PSU TLT

I think it would be cool to add a link in our new LMS where students could share their class notes online with the other students in the class. A rating system could percolate the best notes to the top and a search feature could possibly return a page of student notes using that word or phrase.

In a former textile mill in downtown Manchester, the university's president, Paul J. ­LeBlanc, has installed a team of for-profit veterans who help run a highly autonomous online outfit that caters to older students, with classes taught mostly by low-paid adjuncts. Their online operation is the institution's economic engine, subsidizing its money-losing undergraduate campus, known as University College, whose 2,350 students enjoy a new dining hall, Olympic-size pool, and small classes taught largely by full-time professors. "The traditional campus, in some ways, now has the resources to be even more traditional," Mr. LeBlanc says in his office on the suburban main campus, four miles from the online college. "And the nontraditional, with this split, has the ability to be even more nontraditional."

"It doesn't seem to me to be the 'disruptive innovation' that's going to transform things," says Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University and one of the authors of Academically Adrift, a harsh critique of undergraduate learning. "It seems to me like just business as usual.

A lucrative one, too. With 7,000 online students, up from 1,700 four years ago, the College of Online and Continuing Education is on track to generate $73-million in revenues this year and more than $100-million next year. It posted a 41-percent "profit" margin in the 2011 fiscal year. The university plows the surplus into new buildings, employee salaries, financial aid at the traditional campus, and improvements in the online program.

Sprint officials reasoned that colleges would flock to the free version of the software, Mobile Learn. And because only Sprint customers could use the software with Android, BlackBerry and Palm phones, college students would have a powerful incentive to sign up with Sprint.

Sprint asked a judge to bar Blackboard from allowing its free iPhone and iPad versions to use wireless networks.

The exact amount is unclear, but Sprint will eventually owe more than $50-million that it has not already paid, Blackboard said in a court document. Sprint must pay Blackboard $2 per month for every student who has downloaded Mobile Learn for Sprint, in addition to millions in other fees, the document says.

A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.

The three online courses, which will employ both streaming Internet video and interactive technologies for quizzes and grading, have in the past been taught to smaller groups of Stanford students in campus lecture halls. Last year, for example, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence drew 177 students.

How will the artificial intelligence instructors grade 58,000 students? The scientists said they would make extensive use of technology. “We have a system running on the Amazon cloud, so we think it will hold up,” Dr. Norvig said.

Davidson uses the insights from these experiments as a lens through which to examine the nature and evolution of attention, noting that the educational system is driven by very rigid expectations of what “attention” is and how it reflects “intelligence,” a system in which students who fail to meet these expectations and pay attention differently are pigeonholed somehow deficient of aberrant, square pegs in round holes. Yet neuroscience is increasingly indicating that our minds pay attention in a myriad different ways, often non-linear and simultaneous, which means that the academy and the workplace will have to evolve in parallel and transcend the 20th-century linear assembly-line model for eduction and work.

Announcing AWS GovCloud, a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. Previously, government agencies with data subject to compliance regulations such as the International Trade and Arms Regulation (ITAR), which governs how organizations manage and store defense-related data, were unable to process and store data in the cloud that the federal government mandated be accessible only by U.S. persons. Because AWS GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by U.S. persons only, government agencies can now manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with strict federal requirements. The new Region offers the same high level of security as other AWS Regions and supports existing AWS security controls and certifications such as FISMA, SAS-70, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1. AWS also provides an environment that enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations. AWS resources deployed from AWS GovCloud such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are available on-demand and agencies pay only for what they use, allowing the U.S. government to benefit from the flexibility, scalability and low pay-as-you-go pricing of AWS. Customers who are interested in learning more about the AWS GovCloud should contact their government sales representative by filling out the Contact Us form on the AWS GovCloud website.