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By Eric Nee, Stanford Social Innovation Review, May 20, 2009. Rodin heads the Rockefeller Foundation and, in this interview, discusses their new initiative to fund organizations that work on innovation processes. The two examples are crowdsourcing (they fund InnoCentive, a for-profit that sponsors contests to solve other company's R&D problems) and collaborative competitions (they partnered with Changemakers, where the participants collaborate on each other's solutions).

By Kevin Carey, Commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 2011. Community Colleges will now have an opportunity to vie for a top prize. "The Aspen Institute is awarding the first annual Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, with the winner and up to three runners-up sharing in the $1-million prize fund." Among the 10 finalists, Aspen Institute's evaluators conducted site visits and looked closely at employment outcomes, teaching practices and student learning. "The best community colleges, they found, were focused and intentional when it came to structuring the learning experience."

by Jon Marcus on The Hechinger Report, December 26, 2011. Open University, a successful British online public university to be used as a model in the U.S. The goal is to help students who are intimidated by higher education adapt to and succeed in college. Next Generation Learning Challenges, a Gates funded initiative, will adapt two free Open University, at-your-own-pace online courses for use at about a dozen U.S. colleges and universities this academic year: one to help students be more comfortable with math so they do better on placement tests or move more quickly through remedial courses, and another to teach students skills to prepare them for college.

Budget cuts to community colleges highlights the fact that as a society we were never fully committed to remedial students in the first place. Young people and adults who have been criminalized and imprisoned are ineligible for loans, and cannot afford college to turn their life around. These cuts target the working poor, undereducated, and disadvantaged and are a threat to our democracy.

Democracy is dependent on educating those students who require developmental education. Funding dev ed is a moral and social issue, not just an educational one.

ALEKS produces web-based, artificially intelligent educational software used for assessment and then individualized lesson plans. Developed at the University of California, Irvine with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Mentioned in pedagogy circle, radical ideas: variety vs. monotony.

Press release from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation announcing funding for the GSCC program. Dec 3, 2009.

By Kevin Carey in the Commentary section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15 2011. Carey cites a recent negotiation between the US Departments of Education and Labor in which community colleges can compete for federal funds "to serve students online" but, in exchange, will also provide those online tools, free, via Creative Commons license.

By the SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies, May 2011. For this report, the SOURCE's editor-in-chief interviewed eleven community college leaders from across the country. Questions relate to: college readiness, remedial education, workforce development, educational technologies, student services, data analysis, funding/grants

By Thomas J. Snyder in The Hechinger Report, May 3 2011. Snyder, president of the nation's largest state-wide community college (Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana), argues that governors who cut funding to community colleges are being short-sighted, and argues for the importance of community colleges in the economic recovery.

Program supports and disseminates innovative reform projects for improving postsecondary education.

A press release published by Creative Commons, January 20 2011. As part of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT), over $2 billion will be invested over the next four years, part of the program to support President Obama's goal of increasing college graduates by 2020. This program is of interest to Creative Commons because all such projects must be released using a Creative Commons attribution (CC BY) license.

By Lloyd Armstrong on his blog Changing Higher Education, May 23 2011. Announcement of a new Gates Foundation grant to aggregate data from several large post-secondary systems that are members of WICHE (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Ed) in order to get a better picture of outcome data.