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"focusing on the next mega-institution or the gold-rush mentality that has garnered so much attention in online education is a distraction from this higher calling. For us, a mega model does not align with our core educational philosophy. We imagine that for the majority of universities, the mega-university concept is not only unrealistic, it is also anathema to their institutional philosophy. We look forward to joining efforts across higher education to embrace a chapter of fundamental transformation."

"Every time a student interacts with their university - be that going to the library, logging into their virtual learning environment or submitting assessments online - they leave behind a digital footprint. Learning analytics is the process of using this data to improve learning and teaching. Learning analytics refers to the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about the progress of learners and the contexts in which learning takes place. Using the increased availability of big datasets around learner activity and digital footprints left by student activity in learning environments, learning analytics take us further than data currently available can."

"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."

"Welcome to the other side of the uncanny valley of profile photographs. The attention of generated imagery has so far focused on "deepfake videos," in which a real person's face is grafted semi-realistically (for now) onto someone else's body. There's a different impact with deep-learning AI-generated fake still-photo faces that look realistic but aren't attempting to match the appearance of any actual person. And they're so new that these images have yet to get a name-perhaps deepfaces will win out. Deepfaces have a greater potential to add to the noise of troll farms, social-media griefers, and outright scammers and fraudsters because they look legitimate and fail reverse-image searches. As Craig Silverman, a long-time exposer of online frauds and BuzzFeed media editor, says, "I think it presents a big challenge for some of the existing approaches used by investigators, journalists, and police and others to follow a breadcrumb trail.""

"Nelson says the new version of the system lets professors quickly divide a large class into groups of up to 12 students. Those break-out groups of students can then participate in a small-group discussion while each student fills out a "structured worksheet" that can be graded later by a TA following a rubric to make sure each student was following along and participating. During the live class, the professor can peek into any of the breakout sessions, either by appearing as one of the participants, or lurking in the background so that he or she can see and hear the students but they don't know the professor is there. The requirement of filling out the worksheet, or doing some other activity like a poll or quiz, makes sure students in breakout groups stay on task, Nelson says."

"The National University System, for example, is developing  a variety of initiatives aimed at bringing down the cost of a degree, including through FlexCourse?, a teaching and learning platform that offers faculty-supported, variably-paced online degree programs at an affordable price point of $8,500 annual tuition. The platform is initially being offered in conjunction with John F. Kennedy University, through JFKU online --  both part of the National University System."

"with no existing online programs and a culture unaccustomed to rapid transformation, they weren't prepared for the challenge, Coleman admitted during a session last month at the University Professional, Continuing and online Education Association's annual meeting. "Wellesley had no understanding of this market," Coleman said. "I'm not really sure that they had a full understanding of what this could be or what they wanted it to be.""

"WGU Academy courses will be delivered in an online, competency-based format similar to the WGU learning model. Students will enroll in customized programs of two or more college-level courses that typically include a writing course and one or more courses in math, general education, or introductory-level classes focused on desired degree paths. In addition to college-level courses, WGU Academy offers the Program for Academic and Career Advancement (PACA). Modeled on a nationally recognized social and emotional learning course used by WGU for several years, the course provides group sessions, peer interaction, and one-to-one coaching to build confidence and college persistence."

"While distance-learning programs are not likely to replace the traditional college experience for everyone, the rate of growth in online enrollment is outpacing that for campus enrollment. The market for online programs is crowded and relatively easy to enter, but traditional name-brand universities now claim a larger share of it than in the past. This means smaller institutions with less-established programs will struggle unless they can set themselves apart, according to the report."

"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."

"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."

"A prominent online program management company, 2U, announced this morning that it will purchase Trilogy Education Services, a large boot camp provider that partners with continuing education divisions at dozens of universities."

"Instructors often kick off a discussion board assignment by asking each student to respond to an assigned reading. To prevent plagiarism, some learning management systems are set up, either by the platform or by policies of the institution or instructor, to only reveal the full contents of a discussion thread after a student has already posted."

"Given these limitations, the rubrics do provide great value. Ultimately, these rubrics represent the current thinking about improving the quality of online courses. Some of the rubrics have evolved over twenty years and will continue to do so. The rubrics' strengths manifest at different levels-for individual instructors, a rubric acts as a course design guide; for institutions and systems, a rubric creates a common vocabulary, an aspirational worldview, a mechanism for consistency and accountability, and the basis for a social infrastructure that runs parallel to the technological infrastructure."

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

""In other words," the researchers wrote, "students who have positive attitudes about multitasking and prefer to multitask appear to better control this academically disadvantageous behavior in face-to-face courses." They attribute the students' "control" heavily to what Lepp called the "norms of the classroom" -- essentially, pressure from peers or the instructor not to multitask."

"Digital networks, websites, and services are a necessary component of the toolset required to build and utilize digital and media literacies. Appropriate policies, procedures, and guidelines are necessary to protect the developers and administrators of these texts and tools, as well as the users of these spaces. These documents often fail to provide users with the freedom needed to expand their skills, while still creating safe and appropriate boundaries for use of the Internet and all it has to offer."

"We've lost signals of credibility. Before the online era, you would need to shell out a lot of money to print a fake newspaper, or it would look like an obvious counterfeit."

""The shortage of students is a fallacy," says Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, which enrolled more than 95,000 undergraduates in 2017, about 28,000 of them online. The number of Americans with some college but no degree presents "an unbelievable market," he adds, but most institutions that educate students on a brick-and-mortar campus are not equipped to recruit, or serve, such students."

"The Online program management (OPM) market is growing in terms of the number of institutions using OPM providers and in the number of providers. The market is also showing signs of consolidation as the providers figure out how to position themselves in this competitive landscape. What we don't hear much about is the international trend that is also taking shape. Yes, the US market started earlier and is still larger than all others combined, but the international market is growing and becoming more and more important."