Red Balloon Resources

"Alan Jacobs - Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College. He blogs at ayjay.tumblr.com. The Great Unbundling of the University By Alan Jacobs Jan 23 2012, 2:14 PM ET 14 The bundle of knowledge and certification that have long-defined higher education is coming apart, but what happens now? Felix Salmon tells the story of how Sebastian Thrum was so overwhelmed by the success of his online Introduction at Artificial Intelligence course -- 160,000 students enrolled! -- that he decided to quit teaching at Stanford and start his own online university, where he'll begin by teaching the people who sign up how to build a search engine. Well, how cool is this? There are about a thousand things I could say about this development, but let's boil it down to the essentials. For a long time now, universities have flourished by offering a bundled package of knowledge and credentialing. People attended university in order to learn stuff that they couldn't learn elsewhere -- because the experts weren't elsewhere -- and to be certified by those experts as having actually learned said stuff. The bundle has been a culturally powerful one. But now: unbundling. Clearly, many universities have come, or are coming, to the conclusion that their primary product is the credentialing, and that they can give knowledge away either as a public service or as brand consolidation (choose your interpretation according to your level of cynicism). Those 160,000 students may have learned a great deal about artificial intelligence, and the successful ones received a "statement of accomplishment ... sent via e-mail and signed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig." But in announcing the course the instructors were careful to note that the "statement of accomplishment ... will not be issued by Stanford University." The big question for universities going forward is this: Can control of credentialing last for long without control of knowledge? If a great many people learn

"Udacity and the future of online universities By Felix Salmon January 23, 2012 The most exciting (but also, in a small way, slightly depressing) presentation at DLD this year came from Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford and Google. Or formerly of Stanford, anyway. Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online - he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well. Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun's talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford. Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running "weeder" classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed - by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary u

"Get Out While You Can August 19, 2011 By James D. Miller Tenure won't save us from a higher education collapse. Start making alternative career contingency plans now because this collapse could be sudden and catastrophic."

"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

"Venture Fund for Traditional Colleges January 17, 2012 - 3:00am By Doug Lederman The space between nonprofit and for-profit higher education gets a little more crowded today. University Ventures Fund, a $100 million investment partnership founded by a quartet of veterans of the for-profit and nonprofit education sectors, is the latest entrant in a market that aims to use private capital to expand the reach and impact of traditional colleges and universities. The fund, whose two biggest investors are the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and the University of Texas Investment Management Company, is focused on stimulating "innovation from within the academy," rather than competing with it from the outside, David Figuli, a lawyer and partner in University Ventures, said in an interview Monday. The projects will include helping institutions expand the scale of their academic programs, re-engineer how they deliver instruction, and better measure student outcomes; the first two investments, also announced today, will be creating a curriculum through Brandman University aimed at improving the educational outcomes of Hispanic students, and a company that helps universities in Britain and elsewhere in Europe deliver their courses online. "Most of the attempts to bring about innovation in higher education have come from people trying to buy their way in," Figuli said, citing the many takeovers of traditional institutions by for-profit colleges over the last decade (quite a few of which he helped engineer). "Our way is to find good ideas within the existing institutions and fund those." Figuli, a former general counsel for the South Dakota and Montana university systems, said he and his partners don't buy the critiques of traditional postsecondary institutions as unimaginative or fearful of change. "I've been in higher education for 30-some years, and most of the nonprofit institutions I've worked with have been frustrated by the fact that they're capital-constra

This is the season when many high school seniors are applying to and awaiting decisions from colleges and universities. It's an exciting time for those of us in higher education. We are reminded that learning is a lifelong pursuit. We are energized by the ideas and ambitions of our students. While we are excited about the prospects of a new freshman class, the economic downturn of the last three years has exposed and amplified our society's skepticism about the value of higher education. Yes, people still want to go to college, but there are growing concerns about student debt and unemployment after graduation. Students worry about their return on investment. Institutional leaders worry about hiring and retaining effective faculty and administrators, and about the constant cost of maintaining physical and technological infrastructures. Like the auto and newspaper industries, American higher education needs to innovate and reinvent itself if it's going to survive, thrive, and recapture its earlier glory. Industries that do not recognize the need for transition-or that do not manage that transition with agility-are likely to fail.

"What They Are Really Typing May 18, 2011 College students might sometimes feel they are getting mixed messages about laptops. Many receive them for free or at a discount from their colleges, only to have professors banish the machines from their classrooms, or at least complain about them. For years, researchers have conducted studies in hopes of answering whether having laptops in class undermines student learning. In the avalanche of literature, one can find data pointing each way. A 2006 study of 83 undergraduate psychology students suggested that having laptops in class distracts both the students who use them and their classmates. Several law professors have written triumphal papers documenting their own experiments banning laptops, which one of them complained had transformed his students from thoughtful, selective note-takers into "court reporters" reduced to mindlessly transcribing his lectures. And yet other papers have argued that laptop bans are reductive exercises that ignore the possibility that some students - maybe even a majority - might in fact benefit from being able to use computers in class if only professors would provide a modicum of discipline and direction. Still, there is one notable consistency that spans the literature on laptops in class: most researchers obtained their data by surveying students and professors. The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students. In one study, a St. John's University law professor hired research assistants to peek over students' shoulders from the back of the lecture hall. In the other, a pair of University of Vermont business professors used computer spyware to monitor their students' browsing activities during lectures. The authors of both papers acknowledged that their respective studies had plenty of flaws (including possibly understating the extent of non-c

The per-pupil cost of educating a student through virtual education is significantly less, on average, than the national average for brick-and-mortar schools, a paper from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute says. The report also says that fully virtual programs are less expensive, on average, than blended-learning programs, which combine face-to-face and online learning, but the paper does not address whether student outcomes are equal.

"MyEdu & KnowU - Two Approaches to Social Media in Higher Ed Keith Hampson Higher education is trying hard to find the best ways to integrate social media into its practices. They've approached it from a number of angles: marketing, community building, student support, and instruction. Instigators behind the efforts include software vendors looking to build the next edu social platform, colleges, individual educators, and on less formal basis, the students themselves. As of late 2011, there are very few scalable, institution-wide initiatives - but a great deal of isolated experimentation by innovators. The opportunities seem endless, but higher education management professionals are on the lookout for the right approach to make social media work for them today. Not all areas of higher ed will be equally well-suited to the opportunities that social media presents. Of all of the possibilities, integrating social media and instruction may be the most difficult, for example - due to the conflicting properties of social media and higher ed. While social media is particularly well-suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people - with no clear or prescribed beginning and end - higher education has clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. syllabi). Social media is user-generated and leaderless. Higher education is top-down and instructor-directed. Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users. High volume provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency. (Although Twitter and Linked In have over 100 million users, only a fraction of the users are of significance to any one user.) On the other hand, higher education instruction typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. 100 students). This is not to say that higher education won't find ways to use social media for instructi

Would you sacrifice part of the proverbial best four years of your life to cut costs? Paying eight semesters' worth of tuition, room and board, textbooks and other fees can add up to tens of thousands of dollars, and that's if you finish college in four years.

"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."

"September 19, 2010 A Measure of Education Is Put to the Test Results of national exam will go public in 2012 By David Glenn You have 90 minutes to complete this test. Here is your scenario: You are the assistant to a provost who wants to measure the quality of your university's general-education program. Your boss is considering adopting the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a national test that asks students to demonstrate their ability to synthesize evidence and write persuasively. The CLA is used at more than 400 colleges. Since its debut a decade ago, it has been widely praised as a sophisticated alternative to multiple-choice tests. At some colleges, its use has helped spark sweeping changes in instruction and curriculum. And soon, many more of the scores will be made public. But skeptics say the test is too detached from the substantive knowledge that students are actually expected to acquire. Others say those who take the test have little motivation to do well, which makes it tough to draw conclusions from their performance."

"Adult education for the 21st century Too many are unable to make the leap from community college to a four-year degree By Susan C. Aldridge July 6, 2010 I have had the pleasure of handing diplomas to some unusual people at commencement. Still, it was startling to see the child walk toward me. He was 9. He looked younger. He wasn't accepting the diploma for himself, of course. It was for his dad, on active duty in Iraq. He'd sent his son, living on a base in Germany, to get it for him. "Congratulations," I said. He and his dad deserved it. At University of Maryland University College (UMUC), our graduates are America's adult learners. Almost all work full time. Half are parents. Their diplomas often reflect the work, sacrifice - and triumph - of an entire family. The personal achievements of our students, though, are the exception rather than the rule. They highlight a national problem. UMUC graduates often begin studying at the "unsung heroes" of higher education: America's community colleges. But each year, thousands of community college students who want to earn a bachelor's degree - particularly those from modest-income or minority families - cannot continue. America's four-year colleges don't accommodate them. This is not just a tragedy for them. It is a tragedy for our nation. Researchers estimate that baby boomer retirements will soon leave our workforce 14 million shy of the number of four-year degree recipients we need. What stands in the way? First, cost. Students paying about $2,500 a year for community college tuition cannot always afford the $7,000 average for public universities, much less the $26,000 average for private institutions. And there are other obstacles. Four-year colleges and universities often reject credits from transfer students. They schedule courses at challenging times for students who work. Sometimes they cannot even provide enough parking spaces for people rushing from work to class. When it comes to higher educat

"June 25 Selma Botman: University's changes real, and hardly random USM's academic reorganization serves students, galvanizes faculty and saves administrative costs. Reorganizations typically generate concerns and doubts, not to mention a lot of satirical workplace humor. In one Dilbert comic strip, the manager announces a new strategy. "Let me guess," says Dilbert, "you're going to randomly reorganize the department, just like last month." One course of action higher education cannot be accused of is random reorganization. At USM and elsewhere, academic models that made sense a generation ago -- or even a millennium ago -- are long overdue for serious reconsideration. Prompted by a tighter focus on student success and the harsh realities of a new economic climate, USM has spent much of the past year rethinking how its academic programs should be organized. In May, the university's trustees approved an academic reorganization that will transform our university in profound ways. The new plan will further distinguish and energize our academic core, while repositioning us for future growth and sustainability. Most importantly, it will enhance the educational experience for our students. Through a collaborative effort that actively engaged faculty in the process, six schools and colleges have been consolidated into three new colleges. USM's two other colleges, Lewiston-Auburn College and the University of Maine School of Law, are not structurally affected. The plan eliminates the positions of three deans and will lead to the centralization of other administrative services, saving some $1.3 million. FOR THE STUDENTS So how will this plan benefit students? Our reorganization plan, which will be implemented during the 2010-2011 academic year, groups academic disciplines in order to encourage the growth of exciting new opportunities for interdisciplinary studies. This will be an intensely creative moment in USM's academic history. Faculty across the university are

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."

"Whither the Wikis? July 14, 2010 Of all the Web 2.0 tools that have become de rigueur on college campuses, wikis fundamentally embody the Internet's original promise of pooling the world's knowledge - a promise that resonates loudly in academe. And yet higher education's relationship with wikis - Web sites that allow users to collectively create and edit content - has been somewhat hot-and-cold. Wikipedia, the do-it-yourself online encyclopedia, vexed academics early on because of its wild-west content policies and the perception that students were using it as a shortcut to avoid the tedium of combing through more reliable sources. This frustration has been compounded by the fact that attempts to create scholarly equivalents have not been nearly as successful. Share This Story * Bookmark and Share * E-mail * Print Related Stories * Google and the Digital Humanities July 14, 2010 * The iPad for Academics July 12, 2010 * Blackboard's Big Buy July 8, 2010 * Driving Home the Point on Accessibility June 30, 2010 * Honorable Technology June 28, 2010 FREE Daily News Alerts Advertisement However, academe's disdain for the anarchical site has since softened; a number of professors have preached tolerance, even appreciation, of Wikipedia as a useful starting point for research. As the relationship between higher education and wikis matures, it is becoming clearer where wikis are jibing with the culture of academe, and where they are not. In most cases, using wikis to pool human knowledge of various topics into single, authoritative accounts falls into the "not" category. Academic culture abhors mass authorship. This is not only because many disciplines are given to disagreement and conflicting interpretations, but because scholars tend to chafe at the notion of not getting credit for their work, or having it fussed with by others. "Literature reviews and summaries of articles are never

"UC online degree proposal rattles academics Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer San Francisco Chronicle July 12, 2010 04:00 AM aking online college courses is, to many, like eating at McDonald's: convenient, fast and filling. You may not get filet mignon, but afterward you're just as full. Now the University of California wants to jump into online education for undergraduates, hoping to become the nation's first top-tier research institution to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus program. "We want to do a highly selective, fully online, credit-bearing program on a large scale - and that has not been done," said UC Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley, who is leading the effort. But a number of skeptical faculty members and graduate student instructors fear that a cyber UC would deflate the university's five-star education into a fast-food equivalent, cheapening the brand. Similar complaints at the University of Illinois helped bring down that school's ambitious Global Campus program last fall after just two years. UC officials say theirs will be different. On Wednesday in San Francisco, UC's governing Board of Regents will hear about a pilot program of 25 to 40 courses to be developed after UC raises $6 million from private donors. The short-term goal is to take pressure off heavily enrolled general education classes like writing and math, Edley said. More for less Long term, the idea is to expand access to the university while saving money. Tuition for online and traditional courses would be the same. But with students able to take courses in their living rooms, the university envisions spending less on their education while increasing the number of tuition-paying students - helpful as state financial support drops. Savings estimates are "encouraging" but too preliminary to disclose, Edley said, noting that even if the pilot program succeeds, cyber UC is still several years away. Evidence

"Are Colleges Worth the Price of Admission? How Colleges Can Set Things Right, and Some That Do 1 By Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus Tuition charges at both public and private colleges have more than doubled-in real dollars-compared with a generation ago. For most Americans, educating their offspring will be the largest financial outlay, after their home mortgage, they'll ever make. And if parents can't or won't pay, young people often find themselves burdened with staggering loans. Graduating with six figures' worth of debt is becoming increasingly common. So are colleges giving good value for those investments? What are families buying? What are individuals-and our society as a whole-gaining from higher education? Several years ago, we set out to answer those questions and began studying institutions and interviewing higher-education leaders, policy makers, and students across the country. Our conclusion: Colleges are taking on too many roles and doing none of them well. They are staffed by casts of thousands and dedicated to everything from esoteric research to vocational training-and have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people. Higher education has become a colossus-a $420-billion industry-immune from scrutiny and in need of reform. Here are some proposals that might begin to set things right:"

"Microsoft Research Unveils Online Observatory of NASA Images of Mars By Jeff Young The crowd-science trend has reached Mars. Students and amateur scientists can now explore the Red Planet online, using software released today by Microsoft Resarch based on NASA images. Though many of the images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are already available on the space agency's Web site, Microsoft has now loaded them into its WorldWide Telescope interface, which creates a way for users to easily pan around the images to see them in context, and presents them in higher resolution than previously available online. "You can actually see rover tracks on the Martian surface," said Dan Fay, director of earth, energy, and environment for Microsoft Research, in an interview. The WorldWide Telescope software is free but only runs on Microsoft's Windows operating system. A Web interface of the system is available, but the Mars images are not yet available there. The company's research division teamed up with astronomers to build the Web-based telescope to experiment with better ways to manage and analyze large data sets (so the company can improve its Bing search engine and its software). Meanwhile, some professors and schoolteachers use the Web telescope in their classrooms, and anyone online is encouraged to scour the images to find unique features of Mars that professional researchers might have missed."

Here is a real example of a red balloon-like $25,000 prize offered by the Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge contest that was awarded to a Second Life learning environment featuring Mars at the Defense GameTech 2010 conference. The award went to the Mars Expedition Strategy Challenge that could incorporate Nasa images. It remains to be seen how technologies such as Worldwide Telescope can mash up into Virtual Environments. A worthy applied R&D topic for an academic DARPA group. This site has a Slidecast with audio narration explaining the project. http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/2010/01/mars-expedition-strategy-challenge.html

"Accreditor Takes a Tougher Look at Sales of Colleges By Eric Kelderman Before 2008, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools had a reputation as an accreditor that allowed flexible standards for the burgeoning for-profit education industry, which has rapidly attracted both students and the federal grants and loan dollars they use to pay tuition. But this week, the regional accreditor, which counts many of the largest for-profit education companies among its members, showed that it was serious about changing that reputation. On Wednesday, the commission announced that it had denied a request to transfer the accreditation of Dana College, a small, religiously affiliated college in Nebraska, to a group of private investors that had said it would buy the college and save it from financial ruin. At the same time, the commission rejected a similar proposal for Rochester College, in Michigan."