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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.

The lecture hall is under attack. Science, math and engineering departments at many universities are abandoning or retooling the lecture as a style of teaching, worried that it's driving students away. The faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has dedicated this academic year to finding alternatives to the lecture in those subjects. Johns Hopkins, Harvard University and even the White House have hosted events in which scholars have assailed the lecture.

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.

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.

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.

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

A collection of video tutorials from the Indiana University School of Education.

"blendmylearning project brought together Envision schools, google, khan academy, and stanford university d.school to chronicle the performance and engagement of low-performing high school algebra students receiving a mix of traditional teacher led instruction and self-guided instruction through the khan academy website."

As universities transition to a mobile-friendly campus, more and more IT departments are considering the benefits of open source technology. Cost is definitely a factor, but schools are just as attracted to the flexibility that open source gives them.

After seeing low success and persistence rates in introductory STEM classes, UMBC began using unconventional teaching approaches to help students with the transition to rigorous college courses; in at least one area of study, the approach worked: the number of students failing chemistry has been cut in half and the number of chemistry majors has doubled since the changes.

With its recently debuted project "Toda la UNAM en Línea" (All of UNAM Online), the university will go beyond providing lecture notes and classroom handouts by giving users digital access to libraries, special collections, conferences, and the research of students and professors.

College graduates who showed paltry gains in critical thinking and little academic engagement while in college have a harder time than their more accomplished peers as they start their careers, according to a report released today. The report, "Documenting Uncertain Times: Postgraduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort," follows up on the highly influential and controversial book Academically Adrift, which was published one year ago. The report is being released at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and it expands upon many of the themes that the book explored by following a subset of students from the book into early adulthood.

"The market for "continuing education" is potentially much larger than undergraduate. After those four years of college, there are a lot more years in a rapidly-changing workplace. Maybe that's where the real money lies? Could providing the on-going, lifelong learning be the place where some of the costs for the face-to-face undergraduate education are carried? Maybe the content gets paid for by the lifelong learners, and the undergrads get it at reduced cost? Recall what John Daniel said about the US Open University - it failed because it went after undergraduate first, not graduate."

Catchy title.

good ideas for good discussion threads

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?

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 resource page for rubrics at Carnegie Mellon. Provides disciplinary examples.

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."