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Though those circumstances have "rendered higher education impossible to disrupt in the past," the situation is changing, the authors write. Policy makers are demanding that they enroll and successfully educate many more students at a time when their "economic model is already broken" -- with public pressure mounting against increasing tuitions and their ability to use "government dollars, ... endowments and gifts ... to paper over cost increases" waning, Horn said.

The key question the authors pose is whether traditional institutions can adapt themselves enough to fill this role or "whether community colleges, for-profit universities and other entrant organizations aggressively using online learning will do it instead -- and ultimately grow to replace many of today's traditional institutions."

Changing will not be easy for, say, Harvard and the University of Texas; just ask General Motors and America's steel companies, the authors suggest. Altering an institution's educational model (by delivering courses only online, for instance) does not in and of itself transform an institution unless new business models are embraced, too, that allow for lower prices and the shedding of research and other functions that aren't central to teaching and learning.

Yesterday, I attended a 90 minute presentation by one of the most well-known CMS vendors.

teaching, learning, knowing, and thinking. Once you have begun to grapple with these messy and essential questions, sitting through presentations aimed at describing content delivery and administrative efficiences sucks a little more of your soul out of your being.

Ultimately, then, our conversations about technologies must grapple with our larger community’s values — and what code we think enacts these values.

In the Internet age, walls are everywhere falling in academe. Online education, all but cleansed of its original stigma, has become commonplace. This is especially true among big public universities, which have clamored to capitalize on new markets by enrolling far-flung students. The University of Massachusetts and Penn State University rake in tens of millions of dollars each year from their online programs.

there is no way to tell how much actual learning these expensive projects are creating. “If you take away OCW completely,” said Ira Fuchs, former vice president at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, of MIT’s celebrated OpenCourseWare project, “I’m not sure that higher education would be noticeably different.”

Though often designed primarily for external audiences, these projects have also made an impact closer to home, aiding efforts to improve alumni relations, recruit prospective students, and provide a welcome study aid (and a kind of enhanced course catalog) for the university’s enrolled student population.

ELMS stands for e-Learning Management System. ELMS is a completely open source project built on top of the Drupal Content Management System. Drupal is one of the largest open source communities in existence today and gives developers access to thousands of community contributed and supported modules and themes.

Aimed for Google’s 10 million Google Apps for Education users, the category offers over 20 applications from 19 vendors including specialized apps for schools and universities such as social learning game Grockit, grading software LearnBoost, math teaching tool DreamBox, design apps Aviary and more.

Only 10 percent of colleges have begun phasing out their physical computer labs, even though the vast majority of students now own laptops, according to the Campus Computing Project. A full two-thirds of respondents to last fall’s survey said they had decided not to phase out their labs. Yet all of the technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed agreed that virtual computing labs are bound to emerge to supplement physical computer labs across higher education, and some even suggested that the rooms where students currently tap away on campus-owned computers will eventually yield to the virtual kind.

Well before the term entered the popular lexicon via a recent Microsoft advertising campaign, “the cloud” was transforming how college students interact with their coursework.

In a virtual computing lab, students log in via a secured website and choose from a library of “images” — virtual desktops outfitted with different versions of various programs. The selected image then appears as a window on the student’s own computer desktop, at which point students can open a program and begin working. They can save or print their work just as though the program were running on their own hard drives.

While I was already familiar with a number of OER websites, I was surprised to learn of a few that were new to me. I have shared the complete list below.

An open-ended student response system is an electronic service or application that lets students enter text responses during a lecture or class discussion. Open-ended systems give faculty the option of collecting such free-form contributions from students, in addition to asking the true/false or multiple-choice questions that conventional clicker systems allow. Such tools open a channel for the kind of individual, creative student responses that can alter the character of learning. The great strength of open-ended student response systems may be that they create another avenue for discussion, allowing students to join a virtual conversation at those times when speaking out in live discourse might seem inappropriate, intimidating, or difficult.

Just as the real computing revolution didn't happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won't happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment.

Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we've already made for them won't do. Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances. For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged.

To provide students the guidance they need to reach these goals, faculty and staff must be willing to lead by example — to demonstrate and discuss, as fellow learners, how they have created and connected their own personal cyberinfrastructures. Like the students, faculty and staff must awaken their own self-efficacy within the myriad creative possibilities that emerge from the new web.

Sending shockwaves through the ed tech establishment, Apple unveiled the iPad LMS at the March 2nd iPad 2 event.

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The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.