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ebrary, a ProQuest business, is expanding its ebook selection across acquisition models. The company reports this is in an effort to strengthen its new approach to strategic ebook acquisition based on three steps: Transition, Diversify, and Streamline. More than 1,800 new ebooks from Wiley, from John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and 2,300 new titles from publishers, including Princeton University Press and World Scientific & Imperial College Press, will be available in Academic Complete. An additional 6,300 ebooks from publishers such as MIT Press, Oxford University Press, and University of Illinois Press will be available through other ebrary models, including patron driven acquisition, short-term loan, and perpetual archive.

"Lee Rainie discusses Pew Internet's most recent findings about Americans use the internet and their mobile devices to learn, share, and create information. He explores how the changed media environment is affecting learners' expectations about the availability of information and the ways in which learning takes place. In this new environment, the traditional boundaries between home and school, teacher and pupil, public and private are breaking down and that is affecting the way learning occurs. Lee also describes how Pew Internet has looked at these subjects and the ways in which schools and families are responding to them."

Valdosta State continues its efforts to reach the underserved population of adults who do not have a college degree. As part of the Complete College Georgia initiative, Valdosta State is strengthening existing programs and creating new ones to improve overall student success, especially in the area of access for working adults and members of the military.

This week, Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation for Education, released a statement offering ideas for a national strategy to rapidly train workers for new jobs; among these, prior learning assessment (PLA) was cited as one possible game-changer. But beyond CLEP and the controversial challenge exam, how can enrollment managers and academic leaders assess prior learning effectively and with rigor? We asked Denise Hart, director of adult education and creator of the Success Program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and author of a landmark study of prior learning assessment portfolios, for techniques that institutions should be thinking about.

When something sounds too good to be true, you check it out. So Jeana Murphy and Henry Jordan did some sleuthing when their employer, Walmart, offered to pick up part of the tab for degrees from an online university that offers flexible hours, relatively cheap tuition and college credit for on-the-job training and experience. Murphy, a 30-year-old assistant manager at a Walmart store in Elkin, N.C., started by Googling the American Public University System, the for-profit institution that two years ago landed a highly sought partnership as the preferred educational provider for the more than 1.3 million U.S. employees of Walmart Stores, Inc.

As institutions invest in outreach to students deemed academically "at risk," software technologies to assist in early alert are proliferating on the market. Jennifer Jones, who previously managed a comprehensive program for identifying at-risk students at the University of Alabama, offers checklists of the questions you need to ask up front, prior to procuring new software

"These are 23 top online degree program indicator rankings that will be published: 1. Online Bachelor's: Student Engagement and Assessment 2. Online Bachelor's: Student Services and Technology 3. Online Bachelor's: Faculty Credentials and Training 4. Online Business: Student Engagement and Accreditation 5. Online Business: Student Services and Technology 6. Online Business: Faculty Credentials and Training 7. Online Business: Admissions Selectivity 8. Online Nursing: Student Engagement and Accreditation 9. Online Nursing: Student Services and Technology 10. Online Nursing: Faculty Credentials and Training 11. Online Nursing: Admissions Selectivity 12. Online Education: Student Engagement and Accreditation 13. Online Education: Student Services and Technology 14. Online Education: Faculty Credentials and Training 15. Online Education: Admissions Selectivity 16. Online Engineering: Student Engagement and Accreditation 17. Online Engineering: Student Services and Technology 18. Online Engineering: Faculty Credentials and Training 19. Online Engineering: Admissions Selectivity 20. Online Computer Information Technology: Student Engagement and Accreditation 21. Online Computer Information Technology: Student Services and Technology 22. Online Computer Information Technology: Faculty Credentials and Training 23. Online Computer Information Technology: Admissions Selectivity"

The way to think about the iPhone in relation to higher ed is less as a single product but a new product category. This category, which includes Android/Google and maybe eventually the Windows 8 phones, equals smart phone plus an app ecosystem. The carriers (Verizon, Sprint, AT&T etc.) remain a critical (as they own the cellular network), but annoying component of this ecosystem. Annoying because their voice/data pricing plans are only getting more expensive, restrictive and confusing as the hardware and software on smartphones improves exponentially each year. Any impact that the iPhone and its cousins achieve in higher ed will be in spite of, rather than because, the big cellular companies that we all must endure. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/6-ways-iphone-changed-higher-ed#ixzz1zZpsm081 Inside Higher Ed

Though the origin of this post is a blog on computing education, the strategies discussed could be used in any discipline.

This is in Beta but it looks like it could be interesting. "PresentationTube provides a video presentation desktop recorder and sharing network to help instructors, students, virtual presenters, and business professionals record, publish and share quality, accessible, and interactive video presentations from the comfort of home or office. PresentationTube integrates a variety of presentation aids and synchronizes presenter's audio and video, PowerPoint slides, whiteboard, drawing board, and Web content. PresentationTube provides a slide scrollable thumbnail allowing the user to move to the respective video content and control both the time and progress of video presentation. A PresentationTube presentation allows interactivity via scrollable thumbnail, discussion board, and self-assessment quiz, allowing participants to be heard and involved. No need for new or third-party software or hardware. It is free, with no ads, no banners, and unlimited bandwidth and storage space. "

"To a limited extent, research directly influences classroom practce when teachers and researchers collaborate in design experiments, or when interested teachers incorporate ideas from research into their classroom practice. This appears as the only line directly linking research and practice in Figure 11.1. More typically, ideas from research are filtered through the development of education materials; through pre-service and in-service teacher and administrator education programs; through public policies at the national, state, and school district levels; and through the public's beliefs about learning and teaching, often gleaned from the popular media and from their own experiences in school. These are the four arenas that mediate the link between research and practice in Figure 11.1 The public includes teachers, whose beliefs may be influenced by popular presentations of research, and parents, whose beliefs about learning and teaching affect classroom practice as well. Several aspects of Figure 11.1 are worth noting. First, the influence of research on the four mediating arenas-education materials, pre-service and in-service teacher and administrator education programs, public policy, and public opinion and the media-has typically been weak for a variety of reasons. Educators generally do not look to research for guidance. The concern of researchers for the validity and robustness of their work, as well as their focus on underlying constructs that explain learning, often differ from the focus of educators on the applicability of htose constructs in real classroom settings with many students, restricted time, and a variety of demands. Even the language used by researchers is very different from that familiar to teachers. And the full schedules of many teachers leaves them with little time to identify and read relevant research. These factors contribute to the feeling voiced by many teachers that research has largely been irrelevant to their work (Fleming,

"This is the final report, in a series of four reports, produced by the CEO Forum on Education and Technology during a five-year exploration of the impact of educational technology. The CEO Forum's mission for the five-year initiative was to provide reports to inform educational decision makers about effective uses of educational technology. The report concludes that effective uses of technology to enhance student achievement are based on four building blocks which are alignment, assessment, accountability, and access and analysis. Its definition of student achievement includes 21st Century skills. The report describes 21st Century skills as "a new set of skills necessary to prepare students for life and work in the digital age. These skills include digital literacy, inventive thinking, effective communication and high productivity abilities" (p. 32). The CEO Forum asserts that to obtain the maximum return on investments in technology, educational organizations need to focus their technology efforts on the four building blocks of student achievement."

About this site The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and the Office of Technology for Education strive to enhance the quality of education at Carnegie Mellon. We collaborate with our colleagues to improve courses and learning environments by broadening their understanding of the science of learning and how new pedagogical approaches and technologies can enhance student performance."

Open-source textbooks, long considered a promising way to cut costs but still not widely used, could become more readily available and easily vetted as a University of Minnesota project expands. Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books. (Faculty members elsewhere are welcome to post their own reviews, but they won't be compensated.) Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500, with all of the money coming from donor funds.

After student complaints, Utah professor denied job | Inside Higher Ed I have a teaching innovation for you to consider. Extensive research repeatedly shows a positive impact on student learning. Corporate stakeholders clearly prefer to hire employees that have these skills. Democracy is strengthened… What's that? It might make the students uncomfortable? How do we approach this issue?

Okanagan Mission Secondary School in Kelowna, B.C., is among the early Canadian adopters of the flipped classroom - a model where students switch around what's traditionally covered at school and what's assigned for kids to do at home. Instead of lectures in class and homework after school, these students are watching lectures at home care of the Web and working one-on-one on assignments with teachers during school hours. The Globe talked to some of the students - kids taking senior math and biology classes - and their teacher to find how what they make of "flipping out."

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called "MITx." MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will: organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication allow for the individual assessment of any student's work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions. MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others - whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems - can leverage the same software for their online education offerings, ...MITx online learning tools to be freely available All of the teaching on the platform will be free of charge. Those who have the ability and motivation to demonstrate mastery of content can receive a credential for a modest fee...If credentials are awarded, will they be awarded by MIT? As online learning and assessment evolve and improve, online learners who demonstrate mastery of subjects could earn a certificate of completion, but any such credential would not be issued under the name MIT. Rather, MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within the Institute that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion"

The modern workplace and lifestyle demand that students balance cognitive, personal, and interpersonal abilities, but education policy discussions have not defined those skills well, says a report released last week by scholars from the National Research Council.

Debates continue in the public sphere over the quality and efficacy of online instruction, with research studies citing quite different outcomes confusing the issue. The heart of the matter is that not all online instruction is equal -- institutions still differ widely in the level of planning that goes into the online instruction they provide and in the level of preparation and training provided for online instructors.