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"Learning in Dorm, Because Class Is on the Web By TRIP GABRIEL November 4, 2010 GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Like most other undergraduates, Anish Patel likes to sleep in. Even though his Principles of Microeconomics class at 9:35 a.m. is just a five-minute stroll from his dorm, he would rather flip open his laptop in his room to watch the lecture, streamed live over the campus network. On a recent morning, as Mr. Patel's two roommates slept with covers pulled tightly over their heads, he sat at his desk taking notes on Prof. Mark Rush's explanation of the term "perfect competition." A camera zoomed in for a close-up of the blackboard, where Dr. Rush scribbled in chalk, "lots of firms and lots of buyers." The curtains were drawn in the dorm room. The floor was awash in the flotsam of three freshmen - clothes, backpacks, homework, packages of Chips Ahoy and Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries. The University of Florida broadcasts and archives Dr. Rush's lectures less for the convenience of sleepy students like Mr. Patel than for a simple principle of economics: 1,500 undergraduates are enrolled and no lecture hall could possibly hold them. Dozens of popular courses in psychology, statistics, biology and other fields are also offered primarily online. Students on this scenic campus of stately oaks rarely meet classmates in these courses. "

"Is the "bundled" model of higher education outdated? Some higher-ed futurists think so. Choosing the academic program at a single university, they say, is a relic of a time before online education made it possible for a student in Oregon to take courses at a university in Florida if she wants. Since the online-education boom, the notion that students could cobble together a curriculum that includes courses designed and delivered by a variety of different institutions - including for-profit ones - has gained traction in some circles."

"Buying Local, Online July 23, 2010 That online education knows no geographical limitations is considered one of the platform's more disruptive qualities. To entrepreneurs, it means that for-profit educational companies, such as the University of Phoenix or Kaplan University, can grow very large and make a lot of money, very quickly. To regulators, it means headaches. To highly visible traditional universities, such as Pennsylvania State University or the University of Massachusetts, it means an opportunity to take cues from the for-profits and create new revenue streams. To smaller universities with less national cachet, it might mean an opportunity to grow the brand and enroll students from across the country, even the globe. But it also might mean they need to fight for their lives. Online education has been seen as a godsend by many students, particularly adult learners, who need more college in order to boost their professional prospects but whose many responsibilities -- to jobs, families, etc. -- make it difficult to enroll in courses at a brick-and-mortar institution, even a nearby one. "You could be three blocks from the campus," says Carol Aslanian, a senior vice president of market research at Education Dynamics, a consulting firm, "but because of work and children, you could [feel] barred from the campus.""

"Credentials, Good Will Hunting & MITx It's no secret that the authority to bestow credentials is a core source of value for higher education institutions; it's also a key means by which the institution protects itself from unwanted competition from non-sanctioned education providers. The importance of credentials to higher education is what makes the recent announcement from MIT particularly interesting. MIT has received a great deal of positive attention in response to the MITx announcement - a "game changer", argued Forbes. It may well turn out to be just that, but I think it's useful to see this initiative as part of a broader trend that began in earnest six or seven years ago: the creation and (slow) legitimization of new types of learning providers, ways of learning, and credentials. As soon as access to the Net became commonplace, innovators saw the potential to offer learners educational opportunities outside of established educational institutions. (You might recall oft-repeated quote from John Chambers, CEO of Cisco: "the next killer app is education over the internet (New York Times, Nov 17, 1999). The innovations took a number of forms, but for those of us in higher education, possibly the most interesting of the bunch were those that were presented as direct challenges to higher education. Here are a few of the more interesting examples: - "UnCollege" was started by college dropout, Dale Stephens, who declared there are better ways to learn than what is being offered by US colleges and universities. - The "Personal MBA" argued that spending 80k (plus lost wages) on an MBA was unnecessary, and set up an online community to allow people to learn outside of institutions. - Peter Thiel offered 100,000 per year to 20 students that would drop out of college to launch a business. - And possibly most significant is the creation of "badges" that allow people to demonstrate mastery of subjects in a variety of ways. These initiatives have a fascinati

"Killing the Lecture With Technology, Part II By Marc Parry Earlier this month, The Chronicle wrote about New York University's attempt to reprogram the roles of some professors in large undergraduate classes, using technology to free them up for more personal instruction. The article prompted other professors to share similar examples of strategies they've used to shift class time away from lectures. Here are three of their stories: * David B. Miller, a psychology professor at the University of Connecticut, spent 400 hours producing 90 videos for a large undergraduate animal-behavior course. The content, which includes narrated film clips and animations, is available as streaming video on password-protected servers and not to the public due to copyright issues. The idea is to substitute the online lectures for one of the course's biweekly class sessions. The remaining meeting is devoted to additional content, discussion, and questions. Honors students also gather face-to-face for an extra hour of discussion each week, which is recorded and turned into a podcast. The format works: "Almost half the class earned A's (I do not curve grades), and for the first time that I can recall, nobody failed the course," writes Mr. Miller, who is pictured above. Here's a video explaining his methods."

"Biology Professors Use Cloud Computing to Reach Students January 28, 2011, 2:00 pm By Tushar Rae To help reduce the number of dropouts in freshman biology courses, professors at the University at Buffalo have turned to the power of collaboration and cloud computing to build an online teaching tool designed to explain concepts better than a textbook can. The tool, called Pop!World, provides a visual way to map evolution. It's the work of Bina Ramaurthy, a research associate professor in the department of computer science and engineering; Jessica Poulin, a research assistant professor in the department of biological sciences; and Katharina Dittmar, an assistant professor of biological sciences. Cloud computing allows for different levels of network resources to be devoted to Pop!World based on the number of students using it, Ms. Ramaurthy says. The addition of Pop!World, which will serve as a lab component, is part of a redevelopment of the freshman biology curriculum that aims both to address attrition and to add mathematical rigor to the program, Ms. Poulin says. The hope is that it will visually engage students. "Teaching from a text gets boring to them," says Ms. Ramaurthy. Though Pop!World has been used for only one semester on the campus, which is part of the State University of New York, Ms. Poulin says she already sees the effects. On a survey of students who were retaking freshman biology during the fall semester, and thus had experienced the course with and without Pop!World, positive reviews of Pop!World, she says, were "off the charts.""

"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

Colleges thought they were enhancing efficiency when they moved their course evaluations online, but an unintended consequence of the shift to evaluations not filled out in class is that students started skipping them altogether.

March 18, 2012 A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups Despite recession investors see technology companies' 'Internet moment' By Nick DeSantis Harsh economic realities mean trouble for college leaders. But where administrators perceive an impending crisis, investors increasingly see opportunity. In recent years, venture capitalists have poured millions into education-technology start-ups, trying to cash in on a market they see as ripe for a digital makeover. And lately, those wagers have been getting bigger. Investments in education-technology companies nationwide tripled in the last decade, shooting up to $429-million in 2011 from $146-million in 2002, according to the Na­tional Venture Capital Association. The boom really took off in 2009, when venture capitalists pushed $150-million more into education-technology firms than they did in the previous year, even as the economy sank into recession. "The investing community believes that the Internet is hitting edu­cation, that education is having its Internet moment," said Jose Ferreira, founder of the interactive-learning company Knewton. Last year Mr. Ferreira's company scored a $33-million investment of its own in one of the biggest deals of the year. Enlarge Image A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups 2 Mark Abramson for The Chronicle Huge advances in computing power at colleges have created a fertile ground for companies offering technology services, like the computer-learning group Knewton (above), where staff members recently gathered for a meeting. The scramble to make bets on a tech-infused college revolution has led to so many new companies that even Mr. Ferreira can't keep track. Udacity, Udemy, and University­Now all have plans to revolutionize online learning. There's the Coursebook, a young online-learning start-up. And Coursekit, a nascent challenger to Blackboard in the market for learning-management software. And Courseload, the Indiana-based digital-textbook enterprise. And CourseRank, the cl

A Marriage Made in Indiana July 14, 2010 Just about everywhere you turn, state leaders are searching for a way to use online education to expand the reach of their public higher education systems at a time of diminished resources. The approaches vary: In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Pawlenty has heralded a future of "iCollege," while in Pennsylvania, the state college system envisions using distance learning to help its campuses sustain their offerings by sharing courses in underenrolled programs. California's community college system turned to a for-profit provider, Kaplan University, to work around its budget-related enrollment restrictions. And a grand experiment to create a fully online branch of the University of Illinois, meanwhile, crashed and burned last fall. Like those and other peers, Indiana's leaders have increasingly recognized that the state cannot thrive economically if it does not bolster college completion, particularly among adults (aged 29-49) who have historically been underrepresented in the state's seven public four-year universities. But they recognize that doing so at a time of (temporarily, if not permanently) diminished resources isn't easy -- and that online education is no panacea because, done right, it isn't cheap."

"Beating the 'Not Invented Here' Mentality January 6, 2011, 5:15 pm By Josh Fischman Las Vegas-Linda Thor, chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, started a session here at the Higher Ed Tech Summit with a startling statistic: In her previous job, as president of Rio Salado College, the college improved online-course completion rates from 50 percent to upward of 80 percent. Technology played a big role, she said. Adding 24/7 student support, detecting signals of classroom success and failure, and making things like library services available online when students needed them were aspects of this. So if such big gains are possible, why isn't everyone doing this? "It's the 'not invented here' issue," said Ms. Thor. "We have a boutique problem," said Mark David Milliron, deputy director of higher education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who joined Ms. Thor on the panel, which was about using technology to improve graduation rates. There are plenty of good ideas, the two said, but colleges are reluctant to adopt solutions that did not arise from their own campuses. There is an institutional mind-set, Mr. Milliron said, that if something was not invented on a particular campus, it is not appropriate for that particular campus. Ms. Thor added that there are many "best practices" in technology but few mechanisms for disseminating them to a wider community. So things that work are not picked up or are deliberately passed over. So how do we break down the resistance? asked Philip Regier, executive vice provost and dean of Arizona State University Online, who was also on this panel."

Delivering courses in cyberclassrooms has gained broad acceptance among top college leaders, but the general public is far less convinced of online education's quality, according to new survey data released this week by the Pew Research Center, in association with The Chronicle. Just over half of the 1,055 college presidents queried believe that online courses offer a value to students that equals a traditional classroom's. By contrast, only 29 percent of 2,142 adult Americans thought online education measured up to traditional teaching. The presidents' survey included leaders of two-year and four-year private, public, and for-profit colleges and was conducted online. The public survey was conducted by telephone. The gauge of differing perceptions comes at a critical moment for online education. Just 10 years ago, few colleges took teaching onto the Internet, and skepticism about the practice was the norm among professors and university leaders.

"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

"Tue, Jan. 31, 2012, 3:01 AM Global contest will lead to help during heart attacks By Marie McCullough Inquirer Staff Writer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man´s life this month because he knew the location of an AED. MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man's life this month because he knew the location of an AED. Do you know where the nearest defibrillator is located? Yes No View results Post a comment RELATED STORIES Join the MyHeartMap challenge PHILLY.COM's TOP FIVE PICKS Mayor Nutter outraged at suspect's bail Media misled about whereabouts of Santorum daughter Parents: Disabled daughter's transplant could happen Where's the school choice, Chaput? Contest's 1st clue: Find the pig Around the world, the hunt is on for thousands of lifesaving portable medical devices that are hanging in public places - in Philadelphia. Why would someone in, say, Abu Dhabi care about finding devices in Philadelphia? Because a University of Pennsylvania project to map the locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout the city has mushroomed into a global "crowdsourcing" competition fueled by the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones - and the chance to win cash prizes up to $10,000. The ultimate prize, of course, will be saving the lives of cardiac-arrest victims. Penn plans to create an interactive online AED registry that will, for the first time, enable the city's 911 system, emergency responders - and any bystander with a phone - to quickly locate an AED. Beginning Tuesday, participants in Philadelphia will use a free app downloaded to their phones to transmit photos and locations of the city's estimated 5,000 AEDs. These backpack-size machines can assess a cardiac-arrest victim and, if appropriate, deliver an electric shock to restart the heart. Studies show even sixth graders can follow an AED's step-by-step audio directions. But in this age of cyber collaboration, the contest, called "

"The For-Profit LMS Market November 1, 2010 Blackboard historically has been synonymous with learning management technology. While the company in recent years has lost some clients in that market to competitors, it still provides the learning management platform for more than half of nonprofit institutions, according to the latest data from the Campus Computing Project. But in the growing for-profit market for learning management, Blackboard is not king. That crown belongs to eCollege, the learning-management provider owned by the media conglomerate Pearson. A peon in the nonprofit world (it owns less than 2 percent market share, according to the Campus Computing Project), eCollege cornered the for-profit market early on by offering a product tailored to meet the unique needs of that type of institution, says Richard Garrett, managing director of the higher ed consulting firm Eduventures. The online learning platforms offered by eCollege and Blackboard "were evolved with different goals in mind," says Garrett. The eCollege platform "was built with top-down enterprises in mind," he says, whereas Blackboard's product was designed to "enable individual faculty to experiment with online, or to use it at an individual course level as a supplement to the classroom" - more in line with the governance structure of the traditional college, where professors have more autonomy."

"'Social Teaching' Company Gets Buy-In From Capella Education February 4, 2011, 4:27 pm By Josh Fischman What happened to music because of the Internet-going from few creators to many-is going to happen to education very soon, says Don Smithmier, and his new "social teaching" Web site, Sophia, is going to be part of that change. That's a big claim for a small start-up now in beta testing, but it seems more plausible the first week of February, after Capella Education, the corporation behind the online educator Capella University, made a substantial investment in his company. "The money is going to let us scale up," Mr. Smithmier says. "And they have 38,000 learners in their system, so it lets us pilot studies of our technology." Michael Walsh, a Capella spokesoman, said the company could not disclose the amount of money, because they were in a so-called "quiet period" required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Officials did say in a prepared statement that they viewed Sophia as a strategic investment. The basic idea behind Sophia is to identify the best teachers for any concept, put their instruction for that concept online, and students all over the world can use these "learning packets" free of charge. For example, a professor who has a really great lesson on how to factor polynomials can package that lesson-complete with video and any other materials-on Sophia, and search engines like Google will let students find it and use it. But who decides what makes a lesson really great? Or even accurate? Mr. Smithmier says the site has two levels of quality assurance. One is votes from users. Currently there are about 1,100 of them, and more than half are educators at the college level. They get to rate each learning packet with a 5-star system. The second level is a rating of academic soundness. "People on Sophia identify themselves as someone with an advanced degree in a particular subject, and then they rate the packets

"Bridgepoint has skyrocketed in revenue from $8 million in 2004 to $454.3 million last year. Using online technology for part-time students, it offers 60 degree programs and 125 specializations, ranging from bachelor's degrees in biology and homeland security to a master's in business administration and doctorate in sports psychology. The company owns two tiny colleges - Ashford University in Iowa and University of the Rockies in Colorado - but 99 percent of its 54,000 students take all their courses online and communicate by phone and e-mail with academic, enrollment and financial advisers in San Diego and other locations. Roughly 2,430 adjunct professors teach 1,150 five-week courses, using chat sessions and online taped lectures and reading and writing assignments. As an example of its aggressive marketing approach, Bridgepoint this week announced discounted programs in a partnership with Blockbuster to benefit its 38,000 employees seeking college degrees"

"More Opposition to For-Profit Partner at Arkansas State Controversy continues to swirl around the partnership between a for-profit online course provider and Arkansas State University, where faculty voted last week for a moratorium on any new programs with the company. In a 19-10 vote, the university's Faculty Senate approved a resolution that calls on Arkansas State to hold off on developing any further programs with Academic Partnerships, LLC, a company formerly known as Higher Ed Holdings. Before moving forward, a faculty committee should review the existing relationship, which has created a "fundamental shift in the nature of faculty roles and relationships, manner of instruction and the nature of the institution itself," the resolution states. Administrators' ties to the company have prompted conflict of interest charges, leading an interim chancellor and the former system president to distance themselves from the company and the university, respectively."

"Globalization 101 November 4, 2010 ORLANDO, Fla. -- In an effort to deepen their understanding of how technology can help different cultures understand each other better, David L. Stoloff last year decided to give his students a taste of peer review -- and outsourcing. Presenting on Wednesday at the annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning, Stoloff, a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, described an experiment in which he used social media to teach students in a first-year course on educational technology a lesson about how they can use social media to change how they do amateur cross-cultural research on the Web. Stoloff divided the students into four groups, and assigned each to put together a PowerPoint presentation on one of four countries -- Taiwan, Algeria, Nepal and Russia -- using basic Web research. But instead of assessing the projects himself, he tapped more authoritative sources: university students in those countries. Using the learning-oriented social networking site ePals.com, which mostly focuses on K-12, Stoloff tracked down professors at 20 universities and asked them via e-mail if they would be interested in having their students evaluate his students' work. Four replied. "

"June 12, 2011 In Follow-Up, 'Academically Adrift' Students Show Worrisome Levels of Debt and Joblessness, Author Says By Scott Carlson Some people have been talking about a bubble in higher education. Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, doesn't quite buy it. But he did tell a room of college administrators here that higher education was going through a sea change: Once upon a time, if you took the financial risk of getting a college degree, no matter your major, you would do extremely well in life, compared to someone with only a high-school degree. Times have changed, he said. "It's not that college degrees aren't worthwhile," but the returns are diminished, he said. "After 2008, "you can't be so sure that the college credential, waving that paper in the air, is enough to give you the job that is going to pay enough that it didn't matter how many loans you took out." Mr. Arum appeared here at the Summer Seminar, a conference put on by the Lawlor Group and Hardwick-Day, two higher-education consulting firms based in the Twin Cities, to discuss the book he wrote with Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011). By now, most academics are familiar with the book and its provocative thesis: Students, the authors contend, spend a great deal of time socializing and relatively less time studying effectively. As a result, they don't seem to be learning as much as we might like to think they are, despite the high grades many have. "They might not hand out A's on college campuses like they're candy," he said, "but we hand out B's like they are candy. You've got to really work today to get something below a B." The book represents the work the researchers did in tracking through their first two years of college 2,300 students who entered 24 representative four-year institutions in the fall of 2005. "By the time the book came out, we had data not just on the first tw