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"October 31, 2010 YouTube U. Beats YouSnooze U. By Salman Khan Every day during the academic year, tens of thousands of students across the country sit passively in 300-person lecture halls listening to 90-minute lectures on freshman or sophomore-level calculus, chemistry, or biology (and this isn't even counting the students who have decided to punt the lecture altogether). Some students take notes to keep up. Most are lost or bored or both, trying their best to stay awake. Professors stare at a sea of blank faces while delivering a lecture not much different from the ones they have delivered in each of the past 10 years. Students go back to their dorms to work on problem sets in a vacuum. They fight through 1,000-page, 10-pound tomes to get at the nuggets of information they really need or can comprehend. Many give up and copy from their peers. This cycle continues for several weeks, until just before the midterm or final exam, when students cram everything they should have learned into one or two sleepless nights. Regardless of whether they can prove proficiency in 70, 80, or 90 percent of the material, they are "passed" to the next class, which builds on 100 percent of what they should have learned. Fast-forward six months, and students are lucky to retain even 10 percent of what was "covered.""

"December 12, 2010 Student Learning: Measure or Perish By Kevin Carey For the past three months, The Chronicle's reporters have been writing a series of articles collectively titled Measuring Stick, describing the consequences of a higher-education system that refuses to consistently measure how much students learn. From maddening credit-transfer policies and barely regulated for-profit colleges to a widespread neglect of teaching, the articles show that without information about learning, many of the most intractable problems facing higher education today will go unsolved. Failing to fill the learning-information deficit will have many consequences: * The currency of exchange in higher education will continue to suffer from abrupt and unpredictable devaluation. Students trying to assemble course credits from multiple institutions into a single degree-that is, most students-frequently have their credits discounted for no good reason. That occurs not only when students transfer between the two- and four-year sectors, or when the institutions involved have divergent educational philosophies. A student trying to transfer credits from an introductory technical-math course at Bronx Community College to other colleges within the City University of New York system, for example, would be flatly denied by five institutions and given only elective credit by three others. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, by contrast, would award the student credit for an introductory modern-math course acceptable for transfer by every CUNY campus, including Bronx Community College-except that BCC would translate that course into trigonometry and college algebra, not technical math. Students who emerge from this bureaucratic labyrinth should be awarded credit in Kafka studies for their trouble. Credit devaluation, which wastes enormous amounts of time, money, and credentialed learning every year, is rooted in mistrust. Because colleges don't know what students in

"The Brand in the Classroom December 14, 2010, 12:19 pm By Mark Bauerlein An interesting survey by Harris Interactive came out this month, one that may have quirky implications for teachers, particularly at the secondary level. It's called the Youth EquiTrends Study, a poll of 5,077 8- to 24-year olds administered last August. The sample was drawn from 13- to 24-year-olds by online means, 8- to 12-year-olds through the parents. The researchers aimed to identify "brand equity" among the young, that is, a brand's overall strength as judged "by a calculation of Familiarity, Quality, and Purchase Consideration." Respondents were asked to rate between 98 and 125 popular brands of goods, relaying how well they know them, how high is their quality, and would they buy them. For 8- to 12-year-olds, the findings aren't surprising. It's all entertainment and junk food: 1. Nintendo Wii 2. Doritos 3. Oreo's 4. M&Ms 5. Disney Channel 6. Nickelodeon 7. Nintendo DS 8. McDonald's 9. Toys R Us 10. Cartoon Network Lots of screen time here, all for play and diversion. At least Nintendo gets them off the couch and burns some of those Oreo's calories. For the next age group, 13- to 17-year-olds, a different screen time emerges, along with a drop in junk food (although one of them still tops the list). 1. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups 2. iPod 3. Google 4. M&Ms 5. Oreo's 6. Subway 7. Hershey's Milk Chocolate 8. Target 9. Sprite 10. Microsoft Note the appearance of Google at Number 3. It isn't something you buy or eat or watch, really. It's not a show or a TV channel, and you don't shop for it in a store. It's something you do. Most importantly for teachers, Google is a central learning resource in and out of the classroom. For their homework, especially research assignments, students go to Google as their first resort. Is this the first time ever that young people have given brand loyalty to a tool so much a part of their schoolwork? The

Bill Graves writes about the "Learning Assurance Commons" (LAC). It draws on his recent monograph (published online in conjunction with the "future-of-higher-education" Jan./Feb. 2010 EDUCAUSE Review). The paper proposes a construct that he now call the "learning assurance commons" (LAC). The paper describes more clearly what the LAC is and how it might become a means to balance rights and responsibilities among education providers and their external investors - students, families, donors, employers, and governments. A key leverage point for such rebalancing would be government vouchers earned by students. The vouchers would flow to students who earn them via assessments and then to the education providers who, along with those students, have agreed to a set of accountability protocols governed by the LAC. The paper extends the idea of the interoperability of the technologies used in education to the interoperability of inter-institution educational processes, such as transfer of credits.

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than of forced departure. The Chronicle, however, ran an in-depth analysis pointing to a

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities (but not non-profits) would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. A week later, Shireman announced his impending departure. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than o

"A New Model Community College January 4, 2011 When for-profit companies team up with traditional colleges to offer instruction, many academics object. The Princeton Review inked a deal to offer a nursing program for a Massachusetts community college last year, and faculty unions scoffed that the high price students must pay for the program violated the traditional community college mission of open access and public accountability. Critics said the same about Kaplan's failed deal to take on California students locked out of financially strapped community colleges. In contrast, there has been relatively little controversy over a different kind of partnership between a company and a private college: a joint effort of Tiffin University, a small private institution in northeast Ohio, and Altius Education, a for-profit company based in San Francisco. In 2008, Tiffin and Altius opened Ivy Bridge College, an online community college that offers a general studies associate degree program targeted at traditional-age students who wish to transfer to four-year institutions. Though tuition for an academic year of full-time study is $9,450, which is considerably more than a typical community college would cost, financial aid is available. Tiffin handles the academics - its accreditation extends to Ivy Bridge - and Altius handles the enrollment management."

"Google to Dip Into Ed. App. Market By Katie Ash on January 4, 2011 5:53 PM | No comments | No recommendations An article on Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Google execs are currently in talks with education software companies about creating educational apps to be featured in Google Apps Marketplace, an online store that opened in March. Education software sales in K-12 and higher ed raked in about $4.6 billion in 2009, according to the article, and Google, which typically makes its profit from search advertising, is hoping to cash in on some of that revenue stream. Google already offers free apps, such as e-mail, word processing, and spreadsheets, to educators, so hooking up the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's 10 million users in schools with educational software apps could be a natural fit, says Google's business development manager for education, Obadiah Greenberg, in the article. For now, most of the software companies that create apps for the Google Apps Marketplace collect all the profit from sales through the site, but in the coming months, Google plans to begin taking about a 20 percent cut of the revenue, the article said."

"November 28, 2010 New Social Software Tries to Make Studying Feel Like Facebook Brittany Robertson, a junior at Purdue U., uses Mixable, note-and-coursework-sharing software that works with Facebook, because it easily lets her shift from socializing to studying. By Marc Parry and Jeffrey R. Young Students live on Facebook. So study tools that act like social networks should be student magnets-and maybe even have an academic benefit. At least that's the idea behind a new crop of Web services sprouting up across higher education. Colleges, entrepreneurs, and publishers, all drawn by the buzz of social media, are competing to market software that makes sharing class notes or collaborating on calculus problems as simple as updating your Facebook status. "Our mission is to make the world one big study group," says Phil Hill, chief executive of OpenStudy, a social-learning site that started as a project of Emory University and Georgia Tech. It opened to the public in September. Many of the social-learning sites are, like OpenStudy, for-profit companies-or at least they aspire to be once their services take off. And some of their business plans rely on a controversial practice: paying students for their notes. The big question facing all of these sites-a group that includes Mixable, from Purdue University, and GradeGuru, from McGraw-Hill-is whether students are really interested in social learning online. Another quandary: If students profit from selling their notes, are they infringing on a college's or a professor's copyright? And while the sites are not part of the seamy world of exam or term-paper vendors, what happens if some users post answers to tests? One service has already failed to mix Facebook with studies. In 2008 a company called Inigral closed its Facebook "Courses" application, which had allowed students to view who was in their classes, start discussions, and get notified of assignments. "We found that Facebook was not a popular place to e

"October 11, 2010 New Initiative Will Advance the Best Uses of Technology to Improve College Readiness and Completion Multi-year "challenge" grant competition will identify and fund most promising innovations EDUCAUSE Marge Gammon Phone: +1.303.816.7431 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Phone: +1.206.709.3400 Email: media@gatesfoundation.org SEATTLE -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced the Next Generation Learning Challenges, a collaborative, multi-year initiative, which aims to help dramatically improve college readiness and college completion in the United States through the use of technology. The program will provide grants to organizations and innovators to expand promising technology tools to more students, teachers, and schools. It is led by nonprofit EDUCAUSE, which works to advance higher education through the use of information technology. Next Generation Learning Challenges released the first of a series of RFPs today to solicit funding proposals for technology applications that can improve postsecondary education. This round of funding will total up to $20 million, including grants that range from $250,000 to $750,000. Applicants with top-rated proposals will receive funds to expand their programs and demonstrate effectiveness in serving larger numbers of students. Proposals are due November 19, 2010; winners are expected to be announced by March 31, 2011. "American education has been the best in the world, but we're falling below our own high standards of excellence for high school and college attainment," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "We're living in a tremendous age of innovation. We should harness new technologies and innovation to help all students get the education they need to succeed." Next Generation Learning Challenges invites proposals from technologists and institutions within the education community, but also innovators and entrepreneurs outside the traditional educa

"Report Finds Low Graduation Rates at For-Profit Colleges By TAMAR LEWIN Published: November 23, 2010 A new report on graduation rates at for-profit colleges by a nonprofit research and advocacy group charges that such colleges deliver "little more than crippling debt," citing federal data that suggests only 9 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor's degree students at the University of Phoenix, the nation's largest for-profit college, graduate within six years. The report, "Subprime Opportunity," by the Education Trust, found that in 2008, only 22 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor's degree students at for-profit colleges over all graduate within six years, compared with 55 percent at public institutions and 65 percent at private nonprofit colleges. Among Phoenix's online students, only 5 percent graduated within six years, and at the campuses in Cleveland and Wichita, Kan., only 4 percent graduated within six years. "For-profits proudly claim to be models of access in higher education because they willingly open their doors to disadvantaged, underprepared students." said José L. Cruz, a vice president for the trust. "But we must ask the question, 'Access to what?' " Since the first-time, full-time students tracked in the federal statistics are the most likely to graduate, the report said, these figures may actually overstate the graduation rates. "

"A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 3) December 16, 2010 'It Should Be Fine' Perhaps all of the back-and-forth about StraighterLine - the news stories, the blog posts, the assorted incidents of backlash, the endless tug-of-war over who awards credit for what - might be boiled down to two essential questions: Are StraighterLine's courses truly more or less equivalent to the courses that many college students are already taking? And, more broadly, at what point does any educational experience - specifically, in StraighterLine's case, an introductory-level general education class - become worthy of college credit? The former question addresses the level on which Burck Smith would like for his brainchild to be evaluated; the latter is an issue that he actively seeks to avoid. In a long series of emails over the course of several weeks, as well as one 90-minute telephone interview, Smith repeatedly and expressly urged me to "make sure to compare our courses to other colleges' general education courses with whatever evaluation standards they use rather than what they say they do or wish they did." "…[E]veryone else is doing the same thing," Smith said, "but they're allowed to be accredited and approved and sort of part of the club." If one accepts Smith's terms of debate, it is difficult to argue with him. Surely accredited institutions offer plenty of courses that are not of the utmost quality. And colleges and universities do turn a profit on many large, introductory-level courses - particularly courses that are taught by low-paid temporary instructors, or broadcast online to vast numbers of students - and that profit is used, as Carey's Washington Monthly article puts it, "to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else." How colleges pay their classical Chinese poetry experts is not Smith's concern; on the contrary, he views himself as something of a consumers' adv

"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."

"January 2, 2011 Academic Library Autopsy Report, 2050 By Brian T. Sullivan "Insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal." -Shakespeare The academic library has died. Despite early diagnosis, audacious denial in the face of its increasingly severe symptoms led to its deterioration and demise. The academic library died alone, largely neglected and forgotten by a world that once revered it as the heart of the university. On its deathbed, it could be heard mumbling curses against Google and something about a bygone library guru named Ranganathan. Although the causes of death are myriad, the following autopsy report highlights a few of the key factors. 1. Book collections became obsolete. Fully digitized collections of nearly every book in the world rendered physical book collections unnecessary. Individual students now pay for subscriptions to any of several major digital-book vendors for unlimited access. The books may be viewed online at any time or downloaded to a portable device. Some colleges have opted for institutional subscriptions to digital-book collections, managed by their information-technology departments. Most of these collections originated in physical libraries, which signed their own death warrants with deals to digitize their books. 2. Library instruction was no longer necessary. To compete with a new generation of search engines, database vendors were forced to create tools that were more user-friendly, or else risk fading into obscurity. As databases became more intuitive and simpler to use, library instruction in the use of archaic tools was no longer needed. Almost all remaining questions could be answered by faculty (see No. 3) or information-technology staff (see No. 4). It was largely the work of academic librarians that led to most of these advances in database technology. 3. Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum. As faculty incorporated information literacy into their teaching, it became part of the gener

"A Curricular Innovation, Examined December 16, 2010 It was the fall of 2010, and I was taking an introductory macroeconomics course. As I sat at my computer clicking through the lesson presentation for Chapter Eight: Basic Macroeconomic Relationships, my eye was caught by a "Real World Example": "Is the U.S. housing market out of equilibrium? For a current example of equilibrium in action, read 'Housing Bubble - or Bunk? Are home prices soaring unsustainably and due for plunge? A group of experts takes a look - and come to very different conclusions.' Keep the housing market in mind as you go through this topic, and use your new knowledge to draw your own conclusions." Few professors of economics would argue with the idea that it's important to relate the material in a macroeconomics course to events both current and historical. But what kind of professor would tie his class lessons to economic news more than five years out of date -- and now painfully ironic to boot? The answer, at least in this case, is no professor at all. I took my introductory economics class through StraighterLine, an online provider of higher education that has made numerous headlines over the past couple of years for its unusual business model. Students can take StraighterLine courses for an exceptionally low price, then receive college credit through one of StraighterLine's partner colleges, or through another institution that awards credit for courses evaluated by the American Council on Education's Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT recommends college credit for 15 of StraighterLine's courses, including the lab and non-lab versions of two science classes) -- StraighterLine itself is not accredited. "

"December 12, 2010 Who Are the Undergraduates? From teenagers coddled by helicopter parents to underage drinkers mad for Four Loko, popular depictions of undergraduates often paint them as young adults feeling their way through postadolescence. But-while a cadre of undergraduates certainly does leave home at 18 to live on leafy campuses and party hard-many others are commuters, full-time workers, and parents. Roughly 22 million undergraduates attended college at some point in 2007-8, and the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study from that year provides a snapshot of where students are coming from and how they pursue their educations. More than a third of all undergraduates attend part-time, and most are not affluent. That's reflected in where students go to college-more than twice as many undergraduates attend the University of Phoenix's online campus as go to an Ivy League college. You can explore students' demographics for yourself below."

"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. "

"Technology and the Completion Agenda November 9, 2010 The White House, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Call them the Three Tenors of the completion agenda. In one of his first speeches as president, Barack Obama emphasized the need for a higher rate of postsecondary completion. Lumina had already been investing in projects designed to get more Americans into college and out with a degree. And Gates has, in recent years, made college completion as basic to the legacy of its eponymous benefactor as, well, BASIC. (Others have since echoed the call.) Now, the technology section is joining the band - and may be holding the instruments that could make the whole song a hit: data analytics. "This has been building for a while," says Donald Norris, president and founder of Strategic Initiatives, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in "transformative change" in higher ed and elsewhere, which has lately taken a strong interest in analytics. But only now, Norris says, as institutions grapple with the challenge of enrolling more students and increasing success with fewer resources, has the subject of data analytics - and the tools that technology vendors have been developing to wield those data - emerged at the forefront of conversations about technology in education. Data analytics is shorthand for the method of warehousing, organizing, and interpreting the massive amounts of data accrued by online learning platforms and student information systems - now as elemental to higher education as classrooms and filing cabinets - in hopes of learning more about what makes students successful, then giving instructors (and the platforms themselves) the chance to nudge those students accordingly. "

"New Job With an Old Friend November 2, 2010 While collecting a $115,000 paycheck from Arkansas State University, the former president of the state system hopes to strengthen relations between the university and a controversial online education company that now employs him, according to documents released Monday. Leslie Wyatt, who resigned as system head in July and now has faculty status, works as a consultant for Academic Partnerships, LLC, formerly known as Higher Ed Holdings, university documents state. Additionally, he serves as president and chairman of the American University System, a nonprofit association affiliated with the company, according to a cached version of the organization's website. Amid mounting concern over potential conflicts of interest, the nonprofit group removed the only mention of Wyatt's name on the site. Wyatt's work with Academic Partnerships has given additional fodder to critics, who have questioned how the company secured a lucrative contract without the input of any non-administrative faculty. As with the University of Toledo, where faculty rancor over Higher Ed Holdings derailed a deal in the works, some at Arkansas have questioned whether academic quality suffers when a university partners with a company known for providing inexpensive degrees on a massive scale. "

"Upstart Course-Management Provider Goes Open Source January 31, 2011, 10:27 pm By Josh Keller Instructure, a course-management software company that recently won a large contract in Utah, announced on Tuesday that it would make most of its software platform available for free under an open-source license. Instructure is one of a wave of new entrants into an increasingly competitive market for learning-management software in higher education. The company's year-old Canvas platform allows instructors and students to manage course materials, grades, and discussions online. In offering its basic software for free, the company could offer new competition for Moodle and Sakai, the two main existing open-source platforms. Like commercial arms of those platforms, Instructure intends to make money from colleges by supporting, hosting, and extending its software. In December, the company won a bid to provide software to a collection of Utah colleges that serve roughly 110,000 students, provoking a lawsuit from a competitor that lost that bid, Desire2Learn. The suit was quickly withdrawn. Instructure says it has signed contracts with a total of 25 colleges. Josh Coates, Instructure's chief executive, promoted the platform's ease of use and its integration with outside services like Facebook and Google Docs. "I don't consider what we've done at Instructure like rocket science," Mr. Coates said. "But it feels like it because we're sort of working in the context of the Stone Age.""