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"Higher education is facing a variety of conflicting challenges. National and state competitiveness depend on a citizenry with postsecondary education. Large segments of the population traditionally have not had equal access to higher education, and this is particularly true for minorities and the economically disadvantaged, two groups that also suffer disproportionally from another of higher education's challenges-students coming to higher education without adequate preparation. This bulletin describes an analytics system that Bowie State University (BSU) has implemented and is enhancing in order to improve the retention and success of at-risk students. While BSU has a substantial population of such students, the approaches taken are broadly applicable since many institutions have students in this category."

The preview version of the TechWatch report entitled Preparing for Effective Adoption and Use of eBooks in Education is now available. We invite feedback on this report produced by JISC Observatory, to help shape its coverage and guidance to the Higher and Further Education sectors. The feedback period is open from 27 September to 8 October 2012.

"STEPP was launched by the Alternative Media Access Center, in partnership with CourseSmart and the AccessText Network, through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (DoEd), Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). This program is designed to meet the textbook rental needs of any postsecondary student and aims to help improve low-cost access to higher education textbooks for all students, including those with print-related disabilities. "

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is stepping up its investment in innovative delivery models in higher education, announcing $9-million in grants today to support a range of new approaches. Among the awards is the foundation's first contribution to so-called MOOC's, or Massive Open Online Courses, where professors let anyone online take their courses, sometimes attracting tens of thousands of learners. Specifically, the Gates Foundation is giving $1-million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its MITx project, which offers such open courses.

"I found that producing video lectures spurred me to hone pedagogical presentation to a far higher level than I had in 10 years of teaching the class on campus," he said. The result was an online class that he describes as "significantly more rigorous and demanding than the on-campus version." It takes an immense amount of work to produce an adequate MOOC," The continuing participation of top faculty members in massive online courses, he said, will depend on whether their colleges are willing to let MOOCs distract them from their traditional duties. At that point, Mr. Owens said, campus officials will need to ask themselves whether they want to give that faculty time to online students, "99 percent of whom who are not at their universities."

improving the quality of instructional design will be key to whether MOOCs eventually find their role within American higher education,

"Shortly after the invention of the quantum computer chip, and the laying of fibre optic broadband to almost every house in the UK, it had been clear that the days of teaching as a profession were numbered. Teaching had been relegated to a minority profession in a matter of years. It had been simply a question of scale. A teacher, working for 45 years, could teach maybe 1,500 children. Some lessons would be better than others, some children would get more attention and do better than others, they'd occasionally need time off and so on. Simply put, human teachers were inconsistent, and not always great. So when the new educational bodies started recording the best lectures for every subject from around in the world, annotating them in 3D, and enhancing them with CG, what could the schools do to fight back?"

That's neat. Time for professors to update their resumes?

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to host a gathering of interested parties to identify and discuss solutions to the challenge facing us with etextbooks and their adoption in higher education."

if FWK (or other organizations) can find sustainability while distributing free digital textbooks, the textbook market could be dramatically altered. Because it is so hard to compete with "free," textbook prices would likely come down and eventually become only a small part of the cost of higher education. The potential for the disruption of the textbook publishing industry, as well as the potential savings to students, is enormous if one or more organizations can create a sustainable business model. Whether this can be done remains to be seen.

"Transform your institution to reap the benefits of the digital age. With Adobe's industry-leading portfolio of technologies and services, you can help faculty, students, and staff deliver standout digital experiences that promote excellence campuswide."

Disrupting Ourselves, The Problem of Learning in Higher Education

Great article by Randy Bass. There is a reference to the eportfolio model that C2L is starting to create. He also aligns eportfolios and PLE's. [E-portfolios, or Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), or whatever they are named-as something that enables students to weave these connections back and forth across the formal and experiential curricula-will be an essential element of our response to this disruptive moment. Randy also mentions the emerging discussions about learning analytics.

"This wiki was created by Utah Valley University's Innovation Center and is collaboratively authored by Utah higher ed institutions as part of the Instructure Canvas statewide LMS project, hosted and supported by the Utah Education Network (UEN). "

"Salt Lake Community College, in connection with the Utah System of Higher Education Consortium, is adopting Instructure Canvas as its new learning management system. Canvas will replace Blackboard Vista as the system for hosting online learning activities and course content. All courses currently hosted in Blackboard Vista will be moved to Instructure Canvas by July 1, 2012."

"'Learning Analytics' is a term used to describe an emerging professional practice that systematically applies statistics and research methods to large "n" data sets. Analysts look for patterns among the analyzed results that can inform more accountable decision-making."

Does anyone know if UD is a member of WCET (WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies)? I signed up to follow the blog. WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) accelerates the adoption of effective practices and policies, advancing excellence in technology-enhanced teaching and learning in higher education.

In a few slides, he'd spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT's OpenCourseWare-the university's decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses-he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.