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As college debt skyrockets to over $35,000 per student, the state of Oregon has proposed a novel investment approach to loans: free tuition at public universities in exchange for 3 percent of earnings for the first 25 years after graduation. Just like a venture-capital portfolio that earns its profit from a few star investments, many students would end up underpaying the cost of their college, subsidized by the school's star businessmen.

"Georgia Tech's Tucker Balch, an associate professor at the School of Interactive Computing, released the following information based on the survey of students who took part in his recent Coursera class, "Computational Investing." Of the 2,535 students who completed the course (or 4.8 percent of those enrolled), 34 percent were from the United States and 27 percent came from non-OECD countries. The average age of participants was 35 (ranging from 17 to 74). Seventy percent were white. Ninety-two percent were male. And more than 50 percent of the students already had a master's degree or a PhD. Clearly, this is hardly the "typical" undergraduate population (although it's worth noting that "Computational Investing" isn't really a "typical" or introductory class). Nonetheless, these figures do raise questions about who exactly is being served by today's MOOCs: Is it "learners" from around the world? Or, for lack of a better word, is it "knowers" from the U.S.?"

"While there's no doubt that a college degree increases earning power and broadens opportunities, today's high cost of education means it makes sense to more carefully consider which degree you earn. When it comes to return on investment (ROI), not all degrees are considered equal. This article exposes eight college degrees with poor ROI. "

"The Federal Government currently invests billions of taxpayer dollars each year in programs that include the creation of educational, training, and instructional materials through grants, contracts, and other cooperative agreements. This investment produces educational resources ranging from innovative curricular resources to workforce training materials to English language learning tools. While these materials are created for the public good, they are generally not open to the members of the public who paid for them. At a time when educational opportunity, workforce development and access to knowledge are critical to America's future, these valuable publicly-funded resources should be openly available to students, teachers, businesses, workers and the public to use in new and innovative ways."

"it appears that the rise of free or low-cost online learning and professional education content is reducing the demand for some continuing-education courses offered by universities. In some cases, it may be reducing demand for executive education offerings, and even for degree programs like the traditional MBA. While individual workers remain interested in credentials-which are portable from job-to-job-companies often prefer to invest in targeted learning opportunities that relate directly to their business needs and has a clear business return on investment. "My people already have degrees, they need something more specific," says Bradley. "Academic credit is not always the selling point that universities think it is.""

"Many institutions have invested substantial resources in diverse initiatives to deliver distance learning and/or enhance campus-based learning with online resources. To these institutional efforts, faculty and students are now adding online tools and resources from beyond the campus. Higher education institutions are confronting the need to connect these various efforts to create more powerful and integrated learning experiences for all of their students. In this interview, Brian Hughes, Director of Social Media at the Teacher's College at Columbia University, discusses the issues surrounding social media integration."

"Whether you're an individual or a brand, it's important to adjust your content around the changing seasons and fickle trends. A good way to monitor the effectiveness of your pins and reach is by investing time in Pinterest analytics tools. To help, we've gathered six services that measure a wide range of Pinterest engagement metrics. How do you determine your Pinterest influence, either for your personal or branded account?"

" institutions of higher education are invested in keeping their scholars and those scholars' intellectual products limited and cloistered. This is a profoundly poor use of valuable resources, but it's bound to continue until institutions decide to reward scholars for doing more than contributing to niche knowledge communities."

"We should be justifiably proud of the remarkable and enviable triumphs of American higher education. Instead, we find most recent conversations about higher education echoing around this one tiny (and so far trivial) aspect of the complex and diverse ecosystem of higher education. This focus on technological platforms at the expense of actual threats, challenges, and successes robs us of the ability to have sober, informed debates about the proper level and style of investment in higher education. So I suggest we let MOOCs grow and do their best work, learn from successes and mistakes, and stop assuming that they are the simple answer to anything meaningful and profound in the production and distribution of knowledge. The world is just not that simple."

"Wherever the money is coming from, and however it is being spent, the root of the crisis in higher education (and the evidence that investment in universities may amount to a bubble) comes down to the fact that additional value has not been created to match this extra spending. Indeed, evidence from declines in the quality of students and graduates suggests that a degree may now mean less than it once did."

""We have an opportunity to take back the curriculum!" she told educators at last week's SXSWedu event. "What if we took the $5 billion annually spent on textbooks and invested that in teachers and their work?""

"Schools are buying tablets with a reckless ferocity. There are pronouncements of how iPads will revolutionize or transform education, without a coherent vision of what that might look like or a single example rooted in practice. The iPad provides an illusion of modernity with no real challenge to the nature of schooling-a win-win proposition unless you're a child. Add hysterical Web filtering, social media bans, and locked-down devices incapable of installing software, and the tablet becomes a tool of compliance, not empowerment. Tablets could have all the functionality of a laptop, but they don't. Until they do, I recommend that schools invest in laptops for student use."

A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality. I'm all in favor of that. You say you are too. But is that what you are telling your partners in finance and university administration? Or are you telling them that they can accumulate even more of what they already have-money and prestige-while appearing to be giving it away? I will know my course has been successful when my students understand Coursera's business model behind offering free higher education globally (along with the promise of greater social equality) as an exciting venture capital investment opportunity through which to increase privately-held wealth and lock in existing educational hierarchies.

The top-ranked schools all focus on engineering, including Harvey Mudd College, California Institute of Technology, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and SUNY - Maritime College. At the bottom of the rankings was the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, which had an opportunity cost of $155,000 to attend in 2012, including living expenses and lost wages from not working. The school had a graduation rate of 37 percent while its 30-year net return on investment was projected as a loss of $228,000, Payscale.com said.

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC): an online course or content aiming at large-scale interactive participation and open access. Open Educational Resources (OER): freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. ($): Requires some financial investment

"The bottom line is that there really is no replacement for face-to-face interaction between academics and students. Digital and online methods can enrich those interactions, but it seems unlikely they can replace them in anything other than a greatly impoverished way without the investment of considerable resources. No wonder 72% of those who have taught moocs over the past three years believe students who took their classes had not done sufficient work to deserve credit from their institution."

The Case Foundation, created by Steve Case and Jean Case in 1997, invests in people and ideas that can change the world. We create and support initiatives that leverage new technologies and entrepreneurial approaches to drive innovation in the social sector and encourage individuals to get involved with the communities and causes they care about.

"Sick of hearing that social media is just a buzzword? Are you looking for hard statistics so that you can prove to your boss that social media is worth the investment? Looking for some pick up lines at the next social media meetup?"

"too many young people are spending years on loan repayment instead of growing personal wealth through investments like real estate and retirement accounts. In the long term, Elliott adds, that can be a drag on the economy - and create a wealth divide between people who have student debt and those who don't."

To ensure that the Federal investment of these funds has as broad an impact as possible and to encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a Ready to Work grant, the grantee will be required to license to the public all work (except for computer software source code, discussed below) created with the support of the grant under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license. Work that must be licensed under the CC BY includes both new content created with the grant funds and modifications made to pre-existing, grantee-owned content using grant funds.