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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.

The 11-year-old online program accounts for just over a quarter of the enrollment at UMass's Isenberg School of Management, yet revenues from the program cover about 40 percent of the school's $25-million annual budget. And that's after UMass Online, the in-house marketing agency, as well as a few other arms of the university have taken their cuts. The business school's experience helps to illustrate the economics of distance education and the way one college with a marketable offering is using online education to help its bottom line.

"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."

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.

"In collaboration with Academic Partnerships, the University of Delaware's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics has announced an innovative new online master of business administration (MBA) program. Academic Partnerships was selected to work with the Lerner College to deliver their faculty's curriculum to a growing number of students who want a top MBA delivered in a highly-flexible format. The program is expected to launch in spring 2013. "

Now, with $16 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the two professors officially launched Coursera, their new online education company that includes partnerships with Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania to offer web-based classes on the Coursera platform for free. A total of 37 undergraduate and graduate-level courses across a broad range of disciplines will launch this spring.

Big data, it seems, is everywhere-even in education. Researchers and developers of online learning systems, intelligent tutoring systems, virtual labs, simulations, games and learning management systems are exploring ways to better understand and use data from learners' activities online to improve teaching and learning.

The purpose of this document is two-fold: - to offer an online history of the development of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - to use that history to describe major elements of a MOOC

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 university president has expressed interest in the idea of exploring mechanisms for professors to publish textbooks online, and to receive appropriate academic credit for it," Mr. Carey said.

"Given an expectation of digital literacy among students, why should we worry about student perceptions of CMS tools? For the same reason exemplary instructors stay aware of their students' general learning style preferences-to evolve their teaching styles to meet diverse preferences and maximize learning while also attempting to develop and enhance students' abilities to learn in different ways. Likewise, knowing the CMS tools that students find most effective establishes an important baseline for understanding student needs that can be addressed not only in a CMS but also through other online systems and services. The University of Florida (UF) conducted a survey investigating that question in spring 2009, during the university's most recent CMS evaluation and adoption decision to replace the existing CMS. This research bulletin presents the survey results to help inform other institutions with their own evaluation and adoption processes. The information will also benefit instructors looking to maximize their own use of a local CMS and/or to choose tools that enable personal learning environments, as well as specific tools for learning. "

Insights on student perceptions of the LMS.

"Of the 1,140 respondents, 92% reported they found the system very useful, useful, or somewhat useful, providing further evidence of the mission-critical nature of CMSs. [...] Responses identified their top choices as the ability to see their grades, course announcements, syllabus, assignment submission, online quizzes and tests, discussions, and calendar." (p. 4) "Students most frequently cited the need for a better user interface." (p. 5) "The most repeated suggestions fell into the areas of: - Improving ease of use of the e-learning system - Requesting specific tools or features - Requesting --perhaps requiring-- instructors to use the CMS" (p. 6) "Students most value tools that support self-monitoring: tracking progress, self-assessment, grade book views, and the like." (p. 8)

Online, on demand access to one textbook (~$19/month) costs more than online, on demand access to every major movie, TV show, and song produced in the US in recent memory ($7.99 + $9.99 = $17.98/month). Really. One textbook costs more than the entire output of the film, television, and music industries combined.

Interesting summary -

"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."

"More than 30 professors and 1,200 students are test-driving an alternative to Sakai, called Canvas, this semester, according to Internet Technology project leader Mathieu Plourde. The university has used Sakai for more than four years, but Plourde said he thinks the program shows its age. "

"Regardless of any program the university uses, there will be technical issues that follow. No application is perfect. However, some work better than others. The university should test out different applications and get student and professor feedback before committing. This way, more people can be happy with the university's decision and have a more positive experience using the technology. Online platforms for universities are used to make grading and submitting assignments more convenient. They should not be a stressful experience. "

"Princeton, Penn and Michigan will join Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley as partners of Coursera, a company founded earlier this year by the Stanford engineering professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. Using Coursera's platform, the universities will produce free, online versions of their courses that anyone can take."

"Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books."

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.

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.