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Starbucks has started a college assistance program for its staff members to earn four year college degrees, ONLINE, through Arizona State University. ASU has dedicated Pretty neat if it works as described.

Commencement speeches at different colleges, June 15, 2014 Harvey Mudd College Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist "Your unique education has prepared you for careers at the cutting edge of innovation. This is both good news and bad news. It's good news because you're probably going to find a job, it will pay well, and it will be intellectually fulfilling. It's bad news because whatever you thought you were training for when you started this exercise might not actually exist anymore. Five years ago, when you guys were deciding where to go to college, there were very few mobile-app developers or big-data architects, and there certainly weren't any chief listening officers for social media outlets. It's hard to imagine where the next five years will go, but it's kind of fun to do so. ... Who knows, but you guys are going to be among the people that are actually making it happen. And it'll be awesome, as long as you're willing to take some risks and step outside of your comfort zone. When an opportunity arises, take it." UNC at Chapel Hill Atul Gawande, doctor and writer "Ultimately, it turns out we all have an intrinsic need to pursue purposes larger than ourselves, purposes worth making sacrifices for. People often say, 'Find your passion.' But there's more to it than that. Not all passions are enough. Just existing for your desires feels empty and insufficient, because our desires are fleeting and insatiable. You need a loyalty. The only way life is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. ... the search for purpose is really a search for a place, not an idea. It is a search for a location in the world where you want to be part of making things better for others in your own small way. It could be a classroom where you teach, a business where you work, a neighborhood where you live. The key is, if you find yourself in a place where you stop caring - where your greatest conce

Research brief that looks at online learning in higher education from the perspectives of employers and community college students. 2013. Notes that community colleges serve nearly 1/2 the nation's undergraduate students. Overwhelming majority is first-generation college students. Online educ is flexible and opens up study options. But many cc students are underprepared for college.

Review by Rob Jenkins on the Chronicle, 3.18.13, on why MOOCs are a massively bad idea for wait-listed community college students in California as proposed in new legislation there. Excerpt: "We know that succeeding in online classes requires an extraordinary degree of organization, self-discipline, motivation, and time-management skill. A simple Google search of "how to succeed in online classes" yields a plethora of Web sites-including many college and university sites-offering students such gems as "be organized," "manage your time wisely," and (my favorite) "stay motivated."" Excerpt: So to recap, California's plan (or to be fair, one senator's plan) is basically to dump hundreds of thousands of the state's least-prepared and least-motivated students into a learning environment that requires the greatest amount of preparation and motivation, where they will take courses that may or may not be effective in that format. Here's a prediction: Those students will fail and drop out at astronomical rates. Then the hand-wringing will begin anew, the system will pour millions more dollars into "retention" efforts, and the state will be in an even deeper fix than it is now. (Virtual cheating will probably run rampant, too, followed by expensive anticheating measures, but that's another blog post.) Look, I'm not a politician or an economist. I don't know the answer to California higher education's budget woes. But I'm pretty sure herding community-college students into MOOCs is not it.

interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, September 2012, Harvard Magazine on business ecosystems and how they thrive with connections between large and small businesses, education and business, turning ideas into enterprises, and cross-sector collaboration

article by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post, February 15, 2015, on how colleges are eliminating or reducing or redesigning lectures in class to make them available online outside of class hours, mixing them with interactive questions and discussion, and making them shorter.

article by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post, February 15, 2015, on how colleges are eliminating or reducing or redesigning lectures in class to make them available online outside of class hours, mixing them with interactive questions and discussion, and making them shorter. 

From undercoverrecruiter.com: Indeed and Monster have more candidates without a college education, Careerbuilder has more candidates with a college education and degrees. Indeed and Monster cater to teenagers, temporary job seekers, those only with a high school education and those freshly out of college. Careerbuilder weeds out some of the less serious applicants and is used more by high-scale employers. Entry-level hiring employers use Monster. For employers, Indeed is cheapest to use, then Monster, with Careerbuilder being the most expensive. Employers still use Careerbuilder because it weeds out unqualified and less serious applicants.

MOOCs have hit TIme mag!

The Chronicle of Research Services issued this report: The College 2020: Students. Although from 2013, it has a great section on a poll from students who identified the rigidity of University learning was stifling them. Their suggestions included customizable text books, mobile learning, and self-directed curricula.

Rio Salado College is an online community college and offers a lot of the topics we want to offer in the Studio. This link is to the description of their offers in relation to online overload and net savvy. Although geared towards their students, anyone could take these.

I'm beginning to wonder if we have been overcome by events in terms of our learning offers! The course descriptions look really good.

DIY for after high school. Dropping out of college or not going at all is viewed as an alternative track for those who don't want to accrue massive debt and want to create the next "app" or online company.

Article by Kerry Hannon, Forbes, 1.25.13 This author asserts that older workers will become more valued by employers even though they aren't making special efforts to hire or retain them now and do not want to pay for the cost of training/retraining them. These trends suggest that taking charge of one's own learning with a PLP, PLN, etc. and taking advantage of all the free opportunities will be valuable skills to have. This author only looks to community colleges for retraining and does not reference any of the online options that we know about from the work on the directory. Should we draft a comment back to Kerry Hannon on this website? "1. Who is going to pay for that training? Most labor market experts I have interviewed say the government and private employers need to ramp up more training programs for older workers and create workplaces that make it easier for them to do their jobs. Employers don't want to spend for it. They've already cut to the bone to stay competitive globally in recent years and this kind of spending is a tough sell. Conceivably, as I discussed as a panel member at a recent Federal Reserve Workforce Development conference, one way to provide the needed training is through the community college system. The coursework could be offered at an affordable cost for the worker. Depending on who foots the bill, employers or employeees could receive tax incentives to ease the tuition bill. (Please continue to next page.) "

Emerging Ed Tech site with blog on how MOOCs will impact the future of college education, K. Walsh, April 25, 2012

Importance of learning online to replace formal degree seeking activities by Lolly Daskal and Matthew Brimer, founder of General Assembly, turning thinkers into creaters "Luckily for you, there are now a ton of educational resources and pathways to learn web design and hone your skills, available both online and offline, without the requirement of pursuing a traditional college degree. When hiring a designer, most employers today care about your portfolio over your resume, your creative talent over your GPA, and your ability to produce great work over the name brand of the school you attended."

article by Steven Mintz for the Chronicle of HE, July 22, 2013 Excerpt: "But the most important challenge involves a shift in the way students consume higher education. Instead of attending a single institution, students receive credit in multiple ways, including from early-college/dual-degree programs, community colleges, online providers, and multiple universities. Students are voting with their feet, embracing online courses and undermining core curricula, which served as a cash cow, by turning to alternate providers, and pursuing fewer majors that require study of a foreign language." Fifteen innovations: 1. e-advising 2. evidence-based pedagogy 3. decline of lone eagle teaching 4. optimized class time 5. earlier educational transitions 6. fewer large lecture classes 7. new frontiers for e-learning 8. personalized adaptive learning 9. increased competency based and prior learning results; 10. data driven instructions 11. aggressive pursuit of new revenue 12. online and low-residency degrees at flagships 13. more certificates and badges 14. free and open textbooks 15. public-private partnerships

College students don't use email because it is too slow, you have to put in a subject, and you have to send it. They all text, which is faster and less labor intensive. They also don't use search engines. One professor reports saying to students (he is an academic adviser) "have you tried Google?). Usually, they hadn't.

Inside Higher Ed article by Scott Jaschik, April 20, 2015, on how students studying online in California's community colleges are not as successful in completing courses or earning As and Bs as their peers do working f2f in classroom formats.

Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States is the tenth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education. The survey is designed, administered and analyzed by the Babson Survey Research Group. Data collection is conducted in partnership with the College Board. This year's study, like those for the previous nine years, tracks the opinions of chief academic officers and is aimed at answering fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education. Based on responses from more than 2,800 colleges and universities,

Dr. Tuajuanda C. Jordan is president of St. Mary's College of Maryland, a small liberal arts school. Jordan was trained as a biochemist, but had a liberal arts education and was exposed to natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and the arts while attending college. This is a very articulate and clear essay on why liberal arts education matters, and how learning to question is its most valuable trait.

interesting article in NYT on February 24, 2013 on how adults long out of high school in some cases cobbled together learning experiences--formal academic work, open courseware, and experiential--to receive college degrees from Thomas Edison in New Jersey without ever having arrived on campus or borrowed money to pay for their degrees