Red Balloon Resources

"Changing Course October 22, 2010 As a growing number of nonprofit colleges hire for-profit companies to lay tracks for their new online programs, academics generally have been the third rail. Technology and information systems are one thing, the colleges say; to outsource teaching and curriculum is quite another. Now, two major e-learning companies have teamed up to disprove that truism. Blackboard and K12, Inc. announced last week that they will begin selling online remedial courses to community colleges beginning next year. The details will be hashed out over the next few months, but the basic outline is this: The companies will design the courses and provide the instructors from K12's stable, and the colleges will offer the courses through their normal catalogs. Some nonprofit institutions that partner with companies on online education have been careful to emphasize their commitment to keeping a wall between the business and technology of online course delivery and the actual instruction. "Some things, we would never turn over to the private sector," Philip Regier, dean of Arizona State University's online programs, said earlier this month, after his institution announced it was going into business with Pearson to help boost its online offerings."

"April 17, 2011 5 Myths About the 'Information Age' By Robert Darnton Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial non-wisdom. Five stand out: 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain-"Super Thursday," last October 1-800 new works were published. The latest figures for the United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355, suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books-a further 764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche" print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. However it is measured, the population of books is increasing, not decreasing, and certainly not dying. 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented. 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less di

A new project, unveiled at the Educause conference here today, plans to provide college students a similar experience on academic Web sites. It's called Sherpa, like the guides who lead climbers up Mount Everest. The goal of the software, developed by the South Orange County Community College District, is to mine data about students to guide them to courses, information, and services.

"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."

Looking past massive pool of registrants, edX probes tiny subgroup of MOOC students who actually stuck around to the end of its pilot course.

"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.""

"Bridge Programs for Underprepared Adults Could Improve College Completion By Jennifer Gonzalez "Bridge" programs that help adult students acquire the skills necessary to succeed in postsecondary education are gaining momentum and could play a vital role in fulfilling the nation's degree-completion agenda, according to the results of a new study by the Workforce Strategy Center. The study, called BridgeConnect, surveyed 515 programs in 345 communities across the nation that are using the concept as part of job-training efforts. The intent of the survey, which was commissioned by the Joyce Foundation and conducted by the Workforce Strategy Center, was to take a composite look at the nation's bridge programs. There is no clearinghouse that keeps track of such efforts, which have many different sources of funds, standards, target populations, goals, and outcomes. A clearer picture could help policy makers grasp the diverse work that bridge programs accomplish, which could lead to a scaling-up of programs and even the formation of national standards, said the authors of a report on the survey. The report, "Building a Higher Skilled Workforce," will be posted on the Web site of the Workforce Strategy Center"

"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.""

"Adapting to Developmental Ed March 10, 2011 With public higher education systems under political pressure to increase completion rates, and foundations offering grants to colleges that are using new technologies to help usher students through to a degree, education technology companies are seeing a ripe market of potential buyers for new e-learning products - in particular, software aimed at high school graduates who lack the basic reading, writing, and math skills to succeed at the college level. Technology geared toward helping students "catch up" has been around for a while, but only recently has it achieved a potentially game-changing level of sophistication, according to Carol Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. "These products that 10 years ago were sort of iffy, at best, have now become remarkably mature and high quality products," she says. And while public higher ed systems are seeing their budgets cut, developmental education is in such bad shape that many colleges are prepared to spend - often with foundation support - on products they think could help bring them more in line with state and national completion goals. There are many contracts to be won, Twigg says. The education tech industry is responding by mobilizing teams to tweak and re-brand existing software for the developmental market and begin developing new products to sell to desperate colleges. Most companies are offering variations on a theme: "adaptive" technology that learns the strengths and weaknesses of individual students and tailors its tutorials to address their needs. Unlike a traditional sequence of instructions in a learning exercise, adaptive software adjusts to how well a student appears to understand different concepts. If a student struggles to learn a skill when it is presented one way, the software will detect her confusion and present it another way. The model is highly individualized instruction, without the many instr

"Why the Obama Administration Wants a Darpa for Education March 4, 2011, 11:59 am By Marc Parry The Big Brains at Darpa have dreamed up some pretty cool stuff over the years: GPS, mind-controlled robotic arms, the Internet. So could education benefit from its own version of the Pentagon-led research agency? The Obama administration thinks the answer is yes. Its proposed 2012 budget includes $90-million to kick off the effort, conceived as a way to support development of cutting-edge educational technologies. Why the need for a new agency? Education research and development is "underinvested," argues James H. Shelton III, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement in the U.S. Education Department. A new agency-its name would be "Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education"-would have more flexibility to identify specific problems and direct efforts to solve them, he says. Plus, it would be able to attract top outside talent to work on these projects. Mr. Shelton offered few specifics on what projects the new agency would support, but he did suggest that education officials want to build on work that's already been done by other agencies. He pointed to Darpa's work on digital tutors as one example. One of the big problems that has not yet been solved, Mr. Shelton says, is this: "How do you actually enable teachers to personalize instruction for students and access the resources that best match the needs and interests of those students?""

"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."

But this course, Building a Search Engine, is taught by two prominent computer scientists, Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford research professor and Google fellow, and David Evans, a professor on leave from the University of Virginia. The big names have been a big draw. Since Udacity, the for-profit startup running the course, opened registration on Jan.

"July 13, 2010 For Colleges in Some States, Financial Relief Is Far Off By Goldie Blumenstyk Even when the economy begins to recover and employment picks up, public colleges shouldn't expect much immediate relief from their states, warns a report this month from Moody's Investors Service. Some states will very likely recover much more slowly than others. In more than half of the states, recovery is not projected to kick in until at least 2013, 2014, or later. And even then, the report notes, states will still face pressures for spending on public-employee pensions, health care, primary education, and other services."

"Beware: Alternative Certification Is Coming January 23, 2012, 4:42 pm By Richard Vedder The announcement of agreements between Burck Smith's StraighterLine and the Education Testing Service (ETS) and the Council on Aid to Education (CAE) to provide competency test materials to students online is potentially very important, along with several other recent developments. A little economics explains why this is so. In the first week of beginning economics courses, professors usually make this fundamental point: If the price of something rises a lot, people look for substitutes. Resources (dollars) are scarce, and individuals want to make the best use of them. They "maximize their utility" by shifting away from high-priced good or service A to lower-priced good B. With regards to colleges, consumers typically have believed that there are no good substitutes-the only way a person can certify to potential employers that she/he is pretty bright, well educated, good at communicating, disciplined, etc., is by presenting a bachelor's degree diploma. College graduates typically have these positive attributes more than others, so degrees serve as an important signaling device to employers, lowering the costs of learning about the traits of the applicant. Because of the lack of good substitutes, colleges face little outside competition and can raise prices more, given their quasi-monopoly status. As college costs rise, however, people are asking: Aren't there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers? Employers like the current system, because the huge (often over $100,000) cost of demonstrating competency is borne by the student, not by them. Employers seemingly have little incentive to look for alternative certification. That is why reformers like me cannot get employer organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to take alternative certification seriously. But if companies can find good employees with high-school diplomas who have dem

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.

"February 2, 2012 Multiyear Study of Community-College Practices Asks: What Helps Students Graduate? By Jennifer Gonzalez Community colleges are brimming with programs and policies designed to help students complete their studies. Practices like requiring orientation and establishing early-academic-warning systems have sprouted since 2009, when President Obama announced that he wanted to make the United States the best-educated country in the world by 2020. Now the questions for the nation's community colleges are: Which of the practices work and why? And perhaps most important, how do colleges expand them to cover all students? A new, multiyear project led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement will attempt to get some answers. The research organization plans to analyze data from four different but related surveys and produce reports annually for the next three years. The surveys represent responses from the perspective of entering and experienced students, faculty members, and institutions. Kay M. McClenney, the center's director and a senior lecturer in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin, says the project will allow community colleges to make more-informed decisions about how they spend money and about the type of policies and programs they want to emphasize. The first of three reports, "A Matter of Degrees: Promising Practices for Community College Student Success" was released last week. It draws attention to 13 strategies for increasing retention and graduation rates, including fast-tracking remedial education, providing students with experiential learning, and requiring students to attend orientation. The strategies specified in the report are not new. In fact, many of them can be found at two-year colleges right now. But how well those strategies are working to help students stay in college and graduate is another matter. The report found peculiarities among responses on similar topics, sugges

Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

"Commonality Across Countries September 16, 2010 PARIS -- Concisely summarizing the themes of any conference is difficult; doing so for a meeting where the 30 main speakers hailed from 15 countries and gathered to talk about a topic as broad as where higher education is headed around the planet seems a fool's errand. And yet the striking thing about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's biennial higher education conference that ended here Wednesday was that, despite the vast differences in how higher education institutions are operated and funded and governed from country to country, there was enormous commonality in the issues and problems they're facing, the questions their governments are asking of them, and how their leaders are responding."

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

"The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education By Seth Godin For 400 years, higher education in the United States has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amounts of time and money and prestige in the college world have been climbing. I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it. Most undergraduate college and university programs are organized to give an average education to average students. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up. The definition of "best" is under siege. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect. Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem."