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Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid classes - those that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component - performed as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming. Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.

It is far more common, however, for Rio Salado to revise its existing courses, which it does every two or three years. The job of creating and revising courses is assigned to a team of faculty and staff members. Each team includes a project manager, who keeps the process moving; a faculty chair, who ensures that the material is rigorous and aligned with the rest of the curriculum;, and a subject-matter expert, who is typically one of the college's 1,400 adjunct faculty members. (Only 23 faculty members are full time). A separate team of technical staffers puts the material online.

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.

"The Center for Instructional Technology maintains a pool of approximately 125 iPads and iPad2s dedicated to student/faculty use in semester-long courses. Interested Duke faculty whose instructional goals are compatible with CIT's annual investigative goals as listed below may submit an application to use iPads in their class. Additional information and a link to the application can be found on the iPad Course Loan page."

"Welcome to Howard Community College's student training site for Canvas, our new learning management system! Most likely, you will have a course in Canvas in the next few semesters, so we have created this site to explain the main features of the system. Here you will find a module-based training approach, so feel free to peruse each module as needed. In the future, you can use this site as a resource for questions about using Canvas in your courses."

Use this template package and tutorials to organize your material and give your course a professional look.

The University of California, Irvine OpenCourseWare is now offering four new courses in Public Health, Physics, and Chemistry on iTunes U. iTunes U provides users with free public access to lectures, videos, books, podcasts, and courses from colleges and universities across the globe. Users can download the content to their iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch with the iTunes U app.

Courseload's seamlessly integrated platform delivers course materials through any web-enabled device (computers, laptops, iPads and Android devices, smart-phones, etc.) allowing all course material to be located in a single place. With digital tools that enable search, highlighting, annotating, and creating links to online content, the technology is easy-to-access and simple to use. And, it costs one-third the price of traditional textbooks - the same textbooks sourced from the same publishers that you use today.

Carl says that we should familiarize ourselves with Courseload, the digital textbook Indiana uses.

"White said that UD faculty have three basic options for dealing with such situations: Faculty members can contact the UD General Counsel's Office and request assistance in sending a "take-down notice" to the offending website; Faculty members can send a take-down notice on their own; or Faculty members can include in their syllabi a notice to the effect that their lectures and other course materials are copyright protected and that students are not authorized to commercialize the notes they take down in class, the test questions they answer or any other course related materials. Students violating this rule would be subject to discipline under the code of conduct in UD's Student Guide to University Policies."

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.

For millions of students worldwide, free, open courseware provides a window, if not a front-row seat, to top university classes. The formats are as varied as the people who tune in. Some consist mainly of lectures recorded on iTunes, while other courses seek to replicate a classroom experience by offering study groups, computer-graded tests, and weekly assignments. And while you might get a badge or certificate showing you mastered the material, you generally won't get direct interaction with the professor, who may have recorded the lectures a few years ago. Here is a look at five introductory economics classes: four through open courseware and one in a traditional classroom.

UW Canvas (uw.instructure.com) is a feature-rich learning management software, allowing for simplified course management, seamless course calendaring, and efficient grading. Canvas improves communication between instructors and students through integrating multiple tools and methods.

"several of the Kaleidoscope schools started using the rSmart Academic LMS, built on the Sakai open academic environment, which allows faculty to pull Kaleidoscope modules into their courses and add localizations. It also allows users to access the reservoir of openly licensed, shared content used in the Kaleidoscope courses. "This is the only LMS designed for the era of open sharing of content and a collaborative approach to curriculum design, so it could not be a more perfect match," says Thanos. "It allows for social connections and you can bring your academic content into your profile." "

"Emily Furgang, Doctoral Candidate in Occupational Science and CIDD Fellow shares how a traditional Blackboard course was transformed into a problem-based, hybrid Sakai course (part online, part face-to-face instruction). For students, Sakai becomes "a universal meeting place.""

"For instructors who are currently teaching courses on Instructure Canvas, the following content package is available to download and import into your course."

"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."

Coursera's leaders say they are actively pursuing only two of the moneymaking ideas on the list: charging students who pass the courses a small fee for a certificate, and serving as a matchmaker between students looking for jobs and companies seeking qualified employees.

"Our application provides real-time copyright clearance and an ever-expanding content library along with the ability to add your own materials and articles from the web. And - peer recommendations from colleagues in your discipline can present new possibilities to enrich your courses. "

This is basically a course pack builder. It takes care of copyright clearance and offers the option for students to download as a digital file or get a print-on-demand.

"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."