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Howard University announced "Howard University Online," part of a comprehensive initiative that will expand the flagship research University's array of blended/online courses and programs in partnership with Pearson.

"University officials say the higher tuition rates for online courses are the result of expensive infrastructure and the costs for designing the courses, which often involve partnerships or contracts with outside online education providers.   Nassirian said the infrastructure costs make it difficult to create online classes cheaply on a small scale."

"Privatization of online higher education is on the rise. For-profit online education corporations like Academic Partnerships, Kaplan, Wiley, Pearson, and Blackboard contract with public and private nonprofit institutions to provide digital platforms for educational content, recruit students, manage enrollment, facilitate the development of course materials, and more. While the use of digital platforms and online teaching tools can enrich higher education, elements of contracting with for-profit online education corporations can present problems in areas of interest to faculty, particularly academic freedom and shared governance. Check out our resources, surveys, and social media shareables below and learn how you can get involved in making sure that higher education serves the common good, not private profit."

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).

Coursera continued its ambitious expansion in the growing market for MOOC support today, announcing accords with 16 new universities to help them produce massive open online courses - more than doubling the company's number of institutional partners and pushing its course count near 200.

"David-John Palmer, an instructor at FIU and associate director of educational technology at FIU Online, has spearheaded the recent AI initiative in his own Introduction to Information Systems course in partnership with Cognii Inc., a leading provider of AI-based educational technologies. His course, offered through the College of Business, is the first online FIU course to feature AI in instructional design."

Antioch University is the first US institution to receive approval from Coursera to offer college credit for specified Coursera MOOCs (massive open online courses). Through this new partnership, Antioch University and the Antioch University Los Angeles campus can reduce student costs to complete a four-year degree and expand course offerings through free online courses offered by the highly respected universities that have partnered with Coursera.

Very cool! Maybe college debt will start to go down for students of the future. Higher levels of education for less money :) I know I will paying back my school loans until I am dead.

The massive open online course (MOOC) provider edX took a step toward boosting the credibility of its "graduates" on Thursday, announcing a partnership with Pearson's testing centers that would allow students in edX's free, online courses to take proctored exams.

"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 recently announced partnership with the University of Edinburgh presented the team with an opportunity to engage and experiment with the much-publicised MOOC format, and foreground issues related to the theory and practice of online education itself. What follows are some of our perspectives on the planning and development of a large scale open course, what challenges the MOOC presents for delivering a worthwhile educational experience, and what questions this type of course format provokes for a team already teaching and researching in the field of e-learning and technology in higher education.

"The new university/company AI partnership model will resemble the current online program management model, in which the AI company de-risks the AI investment with up-front capital and resources, and is paid by a revenue share."

"A few disparities stood out. Smaller institutions were more likely to cite "superior service to in-house alternatives" as a reason to pursue partnerships. And while 46 percent of smaller institutions cited "online program expansion" as an area of interest, only 36 percent of the larger ones did."

"Google is teaming up with EdX, an open-source online education nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT, to create a new site that EdX's president compared to a "YouTube for MOOCs." The site is called mooc.org-MOOC being the unfortunate acronym for "massive open online courses." It will use the same EdX platform through which professors at Harvard, MIT, and other EdX-partner universities now offer their online courses. But it will be open to everyone, including businesses, governments, and private individuals as well as professors at non-EdX colleges."

"Publish or perish" is an old saw that, like so many things in higher education, has been updated to reflect modern wisdom. The revised version of the phrase offers advice not to professors but to colleges: "Partner or perish."