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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Review the data from the Lumina Foundation's report, "A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education," including degree attainment rates by state and progress on meeting the foundation's goal of 60 percent attainment by the year 2025.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Washington, DC-based Gilfus Education Group has released its annual list of the top five trends in education innovation for 2012, which included three focused on higher education technologies: Prestigious institutions will launch online experiences designed to be as unique as those available to students on campus: "Dynamic and flexible learning experience engines" will emerge to replace learning management systems (LMS); and Tablets will surge as a means of delivering courses and e-learning media.

"Employers Say College Graduates Lack Job Skills"

Report: Measuring Completion at Two-Year Colleges (pdf link) The Department of Education's Committee on Measures of Student Success has issued its final report on measuring student completion rates at community colleges. Among the committee's suggestions: a combined "graduation and transfer" rate that would count students who graduate along with those who transfer to a four-year institution before graduating.

dealing with early intervention