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"This report profiles six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology as ranked by an expert panel of leaders from across the higher education landscape."

"…because of term extensions, we've had to wait almost a century before copyrighted works enter the public domain (in 2019, works from 1923 are finally freely available). Under current copyright terms - life plus 70 years for natural authors, and 95 years from publication for works of corporate authorship - you're unlikely to see any works created in your lifetime enter the public domain. This imposes great (and in many cases unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, it imposes costs on our collective culture. Even for the works that are still commercially available, the shrinking public domain increases costs to citizens and limits creative reuse. But at least those works are available. Unfortunately, much of our cultural heritage, perhaps the majority of the culture of the last 80 years, consists of the orphan works described above-works that have no identifiable or locatable copyright holder. Though no one is benefiting from the copyright, they are nevertheless presumptively off limits."

"Presented on May 8, 2019 by Dr. Janette Isaacson and Grant Kirby form Oregon Institute of Technology It all started with the question, "Are we really sure students are learning what we think they are learning?" Hear how faculty at Oregon Institute of Technology have used Quality Matters Standards and Coursetune mapping software to strengthen course design and alignment across the courses they teach. Dr. Janette Isaacson and Grant Kirby have implemented a student-centered instructional design model that begins with three key components: QM is the foundation of quality metrics; Coursetune provides scalable modeling for alignment mapping; real-time student feedback provides an empirical measurement for quality success."

"Among the software slated to be released under an open-source license is the university's pioneering adaptive-learning project, the Open Learning Initiative, as well as a learning analytics platform LearnSphere. Officials estimate that developing the software has cost more than $100 million in foundation grants and university dollars. The goal of the software giveaway is to jump-start "learning engineering," the practice of applying findings from learning science to college classrooms."

"Instructors often kick off a discussion board assignment by asking each student to respond to an assigned reading. To prevent plagiarism, some learning management systems are set up, either by the platform or by policies of the institution or instructor, to only reveal the full contents of a discussion thread after a student has already posted."

"A prominent online program management company, 2U, announced this morning that it will purchase Trilogy Education Services, a large boot camp provider that partners with continuing education divisions at dozens of universities."

"WGU Academy courses will be delivered in an online, competency-based format similar to the WGU learning model. Students will enroll in customized programs of two or more college-level courses that typically include a writing course and one or more courses in math, general education, or introductory-level classes focused on desired degree paths. In addition to college-level courses, WGU Academy offers the Program for Academic and Career Advancement (PACA). Modeled on a nationally recognized social and emotional learning course used by WGU for several years, the course provides group sessions, peer interaction, and one-to-one coaching to build confidence and college persistence."

"expect to see more colleges turn to these providers, said Michael Feldstein, a consultant and co-publisher of the popular e-Literate blog, who has long followed the OPM market. A survey released last week by The Chronicle of Higher Education and P3-EDU, a conference on public-private partnerships to be hosted by George Mason University, found that 42 percent of provosts, chief financial officers and presidents surveyed said that expanding online programs was the area they most considered turning to a private company to help with."

""The study indicates that, based on two years of implementation across scores of colleges, OER can be an important tool in helping more students-and particularly low-income and underrepresented students-afford college, engage actively in their learning, persist in their studies, and ultimately complete," says Dr. Karen A Stout, ATD president. "Data show that even using the most conservative estimates, cost savings are significant and that OER content plays a role in helping strengthen instruction and learning across not just a few courses but entire degree pathways.""

"with no existing online programs and a culture unaccustomed to rapid transformation, they weren't prepared for the challenge, Coleman admitted during a session last month at the University Professional, Continuing and Online Education Association's annual meeting. "Wellesley had no understanding of this market," Coleman said. "I'm not really sure that they had a full understanding of what this could be or what they wanted it to be.""

"Nelson says the new version of the system lets professors quickly divide a large class into groups of up to 12 students. Those break-out groups of students can then participate in a small-group discussion while each student fills out a "structured worksheet" that can be graded later by a TA following a rubric to make sure each student was following along and participating. During the live class, the professor can peek into any of the breakout sessions, either by appearing as one of the participants, or lurking in the background so that he or she can see and hear the students but they don't know the professor is there. The requirement of filling out the worksheet, or doing some other activity like a poll or quiz, makes sure students in breakout groups stay on task, Nelson says."

"What Anbar has in mind is something he calls "active OER." That's taking the standard digital textbook and expanding it with the addition of digital resources, including simulations that are both interactive and adaptive. "The learner doesn't just move something around in the simulation but actually gets prompting feedback that guides them to success," he explained. That's where Smart Sparrow comes in: The company produces aero, a learning platform that allows the instructor to pull together lessons from a set of templates that can include text, tests, assessments, virtual labs and field trips, and other digital components. For the purposes of the consortium, those elements would be pulled from OER materials."

"When a college goes out of business, all of its alumni can suddenly find themselves in an unexpected dilemma: How can graduates prove they actually earned their degrees when no one is left at the institution to send academic transcripts to prospective employers or graduate schools? That scenario is one reason that a group of nine universities, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, today announced a collaboration to build a system that would let institutions issue digital diplomas and credentials in a way that can be verified without needing to check with a human registrar. The idea is to encourage widespread use of digital credentials across all kinds of academic institutions, and even at more informal places of learning, so that students end up taking ownership of how to communicate their learning to employers."

"Publishers claim that new technologies, like digital textbooks and Netflix-style subscription services, make textbooks more affordable for all. But affordability advocates say that if anyone is to blame for the fact that textbook costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s, it's the publishers - and, advocates claim, these new technologies are publishers' attempt to maintain their stranglehold on the industry while disguising it as reform."

"Digital student records are evolving in ways that more fully document student achievements. One such form is the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR), a digital asset that helps students both better understand their learning and share a verifiable record of their knowledge and accomplishments. CLR content can include portfolios, learning artifacts, course descriptions and syllabi, rubrics, performance evaluations, and other materials that help document what a learner knows and can do. The CLR shifts attention away from seat-time metrics to richer measures of an individual's abilities."

"Accessibility policies frame standards and expectations for how a college or university's programs, services, and facilities serve the needs of people with disabilities. Some policies are aspirational in nature and relatively short on specific mandates, while others are much more prescriptive in stating standards, rules for compliance, and sanctions for behaviors that fall short. Accessibility policies constitute a statement of values that the institutional community subscribes to, and they serve as guidelines for how the institution intends to ensure the equitable treatment of all members of the campus community."

"Jakubowski identified some key steps institutions might take to mitigate risk and set themselves on a path for achieving accessibility success"

""In other words," the researchers wrote, "students who have positive attitudes about multitasking and prefer to multitask appear to better control this academically disadvantageous behavior in face-to-face courses." They attribute the students' "control" heavily to what Lepp called the "norms of the classroom" -- essentially, pressure from peers or the instructor not to multitask."

"These aren't necessarily a "yellow brick road to student success," - yet - the report noted; completion and retention rates for institutions reporting adoption of guided pathways were lower than those not reporting adoption of this approach."

"That democratization of forgery is just around the corner. "I would say within another 18 to 24 months, that technology is going to get to a point where the human brain may not be able to decipher it," Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, recently told me. Soon, the forger will consistently fool us."