Red Balloon Resources

"Here's the pitch: "Can you really GO TO COLLEGE for LESS THAN the cost of your monthly CELL PHONE BILL? The point we're trying to make is that taking general education, required college courses just became A LOT more affordable." How affordable? $99 for a course. And if you take the courses offered by StraighterLine -- in composition, economics, algebra, pre-calculus, and accounting -- you don't need to worry that the company isn't itself a college. StraighterLine has partnerships with five colleges that will award credit for the courses. Three are for-profit institutions and one is a nontraditional state university for adult students. But one college among the five is more typical of the kinds of colleges most students attend. It is Fort Hays State University, an institution of 10,000 students in Kansas."

"Is the "bundled" model of higher education outdated?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."

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.

"A highly engaged set of respondents that included 895 technology stakeholders and critics participated in the online, opt-in survey. In this canvassing of a diverse number of experts, 72% agreed with the statement: "By 2020, innovative forms of online cooperation will result in significantly more efficient and responsive governments, business, non-profits, and other mainstream institutions.""

A primer on higher education funding in California by CSU Northridge Provost Harry Hellenbrand that can be used as a model to help educate faculty about state funding and related policy choices.

"we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created."

A think piece by CSU Northridge Provost Harry Hellenbrand about Learning Management Systems and how we need to think about them more holistically than just a commercial software package.

A think piece by CSU Northridge Provost Harry Hellenbrand about how to think about change.

These curricular developments (at Chicago, Harvard and Stanford) are harbingers of a third way in liberal education. This new way bypasses the old battleground of the culture wars - the canon - by recognizing the privileged place that certain works and events occupy in past and present societies, without dictating which of these must absolutely pass before every student's eyes. As opposed to the more common "general education requirements," moreover, the courses in this model also provide students with an intellectual meta-narrative, that is, a synoptic perspective linking different periods, cultures, and even (ideally) disciplines. Finally, this model can offer scholars, administrators and policy makers a new language with which to define the goals and ideals of liberal education, and to help define criteria for their evaluation.

Gates-funded project, 26 teachers across the country who have had uncommon success in helping remedial students. Goal of the project is to identify successful teaching strategies to achieve 80% success rates with remedial students.

Hilary Pennington, at the ACE Annual Meeting in March 2010, argues that we're moving toward a circumstance where wealthy and middle class students will attend public institutions, and increasingly poor students will attend higher priced for-profit institutions.

Hilary Pennington, at the ACE Annual Meeting in March 2010, argues that we're moving toward a circumstance where wealthy and middle class students will attend public institutions, and increasingly poor students will attend higher priced for-profit institutions.

"Kotkin (The City) offers a well-researched-and very sunny-forecast for the American economy, arguing that despite its daunting current difficulties, the U.S. will emerge by midcentury as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history."

Liz Coleman (Oct 2007) describes the new curriculum, a series of design labs. It's a terrific paper on core values.

In a recent survey by Pat Callan's group, more than half of Americans voiced the belief three years ago that colleges and universities are more interested in their bottom lines than in providing a good education for students. We have been even more surprised -- and dismayed -- to see that figure jump almost 10 percentage points in just three years.

Texas tech will offer a three (3) year medical degree for family practice doctors

The Princeton Review is entering the distance education market by teaming up with community colleges to offer fast-track allied health-care programs to students who are willing to pay higher tuition to bypass long waiting lists.

Editorial from the book DIY U: Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. She cites 4 trends: 1. 80/20 rule 2. Great Unbundling 3. Techno-hybridixzation 4. Personal Learning Networks and Paths