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Julie Phillips, an online instructor for Globe Education Network, shares an extensive list of suggestions for faculty members hoping to incorporate service-learning into an online course. On-ground courses have long included service-learning components at colleges and universities across the country. Over the past decade online programs have grown drastically, but have left the challenge of offering service-learning courses to online learners. Phillips offers a variety of suggestions to assist a faculty member or administrator develop an online course including a service-learning assignment. Below is a list of Phillips' recommendations: - Select an appropriate course - Establish clear expectations - Respond to email/outreach from students and community partners within 24-48 hours - Volunteering should align with course objectives - Identify challenges upfront - Communicate, communicate, communicate - Encourage reflection throughout the course - Listen to student concerns and work through them - Enlist feedback from students and community partners - Allow students to share their experiences - Requirements should be realistic - Never underestimate the power that hands-on experience has on student learning - Incorporate various resources into class to help guide students - Not all community partners are created the same - Get excited!

PRWeb assists companies and organizations release news on their products and services, with extended reach through online searches. LoudCloud Systems, the creator of LoudCloud Learning Ecosystem, for Higher Education, promoted an enhanced version of their current product through PRWeb in July of 2012. The new LoudCloud Learning Ecosystem, for higher education, includes greater flexibility for teachers and administrators; a task centered design, a redesigned behavioral reader, and enhanced analytics on students, administration, and teachers. LoudCloud Systems establish themselves as an emerging leader in learning management systems in 2010, and has continued to impress the education industry with new products and upgrades. The learning solutions offered by LoudCloud are intuitive, collaborative, adaptive and intelligent. The system collects data on users and personalizes their learning experience based on each individual's learning styles. LoudCloud Learning Ecosystems, for Higher Education now offers more than 100 discreet rights, but also allows for segmented branding within one system for larger institutions.  LoudCloud Systems offers services for higher education and K-12 institutions. Administrators and information technology personnel are the intended audience for this article. The reader should remember LoudCloud wrote the article, with supervision by PRWeb. 

The author is Associate Provost and Executive Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University. The author refers to Clayton Christensen's "disruptive innovation" term to refer to the recent changes in higher education. The author argues that a key source of disruption in higher education is coming not from the outside, but from internal practices. This administrator points to the increase in experiential modes of learning, how education is moving from "margin to center", which proves to be powerful in the quality and meaning of the undergraduate experience as well as the way business is conducted. The author refers to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and its publishing of a "high impact practice" list, strategies which are connected with high retention and persistence rates, such as undergraduate research, service/community-based learning, and global learning. These practices also have a significant influence because they increase (according to George Kuh) student behaviors that lead to meaningful learning outcomes. The author summarizes how technologies can play a key role as new digital, learning, and analytics tools make it possible to mimic some features of high impact activity inside classrooms, changing when and how students can engage in course content. Since the greatest impact on learning is in the innovative, integrative, and socially networked experiences, then the author argues that faculty and staff need to re-create dimensions of these experiences by bridging the classroom with life outside of it. He concludes that connections between integrative thinking, or experiential learning, and the social network should no longer be an afterthought, but the connection that should guide and reshape learning in higher education. This article would be most useful for administrators and faculty who inform decisions related to technology infrastructure and tools for teaching and learning.

Mobile learning (referred to as "m-learning" in the article) is considered as the next generation of e-learning using mobile technologies. Students' awareness of such technology is one of the key areas for it to be successful. This study aimed to investigate students' awareness and requirements of mobile learning services among Malaysian students in the higher education environment. The authors reviewed mobile learning services as a new vital platform for the higher education environment and the requirements for utilizing it. It provides information about the current state of students' awareness about mobile learning services. The article also covers possible mobile device limitations to consider, including: memory size, battery life, high line cost and small screen. These limitations can hinder using mobile technology widely in learning, but the authors point to Corlett et al. (2005) directions to extend the wireless network across the campus and to redesign software as well as hardware for mobile learning purposes. According to the authors, both the environment and the infrastructure in higher education is appropriate to incorporate mobile learning, as long as necessary adaptations are made. The results also demonstrate that students have adequate knowledge and awareness to use such technology in their education environment. The authors caution that the barriers and obstacles that could be faced during the actual use of mobile learning should be considered. This article would be most helpful for information technology professionals who are making decisions regarding mobile learning and technology implementation.

This focus paper describes in detail the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) that was launched at Graz University of Technology in 2010. The context of Web 2.0 and how current learners are using technology is explained. The author demonstrates how browser-based widgets were used to change the appearance of multiple personal desktops, creating a "ubiquitous" personal learning environment (UPLE) that can be used in the future, similar to the appearance of apps on a smartphone device. This article describes how spaces help learners to organize their learning resources via widgets, making connections to how they operate in their natural learning environments outside of the academic realm. Based on the article, using technologies which mimic those that students already use seems important for faculty and administrators to consider when deciding how to best approach implementing personal learning environments. The author is a Doctoral student in the Social Learning, Information Technology Services at Graz University of Technology in Austria.

This article describes the value of having a "service lens" in strategic implementation of technology in higher education. The authors view higher education as a co-created set of activities and experiences, having value only in their use over time, which is a shift from traditional thinking. They share that this strategy requires a belief in service systems existing in order to serve consumers, employers, and society at large. A service lens puts the consumer (the student) at the center of improvement and innovation initiatives, considering the consumer's experience to be a foundation for looking at how to make important changes in higher education. The authors argue that service blueprinting can be used to transform a traditional course to an online course while enhancing efficient delivery of content, the student experience, and student learning outcomes. Several examples are shared from the authors' institution, Arizona State University, with evidence pointing to an increase in student success, achievable learning outcomes, and reducing cost. This article would be most helpful for faculty and staff looking to take a strategic approach in making decisions about technology based on the student experience.

Steve Kolowich, a technology reporter for Inside Higher Education, discusses the learning management systems (LMS) of the future. The article, geared towards an audience of higher education professionals, as well as those interested in higher education technology, highlights three up and coming LMS providers: Coursekit, Instructure Canvas, and Chegg. Instructure Canvas is an open-source LMS, offering its services to more than 100 institutions, including Brown University and Auburn University. The program is marketed to administrators, as well as individual instructors. Coursekit, another LMS, is free and currently only markets to individual professors. In addition to course management, Coursekit plans to offer students assistance in locating books and homework help, in the future. A significant difference between Coursekit and other LMS is their creation of a social network oriented around education.  Chegg, formerly a solely text rental organization, has rebranded the company into a social education platform. Although Chegg is not a LMS, some of the services offered are similar. Students can search texts associated with courses at their institution, utilize a homework help center and speak with a tutor in India, and buy and sell notes through Notehall. Based on Kolowich's description of three promising LMS-like services, Blackboard (the current majority LMS market shareholder) should be prepared for a new wave of competition.

This article describes the growth and implications of e-learning programs for adults. It covers the historical context and economic background needed in order to understand the sudden expansion in distance learning programs, focusing on access and convenience as the main incentives for students enrolling at rapid rates since 2007. Statistics and charts in the article help to demonstrate how this growth occurred. Characteristics of quality adult learner programs and determinants of success are also reviewed. Barriers to access and participation, such as time and space, financial aid support, and institutional policies and services are explained in detail for the reader. This article is helpful for faculty to understand how to place emerging technologies within the context of the adult learner population. The author is a professor of adult and community college at North Carolina State University and her research seems focused on the engagement and participation patterns of adult learners.

The author of this opinion article is a professor of educational technology and distance learning at the University of Alaska. This article describes the significant implications of the new version of the internet, also known as the "semantic web" for education. Three areas the author believes will be most affected are: knowledge construction, personal learning network maintenance, and personal educational administration. This information would be most helpful to senior-level administrators in higher education who make large-scale decisions regarding their college or university's technology. Under Web 3.0, the author predicts that personal learning networks (PLNs) will be built primarily around subjects, instead of services. The author goes on to describe how personal learning agents will identify relevant information from any source that is accessible and provide information on exactly what students and faculty desire to learn. The semantic web makes it possible for the internet to become an effective and focused information resource that can be tailored for specific content area objectives.The semantic web has the potential to challenge traditional ideas about the institution providing all of the knowledge to students by itself and instead connects information between institutions. The author anticipates that at some point, institutions will describe courses and degrees semantically, to help their own internal functioning, but with the effect of making many parts of education somewhat comparable across institutions. This article encourages faculty, staff, and students to join the discussion about semantic web in order to help Web 3.0 developers shape a tool useful and connected to the higher education environment.

Ben Showers, the author, admits to keeping the projections optimistic, and avoiding the issues of privacy, protection, and data shadow.The article describes five changes to mobile technology that will influence higher education into the future. The first change is mobile devices as a platform for learning and courses. Currently, mobile applications are more of a stepping-stone to larger course-management sites. In the future, students will desire actual learning platforms on their mobile device. The second change focuses on mobile realities. Augmented reality on mobile devices now allows the digital world to overlap with the real, physical world. Higher education institutions are able to use these new augmented reality technologies to aid students in find resources and information on-campus. The third mobile technology to affect higher education is mobile form. In the future, mobile devices will become more personalized and much smaller. As devices are created within glasses, earpieces, and sensors, higher education will have to adapt to those changes. Mobile scales are the fourth change to mobile technology Showers highlights. Large universities will have the ability to personalize each student's experience, offering an educational concierge service never before imagined. Finally, mobile disconnectedness will influence higher education. As students' lives become infiltrated with information via mobile devices, using the Internet, campuses should offer wifi coldspots. Wifi coldspots will offer students and faculty an opportunity to detach from the online work, taking a break from the academic world. 

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. 

The article focuses on the 2012 ECAR Undergraduate Technology Survey results and its implications on higher education. Steven Kolowich, a technology reporter for Insider Higher Education, discusses the results throughout the article, explaining the significant jump in student demand for technology within coursework. ECAR is the research arm of Educaause, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the use of technology in higher education.  The 2012 survey results indicate a spike in student technological demands within the world of higher education. 47% of students in 2010 believed their professors were effectively using technology, which jumped to 68% in 2012. Students are enjoying the use and presentation of technology in the classroom more than ever before.  Of the 10,000 students to participate in the survey, 49% want to see professors use the learning management system more, 57% want to use more open educational resources, 46% want more videos used in coursework, and 55% want more game-based learning. A surprising 70% of the students claim to have used one or more ebooks during their college career. While students want to use more technology within their courses, the students also indicated they desire more training on each technological service or program. Brief instruction at the beginning of a course is not enough.

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.

This is a guest post by Dereck Bruff, and assistant director at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Vanderbilt University, Dwayne Harapnuik, director of faculty enrichment at Abilene Christian University, and Jim Julius, associate director at Instructional Technology Services, San Diego University. The post is a summary of an interactive session of a Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network conference to discuss the question of whether or not the technological revolution, characterized by social technologies and access to the web, can transcend the slow evolutional environment of Higher education institutions. 59 obstacles were identified as the culprits for hindering the advancement of higher education from the industrial model and teaching paradigm, to a learning paradigm. Six of the problems were named in the article are: faculty mistrust; lack of effective modeling; loss of faculty control during the shift to student centered learning; not enough emphasis placed on faculty development professionals; faculty closed off to being open to new technologies; and skepticism about the ability of technology to produce depth of learning. The authors and other POD members agreed that the solution would be to move from a faculty centered teaching mode to a student-centered one, and to encourage a culture of openness by encourage the sharing of effective uses of technology between faculty members. The article is directed at higher education institutions that wish to change their educational landscape.