Group items tagged

"Prior Learning Assessment, or PLA, is a little-discussed strategy to facilitate time-to-degree, particularly for non-traditional students. The concept is to set up the structure and processes to evaluate corporate training from employment, military training, civic responsibilities, travel, and independent study and award academic credit from these out-of-the-classroom learning situations. As the higher education population diversifies with much higher percentages of working adults, PLA can be an important factor in reducing total cost and time-to-degree."

What does this emerging landscape of educational delivery models look like? I have categorized the models not just in terms of modality-ranging from face-to-face to fully online-but also in terms of the method of course design (see Figure 1). These two dimensions allow a richer understanding of the new landscape of educational delivery models. Within this landscape, the following primary models have emerged: ad hoc online courses and programs, fully online programs, School-as-a-Service, educational partnerships, competency-based education, blended/hybrid courses and the flipped classroom, and MOOCs (see Figure 2).

"During the webinar, one of the participants shared a link for a report from Duke University on their first MOOC, Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach, delivered through Coursera in fall 2012. And what a find that was - this is the most thorough description I have yet seen from a university about their experience selecting, development, delivering and analyzing a MOOC. Kudos to Yvonne Belanger and Jessica Thornton, the authors."

"The tension seems to lie between admissions and learning, and the pressure that surrounds students forces them to choose admissions more often than not."

"The transformation of the higher education LMS market continues, and I expect more changes over the next 2 - 3 years. However, it seems time to capture the state of the market based on changes over the past year or two."

"Several weeks ago the University of Florida Online program opened for the Spring 2014 semester, accepting 600 transfer students, and the new program will accept Freshmen starting August 2014. This announcement comes just 2 years after the Florida legislature commissioned a study from the Parthenon Group on how to best leverage online programs in the state, and this program is probably one of the highest profile new online programs in the US within the past few years (along with California's online initiative, Open SUNY, SJSU / Udacity and GaTech / Udacity)."

"It was two years ago, give or take a week, that the MOOC mania started. Think about the effects on higher education of this seminal event and how short a time it has been. In the past two years online education and ed tech have moved into the front pages, being discussed in the front pages of leading newspapers, popular media magazines, and in president's cabinets and board meetings for most institutions. Previously, online education was discussed in small circles and specific contexts, but not as a dominant theme whenever higher education was the topic. Below is a brief (and incomplete) timeline of the national media articles as MOOC mania started in August 2011"

Coursera just raised $43m of funding - what potential do investors see in MOOCs? Based on recent Forbes article - do you see MOOCs as replacing parts of traditional higher ed? Will growing numbers of online students reduce hesitation of employers to hire online students? How does this affect institutions being proxies for quality? What applications are there for MOOCs beyond academic programs? (with interesting answer from Michael based on DS106)

"The schools most at risk are those without strong name recognition. While that might be unfair, it seems to be a fact of life. While Clayton Christensen has taken some heat from the projection that "in 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy", the data from this survey lends some credibility to the concept."

"Coexistence and interoperability, however, should not imply merely having links from the LMS to external tools as is too often the case."

"The Chronicle asked five education-technology experts to think about the year ahead and identify major themes at the intersection of education technology and higher education."

"The shortest answer is that US college students spend an average of $600 per year on textbooks despite rising retail prices."

"Young has reduced the number of students failing, withdrawing or performing below average in Bio 208: Human Anatomy from 50 percent to fewer than 20 percent in about four years, and poorly performing students have watched their grades climb, with continued improvement on the horizon."

"Today the movement became real as Grand Canyon Education announced their agreement to buy Orbis Education Services for more than $362 million."

"Given these limitations, the rubrics do provide great value. Ultimately, these rubrics represent the current thinking about improving the quality of online courses. Some of the rubrics have evolved over twenty years and will continue to do so. The rubrics' strengths manifest at different levels-for individual instructors, a rubric acts as a course design guide; for institutions and systems, a rubric creates a common vocabulary, an aspirational worldview, a mechanism for consistency and accountability, and the basis for a social infrastructure that runs parallel to the technological infrastructure."

"As the online education market has matured, however, there has been a growing pushback against revenue-sharing as the only model available. Thus there is an emerging unbundled fee-for-service OPM model, in which the companies offer the same services, or some subset, for the market price of those services. The institution pays for the services used, mostly independent of the amount of tuition revenue coming into the online program. This category leads to the program, or institution, to take the up-front financial risk but not have to sign contracts sending ~40 - 60% of the tuition revenue to the vendor. Fewer strings attached but more responsibilities and risks for the school."

"some users will be asked to pay a support fee, "from $9 up to some portion of the certification cost," said Medros. The price of the support fee "will be aligned to the value and experience" that a course gives to a learner, said Medros, suggesting that the best courses will also be the most expensive."

"Remembering that broad trends are most important in this first-view of data, we can see a big jump in 2017 thus far for international markets for Canvas. It will be interesting to update this view at the end of the year to see if the trend holds, but it is quite clear that Instructure is making Canvas a global LMS."