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"In the end, young adults need more education and training -- something the U.S. post-secondary system seems curiously bad at delivering. The U.S. ranks first among developed countries in spending on post-secondary education, but eleventh in the share of young adults (ages 25 to 34) with a college degree."

"Across all geographic regions, the study found that MOOC students have high levels of educational attainment: 83 percent of those who responded said they had earned either a two- or four-year post-secondary degree, far more than international averages."

"For those who can crack the top 20 percent, there is great promise. Most people in that elite group, Rank told me, will spend at least part of their careers among the truly affluent, earning more than $250,000 a year. For those at work in the much larger pool, there will be falling or stagnant wages and far greater uncertainty. A college degree is an advantage, but it no longer offers any guarantee, especially for those who graduate from lower-ranked for-profit schools."

"Systemwide, roughly 71,000 students, or 21 percent, complete their undergraduate and graduate degrees completely or partially online, a number that grows each year as the paradigm of higher education evolves from four years in a bricks-and-mortar classroom to an education available nearly anywhere on the planet."

"Hapkit is an open-hardware haptic device designed to be very low-cost and easy to assemble. Hapkit allows users to input motions and feel programmed forces in one degree of freedom. This enables interactive simulation of virtual environments that represent realistic physics (such as springs and dampers) and creative new touch sensations (like textures and buttons). The Hapkit can be assembled using household tools, costs less than $50 for all components, including the microcontroller board, and is easily set up and programmed by novices."

"MIT is taking perhaps its biggest step yet to combine free online classes with its traditional on-campus instruction. The university announced Wednesday at its Solve conference that it will allow students to obtain one of its master's degrees by doing half of the coursework online-from anywhere, for free, without any admissions tests-and then doing the other half in a single semester on campus."

"ACE announced today that 25 colleges and universities are joining an alternative credit consortium as part of an innovative initiative to create a more flexible pathway toward a college degree for millions of nontraditional learners. The 25 institutions serving in this pilot project have agreed to accept all or most of the transfer credit sought by students who successfully complete courses that are part of a selected pool of about 100 low-cost or no-cost lower division general education online courses. These institutions also will help identify the sources, criteria and quality of the courses."

"The Chronicle asked students, recent graduates, parents, and experts a simple question: What is the most you should borrow for a bachelor's degree?"

"Righting the ship will require borrowing a page from the community-college playbook, by adding employment-ready programs like nursing (as Holy Family has done) and computing to entice disaffected degree-seekers. Developing online and hybrid teaching methods might also raise revenue from adult learners. Mostly, self-preservation will require both professors and administrators to accept cost-cutting, which will hardly be easy. Even though St. Joe's ended the year with a $7 million surplus by embracing some of these measures, its administration became cannon fodder for faculty. But if more schools don't follow suit, it could spell closures. "For those college presidents unwilling to reboot," Hartman warns. "I've got one word for them: Detroit.""

"supporting teaching with technology is becoming less about offering training sessions for professors about how to use clickers and course-management systems, and more about coordinating bigger-impact projects like redesigning large introductory courses or leading the creation of a new online-degree program. "

" With a degree in creative writing, she's been working short-term teaching jobs since her 30s, often skirting poverty, never achieving the job security traditionally associated with academia. Now in her 60s, approaching retirement age modestly in a compact mobile home, she's helping build one of Vermont's few adjunct unions to help colleagues gain the respect on the job she has long been denied."

"An easy No Need to Study path through college for those who can literally pay extra should also fuel lingering questions of class and race bias in higher education. Elite education opportunities already skew to those most able to afford to them. But the ability to get a degree by opening a checkbook instead of a textbook does, at a minimum, complicate efforts to flatten the education-access pyramid. "

"in higher education, we do not have a common language to discuss the value of a college credit. At an event hosted by Jobs for the Future and Higher Education Advocates,called Paving New Pathways: Today's Students, New Credentials, and the Next HEA, I noticed a recurring theme: There is a serious issue with college credit transfer policies across postsecondary education. Courses that count for credit at one institution do not "translate" to another. This issue has real consequences on student success and degree completions."

"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."

""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.""

"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."

""The shortage of students is a fallacy," says Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, which enrolled more than 95,000 undergraduates in 2017, about 28,000 of them online. The number of Americans with some college but no degree presents "an unbelievable market," he adds, but most institutions that educate students on a brick-and-mortar campus are not equipped to recruit, or serve, such students."

"Student debt in the U.S. has reached record levels, making higher education out of reach for many people. In New York City, a program called ASAP is gaining national attention for helping students earn a college degree and escape the burden of loans they would struggle to repay."

"The MOOC providers didn't bring about the end of higher education as we knew it, but they did stumble upon a highly-effective marketing funnel with the potential to change the way universities put programs online. This niche is known in higher education as online program management (OPM), and providers who work in this space offer solutions to help universities put their programs online. Now, the MOOC providers are poised to make a dent in the highly-lucrative OPM market."

"In 2016, more than 40 percent of all students who started at a four-year college six years earlier had not yet earned a degree. Odds are that most of those students never will. In real terms, this means that nearly two million students who begin college each year will drop out before earning a diploma."