Red Balloon Resources

"The U.S. government is giving away prizes. In seeking solutions to problems, it has discovered the magic of contests, or challenges -- also known as open grant-making or open innovation. Or crowd-sourcing. This Story Whatever you call this new way of doing business, it represents a dramatic departure from the norm for the bureaucratic, command-and-control federal government. To be sure, the agencies won't abandon the traditional method of doling out grants to predictable bidders. But in the new era of innovation-by-contest, the government will sometimes identify a specific problem or goal, announce a competition, set some rules and let the game begin. Anyone can play. The idea is to get better ideas, cheaper, and from more sources, using the Internet and social networking and all the Web 2.0 stuff as a kind of vast global laboratory. NASA is already doing it -- offering prizes for more flexible astronaut gloves, a lunar rover and wireless power transmission. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon think tank, meanwhile, has staged "Grand Challenges" that lured inventors to create self-navigating robotic vehicles. And on Friday, hoping to scatter the concept more broadly throughout the government, the White House and the Case Foundation will team up with federal employees from 35 agencies in an all-day strategy session titled "Promoting Innovation: Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking.""

"July 19, 2012 Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses 1 Jim Wilson, The New York Times, Redux Andrew Ng, a co-founder of the company and a professor of computer science at Stanford U.: "We have a lot of white boards up around the office where these ideas are being written down and erased and written down and erased." Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young Coursera has been operating for only a few months, but the company has already persuaded some of the world's best-known universities to offer free courses through its online platform. Colleges that usually move at a glacial pace are rushing into deals with the upstart company. But what exactly have they signed up for? And if the courses are free, how will the company-and the universities involved-make money to sustain them? Some clues can be found in the contract the institutions signed. The Chronicle obtained the agreement between Coursera and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first public university to make such a deal, under a Freedom of Information Act request, and Coursera officials say that the arrangement is similar to those with the other partners. The contract reveals that even Coursera isn't yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled "Possible Company Monetization Strategies," lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses. That means students taking a free course from Stanford University may eventually be barraged by banner ads or promotional messages. But the universities have the opportunity to veto any revenue-generating idea on a course-by-course basis, so very little is set in stone. Andrew Ng, a co-founder of the company and a professor of computer science at Stanford, describes the list as an act of "brainstorming" rather than a set plan. "We have a lot of white boards up around the office where these ideas

"Bridgepoint has skyrocketed in revenue from $8 million in 2004 to $454.3 million last year. Using online technology for part-time students, it offers 60 degree programs and 125 specializations, ranging from bachelor's degrees in biology and homeland security to a master's in business administration and doctorate in sports psychology. The company owns two tiny colleges - Ashford University in Iowa and University of the Rockies in Colorado - but 99 percent of its 54,000 students take all their courses online and communicate by phone and e-mail with academic, enrollment and financial advisers in San Diego and other locations. Roughly 2,430 adjunct professors teach 1,150 five-week courses, using chat sessions and online taped lectures and reading and writing assignments. As an example of its aggressive marketing approach, Bridgepoint this week announced discounted programs in a partnership with Blockbuster to benefit its 38,000 employees seeking college degrees"

"U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced the Department of Education's final priorities and the grant application for the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund (i3). The fund, which is part of the historic $5 billion investment in school reform in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), will support the development of path-breaking new ideas, the validation of approaches that have demonstrated promise, and the scale-up of the nation's most successful and proven education innovations. "

"Advancing by Degrees" is designed to help college officials monitor and improve graduation rates by providing a framework of on-track indicators that reveal patterns among groups of students-including those who are struggling and need help to graduate. These data, in turn, can help drive changes in policies and practices that can boost the number of college graduates. Great report...wonderful questions, practical, focused! Terrific.

Salman Khan, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Business School, was working as a hedge fund manager when he began posting videos on YouTube six years ago to tutor young family members in math. That led to the 2008 creation of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that has built a free, online collection of thousands of digital lessons (nearly 3,000 of them created by Mr. Khan himself) and exercises in subjects ranging from algebra to microeconomics. Education Week Staff Writer Lesli A. Maxwell recently interviewed Mr. Kahn about the evolution of the academy and its potential for changing K-12 education.

"February 12, 2012 'Academically Adrift': The News Gets Worse and Worse 'Academically Adrift': The News Gets Worse and Worse 1 Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Kevin Carey In the last few months of 2010, rumors began circulating among higher-education policy geeks that the University of Chicago Press was about to publish a new book written by a pair of very smart sociologists who were trying to answer a question to which most people thought they already knew the answer: How much do students learn while they're in college? Their findings, one heard, were ... interesting. The book, Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, fulfilled that promise-and then some. It was no surprise that The Chronicle gave prominent coverage to the conclusion that "American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students," but few people anticipated that the book would become the rare piece of serious academic scholarship that jumps the fence and roams free into the larger culture. Vanity Fair used space normally allotted to Kennedy hagiography to call it a "crushing exposé of the heretofore secret society known as 'college.'" The gossip mavens at Gawker ran the book through their patented Internet cynicism machine and wrote that "To get a college degree, you must go into a soul-crushing amount of debt. And what do you get for all that money? Not learning." The New Yorker featured Academically Adrift in a typically brilliant essay by Louis Menand. In one of her nationally syndicated columns, Kathleen Parker called the book a "dense tome" while opining that the failure of higher education constituted a "dot-connecting exercise for Uncle Shoulda, who someday will say-in Chinese-'How could we have let this happen?'" Her response proved that Kathleen Parker has a gift for phrasing and did not actually read the book, whose main text runs to only 144 concise and well-argued pages. But the definitive

"Publishing, Education and "How A Book Is Born" January 9, 2012 - 8:30pm By Joshua Kim If you work in higher ed, you fall asleep every night asking yourself the following questions: Will we suffer the same fate as the record industry, the bookstores and the newspaper business? Is higher ed another example of a physical, as opposed to a digital, information industry - and therefore ripe for disruption? If the core business model of education is built on scarcity, will we survive this transition to information abundance? I imagine that these questions also haunt the dreams of people who work in publishing? All these questions, and more, make reading How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding a worthwhile investment of our time. The barriers to reading this book are actually amazingly low. This Kindle Single is only $1.99. At 62 pages, it will not take much time. And if you have read Harbach's The Art of Fielding (a terrific campus novel), then description this backstory is probably irresistible. One thing we learn from How A Book Is Born is that publishing is very big business: "……total book sales in the United States last year were $13.9 billion - and twice that if you include textbooks and other educational materials. Random House, the biggest of the so-called Big Six publishers, brings in about $2.5 billion a year in revenue; Hachette Book Group, at the smaller end of the Big Six, brings in about $700 million. Michael Pietsch's Little, Brown, which sold 21 million books in 2010, accounted for more than a quarter of that. The vast majority of publishers' revenue (100 percent, in the case of Little, Brown) is from the sale of books and subsidiary rights to books; for the moment, publishers really have no other way to make money." The question is, will e-books change not only how books are read, but how they are published? Traditionally, one of the major roles of the publisher has been to place books in bookstores. Will

"The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago."

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ended 2011 with a grand announcement: It would broadcast massive, open online courses - equal in rigor to its on-campus offerings - to tens of thousands of non-enrolled, non-paying learners around the world. Eventually, the university would offer these students a pathway to some sort of credential.

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.

"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.""

"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."

"Guido Sarducci and the Purpose of Higher Education March 14, 2011, 10:38 am By Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson The way college courses generally work is that a teacher presents a group of students with some subject matter, then attempts through tests and papers to determine how well the students have mastered the subject matter. Those judgments are summarized in a letter grade. A list of those subject matters and grades constitutes the transcript that describes what the student has learned and what the student's performance was overall. The students and the teacher are focused on the subject matter, and the implied view is that the learning in college is captured in the exercises that inform those grades. The limitations of this "subject matter recall" model of higher education are hilariously captured in Don Novello's comic performance on Saturday Night Live as Father Guido Sarducci, who marketed the "Five Minute University": http://youtu.be/kO8x8eoU3L4 Sometimes, in some subjects, the mastery of specific subject matter is precisely what is at stake. Students aiming to be engineers will make pretty direct use of the principles they learn in a course in mechanics, for example. Students focused on other particular occupational qualifications, whether in certificate, associate-degree, or bachelors'-degree programs, will probably make direct use of some of the subjects they are taught. However, the learning produced in large parts of a college education is-or at least should be-different from that, and the role of tests and grades is correspondingly different. As economics professors, we have always understood that little of what students learned in advanced economics courses-neither the factual content nor the specific analytical techniques-was ever going to come up in their later lives (unless fate intervened and made them economists). We suspect that the same is true of other advanced courses, whether in mathematics or literature or psyc

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.

"March 13, 2011 Many For-Profits Are 'Managing' Defaults to Mask Problems, Analysis Indicates 3-year default rates on student loans are 5 times as high as 2-year rates at some colleges By Goldie Blumenstyk and Alex Richards It is no surprise that student-loan default rates go up the longer they're tracked: Give borrowers more time, and more of them will default. But a Chronicle analysis has found that at hundreds of colleges, most of them for-profit, the three-year default rate is inordinately greater than the two-year rate, giving credence to concerns that certain colleges are aggressively using "default management" tools to mask problematic rates of default. Education Department data released last month show that rates at nearly all institutions rose when measured for three rather than two years, as federal law will soon require. Yet at 243 colleges, or about 8 percent of the 3,168 degree-granting institutions The Chronicle examined, the three-year rate was at least 15 percentage points higher than the two-year rate, a substantial increase. Of those, 83 percent were for-profit colleges, including 27 institutions owned by Corinthian Colleges, 25 owned by ITT Educational Services, and 17 owned by Career Education Corporation, At five of Career Education's Cordon Bleu culinary colleges, the two-year rates hovered at 5 percent or below and the three-year rates exceeded 24 percent."

As the private sector works faster and more boldly to churn out next-generation technology and embrace cutting-edge practices, the U.S. Department of Education and its partner federal agencies are ramping up their efforts to bring more spark and innovation into elementary and secondary schools.

"The Power of the Nudge March 10, 2011 Everyone needs to be pestered sometimes. A new study suggests that college students may be among those who most need to be nudged to stay on track. The study was a large-scale randomized analysis of the impact of a commercial service that provides individualized coaching to students on time management, academic goals and other subjects. The coaches call regularly and try in particular to link students' life goals with their academic goals -- and to use the former to motivate progress on the latter. The study -- by Eric P. Bettinger, an associate professor of education, and Rachel Baker, a doctoral student, both of Stanford University -- found that the services had a statistically significant impact on student persistence. The impact was greater for men than for women -- a potentially important finding, given the lower enrollment and graduation rates of men at many institutions."

Attorneys general from more than 20 states have joined forces to investigate for-profit colleges that too often saddle students with crippling debt while furnishing them valueless degrees. The investigations have just begun. But it is already clear from testimony before a Senate committee that Congress must do more to rein in the schools and protect students.

Kids don't put Harvard stickers on their rear windshields, parents do. But for how long? These schools have much to recommend them: impressive students, organic dining halls, presidential alumni. To maintain their reputations, however, elite colleges have long relied on limiting access-Harvard's class of 2015 is about 1,700 students, Yale's is 1,300-and that may be coming to an end. Revolutionaries outside the ivy walls are hammering their way not onto campus but straight into class. Enlarge Image CloseAlamy Elite schools have long relied on limiting access-but for how long? .It's a thrilling collegiate coup. Last fall, a couple of hundred Stanford students registered for Sebastian Thrun's class on artificial intelligence. He offered the course free online, too, through his new company Udacity, and 160,000 students signed up. For the written assignments and exams, both groups got identical questions-and 210 students got a perfect overall score. They all came from the online group. So if you bluffed your way into the Ivy League with plumped-up credentials or an essay edited by somebody else, it's time to start breaking a sweat. "I like to compare it to film," Mr. Thrun told me at a coffee shop between Stanford and Mountain View, Calif., where his day job is running Google X, the company's experimental lab. "Before film there was theater-small casting companies reaching 300 people at a time. Then celluloid was invented, and you could record something and replicate it. A good movie wouldn't reach 300 but 3,000, and soon 300,000 and soon three million. That changed the economics." It is education's time to change now. At the high-school level, interactive study sites are increasingly ingenious: Look at Piazza, Blackboard and Quizlet, founded by a 17-year-old. TED-Ed just launched a channel on You Tube, with three- to 10-minute lessons for kids. YouTube's EDU Portal has been viewed 22 billion times. Khan Academy, a favorite of Bill Gates