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Smartphone usage continues to climb in the U.S. More than three out of five (61%) mobile subscribers in the U.S. owned a smartphone during the most recent three-month period (March-May 2013), up more than 10 percent since smartphones became the mobile majority in early 2012. When it comes operating system preference, Apple remained the top smartphone manufacturer in the U.S., while the majority of smartphone owners used Android OS handsets. Fifty-three percent of smartphone owners used the Android OS, and 40 percent owned iPhones.

Undergraduates are significantly more likely to major in a field if they have an inspiring and caring faculty member in their introduction to the field. And they are equally likely to write off a field based on a single negative experience with a professor.

"a quiet movement is brewing in U.S. high schools to reboot curriculums with the objective of better preparing students for a different future of work. The same is happening at a handful of universities - in this case roiling the traditional major model."

"To nudge students toward job-friendly degrees, the governor's task force on higher education suggested recently that university tuition rates be frozen for three years for majors in "strategic areas," which would vary depending on supply and demand. An undergraduate student would pay less for a degree in engineering or biotechnology - whose classes are among the most expensive for universities - than for a degree in history or psychology."

"The boring university lecture is going to be the first major casualty of the rise in online learning in higher education, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The custodian of the world's biggest online encyclopaedia says that unless universities respond to the rising tide of online courses new major players will emerge to displace them, in the way that Microsoft arrived from nowhere alongside the personal computer. "I think that the impact is going to be massive and transformative," says Mr Wales, describing the importance of the MOOCs (massive open online courses) that have signed up millions of students."

The working group has heard and received suggestions across a broad range of topics. Here are a few examples: Make an institutional commitment to fostering high-quality hybrid instruction (online and face-to-face) and provide the IT infrastructure to support course development and redevelopment along those lines. Establish an experimental college with the freedom to innovate in different course formats and individualized interdisciplinary majors. Require an e-portfolio of all undergraduate students, connecting the first-year experience and co-curricular activities to their major field of study and career preparation.

"They perceived they had overcome most obstacles, but that others at their institutions had not.   They did not believe that others were teaching courses that were on par with face-to-face classes in terms of quality. This is because of findings 2 and 3. The second finding was that the overwhelming majority did not feel support from their institutions when transitioning to online modalities, rather they indicated that experiential learning in the form of mentorship, learning by doing, and dialog with peers were most critical when overcoming the challenges. The third finding was that the majority of participants indicated the time required for preparation and intrusion of time on an ongoing basis during the course of an online class were significantly greater than time requirements of a face-to-face course."

"Although the movement in course materials in colleges and universities is clearly from print towards digital, the survey data suggest it will be a slow process. Asked when they thought the majority of their course materials would be primarily digital, fully a fourth of the surveyed faculty indicated "never," while another 9 percent said by fall 2022, and 17 percent indicated by fall 2020. In contrast, fully a sixth (16 percent) reported that majority of their current course materials were digital as of fall 2015, and a third (34 percent) anticipated primarily digital course materials by fall 2018. "

The widely acknowledged need to improve the tech skills of teachers and other school officials, and help them understand how digital tools should be used in the classroom, should be a major area of focus among state officials and other policymakers, according to a report released today by the National Association of State Boards of Education.

What do you geek? Here you will find resources to follow your interests with free, open courses at major universities. Browse the resources below or check with the reference librarian for library resources.

"Following my 8th grade block of social studies, students left arguing whether or not they should include Mao Zedong as a major person in the "birth of communism, China or Korean War" section of their virtual museum.  Less specifically, students left my class in an argument which reflected not only an interest in the lesson and activity but also a deep understanding of the content.  Isn't that what we want our students to do?"

"Fast-forward to October 2012: OERs have failed to significantly affect the day-to-day teaching of the vast majority of higher education institutions. Traditional textbooks and readings still dominate most teaching venues even though essentially all students are online: Course management systems are used only for the dissemination of syllabi, class notes, general communications, and as a grade book. OERs are out there…somewhere. Why aren't they on campus?"

The purpose of this document is two-fold: - to offer an online history of the development of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - to use that history to describe major elements of a MOOC

"The company wants to be a "hybrid university." Its students would gather in dorms in major cities across the world, and after spending time together in one city, move to another, but take online classes from Minerva professors on the other end of the screen."

IN LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR, discussion of the role of online learning in higher education has undergone a qualitative shift. With the launch of for-profit educational start-ups such as Coursera, Udacity, and the MIT and Harvard-founded nonprofit platform edX, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have moved from obscure experiment to major initiative. MOOCs are online classes, generally composed of short lectures, that allow for open, often free enrollments (thousands can easily enroll in a single course), assessing students through periodic quizzes and discussion forums.

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

Millions of students have signed up for massive open online courses, and hundreds of universities are offering some form of Web-based curriculum. Most students aren't paying much for these classes, if they're paying anything at all. So where is all that knowledge-and all the cash-coming from?

"There is substantial overlap between the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. If you've already mastered this content, there's no reason to start all over again taking Composition 101 your freshman year. Testing out of elementary college classes lets you take more interesting, engaging classes beginning with your very first semester. It lets you graduate sooner, it gives you more flexibility if you want to study abroad or do a double major or take a year off, and it can potentially save you thousands of dollars."

in the three years I've been teaching mobile video in a course titled "Information 3.0," even those students who initially say they are very familiar with video later admit that they learned a lot from repeated practice and application of video production skills. In other words, shooting and uploading video to YouTube alone does not a videographer make, at least not in my class of sixty undergraduates who come from any major on campus.

Silicon Valley has wielded its growing political clout at the state Capitol to kill a digital privacy bill that would have given consumers access to information about them being collected online. Had the Right to Know Act become law, California would have been the first state to take direct aim at an online industry that stockpiles and trades in a wide range of personal data about nearly every adult in the United States. In a major defeat for consumer groups and privacy watchdogs, AB 1291 will instead become a two-year bill, effectively putting it into a deep freeze until next year.