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"the charter schools seem to mine the local district of low-cost special education students while leaving the traditional schools with students who have the most severe disabilities. He points to data showing the district's charter schools tends to serve high proportions of low-cost special needs students - those with speech and hearing disabilities, for instance - while serving low proportions of high-cost special needs students, such as those with autism or emotional problems."

"What Zorbas and Sparks call their "Classroom Without Walls" program has allowed their Kenai Peninsula students to connect with students in Afghanistan, Israel, Yemen and several U.S. states. But the videoconferencing exploration grew gradually, from the two teachers team-teaching in the same school, to team-teaching from different schools in the same district, to student-to-student collaborative group work."

"According to data from the Delaware Department of Education, the newly-created ninth grade class at Newark Charter School consists of 15 percent Hispanic and African-American students, with representation of low-income students also at 15 percent. This contrasts starkly with the freshman class at Newark High School which is composed of 64 percent African American and Hispanic students and 70 percent low-income students."

"Career services are a natural evolution of focus for the student success movement. If we abandon low-income or first-generation students at graduation with a poorly designed handoff between college-to-career, we risk failing to deliver on the full promise of higher education," said Dr. Bridget Burns, Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance. "Strada Education Network understands that innovation starts with listening to, and understanding, the perspective of students. This project is about providing career services professionals with the capacity and time to redesign career readiness in order to better prepare students for an increasingly dynamic future of work.""

"The learning experience that you offer your students may still be unknown, unintentional, or misunderstood; nevertheless, you are offering an experience. An e-learning course with 77 content tabs, for example, may evoke a feeling among your students of being overwhelmed, just as presenting the plagiarism policy as the homepage of your course (you know who you are) may elicit a rigid first impression. This is where we can learn from the curators of the theme park experience-by meticulously curating a course to include enough "thrill" for our accelerated student and enough "support" for our remedial student, while still leaving enough room for every student's self-expression."

"The paper's authors measured two types of goal setting, performance based and task based. After surveying close to 4,000 college students in two field experiments, they found that performance-based goals -- setting a goal to earn a certain grade in the class used for the survey -- didn't have a statistically significant effect on whether a student actually got that grade. But when students set their goals on the tasks required to earn those grades, they performed better over all, even though that wasn't explicitly their goal."

"Lessons learned from campuses nationwide have informed an approach to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act during the process of online course design. Providing multiple ways for students to gain knowledge, demonstrate knowledge, and interact goes a long way toward making a course accessible to all students, including those with disabilities. Accessibility efforts benefit not only students with disabilities but also students who are English language learners and those working in noisy or quiet environments."

"One strategy for these colleges to avoid extinction is to diversify-to avoid a precarious reliance on residential students. And one way to do that is by adding online programs to the mix. The challenge for many small colleges is that they see online courses as at odds with their very identity. After all, these institutions embrace intimacy as central to their mission, with close, mentoring relationships between faculty and students, and deep, comradely connections among students-essential ingredients of highly engaged learning. For many, online fails to meet these crucial education ambitions. Instead, they reject virtual instruction as alienated learning, with isolated faculty and students coldly facing inert computer screens-not one another."

"Here's what happened," he continues. "First, when one student has the right answer and the other doesn't, the first one is more likely to convince the second-it's hard to talk someone into the wrong answer when they have the right one. More important, a fellow student is more likely to reach them than Professor Mazur-and this is the crux of the method. You're a student and you've only recently learned this, so you still know where you got hung up, because it's not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing. Whereas Professor Mazur got hung up on this point when he was 17, and he no longer remembers how difficult it was back then. He has lost the ability to understand what a beginning learner faces."

""It's crazy that in a system that is meant to teach and help the youth there is no voice from the youth at all." That's the opening line in a video called "If students designed their own schools," about The Independent Project, a high school semester designed and implemented entirely by students."

This is a really remarkable project, all student driven and Deweyan in its roots.

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.

Today, a survey released by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund shows that 65% of student consumers have opted out of buying a college textbook due to its high price, and of those students, 94% they suffer academically.

University of Baltimore students won't have to pay for their last semester of school anymore, under one condition: They must finish on time. The program, called Finish4Free, is more than a nice gesture to cut students a break on their school debt. The university thinks that letting students finish their last semester for free will encourage more to finish on time.

"An intelligent tutoring system is computer software designed to simulate a human tutor's behavior and guidance. Because these systems are able to interpret complex student responses and can learn as they operate, they are able to discern where and why a student's understanding has gone astray and to offer hints to help the student understand the material at hand. Intelligent tutors provide many of the benefits of a human tutor to very large numbers of students. Intelligent tutoring systems can also provide real-time data to instructors and developers looking to refine teaching methods."

"Academics are used to altering their tone to match the audience and context, whereas students tend to lack such skills and so will, for all their tech-savvy, sometimes be uncomfortable with more formal forms of contact. In the long term, students need to develop these skills: in the meantime, we can meet them halfway."

"However presently, few discussions and promotions of PLN's venture further than lauding specific benefits for teachers. But why just teachers, and not students? Could students benefit from a network of learners? Considering the importance of exams in determining futures, it seems that professional development for students not only has unbounded potential, but must be taught as a matter of urgency."

""You may not be aware, but this can actually have a massive effect on the performance of the [student] cohort," he said. "If the wrong students set up [the most popular] group, and that's the one everyone goes on, the amount of control they have…is massive." He continued: "If the group is set up by students so that only they can post and nobody else, they can censor discussions."

Social presence remains the key to a successful learning experience, and understanding social presence, with its critical connection to learning and community building, allows us to better support faculty and students. Understanding a wide selection of tools, media, and reflective activities helps faculty assist students in taking responsibility for their own learning. Providing iterative feedback and mindful assessments helps faculty meet learning outcomes and guide student learning. Implementing change in small steps is the key to understanding which strategies work and which lead to frustration and discontent.

"Although the open-source textbook concept has been embraced by student groups such as the Student Government Association in College Park, university officials say the challenges include connecting professors with the materials they need for the textbooks and creating a system to assess the quality of the books. Another complication: Many universities are bound to contracts with private companies to run campus bookstores, where many students purchase their textbooks. University System of Maryland financial records show that the bookstore contracts are not always lucrative, however - last year the system lost about $1 million."

"ProQuest SIPX, provider of the most complete digital course materials solutions in higher education, has signed a three-year deal with Arizona State University (ASU), the largest public university in the U.S. with over 90,000 students. ASU will integrate the SIPX Central service-a scalable, self-service configuration that enables anyone at the school to set up course readings-into the campus' Blackboard learning management system. The technology is unique, sophisticated, yet user-friendly and helps get more library resources and open access content into the hands of instructors. The service will reduce the cost of course materials for students and simplify sharing of the course readings between instructors and students."