in courses only meeting face-to-face. The persistence rates of lower-income students using the OLI module were close to 100 percent in Bryn Mawr's preliminary study. While liberal arts colleges may continue to build their reputations on small classes and personalized attention from faculty members, blended courses are able to enhance the traditional instruction model. Perhaps in the future, more liberal arts colleges will be using their blende technologies as a selling point to prospective students as Wesleyan and Bryn Mawr currently are.

Marla Clark, an editor at EdTech magazine, covers the four most effective, and highest in priority, IT investments in the United States in 2012. Clark uses data from a variety of IT surveys, collecting information from more than 550 college and university IT administrators. The intended audience is anyone interested in technologies influencing higher education. The first technology described is the mobile application. More than 60% of the campuses participating in the survey embrace mobility within their IT structure. Public universities lead with more than 77% offering mobile apps in connection with the institution, with private schools at 67%. The second efficient technology is cloud adoption. While many colleges and universities have been slow to transition to cloud technologies, those that have, are utilizing the options more fully. Now institutions are moving calendars and learning management systems to the cloud, instead of just storage and archival materials. Integration of IT into classroom/course instruction is the third item on top of colleges and universities' priority list. 74% of the institutions participating in the survey indicated curriculum integration is a top priority for the next few years. Finally, almost exactly half of the colleges and universities surveyed believe massive open online courses are a viable course delivery module. Of the 50% that look favorably on massive open online classes, more than 60% are unsure of how to earn revenue using the technology.

InCommon is a nonprofit group that offers software to colleges and universities with a shared standard allowing for secure single sign-on. Vendors collaborate with InCommon, allowing for seamless transmission of information from one college to a variety of vendors. Using InCommon allows institutions to streamline their different online services, simplifying the process for all users. The software is free, however, a $700 registration fee is required, in addition to an annual fee of $1,000 to $3,000 depending on the size of the institution. The real costs are associated with switching vendors compatible with InCommon and adding enough servers to back up the entire system. If a server goes down, all of the single sign-on services shut down as well, so reliable and back up servers are required. While InCommon certainly offers a useful product, colleges and universities have been reluctant to join. The initial cost of joining, switching vendors and updating servers can be very expensive. The University of Georgia, for example, has decided to use proprietary software, instead of InCommon, to save on cost. Other institutions are waiting until important vendors, such as Blackboard, join InCommon. Without key vendors on board, the costs cannot be justified. Even though InCommon has not been adapted on every college campus, the organization doubled its membership numbers every year between 2005 and 2010.  

Steven Kolowich, a technology reporter for Inside Higher Education, describes the online support initiative supporting online programs at Northern Virginia Community College. The intended audience for the article is higher education officials, including institutions expanding into online education. Kolowich highlights NOVA's experience with online education and how the College turned a mediocre program into a successful one.   When NOVA began an online program in the mid-2000's, the vice president for instruction and information technology, Steven Sachs, dedicated a few IT employees to help online students with small, instructional issues. After some research, Sachs realized for-profit colleges were spending more than half of their budgets on support services for students, such as financial aid counseling, job placement assistance, and academic advising. Shortly after this realization, Sachs implemented the "Next Level Initiative," spending more than $2 million to offer support to online students. The Next Level Initiative was extremely effective on all six of NOVA's campuses. Over the next four years, online programs grew four times faster than on-campus programs. Additionally, the difference in completion between online and on-ground students fell from 16% to 8%. Kolowich uses NOVA as an example to express how imperative support services are for online students.

The notion behind Professor Direct is to offer instructors the opportunity to teach courses online while determining the price or worth of the class, decreasing the cost of college courses drastically. Unlike other massive open online courses, Professor Direct calls their courses "ultra-affordable," averaging $99 a course. The instructor decides the cost of the course, in addition to office hours, communication (email) speed, tutorial options, and enrollment caps. Accessibility to the instructor, such as office hours and prompt email responses, allows professors to justify an increase in the cost of the course. Professors even receive commission for recruiting new students to their courses.  While there are a variety of benefits to enrolling at Professor Direct, few colleges and universities will accept transfer credits from the institution. Professor Direct also does not offer degrees, which prevents the organization from becoming accredited. The courses are, however, approved by the American Council on Education's College Credit Recommendation Service. Young alludes to an educational revolution if Professor Direct gained regional accreditation, a paradigm shift for higher education. For now, Professor Direct, and a similar organization called Udemy, are not accredited and are working to increase both their student populations and reputation within the higher education world. 

Coursera, one of the largest education companies offering online courses, claims to be content in building their user base without earning profits. Venture capitalists continue to invest in massive open online classes, however, without generating revenue, the investments may begin to wane. For now, elite colleges and universities, in addition to for-profit educational companies, will continue to offer online classes for free, while searching for a margin for profitability. A few sources for revenue have been considered. One of the most promising sources is the payment of licensing fees paid by other institutions to use "courses in a box" or video tutorials complementing currently offered courses. Another possible source of revenue is the sale of high-achieving student data. Corporate employers, such as Facebook and Twitter, can buy information on high-performing students studying specific subjects. A third option for profit generation is charging for credit-baring courses. The American Council on Education is reviewing a variety of courses offered through Coursera to determine if the courses are college credit worthy.  No steady revenue source has been identified in connection with massive open online classes, yet. While different organizations and institutions continue to find a way to profit from highly accessible online education, the user base will continue to increase. Hopefully, in addition to finding a mode of revenue, courses may be offered for college credit and the completion rate of MOOCs will increase. The current completion rate of MOOCs is 10%. 

Joshua Kim, the Director of Learning and Technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program at Dartmouth College, often writes for Inside Higher Ed. In this article, Kim shares ten questions posed to him by Rachel Hanel, a student and employee at Kaplan University. Hanel presented ten questions to Kim based on his experience with learning management systems (LMS).  Kim believes higher education institutions should based their LMS selection off of the quality of the product, the quality of the company, and the size of the user community, not just price. Kim also points out the direct and indirect costs associated with each LMS must be evaluated before making a decision. Students are looking for an LMS utilized by faculty members, while faculty members have a wide range of requests from an LMS, making the selection of a LMS for a college or university difficult. A few products and services to watch break into the LMS market over the next few years are Instructure Canvas, OpenClass, and Coursekit, in addition to Moodle and Blackboard, whom already hold most of the market share. According to Kim, institutions should put education first when reviewing LMSs. College and university personnel, specifically those looking to switch or add a LMS, are the intended audience. 

According to Patton, human resource departments tend to be one of the last areas within higher education to adopt new technologies. Over the past few years vendors have begun developing new products based on college and university needs, especially in the human resource area.  Most human resource departments have an enterprise resource planning system (ERP) or a Human Resource Information System (HRIS), which is used in conjunction with compatible, or sometimes not-compatible, vendor services. SunGard continues to offer more and more human resource services, including an effort certification system, which monitors and collects data on how many hours certain employees are spending on research, if their salary is paid through a grant. In the mid 2010s, SunGard and PeopleSoft partnered to create an applicant tracking system that offered three programs in one: a position description model, a performance management module, and an applicant-tracking model. While some improvements have been made, human resource departments need to embrace the new technologies, and utilize the offered services in the front of the office, as well as the back. Most of the examples within the article are large, state universities, such as Florida Atlantic University, Oklahoma City Community College, and the University of Utah. Duke University is mentioned, however, Duke is a large, elite university with more financial resources than most other private institutions. The question remaining is if the cost of human resource modules are justified at smaller institutions? Hopefully the future will bring options to colleges and universities with a few hundred employees, rather than a thousand. 

This article introduces the reader to the concept of collective bargaining for campus information technology by considering the 2011 announcement of a partnership between desktop computer giant Hewlett Packard (HP) and higher education consortium Internet2. Collective bargaining is not viewed as the norm for higher education where individual colleges prefer to act as individuals, each perceiving themselves as completely unique even among peer institutions, but it has taken root in recent years due to a need to regain control over campus IT services in the wake of a surge in consumer technology use among faculty, staff and students. The cost benefit of collective bargaining is aimed at campus IT consumers but clearly there is a significant benefit for the IT providers as well, in this case, for HP. At the time this article was written, many colleges and universities were struggling to rebalance campus budgets, including reigning in IT costs. Meanwhile, consumer electronics were booming as smartphone sales surpassed standard cell phone sales and laptops outpaced desktop sales, and the war in tablet computing raged between Apple iPads, Amazon's Kindle Fire, and Google's Nexus 7. Students, faculty and staff were walking onto campus with multiple web enabled devices, draining campus Internet services and changing the way campus hardware was used. With more mobile services being used and aging desktop clusters needing to be managed, campus IT had to start thinking about strategies to control its investments. Cloud technologies were gaining in popularity at the time, and this article outlines the ways in which campuses began moving to the cloud to cut costs and to meet evolving user needs. The partnerships described in the article between companies like HP and cloud hosting service Box and Internet2 schools show that there are benefits to the members, but the author also recognizes that faculty, students and staff will likely continue to utilize their own devices and

The article touches upon topics relevant to all Americans, creating a large audience. Anyone influenced by higher education should be interested in Carlson and Blumenstyk's perspective.  While hype surrounds MOOCs and instructional technologies today, others are arguing for investment in brick and mortar colleges and universities. Patricia McGuire, the president of Trinity Washington University, believes those who stand to profit most from MOOCs and other forms of online education have created most of the hype.  Trinity Washington University is full of students receiving Pell Grants and a sub-standard high school education, students who need face-to-face instruction and tutoring more than most other students.  McGuire and other higher education officials listed in the article argue the online education movement is creating a wider gap between those that can afford an on-campus college experience and those that cannot. Unfortunately those that cannot afford to live on-campus and attend an elite university need the resources offered at brick and mortar institutions the most. While enhancement to teaching and learning may come from the development of online education, MOOCS, and new instruction technologies, an emphasis must be put on making on-campus education affordable. If face-to-face instruction is made inaccessible for most Americans, the country will suffer greatly, mainly by a wide divide between the haves and the have-nots within the working word as well as in higher education.

The author of this article is a staff reporter for an information technology blog geared towards higher education professionals. The author shares how the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science provided free data storage to all incoming students who were interested in 2011. The service offered by LifeTime Library, works on students' personal computers and allows them to automatically archive their files and folders. The data is then housed on a website, where students can search for files by name or by date saved. Students can continue to use the online storage after they graduate, which remains free for these students. The author shares that at this college, dealing with large amounts of online data is a big part of what students learn at the School of Information and Library Science and they intend for the LifeTime Library services to act as a teaching tool for students to figure out the best ways to organize their own digital information. This college also provides courses to focus on ways to make the service more useful, by incorporating data collected from students. The author interviewed the Dean of the College, who reported that eventually the program should be able to save every version of a file, even if it has been edited multiple times, archive mobile phone data, or save social media pages. The author explored the legal ramifications, sharing that the college has the right to scan any information housed in the data storage, and that students must agree to an acceptable-use policy. The author shares that this college anticipates the program to grow, having students store more information than they would have otherwise. The challenge for administrators to anticipate how much storage will be needed will likely dictate how much the school will have to pay to maintain a service like this one. This article would be most useful for technology administrators looking to implement a similar service at their institution.

best online colleges with a link to Open education database (OEDB)

Gene Wade, the creator of University Now, in an educational entrepreneur. A subsidiary of Wade's University Now, called New Charter University, uses similar education principles as Western Governors University, but with a different pricing model. New Charter University offers online, self-paced courses for $796 a semester. Students are able to sample courses for free and pay the enrollment fees in order to receive credit. The University is nationally accredited, offering associates, bachelors, and masters' degrees. When a student enrolls in a course, he or she takes an entrance exam, determining ability to understand course material. If the student proves knowledge mastery of some or all of the course topics, he or she is waived of completing that portion of the coursework.  Wade believes Pell Grants and access to student loans have led to the ever-increasing cost of college. New Charter University makes higher education affordable, while also convenient. A few questions tied to New Charter University's success still remain. Will employers value degrees offered through the University? Will the University obtain regional accreditation, allowing for credits to transfer to most colleges and universities across the country? Will students enroll in high numbers? Regardless of the future of New Charter University, Wade and his colleagues are collecting as much data on their students as possible. Tracking students allows University Now to better understand how students learn online, allowing new programs and technologies to enhance the online education model.