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"Is Increasing Teaching Loads a Wise Idea? March 24, 2011, 11:00 am By Richard Vedder The Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, faced with a massive looming budget deficit ($8-billion), has come forth with a budget that is, by staid Ohio standards, rather innovative, calling for selling assets (e.g., prisons), radically restructuring nursing home care for the elderly, etc. His higher-education budget amounts, while down from previous years, were not down as much as university presidents feared (unlike in neighboring Pennsylvania, faced with similar budgetary woes, where university operating subsidies are proposed to be reduced over 50 percent). But one proposal is bound to raise a ruckus: The governor has asked that all full-time faculty members teach one more course every two years. This probably means an increase in teaching load that averages roughly 10 percent for full-time faculty, more for senior research-oriented professors. Like most in higher education, I prefer it when legislators and governors say "cut expenses by X percent-by whatever means is best given your academic mission," then when they say "increase teaching loads by X in order to reduce instructional costs in the long run." Even if a teaching load increase is going to be mandated, it is better done at an institutional level-University X must have its existing staff teaching Y percent more courses-than at the level of the individual instructor. That approach allows universities to raise teaching loads a good deal for some, but not at all for persons who are, for example, highly productive researchers who should be spending time in the laboratory rather than the classroom. Also, many faculty are actually paying their own way via federal or other research grants, and besides being foolhardy to increase their teaching loads, it might even violate those grants to take on additional teaching responsibilities. Having said all of that, however, I understand where John Kasich is coming from, a

The Chronicle of Higher Education February 19, 2012 How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture By Dan Berrett Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos. It happens frequently, when he asks the 80 students in his evolutionary-biology class at the University of Colorado at Boulder to work in small groups to solve a problem, or when he asks them to persuade one another that the answer they arrived at before class is correct. When they start working together, his students rarely stay in their seats, which are bolted to the floor. Instead they gather in the hallway or in the aisles, or spill toward the front of the room, where the professor typically stands. Mr. Martin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, drops in on the discussions, asking and answering questions, and hearing where students are stumped. "Students are effectively educating each other," he says of the din that overtakes his room. "It means they're in control, and not me." Enlarge Image How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture 2 Benjamin Rasmussen for The Chronicle Students discuss the relationship between finches' beak sizes and survival rates during Andrew Martin's evolutionary-biology class at the U. of Colorado at Boulder. Such moments of chaos are embraced by advocates of a teaching technique called "flipping." As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or list

"May 2, 2011 Balance Your Budget by Cleaning House By Michael J. Bugeja As we approach the end of another academic term, some institutions are still living off of stimulus money that did little to inspire solutions to mammoth budget cuts looming for the 2012 academic year, which promises to be one of the most difficult in memory for higher education. I direct the journalism school at Iowa State University, a land-grant institution that strives to make education affordable in good or bad economic times. We've experienced layoffs, firings, and furloughs, and are still in the process of reorganizing within my college of liberal arts and sciences. My school is the largest academic program in the largest college at ISU, and our budget has been slashed by more than 20 percent in the past four years. Nevertheless, in the next academic year, we'll balance our budget without increasing workload for most professors, while graduating students sooner-thanks to streamlined curricula, enhanced by advising. To accomplish those goals, the journalism school and other units at the university have adopted or are in the process of adopting several of the methods below: 1. Curtail curricular expansion. Nothing is more responsible for the increasing cost of higher education than ever-expanding pedagogies. Too many professors want their course loads to harmonize with their research interests, and many create courses based on the latest technology. Others are unwilling to teach basic introductory courses, preferring to farm those out to underpaid adjuncts. Worse yet, administrators typically reward professors for new course creation. Expanding pedagogies are a part of our academic culture, but they must be curtailed. Early adopters should introduce new technology into existing classes, and hires should be made not on the promise of creating new curricula but on teaching within the existing ones. Promotion-and-tenure documents should be revised to reward innovation within the present c

"The Year Ahead in IT, 2012 January 6, 2012 - 3:00am By Lev Gonick This series of annual Year Ahead articles on technology and education began on the eve of what we now know is one of the profound downturns in modern capitalism. When history is written, the impact of the deep economic recession of 2008-2012 will have been pivotal in the shifting balance of economic and political power around the world. Clear, too, is the reality that innovation and technology as it is applied to education is moving rapidly from its Anglo-American-centered roots to a now globally distributed dynamic generating disruptive activities that affect learners and institutions the world over. Seventy years ago, the Austrian-born Harvard lecturer and conservative political economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the now famous description of the logic of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The opening of new markets, foreign or domestic … illustrate(s) the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use that biological term - that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Our colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, are among the most conservative institutions in the world. The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with higher education. The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocatio

"Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up January 23, 2012, 4:53 pm By Nick DeSantis The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience. Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital - Life - Design conference in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters. During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than "a camera, a pen and a napkin." Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course's popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said. Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move was motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, "the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digitial media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago," he said. He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn't continue teaching in a traditional setting. "Having done this, I can't teach at Stanford again," he said. One o

"Fixing Higher Ed August 24, 2010 By Henry F. Fradella The press and the blogosphere have devoted significant coverage recently to a report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce that predicted that the United States is on "collision course with the future." The report estimated that within a mere eight years, the nation will suffer a shortfall of at least 3 million workers with college degrees and 4.7 million workers with postsecondary certificates. The authors of the report concluded that to meet the challenges of a global economy in which 59 to 63 percent of domestic jobs require education beyond the high-school level, America's colleges and universities "need to increase the number of degrees they confer by 10 percent annually, a tall order." Although numerous commentators have responded to the report by echoing its call for increased access to higher education, it seems to me that few have focused on a key term in the report's call to "develop reforms that result in both cost-efficient and high quality postsecondary education." Producing millions more baccalaureate-educated workers will do nothing to address the competitiveness of the U.S. workforce if those degrees are not high quality ones. Sadly, it is pretty clear that far too many college degrees aren't worth the paper on which they are printed. In 2006, the Spellings Commission reported disturbing data that more than 60 percent of college graduates were not proficient in prose, document, and quantitative literacy. In other words, significantly more than half of college degree holders in the United States lack the "critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today's workplaces." Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, cited these findings in his recent Huffington Post essay, "The Failure of American Higher Education." He shared stories about recent college graduates, many from prestigious universitie

"Ready for Change.edu? January 11, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain Andrew S. Rosen takes the long view when talking about higher education. As CEO of Kaplan, Inc., he often defends the role of for-profit colleges in an evolving marketplace, peppering versions of his stump speech with tales about the creation of public universities and community colleges. His point is that some skepticism about for-profits is similar to the snobbery those older sectors faced from elite private higher education. Rosen goes further in his debut book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, which attempts to paint a picture of higher education's future as well as its history. He also takes a turn as a journalist of sorts - an interesting twist for the former general counsel of the Washington Post Co. - writing about his campus visits to other institutions, a couple of which are Kaplan competitors. The book is ambitious in its scope, particularly for an author with obvious vested interests. But most reviewers have given Rosen high marks. Kirkus Reviews writes: "Incredibly, his argument never comes off as self-serving; the author's thorough exploration of 'Harvard Envy' and the rise of 'resort' campuses is both fascinating and enlightening." Rosen recently answered questions over e-mail about his book, which was released by Kaplan Publishing. Q: The book arrives amid a series of challenges for your industry. What did you hope to accomplish by writing it? A: I've spent most of my life studying or working in education, with students of all ages and preparation levels: top students from America's most elite institutions and working adults and low-income students who have few quality choices to change their lives. I've come to see how the American higher education system (as with K-12) is profoundly tilted in favor of those who already have advantages. Our society keeps investing more and more in the relatively small and unchanging number of students who have the privil

"A Disrupted Higher-Ed System January 26, 2012, 2:40 pm By Jeff Selingo The "disruption" of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard's Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players. What exactly those innovations will look like remains a matter of debate. One view from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, envisions a future in which every industry will be disrupted and "rebuilt with people at the center." In this recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg talked specifically about the gaming industry, which has been upended by the popularity of social-gaming venues, such as Words With Friends and Farmville. But what if we applied her people-centered vision to higher ed? While amenities and services on campuses have been redesigned in the last decade with students clearly at the center, the core of the academic experience for students today is almost exactly the same as it was for their parents decades ago. While other industries have been able to find productivity gains without sacrificing quality, on most college campuses we still have professors at the front of a room or at a table with an average of 16 students in front of them. We all know that's one of the key drivers of rising college costs. Higher ed is people intensive, and for many prospective students and their parents, the professor-centered academic experience is well worth the high price and will be for a long time. It's one reason why high-quality institutions really have little to worry about. But we also know that the traditional academic experience isn't for everyone these days. The students we used to call "nontraditional" are now a majority, yet we have way too many colleges chasing after high-achieving 18-to-24-year-olds

"January 23, 2012 Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere By William Pannapacker By now most everyone has heard about an experiment that goes something like this: Students dressed in black or white bounce a ball back and forth, and observers are asked to keep track of the bounces to team members in white shirts. While that's happening, another student dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into their midst, looks around, thumps his chest, then walks off, apparently unseen by most observers because they were so focused on the bouncing ball. Voilà: attention blindness. The invisible-gorilla experiment is featured in Cathy Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011). Davidson is a founder of a nearly 7,000-member organization called Hastac, or the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, that was started in 2002 to promote the use of digital technology in academe. It is closely affiliated with the digital humanities and reflects that movement's emphasis on collaboration among academics, technologists, publishers, and librarians. Last month I attended Hastac's fifth conference, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Davidson's keynote lecture emphasized that many of our educational practices are not supported by what we know about human cognition. At one point, she asked members of the audience to answer a question: "What three things do students need to know in this century?" Without further prompting, everyone started writing down answers, as if taking a test. While we listed familiar concepts such as "information literacy" and "creativity," no one questioned the process of working silently and alone. And noticing that invisible gorilla was the real point of the exercise. Most of us are, presumably, the products of compulsory educational practices that were developed during the Industrial Revolution. And the way most of us teach is a relic of the s

"If Engineers Were to Rethink Higher Ed's Future September 27, 2011, 10:27 pm By Jeffrey Selingo Atlanta - Walk into a college president's office these days, and you'll probably find a degree hanging on the wall from one of three academic disciplines: education, social sciences, or the humanities and fine arts. Some 70 percent of college leaders completed their studies in one of those fields, according to the American Council on Education. You're unlikely to discover many engineering degrees. Just 2 percent of college presidents are engineers. Yet, when we think of solving complex problems, we normally turn to engineers to help us figure out solutions. And higher education right now is facing some tough issues: rising costs; low completion rates; and delivery systems, curricula, and teaching methods that show their age. So what if engineers tackled those problems using their reasoning skills and tested various solutions through simulations? Perhaps then we would truly design a university of the future. That's the basic idea behind Georgia Tech's new Center for 21st Century Universities. The center is officially described as a "living laboratory for fundamental change in higher education," but its director, Rich DeMillo, describes it in terms we can all understand: higher education's version of the Silicon Valley "garage." DeMillo knows that concept well, having come from Hewlett-Packard, where he was chief technology officer (he's also a former Georgia Tech dean). Applying the garage mentality to innovation in higher ed is an intriguing concept, and as DeMillo described it to me over breakfast on Georgia Tech's Atlanta campus on Tuesday, I realized how few college leaders adopt its principles. Take, for example, a university's strategic plan. Such documents come and go with presidents, and the proposals in every new one are rarely tested in small ways before leaders try to scale them across the campus. After all, presidents have l

"What Does It Mean To Be an Academic? January 6, 2012, 4:21 pm By Nigel Thrift There is a fascinating moment when academics reflect upon their practices in ways that are not just emblematic but are clearly leading to real change in what the practice of being an academic actually means. I have been reminded of this fact twice recently as I have considered practices of teaching and research at a number of universities around the world. First, in the case of teaching, there was seeing some of the new educational technology which is coming into operation. I am not just talking about remarkable educational sites like the interactive simulation site for the physical sciences, PhET, which is used by so many science professors. As good as these undoubtedly can be at allowing students to reach a level of competence in particular problems before they come near a lecture, there is also the new software which allows real interaction in the classroom and the tracking of the reaction to that interaction in order to enable new rounds of inquiry. The consequences are only just being worked through but in time, I am now pretty sure, the lecture in its old form, understood as a direct oral presentation intended to present information or to teach students about a particular subject and delivered by a lecturer standing at the front of the room and giving out information and judgments, will become a minority teaching method. Instead, what were lectures will be recorded for students to consult-many universities have already produced a library of such presentations-and the time previously put by for lectures will be used as a surgery, as a time for problem-solving, clarification, and the like. This is a no less time-consuming method of teaching-indeed, it may involve more work. But I think it is likely to become the norm in many disciplines. Second, in the case of research, there has been reading Paul Rabinow's latest book, The Accompaniment, which includes a fascinating cha

"Technology Is at Least 3 Years Away From Improving Student Success January 13, 2012, 7:34 am By Josh Fischman Las Vegas-At the very start of the Higher Ed Tech Summit here this week, James Applegate threw out a challenge. Mr. Applegate, vice president for program development at the Lumina Foundation, told an overflow crowd that the United States needed 60 percent of its adults to hold high-quality degrees and credentials by the year 2025. During the rest of the day, technology executives described programs that could improve graduation rates and learning, but won't be able to do so for several years. They collect many points of data on what professors and students do, but can't yet say what results in better grades and graduation rates. "We're beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don't have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that," said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker. "These are really early days," agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard. There's lots of technology out there that's outcome-related. For instance, at the meeting, which is part of the international Consumer Electronics Show, the interactive textbook publisher Kno announced a suite of new features. One of them, a performance gauge callled Kno Me, gives students information about how much time they spend on different sections of a book, the results of quizzes, and the kinds of notes they took. "With thousands of students using these books, we can show them which of these variables are related to students-anonymous, of course-who get A's, or B's, or C's, so students learn what kind of activity leads to the best results," said Osman Rashid, the company's chief ex

"Wikipedia Aims Higher July 11, 2011 BOSTON - The United States' foremost custodian of public records had advice for professors whose colleagues still turn up their noses at Wikipedia. "If all else fails, you can tell them, 'If it's good enough for the archivist of the United States,' " said David Ferriero, who was appointed to the post in 2009, " 'we should at least take a look at it on campus.' " Five years ago, many professors had pegged Wikipedia as a pariah. Now, four years into its first coordinated effort to recruit professors and students to its cause, Wikipedia's overseers believe they have successfully recast the free, publicly edited encyclopedia as an ally of respectable scholarship. Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have "Wikipedia ambassadors" tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero's office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a "Wikipedian in residence" in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Late last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the encyclopedia, took another step toward assuming the mantle of an accessory of higher education: it held an academic conference. The first-ever Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit convened professors who had incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, as well as others who were considering doing so, to talk about pros and cons of assigning students to improve the publicly edited online encyclopedia. The foundation also made it clear that Wikipedia plans to expand its relationship with academe. When the foundation started recruiting professors several years ago for its Public Policy Initiative - an effort to improve articles relating to U.S. public policy - it already had its eye set on developing "mechanisms and systems that would enabl

"Annals of Higher Education Get Rich U. There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be? by Ken Auletta April 30, 2012 Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university's focus on interdisciplinary education. Photograph by Aaron Huey. inShare214 Print E-Mail Single Page Related Links Audio: Ken Auletta on Silicon Valley and Stanford University. Keywords Stanford University; Silicon Valley; John Hennessy; Education; Entrepreneurs; Distance Learning; Technology Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it's as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Stanford duck syndrome": students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley. Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late twe

"The Disruption Is Here September 15, 2011 - 3:00am Michael Staton A recent essay here by Robert Archibald and David Feldman challenged the idea of a "higher education bubble." They argued that a degree, even an expensive degree, is still worth it. They correctly pointed out that a degree is not an asset that responds to supply and demand like other markets. Their point that "on average most of us are average, and the data show that college is a very good investment for the average person," is true enough. But their real message was: there's no need to panic, the status quo is still working. I disagree. Said essay is part of a broader continuing discussion, this round set off by Peter Thiel's statements surrounding his 20 Under 20 Program encouraging students to "stop out" of college - with the idea that they are more likely to achieve entrepreneurial breakthroughs on their own than with more formal education. Thiel is a managing partner at one of the venture investors, Founders Fund, in my company, Inigral. Ironically, Inigral serves educational institutions with our Schools App, and most of our clients are traditional colleges and universities. (Schools App is a community platform inside Facebook and on mobile devices that helps to welcome the incoming class during the admissions, orientation, and first-year experience, making sure students find their "fit" and get off on the right foot.) So my company helps keep students in college while Thiel is going around talking about the potential value of "stopping out." Given this irony, people often ask me what I think about Thiel's comments suggesting that higher education is in a bubble. Here's what I think: He is mostly right, but the future prospects for education are more optimistic than Thiel suggests for two primary reasons: 1) Though it looks like an economic bubble, it's unlikely that there will be a precise moment in which the market crashes. Instead, there will be a slow market shift towards amor

"December 31, 2011 Let's Improve Learning. OK, but How? By W. Robert Connor Does American higher education have a systematic way of thinking about how to improve student learning? It would certainly be useful, especially at a time when budgets are tight and the pressure is on to demonstrate better results. Oh, there's plenty of discussion-bright ideas, old certainties, and new approaches-and a rich discourse about innovation, reinvention, and transformation. But the most powerful ideas about improving learning are often unspoken. Amid all the talk about change, old assumptions exert their continuing grasp. For example, most of us assume that expanding the number of fields and specialties in the curriculum (and of faculty to teach them), providing more small classes, and lowering teaching loads (and, hence, lowering student-faculty ratios) are inherently good things. But while many of those ideas are plausible, few have been rigorously evaluated. So maybe it's time to stop relying on assumptions about improving learning and start finding out what really works best. A genuine theory of change, as such a systematic evaluation of effectiveness is sometimes called, would be grounded in knowledge about how students learn, and in the best way to put that knowledge to work. The theory should also be educationally robust; that is, it should not just help colleges expose students to certain subject matter, but also challenge institutions to help students develop the long-lasting survival skills needed in a time of radical and often unpredictable change. And it must also have its feet on the ground, with a sure footing in financial realities. Above all, those who would develop a truly systematic way of thinking about and creating change must be able to articulate their purpose. Given the great diversity of institutional types, student demographics, history, and mission among American colleges and universities, it's hard to discern a shared sense of purpose. But when f

"The Quiet Revolution in Open Learning By Kevin Carey In the late days of March 2010, Congressional negotiators dealt President Obama's community-college reform agenda what seemed like a fatal blow. A year later, it appears that, remarkably, the administration has fashioned the ashes of that defeat into one of the most innovative federal higher-education programs ever conceived. Hardly anyone has noticed. Obama originally called for $12-billion in new spending on community-college infrastructure and degree completion. The money was to come from eliminating public subsidies to for-profit banks that made student loans. But late in the process, some lawmakers insisted that savings that had already occurred, because of colleges' switching into the federal direct-loan program in anticipation of the new law, didn't count as savings. Billions were pulled off the table, and the community-college plan was shelved. Two days later, negotiators found $2-billion. But they could spend it only on a U.S. Department of Labor program restricted to workers who had lost their jobs because of shifts in global trade. The fit with the president's expansive agenda seemed awkward, and the amount was pennies on the original dollar. Cynical commentators called it a "consolation prize." Then, the Education and Labor Departments decided to do something highly uncharacteristic of large federal bureaucracies: They began to talk. To one another. Constructively. What they devised could change higher education for huge numbers of students, many of whom will never attend a community college at all. The concept is simple: Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials-videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more-available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license. The materials will become, to use the common term, open educational resources, or OER's. The open-resource movement has

"January 2, 2011 6 Top Smartphone Apps to Improve Teaching, Research, and Your Life Academics describe going mobile to plan lectures, keep up with scholarship, and run classes "I used to use a piece of paper" for taking attendance in class, says David M. Reed, a computer-science professor at Capital U., but he kept losing the sheet. The smartphone app that he wrote to do the job has gained him about $20,000 on the iTunes store. By Jeffrey R. Young Not long ago, it seemed absurd for aca­demics to carry around a computer, camera, and GPS device every­where they went. Actually, it still seems absurd. But many professors (and administrators) now do just that in the form of all-in-one devices. Smartphones or tablet computers combine many functions in a hand-held gadget, and some users are discovering clever ways to teach and do research with the ubiquitous machines. For many on campus, checking e-mail on the go is the first killer app of the hand-held world. The downside: Having that ability can mean working more than ever-answering student e-mails while in line at the grocery store, responding to a journal editor during lunch. There can be benefits, though. Some professors say they find that carrying the Inter­net in their pocket helps them collaborate, teach, and collect data in new ways that include e-mail but go far beyond it. A handful of colleges are running expensive pilot projects in which they give out iPhones or iPads to students and professors to see what happens when everyone goes mobile. Some of the most innovative applications for hand-held devices, however, have come from professors working on their own. They find ways to adapt popular smartphone software to the classroom setting, or even write their own code. That's what I discovered when I put out a call on Twitter, as well as to a major e-mail list of college public-relations officers, asking about the areas in which professors and college officials are making the most of their mobile device

"Sebastian Thrun Resigns from Stanford to Launch Udacity Written by Sue Gee Monday, 23 January 2012 16:07 Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity - an online educational venture. Udacity's first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car. Attendees at this year's DLD (Digital Life,Design) , Conference being held in Munich, Germany and livestreamed around the world, were probably expecting to hear Sebastian Thrun say something of Google's Driverless Car project, but instead that was only covered in the session introduction. (See video below for the full presentation.) DLDTalkThrun Instead Thrun's talk, University 2.0, was devoted to the idea of online education, in particular the experiences and consequences of delivering the Online AI class. As Thrun also explains on his homepage: One of the most amazing things I've ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" to the world online, free of charge. We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career. Speaking at DLD12, Thrun gave other interesting contrasts between the real-world class and the online one: there were more online students from the small country of Lithuania there on all the courses at Stanford combined and while no Standford student had a perfect score on the course, 248 online students scored 100% - i.e completed the assignments and exam question without a single wrong answer. Something that I don't think he should be as proud about i

"Gates Wikipedia University? June 10, 2011, 12:42 pm By Richard Vedder I received an e-mail from James Loynd recently, commenting favorably on an appearance I made on PBS's News Hour. Mr. Loynd asked, "What if the best professors in every department were to video tape their lectures? A student could them work his/her way towards a degree off campus. Even chat-room discussions with grad students could assist the students. Testing could be…not necessarily on campus, maybe even at your local YMCA." Of course, this is not the first time the idea has been suggested, but the question arises: Why are we not moving aggressively to do something like this? More specifically, why doesn't someone-say, the Gates Foundation-hire 100 or so stellar professors in 20 disciplines to offer perhaps 150 to 200 absolutely superb courses online, with testing administered by an outside agency (say, the ACT, SAT, or Underwriter's Laboratories)? Even paying each professor $100,000 per course and allowing for 100 percent overhead, this would cost $30- to $40-million. There would be some expenses for administration and a need to redo lectures every few years, but the whole thing is within the financial capacity of several foundations in the private sector. The upshot would be that a student taking about 32 of the courses would have the equivalent of a B.A. degree, and it could be offered to the student free (with modest per-student private or government subsidies) or at very modest cost. If someone proposed to do this, of course, there would be all sorts of objections. Some would argue you need more disciplines included, more courses, etc. And who would accredit the institution issuing the degree? Most such objections are trivial or bogus-for example, a college student does not have to be offered detailed study in every discipline in order to acquire a body of knowledge over roughly a four-year period that is the equivalent of a decent-quality bachelor's degree. Some fu