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"But it turns out that -- when asked privately -- most presidents don't seem sure at all that MOOCs are going to transform student learning, or reduce costs to students -- two of the claims made by MOOC enthusiasts and an increasing number of politicians and pundits."

"Last week, we launched Edmodo Votes as a way for your students to participate in this year's election. We asked Edmodo educators to poll their students, in advance of election day, on who they think should be our next president. Today, the results are in! Votes have been tallied and the following shows the breakdown of how students would vote in this year's election*:"

"That means figuring out ways for deserving students to wind up on this campus," he said, "but it also means a digital strategy that makes more of Yale's treasure - whether it's scholarship or pedagogy or collections - available online. Moving from a collection of opportunities to a deliberate strategy for giving the riches of Yale, the wealth of Yale, away."

"The ambitious agenda set by Daniels - including a tuition freeze that broke 36 years of price increases - has captured the kind of national attention he once earned as the state's outspoken conservative governor. Daniels now enters his second year at the helm of Purdue with an expanded set of priorities but a continued commitment to cost cutting."

Today California (CA) Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (author of the CA open textbook legislation) announced that SB 520 will be amended to provide open, online college courses for credit. In short, the bill will allow CA students, enrolled in CA public colleges and universities, to take online courses from a pool of 50 high enrollment, introductory courses, offered by 3rd parties, in which CA students cannot currently gain access from their public CA university or community college.

The 'Opt Out' Movement among parents seems to picks up steam in direct proportion to how enthusiastically President Barack Obama and his U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan embrace standardized testing. The most recent attempt to subvert the testing system was in Seattle, where over 600 high school students declined to take the standardized test [...]

At one session here at Davos, the presidents of Harvard, Stanford and MIT all readily acknowledged that the experiments in new models of online learning will soon radically disrupt higher learning. One expert suggested many universities are facing the early days of bankruptcy. Another predicted there may only be 10 universities that survive this transition.

Creating an embedding tool is a tacit acknowledgment that Getty simply can't police the use of its images to the four corners of the Internet. Craig Peters, a senior vice president at Getty, is more explicit about the futility of trying to maintain control of its images.

"The council's advice to the president is to hang back for the time being and "let market forces decide which innovations in online teaching and learning are best," rather than leaping to subsidize a favorite."

"It felt to me that this year we've entered into a post-recession reality in how families are paying for college," said Sarah Ducich, senior vice president for public policy at Sallie Mae and an author of the study. "Even though college costs continue to increase, the amount that families are spending is holding steady, meaning they're making choices in a mostly cost-conscious construct."

""Tiffin University must disengage from our business relationship with Altius," Paul Marion, Tiffin's president, confirmed in an interview."

The University System of Maryland will this fall launch a pilot project to gauge the efficiency of open educational resources (OER), James Jalandoni, president of the system's student council, said on Monday. "We have made it a priority to start tackling the issue of textbook costs and the impact they have on college affordability," Jalandoni said.

"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."

"To be top 10, you have got to be global," Elias Eldayrie, UF's vice president and CIO for Information Technologies, recently told the board of trustees. "You need to connect." Creating Unizin with Indiana University, the University of Michigan and Colorado State University was a year in the making, Eldayrie said.

"Ivory Tower takes a look at universities and their transformation from providers of education to business ventures that strive to be the biggest and the best providers of the "college experience". The competition among these institutions of higher learning has had an adverse effect on those they are suppose to serve. From less rigorous curriculums to higher tuition prices, the universities have changed the way Americans think of educations. Students are now consumers and university presidents are CEOs overseeing multiplexes of the college experience. In order to pay for that experience, students are taking out an average of about $30,000 in student loans. The overall student debt in the US has now surpassed $1tn."

"Under Chairman of the Board Martin Lipton and President John Sexton, New York University has been to operate as a real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side venture. A group of 400 faculty members at NYU, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (FASP), have been working for years against what Pam Martens has called "running NYU as a tyrannical slush fund for privileged interests." FASP just published a devastating document, The Art of the Gouge, which describes how NYU engages in a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to extract as much in fees as possible from students, while at the same time failing to invest in and often degrading the educational "product"."

"Microsoft corporate vice-president for Skype Mark Gillett told BBC News that his division is working on 3D technology for its video calls, although the technology itself is years away from mainstream implementation."

"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.""

At Monday's meeting, Harker will discuss his vision in an address titled, "University of Delaware and the Future of Higher Education." Faculty will also be able to ask questions and share concerns. "One of my responsibilities as president is to anticipate the opportunities and threats facing us and higher education, with an eye toward continuing UD's role as an outstanding university," Harker wrote. "The University of Delaware has already made incredible progress. But we still have much work to do."

""We welcome Acrobatiq's team to the VitalSource family," said Pep Carrera, President of VitalSource®. "VitalSource already does more than just deliver learning materials.  We empower students and faculty with the resources necessary to promote greater success. By combining Acrobatiq's cognitive and data science-based platform with VitalSource's valued relationships with publishers and institutions, we have an opportunity to bring high impact learning to the market at an unprecedented scale."  "