Red Balloon Resources

"iPhone App Raises Questions About Who Owns Student Inventions January 31, 2011, 5:56 pm By Tushar Rae An iPhone app designed by a team of students for a contest at the University of Missouri at Columbia has helped lead the institution to rewrite its intellectual-property policies. Members of the student competition, hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, had been informed that the university might assert a partial or complete claim to the products that the students were creating. That led some students to drop out, said Anthony Brown, then an undergraduate in the department of journalism. Mr. Brown and his team, made up of fellow students Zhenhua Ma, Dan Wang, and Peng Zhuang, decided to stay in, despite their concerns. When they won the competition with an app called NearBuy, the students decided to contact the university to assert their ownership and to ask the university to waive any intent to assert ownership. They argued that student inventions, even if fostered to some degree by faculty mentors, stood apart from the work done by faculty members using university resources."

"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 The suit was quickly withdrawn.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.""

"January 30, 2011 Absent Students Want to Attend Traditional Classes via Webcam Professors already welcome their guest speakers using this same technology New Question for Professors: Should Students Be Allowed to Attend Classes Via Webcam? 1 Paul Jones takes frequent advantage of Skype videoconferencing to invite guest speakers to his mass-communications classes at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among them are (below) Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard U.'s Berkman Center for Internet and Society; Fred Turner, an associate professor of communication at Stanford U.; and Howard Rheingold, author of several books on virtual communities. By Jeffrey R. Young It was just 30 minutes before class when Thomas Nelson Laird, an assistant professor of higher education at Indiana University at Bloomington, got the e-mail from a student: "I can't make it to class. Can you beam me in by Webcam?" "I thought, I don't know if I can do that," the professor says. He looked at the clock and thought about the time it would take to rig up a link via Skype or some other video-chat system. He had used the technology before, though, so he figured, Why not? Professors across the country are facing similar questions. Webcams are ubiquitous, and students are accustomed to using popular services like Skype to make what are essentially video phone calls to friends and family. Recognizing the trend, this month Skype unveiled a service for educators to trade tips and tricks, called "Skype in the classroom." Professors also frequently bring in guest speakers using the technology, letting students interact with experts they otherwise would only read about in textbooks."

"Obama Proposes Education Technology Agency Modeled After DARPA by Jeffrey Mervis on 4 February 2011 The Obama Administration has proposed a new agency within the Department of Education that will fund the development of new education technologies and promote their use in the classroom. In an updated version of its 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, the White House announced today that the president's 2012 budget request will call for the creation of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education (ARPA-ED). The name is a deliberate takeoff on the Sputnik-era DARPA within the Department of Defense that funded what became the Internet and the much newer Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) that hopes to lead the country into a clean-energy future. ARPA-ED will seek to correct what an Administration official calls the country's massive "underinvestment" in educational technologies that could improve student learning. "We know that information and communications technologies are having a transformative impact on other sectors. But that's not the case in K-12 education." The official cited studies showing that less than 0.1% of the $600 billion spent each year on elementary and secondary school education goes for research on how students learn. "There are a number of good ideas and promising early results about the use of education technology that have led the Administration to be interested in doing more in this area," the official noted. (See a special issue of Science from 2 January 2009 on education and technology.) The goal of ARPA-ED, according to the official, will be to "advance the state of the art and increase demand" for successful technologies that teachers and students can use, such as a digital tutor that can bring students and experts together to enhance learning. Federal agencies now fund only a relative handful of projects in this area, the official added, and most local districts don't have the money to purchase those found to be effec

"February 6, 2011 Fast-Growing U. of Phoenix Calculates a More Careful Course By Goldie Blumenstyk In the fall of 2009, after closing the books on yet another banner year of enrollment growth, and with its parent company's stock climbing toward a five-year high of $90 per share, the University of Phoenix began to question fundamental pieces of the very formula that had fueled its years of success. Even as its executives celebrated, recalls one, they were uneasy. A feeling was building "in the pit of everyone's stomach: That felt too good." From that "moment of truth," as that executive, Robert W. Wrubel now describes it, Phoenix quietly began what it calls a major change of direction. Out of the public eye, North America's largest private university not only put in motion an overhaul of what had come to be seen as its grow-at-any-cost admissions practices. It also ended a compensation schedule tied to enrollment, began a required orientation program for inexperienced students, and instituted a host of other reforms in marketing and nearly every other important facet of this 438,000-student institution. The moves, orchestrated from its headquarters here, and from corporate outposts like San Francisco, where the university has assembled a team of Silicon Valley veterans and computer scientists to create a cutting-edge electronic course platform, are part of a top-down campaign led by a team of a half-dozen executives, all of whom have joined its $5-billion parent company within the past four years. excited about an education. "We are investing in academics like no other higher-education company can do," says Joseph L. D'Amico, who as president of Apollo Group Inc. oversees the campaign it calls "Reinventing education, again." The goal, he says, "is to take our business to a new level." Last month Apollo provided The Chronicle a behind-the-scenes (but by no means unfettered) look at some of the new recruiting techniques, educational moves, and marketing tactics

"'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

"Carnegie Mellon Researchers Find Crowds Can Write as Well as Individuals February 3, 2011, 7:29 pm By Tushar Rae Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found that "crowd-sourced" articles written piecemeal by dispersed writers stack up well against those drafted by one author. "I am pleasantly surprised," said Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor at the university's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and one of the lead researchers on the project. The research team developed a framework it calls CrowdForge to split up and recombine complex, creative human tasks such as writing. Articles created with CrowdForge rated well not only against those created by individual authors, Mr. Kittur said, but against those available on the same topics on a portion of Wikipedia devoted to short, clear entries. CrowdForge starts with "small slices at a time and turns them into a complex artifact," said Mr. Kittur. The framework provides guidelines for how to break down a project, assign portions to writers, and reassemble the pieces. The system also includes a method to evaluate the quality of the created product. In experiments that led to the creation of CrowdForge, Mr. Kittur took large writing projects and then separated them into smaller tasks that were then made available to members of Amazon's Mechanical Turk community, an online group of participants willing to work on online projects. Those who signed up were allowed to pick from tasks including creating an outline for an article, writing facts about a topic, combining those facts into prose, merging lines of prose into paragraphs, and finally turning paragraphs into a complete article. Many of the small tasks can be completed separately and simultaneously, taking advantage of a limited amount of time, Mr. Kittur said."

"January 30, 2011 Scholars Create Influential Journal for About $100 a Year By Jennifer Howard A group of herpetologists-researchers who study reptiles and amphibians-has been quietly demonstrating that it's possible to put together a well-regarded, researcher-run journal with the tiniest of budgets and no help from a publisher. The journal, Herpetological Conservation and Biology, caught my eye as a well-developed example of a movement for grass-roots scholarly publishing that has been rapidly picking up speed. The herpetology publication, founded in 2006, is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed journal with a budget of about $100 a year. (That money comes out of the editors' pockets.) Unlike most science journals, it charges no author or download fees. It has a submission-to-publication turnaround time measured in weeks or at most a few months. And it has just hit a milestone: The editors learned in December 2010 that HCB will be included in Journal Citation Reports, a service run by the commercial publisher Thomson Reuters that calculates impact factors for journals-a significant measure of importance for many researchers. HCB will receive its first impact rating in 2012 or 2013, and the editors expect the journal to rate highly. That credential will help reassure potential contributors, especially researchers who don't yet have tenure, that publishing an article in HCB will be good for their careers. Judged by the number of visitors to the site, the journal has caught on. In its first year, 2006, it received just over 6,000 unique visitors. In 2010 it received 42,288, according to the editors. Readers from more than 160 countries came to the site. And the number of submissions that are deemed good enough to be sent out for peer-review stage-more than 100 in 2010-has more than doubled since 2006, according to Malcolm L. McCallum, the managing editor. He says HCB's acceptance rate for submissions that make it to peer review is running about 50

"January 30, 2011 'Facebook of Science' Seeks to Reshape Peer Review By Colin Macilwain Vitek Tracz is a risk-taker. He put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot. "Everybody promised me that open access would not succeed," recalls the scientific publisher. "They said I would go bankrupt. I thought there was a very high chance of that, myself. But it now turns out to be significantly profitable." Two years ago he sold his BioMed Central publications-there are now about 200 of them-to Berlin-based Springer for an undisclosed sum, thought to be in the region of $50-million. Now, the man described by his colleagues as one of the most innovative and mercurial forces in publishing wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication. Mr. Tracz plans to turn his latest Internet experiment, a large network of leading scientists called the Faculty of 1000, into what some call "the Facebook of science" and a force that will change the nature of peer review. His vision is to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers."

"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.""

"Can Students Learn to Learn? January 31, 2011 SAN FRANCISCO -- Why do some students in a course perform better than others of roughly equal ability? The answers, of course, are as varied as are students. Some spend more time studying, or study more efficiently; some have other priorities; some don't connect with the instructor. Some of these factors relate to metacognition, defined variously as knowing about knowing or being able to understand why we learn the way we do. A student with metacognition may realize after a disappointing test that she didn't study hard enough, and needs to devote more time to academics. The student operating without metacognition may respond to the same setback by trashing his instructor on RateMyProfessors.com. While some colleges have long taught study skills, some institutions are experimenting with efforts to teach much more than how to study: they are looking for ways to grow their students' metacognition. Many of these projects are still small and don't have years of data to report, but on Friday, several of those involved in the efforts shared their enthusiasm for the approach in a session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The projects discussed here were from members of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, which received support from the Teagle Foundation to coordinate the efforts. So how does this work? Kristin E. Bonnie, an assistant professor of psychology at Beloit College, said that on her tests, she has always let students pick a few questions on the multiple-choice portion (say 3 of 25) that won't be graded. It's a way to show students that she understands they may not grasp everything right away. In the past, she just let students cross out the questions they didn't want to answer. Now, she makes them answer all the questions -- and to exempt a question from grading, students must pick from a list she provides of the reasons they are selecting that question. Students

"To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test By PAM BELLUCK Published: January 20, 2011 Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques. The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods. One of those methods - repeatedly studying the material - is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other - having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning - is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts. These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do. In the experiments, the students were asked to predict how much they would remember a week after using one of the methods to learn the material. Those who took the test after reading the passage predicted they would remember less than the other students predicted - but the results were just the opposite. "I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge," said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. "I think that we're tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.""

"$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning January 22, 2011, 9:49 am By Marc Parry Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be-if it comes at all-remains unclear. One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet. That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT's plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT's radical idea as official policy-dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses. "With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan's agency is working with the Labor Department on the program. So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here's what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves. And it demands open access to everything: "All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, vi

"Survey Finds Frustration Among Faculty Leaders at Master's-Level Institutions January 24, 2011, 2:59 pm Faculty Senate leaders at master's-level institutions are more likely than those at doctoral-level universities to report that faculty morale at their institutions is low, according to the newly released results of a survey conducted by Ohio University's Center for Higher Education, in collaboration with the American Association of University Professors. Compared with Faculty Senate leaders at doctoral institutions, whose responses to the center's survey were released in November, those at master's institutions were less likely to report having a good working relationship with their institution's administration, more likely to report that requirements for tenure and promotion are increasing, and more likely to report that there were not enough tenure-track faculty members to support academic programs at their institutions. As is the case at doctoral institutions, the overwhelming majority of Faculty Senate leaders at master's institutions are white, the survey found."

"Peer Review by Twitter As social media tools are increasingly used to respond to scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, many researchers are frustrated, according to an article in Nature. "Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather than at small conferences or in private conversation," the article says. It goes on to quote many others who say that speedy response (even if of varying reliability) is actually a huge improvement over a system of waiting a long time for criticism of published articles."

"December 12, 2010 Is Your Psychology 102 Course Any Good? Here are 22 ways to measure quality - but some of these measures have quality issues of their own. By David Glenn In The Chronicle's "Measuring Stick" series this year, we have looked at debates about how to gauge the quality of departments or entire universities. In this final week, we are looking at the individual course, higher education's basic component. We have sketched 22 potentially useful ways to assess a course's quality. Some of them are commonplace, and some are just emerging. We focus on one section of Psychology 102 at an imaginary university. For each of the 22 measures, the table below explains why it might matter; how easy it typically is for the public to find this kind of information about a course; and the potential limits and pitfalls of using the method."

Charles Kolb, President, Committee for Economic Development January 11, 2011 03:35 PM Reforming American Postsecondary Education Are we about to enter an era of postsecondary education reform comparable to what we've seen in the K-12 arena for almost 30 years? In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education released perhaps its most famous and widely read report, "A Nation At Risk." Referring to "a rising tide of mediocrity" in America's elementary and secondary school system, "A Nation At Risk" described the stark challenges faced by American elementary and secondary education. The report became an immediate catalyst for the school reform movement of the last 27 years. That reform movement included initiatives such as education secretary William Bennett's "Wall Chart of State Performance Indicators," the 1989 Charlottesville education summit between President George H.W. Bush and the nations' governors, the subsequent bipartisan national education goals effort that spanned the first Bush and Clinton Administrations, George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act," and now President Obama's "Race to the Top" challenge for state structural reform. As with many K-12 education reform efforts, change has been hesitant, often rancorous, and has achieved mixed results. Nonetheless, there has been steady progress on standards, accountability, measurements and assessment, and a growing consensus about what our children need to know and how we should measure their achievements as they progress toward high-school graduation. What is strikingly absent is that throughout this period of K-12 activity, American postsecondary education has received a "pass." Not a passing grade -- just a pass. There has been precious little discussion about what our young people should be learning in their postsecondary education experience. The typical postsecondary-education debate in Washington and around the country has concerned access and funding. These topics are certainly important, but they h

"$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning January 22, 2011, 9:49 am By Marc Parry Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be-if it comes at all-remains unclear. One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet. That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT's plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT's radical idea as official policy-dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses. "With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan's agency is working with the Labor Department on the program. So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here's what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves. And it demands open access to everything: "All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, vi

"A Program Is Not a Plan January 13, 2011 By John N. Gardner and Andrew K. Koch One of the main thrusts of what has come to be called "the undergraduate student success movement" is misguided. Yes, we did mean to use the term "misguided." A strong word and a strong assertion, but we have equally strong evidence. Simply stated, higher education institutions in the United States focus heavily on student success programs, but rarely do they have a comprehensive plan to guide those programs. In the absence of a plan, redundancies and gaps occur, and retention stagnates. In short, a program or programs do not a successful plan make. Of course, making this assertion means that John Gardner, one of this essay's authors and a key architect in the national student success movement, has to admit that over the years he may not have given the best advice to all people at all times. For about three decades, Gardner has gone around the country telling college educators that their institutions need to adopt or adapt one form of student success program or another. Drawing from his experiences, the recommended program was often a first-year seminar -- a contemporary staple in the American college curriculum that dates back to the 1880s. And, in fact, research does correlate participation in first-year seminars with positive differences in student retention and graduation rates. At the same time that Gardner was advocating for first-year seminars in particular, he was also advocating for a broader philosophical approach to the first year. He coined the term, "the first-year experience," and meant it to encompass a total campus approach to the first year, not a single program. Upon reflection, it seems that speaking about one program extensively while at the same time advocating for a collective approach may have fostered a bit of confusion. And today the "first-year experience" can mean anything from a single course to a full-fledged coordinated effort to improve the fir

"January 9, 2011 State of Washington to Offer Online Materials as Texts Money-saving effort at 2-year colleges faces vexing problems By Martha Ann Overland It's a question that students, and a growing number of their professors, are asking: Why require students to buy expensive textbooks every year, when the Internet is awash in information, much of it free? After all, the words of Plato have not changed in the past 2,000 years, nor has basic algebra. Washington State's financially strapped Legislature, which foots much of the textbook bill for community-college students on state financial aid, has wondered the same thing. With nearly half a million students taking classes at the state's 34 two-year colleges, why not assemble very inexpensive resources for the most popular classes and allow access to those materials online? And why not cap the cost of those course materials at $30? Calculating the savings, when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year, was an exercise in simple math, says Cable Green, director of e-learning and open education at the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. "We believe we can change the cost of attending higher education in this country and in the world," he says. "If we are all teaching the same 81 courses, why not?" So with a $750,000 matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the board has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges. For the Open Course Library, as the materials are known, teams of community-college instructors, librarians, and Web designers from around the state are creating ready-to-use digital course modules for the 81 highest-enrolled courses. The first 43 courses, which are as varied as "General Biology" and "Introduction to Literature 1," will be tested in classrooms beginning this month. The basic design requirements of the Open Course Library are simple enough. The material must be