eLearning solutions

Let me start by saying that for many, many years, my title was some variation of "Instructional Designer." And so, its with some amount of hesitance that I say that the field of instructional design is, well, crap.

I'm not a traditional instructional designer, having a Master's degree in education instead of instructional design or instructional technology. I somehow backed my way into instructional design, working in a whole department of instructional designers in my first ID job. Some of those IDs are among the most brilliant people I have known and worked with, and it was an honor to have the opportunity to cut my ID chops in such talented company.

That said, I immediately noticed some problems with the field of instructional design and more importantly, in how instructional designers are "trained." So, although there are definitely instructional designers out there that are talented and know what they are doing, my experience is that they are few and far between. There are many, many other instructional designers who are a product of how instructional design is taught and marketed, and its killing the art of instructional design as a respected, professional expertise.

MTTI-WellSpring Selects EdTek Services, Inc.

Burlington, MA – March 4, 2010 – MTTI-WellSpring Center for Health & Wellness (www.mtti.net), a Kansas City-based career training facility for massage therapy and fitness and general wellness has chosen EdTek Services, Inc., a provider of accreditation consulting, program design and development services, enrollment marketing and admissions services, and hosted online education software to small and mid-size colleges and universities as its eLearning products and services partner.

WellSpring will be utilizing a package of EdTek services and its new Learning Management System provided by its online education software partner it's learning (www.itslearning.net). The user-friendly features of it’s learning will help supplement classroom delivery, offer hybrid and fully online course delivery and improve the overall learning experience for students.

“While WellSpring places major emphasis on hands-on training, the online capabilities of the LMS will provide us with the framework to better improve the two-way information flow between students and faculty, streamline the delivery of online content, and offer students the tools to manage their academics,” said Don Farquharson, President of WellSpring Center for Health & Wellness.

“WellSpring and EdTek have been working on a plan to integrate more eLearning technology into their current classroom-based offerings to further enhance the quality education that WellSpring is known for,” said Paul Jacobelli, Founder and President of EdTek Services. “The it’s learning platform provided all the features we wanted in an LMS. It was easy to use and offered excellent support services. We also determined that adopting the it’s learning LMS would cost less than using open-source software while still getting the best that open-source and the other commercial options offered.”

The it’s learning courseware will provide unlimited access to information enabling students to always know exactly how they are doing with grades and attendance to ensure that they have achieved competency in areas of study. The implementation of online education software will also enable students and instructors to easily communicate outside of the classroom, fostering networking, creating stronger bonds between classmates, and enhancing discussion.

WellSpring also plans to use the LMS to develop new certification preparation classes and to support their Go Green initiative by dramatically reducing the amount of paper being used by the school.

About MTTI-WellSpring Center

Natural health and wellness has been the total focus of MTTI-WellSpring since the school’s founding in 1988. Massage therapy is a core specialty of the school. The school also offers a state of the art Fitness Training & Wellness program to prepare graduates for successful careers as Personal Trainers. WellSpring’s specialty in training students for massage therapy and fitness and wellness careers sets the school apart from other all-purpose technical schools and provides a very unique and different learning environment. For more information about WellSpring, please call Jennipher Walters at 816-523-9140 x 109 or jennipher.w@mtti.net. Additional information can be found at www.MTTI.net.

About EdTek Services, Inc.

EdTek partners with small to medium-size education providers and offers consulting, training, hands-on administrative support and technology solutions that enable its clients to focus their resources on instruction and learning. By offering solutions for Online Learning Software, Instructional Design, Course Development, Faculty Recruitment and Training, Enrollment Marketing, Retention, Program Management & Program Accreditation, EdTek helps smaller colleges deliver the same quality of education and experience as the leading education providers. Based in Toronto, Canada, the company supports clients across Canada and the United States. Further information is available at www.edtekservices.com.

About it’s learning

Since 1999, the company has provided it’s learning – The Individual Learning Platform™ to European clients in K-12 and higher education. In order to provide more effective service to North American schools and universities, in the spring of 2009 it added a North American headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. In additional to its global headquarters in Bergen, Norway, the company has offices in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain. Investing in the future of education, in 2009, it’s learning dedicated more than 40 percent of its revenue to the design and development of its products. The company’s goals are to offer the best learning platform and related services worldwide and to be the most innovative organization within the education market. For more information visit, www.itslearning.net.

New Web Site Lists Free Online Textbooks

February 5 - A new Web site, Open Educational Resources Center for California (http://grou.ps/oercenter/), brings together information on free and open textbooks and course materials in one location. The site links to more than 400 open textbooks and peer reviews of open textbooks.

Professor Textblaster

February 24 - Mr. McCann, an English instructor at Bay College, in Michigan, is deploying students' own favorite technology to burn away the memory fog. He blasts his classes text-message reminders using Broadtexter (http://www.broadtexter.com/), a free software program used by bands to create mobile fan clubs. Rather than texting tour dates, he keeps the phones in students' pockets buzzing with regular reminders like "Paper 4 is due tomorrow."

Getting Face to Face With Distance Learning

February 17 - New York Institute of Technology's videoconferencing capabilities have brought the school closer to its overseas learning partners. When video, audio, and social networking infiltrated the Web, NYIT went in search of a new way to deliver online course content to the state of New York. The solution had to work in either a Windows or Mac environment, said Silverman, and had to be robust enough to serve the entire state of New York. NYIT adopted technologies from Elluminate for the program.

Want a degree? Get it in three.

February 8 - Mount Olive College has figured out a way to save its students a cool $22,000: get them a degree in three years. The small private college of 800 students in Wayne County is the first in North Carolina to latch onto a burgeoning national trend toward the three-year bachelor's degree.

It is an idea spurred by necessity: with more college students and their families struggling to pay tuition bills, universities have looked for ways to deliver their product more quickly and affordably. The three-year model has gained momentum in the past year, with a handful of small, private colleges unveiling programs of late. Read the full article to learn more about this model and the key factors for its success.

Web Not Yet the Answer to College-Text Costs

February 8 - Most students still prefer print to digital, and even if they didn't, textbook publishers and authors have made very few titles available online. But that could change with the advent of the tablet-style Apple iPad and with students throughout the region buckling under heavy book expenses on top of pricey tuition. A small but growing number already are buying digital texts, many of which are half the price of books.

Experts expect students to have more choices as campuses, professors, and companies look for new ways to make texts available and more affordable. Textbook publishers and book authors are grappling to find a fair method that makes use of technology and satisfies students.

Copyright Policy in Online Learning

February 5 -  Earlier this month, UCLA announced that it was restricting the use of streaming video in online courses. This interview with provides expert advice on what this might mean for other institutions and how they can effectively craft a copyright policy that can deal with such issues.

Reference Publisher Acquires Major Online Library

February 4 - Gale, a division of Cengage Learning, has recently acquired Questia Media, a subscription-based online information service, that lets users access more than 75,000 books and millions of journal, magazine and newspaper articles. Questia Classroom is a course-management system tied to that online material.

Free Online Courses Don't Hurt Paid Enrollment

February 2 - New research takes a close look at what happened when one institution, Brigham Young University, experimented with granting free access to the content of some of its distance-education courses. The study examined the cost of opening up those materials and the impact their publication had on paid enrollments, a concern for institutions worried that giving away free courses could cannibalize their ranks of paying students. The data suggest they needn’t worry.

David Wiley, a Brigham Young associate professor and open-education leader, praises his associate Justin Johansen's research as "the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance-learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing open courseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it."

'it's learning' Receives Straight 'A's in Review

BURLINGTON, Mass., Feb 02, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Next generation individualized learning platform comes to U.S. online learning. After an intensive review of it's learning (www.itslearning.net), MultiMedia & INTERNET@SCHOOLS reviewer Susan Hixson awarded the individualized learning platform with straight "A"s in the categories of installation, content/ features, ease-of-use, and product support in the January/February 2010 issue.

The web-delivered learning platform comes "highly recommended" by Hixson and supports student-centered learning by delivering individualized instruction, multimedia and Web 2.0 content, and engaging peer and teacher communications.

Online Cure for the Nursing Crisis

February 2 - With the baby boom generation wading into retirement, America needs more nurses. Many current nurses need more education. And, increasingly, it appears online degree programs are going to play a critical role in providing it. “Online is increasingly the option for the student who does not have the ability to get on campus for a traditional course and who needs to balance home, work, and school,” says Linda L. Strong, coordinator of the R.N. to B.S.N program at Sacred Heart University. Rising demand, of course, means not only more students to educate, but an expansion of the market and more money to be made. “The pie is very much still growing,” says Gerry Digiusto, a senior analyst at the higher-ed consulting firm Eduventures. And while forays into the potentially lucrative online education market can sometimes backfire, creating an online nursing degree program is a relatively low-risk venture.

Assessment Disconnect

January 27 - Annual gatherings of student learning experts and accrediting officials reveal lots of assessment activity on campuses. But policy makers ponder whether it adds up to meaningful national progress. Major questions remain about just how serious higher education as an industry has gotten about these issues. "We've got to end casual, undisciplined approaches to learning and assessment," added Paul Lingenfelter, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers.

Hitting Pause on Class Videos

January 26 - In the latest clash of copyright law and instructional technology, the University of California at Los Angeles has stopping allowing faculty members to post copyrighted videos on their course Web sites after coming under fire from an educational media trade group. So far, UCLA is the only institution the organization has accused of such infractions. However, Allen Dohra, its president, told Inside Higher Ed that it is prepared to take on other colleges if it becomes clear that similar practices are taking place elsewhere. “We have leads in terms of other universities, and we do plan to investigate further,” said Dohra.

Colleges See 17 Percent Increase in Online Enrollment

January 26 - Colleges saw a 17 percent increase in online enrollment, with more than one in four students taking at least one online course in the fall of 2008, according to the findings of an annual survey published on Tuesday by the Sloan Consortium. Despite this surge, the data suggest that not enough institutions have taken online education into account as they conduct planning around issues like how to deal with budget cuts and space shortages, says A. Frank Mayadas, a special adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

"They have to wake up and begin to think about this as a strategic item," Mr. Mayadas says.

Outsourcing Language Learning

January 22 - The Sage Colleges, with campuses in Albany and Troy, New York, adopted the Drake program’s structure last fall to begin offering Italian. Students were interested in studying the language – many so that they could communicate with Italian-speaking family members. Sage wasn’t trying to eliminate its Spanish and French programs and faculty, said David Salomon, chair of Sage’s department of English and modern languages, but to add to them without incurring costs and logistical challenges it was unprepared to face. “We didn’t do this to replace anything,” he said. “This is additional.”

To Reach Obama's 2020 Goal, Colleges Need to Better Support Adults

January 22 - Many more adults will need to enroll in college for the United States to meet President Obama's goal of having the world's largest share of college graduates by 2020, government officials and higher-education experts said at a panel discussion on Capitol Hill this week. Panelists encouraged colleges to take nontraditional students' needs into consideration and urged lawmakers to replicate and expand successful programs that support adult students.

5 Higher Ed Tech Trends To Watch in 2010

There aren't too many corners of higher education that technology hasn't infiltrated. From admissions to financial aid to the classroom and everything in between, nearly all aspects of college are being handled in some way by the applications, hardware, and gadgets that help institutions work more efficiently.

Moody's Affirms Negative Outlook for Higher Education

Moody's today is affirming that it continues to believe -- as it first stated a year ago -- that the financial outlook for higher education is negative. As a major credit-rankings agency, Moody's views on higher education generally and on individual institutions that seek its ratings are crucial to their cost of borrowing. In a statement being issued today, Moody's says that the "partial recovery in equity markets" has helped many colleges and that many institutions have found ways to increase their liquid assets. But many institutions, Moody's says, face "fundamental and cumulative risks of weakened student demand and donor support," as well as greater outside scrutiny. On issues of credit stability, Moody's says that the risks are greater for private institutions than public institutions.

Accreditation 2.0

After years of dialogue, debate and deliberation, we are at the beginning of the next generation of accreditation. An “Accreditation 2.0” is emerging, one that reflects attention to calls for change while sustaining and even enhancing some of the central features of current accreditation operation.

EdTek Services Selects the it's learning LMS

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release

EdTek Services Selects the it’s learning LMS to Support their Online Learning Partnerships

EdTek Services’ higher education customers to be offered the multimedia capabilities and individualized learning support of the “it’s learning” virtual learning environment

Toronto, Canada – January 13, 2009 – After a worldwide review of Learning Management System (LMS) companies, EdTek Services, Inc., a provider of accreditation, program development, student recruitment, program management and eLearning technology services for small to mid-sized colleges and universities, has chosen it’s learning as the company’s course management solution. EdTek will offer its customers the it’s learning Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) designed for individualized learning, easy implementation and cost effective use.

“As our small to medium size higher education partners became savvier about their online offerings, we found a need to provide them with a robust and cost-effective alternative to the limited and increasingly expensive choices we have had in North America for the last ten years,” said Paul Jacobelli, Founder and President of EdTek Services. “The it’s learning platform provides the multitude of features we were searching for in an LMS, with unparalleled ease of use and excellent support services. In a cost comparison we determined that adopting the it’s learning LMS was less than going the open-source route while getting the best that open-source offered right out of the gate. This LMS will serve as a valuable resource for both our current and future customers.”

EdTek Services was established in 2003 to help smaller education institutions enhance their on-ground and online programs by providing them with comprehensive accreditation, student recruitment, program management, course development and administrative support solutions. Through strategic partnerships with leading technology and content companies, EdTek Services offers a complete package of products and services for smaller education institutions that wish to supplement their on-ground programs or offer fully online degrees.

“This partnership will allow us to share our platform with the tens of thousands of college students and faculty who are part of the EdTek network,” said Jon Bower, President of it’s learning, inc. “With it’s learning, small colleges will be able to supply the same level of services as their larger regional and national competitors, and instructors can easily individualize their instruction to ensure better outcomes for each and every student.”

About EdTek Services, Inc.
EdTek partners with small to medium size education providers and offers consulting, training, hands-on administrative support and technology solutions that enable its clients to focus their resources on instruction and learning. By offering solutions for eLearning Software, Instructional Design, Course Development, Faculty Recruitment and Training, Enrollment Marketing, Retention, Program Management & Program Accreditation, EdTek helps smaller colleges deliver the same quality of education and experience as the leading education providers. Based in Toronto, Canada, the company supports clients across Canada and the United States. Further information is available at www.edtekservices.com.

About it’s learning
Since 1999, the company has provided it’s learning – The Individual Learning Platform™ to European clients in K-12 and higher education. In order to provide more effective service to North American schools and universities, in the spring of 2009 it added a North American headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. In additional to its global headquarters in Bergen, Norway, the company has offices in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain. Investing in the future of education, it’s learning dedicates more than 40 percent of its resources to the design and development of its products. The company’s goals are to offer the best learning platform and related services worldwide and to be the most innovative organization within the education market. For more information visit www.itslearning.net.

For more information contact:

Dominick Miciotta
Phone: (800) 827-1593, ext. 3
Fax: (888) 827-1184
E-mail: dominick@edtekservices.com

'Horizon Report' Highlights 6 Technologies to Watch in Education

January 14 - After failing to make last year's “Technologies to Watch” list, the open-content movement now joins mobile computing as the two trends most likely to enter mainstream learning in the next year, says the report, from the New Media Consortium and Educause.

“Far more than a collection of free online course materials, the open-content movement is a response to the rising costs of education, the desire for access to learning in areas where such access is difficult, and an expression of student choice about when and how to learn,” the report says.

When it comes to mobile devices, the report notes that gadgets like smartphones and netbooks are already taking hold on many campuses, whether as tools for fieldwork or storage for reference materials. But the authors caution that concerns over privacy, classroom management, and access need to be dealt with before their use becomes widespread.

New Tech Fee Will Cover $6 Million in New Projects at U of South Flori

January 8 - The University of South Florida, with 47,000 students on four campuses, expects to collect $3.2 million in new technology fees in the first semester. For the year, the university expects to bring in $6 million, which will be used to enhance institutional technology system-wide for students and faculty.

House Passes Bill: $1.25 Billion in Job Training Funds

January 5 - Like the Recovery Act the bill largely focuses on increasing investments in existing programs, providing $1.25 billion in new training funds under the Department of Labor including $750 million for competitive grants for training and placement of workers in high-growth and emerging sectors. Of that total, $275 million must be for careers in energy efficiency and renewable energy as described in the Green Jobs Act, and of that $275 million, $225 million must be for Pathways out of Poverty grants. Priority for the remaining $475 million must be given to projects in the health care sector.

American Colleges Lag in Meeting Work-Force Needs

January 4 - The study, whose preliminary results were presented on Monday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, found that some academic programs, such as computer science, appear to be highly responsive to labor-market trends, while others, like medicine and dentistry, are largely unaffected by changes in employment opportunities.

The authors' conclusion: In general, growth in employment opportunities and wages and demand for specific occupations do increase degree completion. But that relationship operates with a lag, with the strongest correlations occurring with a delay of four to seven years—the time it takes to earn an undergraduate or advanced degree.

How to Teach With Google Wave

January 4 - If you're wondering what use Google's new Wave tool might have for teaching, one online-learning leader has an answer: combining classes from different colleges. Think of it like bringing in a guest speaker. But with Wave, which is like e-mail but live and jazzed up with multimedia features, you can build online communities that link entire classrooms for a week or two. And you can do it without the administrative headaches of booking rooms or adjusting class schedules.

Ray Schroeder gave it a try last semester at the University of Illinois at Springfield, one of the first colleges to use Wave for online teaching since the preview version came out in September.

Obsolete Learning Technologies

December 29 - The Silicon Alley Insider recently named 21 technologies that became obsolete this past decade. Here are 8 of them.

Hybrid Education 2.0

December 28 - What if you could teach a college course without a classroom or a professor, and lose nothing? According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, there’s no "what if" about it. Carnegie Mellon is not about to replace all its professors with computer programs. But with $4 million in private grants and perhaps more to come from the federal government, the university is currently exploring how the open-learning software could be used in conjunction with classroom education to speed up the teaching and learning process -- a prospect that some involved think could help solve overcrowding in America's community colleges and realize the Obama administration's goal of boosting graduation rates.

Evaluating My 2009 Predictions by Joshua Kim

December 20 - One year ago Mr. Kim made a series of 8 predictions for learning technology in 2009. Here are the predictions, with an accompanying evaluation that in most cases tries to explain why he got most things so ...

Defining the Enrollment Boom

December 18 - The American Association of Community Colleges released the results of a survey designed to see if the many individual reports add up to a national trend -- and the survey results suggest they do. Nationally, head count in credit courses is up 11.4 percent over the last year, and 16.9 percent over two years, according to the survey, which included data from hundreds of colleges from every region of the country. Notably, given that about 60 percent of community college students are enrolled part time, one of the most dramatic parts of the new enrollment surge is that it is coming in large part by full-time students. Over the last two years, the percentage gain in full-time students has been more than twice the rate as for part-time students.

Student Engagment Survey Released

November - In November, the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research released "Assessment for Improvement: Tracking Student Engagement over Time," the report on the tenth annual National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE).

Some of the findings related to information technology include:

Students and faculty were least likely to use used computer technologies for or were lease familiar with:
    -- Videoconferencing or Internet phone chat
    -- Video games, simulations, or virtual worlds
    -- Blogs
    -- Student response systems
    -- Online portfolios

The survey results are available at:
http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2009_Results/pdf/NSSE_AR_2009.pdf

The Challenge to States: Preserving College Access and Affordability in a Time of Crisis

December 11 - The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education has released a report offering recommendations to state governments for devising strategies to preserve college affordability while stimulating innovation to prepare for a future that will require enhanced access, quality, cost-effectiveness, and productivity in higher education. (Full online report.)

The American Graduation Initiative and Workforce Development in the Community College

December 11 - The American Graduation Initiative sets out a goal for the US to have the greatest proportion of college graduates of any country in the world by 2020. Here is an interview with one community college leader examining how technology-related workforce development might factor into achieving the goals of the new initiative.

Helping Faculty Manage Online Workload

December 11 - Because online courses require more preparation, faculty often find that they are committing significantly more time than they would for a face-to-face class. In the absence of specific guidance from department chairs or faculty developers on how to effectively structure an online course or how to manage their growing workload, faculty are in jeopardy of over-committing their time. Here are tips for how department chairs and faculty developers can help faculty manage their workload in an online environment.

Quick Environmental Scanning for Workforce Education Needs

December 4 - With so many displaced workers and unemployed adults, more colleges and universities are working to identify specific workforce needs in their area and launch new workforce education programs in response. From three experts (Rick Voorhees of Voorhees Group LLC, Patricia Malone of Stony Brook University, and Victoria Matthew of UMASS Amherst), here are some fast steps you can take to identify local needs and to measure the demand for workforce education programs in your area.

Postsecondary Enrollment By Race and Type of Institution, Fall 2008

December 4 - The latest figures show full-time status at a four-year college is still the most popular enrollment choice for all racial groups. Hispanic students are the only group whose lowest enrollment is at the graduate level. Blacks and Hispanics have the least postsecondary participation compared with members of those groups who are not working. (Subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Ed required to read full article.)

Associate's Degrees and Certificates Increase, But Not Enough

December 4 - According to an NCES report, American colleges have ratcheted up the number of sub-baccalaureate degrees they award -- but not nearly enough to approach the aggressive college completion goals that President Obama and others have set for the country. The newly released data suggest that, taking a long view, more Americans are entering and emerging from such programs. As seen in the table below, the number of degrees and certificates awarded by colleges and universities that award federal financial aid rose only modestly (by 2.7 percent) from 1997 to 2002, but then jumped sharply, by 25 percent, from 2002 to 2007. The overall rate of increase over the course of the decade, 28.4 percent, was slightly less than the rate of increase for bachelor's degrees, which grew by 11 percent from 1997 to 2002 and 18 percent from 2002 to 2007.

Community Colleges Get Gift of Millions for Online Education

December 3 - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $12.9-million to advance technology at community colleges, improving virtual learning environments for both students and teachers.

The major goal is to bolster the academic success of students who arrive at community colleges lacking study skills, and who are under a lot of pressure to balance studying with demands of family and work. Ideally, new technologies will be intergrated into teaching and course-delivery systems, rather than added as as afterthought.

Online Service Planned to Help Adults Get Credit for Out-of-Classroom Learning

December 3 - For years, colleges have awarded credit for out-of-classroom learning experiences like corporate training, independent study and volunteer activities. But many colleges can’t afford to train their faculty and staff to evaluate those experiences. A new online service is intended to help translate outside learning into college credit, which should be good news for adults who want to save money on tuition and speed up their degrees.

Archived Web Seminar: What you need to know about stimulus fund grants

November 30 - The federal stimulus package can help colleges and universities expand technology to offer more and better services for students and constituents. The good news is that there is money still available, money that can help your institution grow and prosper. Areas that qualify for stimulus funding include green initiatives and infrastructure enhancements, including technology improvements like ERP implementations, virtualization, cloud computing and more. In this web seminar you'll learn how to plan a grant request and what information is needed. You'll also hear from institutions that have &quot;been there and done that&quot; for successful grant approvals.

Original webcast: 10/13/2009. Sponsored by GovConnection

Too Much Reading? Try Listening Instead

November 25 - About a year ago, a library administrator was tinkering with text-enlarging software, which makes it easier for visually impaired students to read. She found that the software could also turn text into sound, and thought it would make sense to make the program available to all students. The speed of the scanning itself depends on the quality of the scanner, but the software, called Kurzweil 3000, converts the scanned text into sound at a rate of three pages per second. Users can choose from several human voices and set a speed at which the text will be read.

Purdue U Brings Social Networking to the Classroom

November 18 - Things are a little different at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, where some professors--especially those who teach in large lecture halls--have come to embrace social networking as an instructional aid. Using an application developed on campus, the educators who enrolled in the program have come to think of social networking via texting and online portals as a tool, rather than a distraction.

Known as Hotseat, the application allows students to comment on the class and then enables other participants--including professors, students, and teaching assistants--to view those messages. Students either use their Twitter, Facebook or MySpace accounts to post the messages or log in to the Hotseat Web site to send text messages. The application resides on the Web; there is no software for professors or students to install.

Identifying At-Risk Online Students

November 13 - An article this week in Inside Higher Ed featured a community college and a for-profit online university which are both using features of learning management systems to track student engagement data and alert faculty and administrators to online students who may be at risk. This is one of the advantages in online instruction: student engagement in the course can be more thoroughly recorded and documented. We asked Mark Parker, assistant provost at University of Maryland University College, to offer some further advice on using LMS data to identify and respond to at-risk students.

Tips for Training Faculty on Teaching With Technology

November 13 - Last week, CDW released a report that indicated, among other findings:

* Only 38% of students surveyed believe faculty are making effective use of interactive learning technologies in the classroom
* Faculty identify training as what they need most to help them integrate learning technologies

Patricia McGee, associate professor of instructional technology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, offers some practical tips on training faculty for the integration of interactive learning technologies into the classroom.

Technologie, Technik [technology]

Tweeting in Class

November 5 - Do Twitter skeptics really believe the popular microblogging service offers no educational value, or are they just afraid of it?

Twitter can be considered a data-gathering resource. Live discussion threads give professors loads of data on the previously mysterious question of what exactly is going on inside the heads of students during a lecture. No longer is a student’s ability to participate in classroom discussions contingent upon whether he is willing to raise his hand and has the good fortune to be called on.

LMS 3.0

November 4 -- LMS 3.0 marks the transition from the LMS as an instructional resource and service for students and faculty to a key source for critical transactional data about academic interaction and student engagement. And let’s be candid about what this means: although the analogy may be offensive to many in the campus community, the LMS is higher ed’s version of the supermarket scanner. The LMS records and stores valuable data about student interactions with academic resources, much the way the supermarket scanner records my purchases of (and preference for) bananas and dark beer.

The transactional data from the LMS can tell us much about the aggregated and individual student interaction with course content outside of the classroom (or in the case of online courses, away from the chat room!). The transactional data from the LMS -- what students do while “in” the LMS for an individual class and how long they are “in” the LMS -- are the new metrics for student engagement and time on task.

The Netflix of Academic Journals Opens Shop

October 29 - By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone. The Web site has been an academic-journal search engine since 2005 and unveiled its rental program this week. Now anyone can “rent” an article—which means you can view it on your computer without ownership rights or printing capabilities—for as little as 99 cents for 24 hours. Users can also subscribe for monthly passes. Currently the site has 30 million articles from various peer-reviewed journals.

Open Courses: Free, but Oh, So Costly

October 11 - Colleges are grappling with the limits of this global online movement. Enthusiasts think open courses have the potential helping people piece together cheaper degrees from multiple institutions. But some worry that universities' projects may stall, because the recession and disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your "free" content?

Online and in Exile

October 23 - In what some believe could be a landmark case in state oversight of online colleges, the Maryland Higher Education Commission this week barred the University of Maryland University College from offering an online doctoral program in community college administration to state residents, citing rules against “unnecessary duplication” of existing programs at historically black institutions.

Colleges Make Their Case for Broadband Grants

October 22 - Colleges and universities have applied for tens of millions of dollars in federal stimulus grants designed to expand broadband internet access, arguing that university IT infrastructure makes campuses worthy recipients. A review of colleges and universities that applied for federal broadband grant money showed many campuses vying to provide more computers with broadband web access to local residents, and other schools hoping to establish wide-ranging cloud-computing networks.

Managing Online Education

October 22 - Three questionnaire items about enrollments indicate that campuses participating in the survey have experienced healthy gains in good economic times and bad – and that campus officials expect enrollments in their online programs to continue to rise in the coming years. Fully 94 percent of the survey respondents – typically the senior campus officer responsible for online or distance education programs –report enrollment gains in their online programs between2006 and 2009; almost half (48 percent) report online enrollments rose by 15 percent or more during this period.

Spanish 101 Goes Online

October 21 - After several years of experimenting with “hybrid” Spanish courses that mix online and classroom instruction, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has decided to begin conducting its introductory Spanish course exclusively on the Web.Spanish 101, which had featured online lessons combined with one classroom session per week, will drop its face-to-face component in an effort to save on teaching costs and campus space in light of rising demand for Spanish instruction and a shrinking departmental budget.

Microsoft's Vision for Higher Ed and Lecture Capture

October 21 - Blogger Joshua Kim, of Inside Higher Ed, takes aim at Microsoft's vision of higher education and argues that what Microsoft should be doing is focusing more on lecture capture technology and services.

An E-Textbook Program Aims to Benefit Students and Professors

October 20 - The program, a result of a nearly $300,000 grant from U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, will commission professors to create texts personalized for specific classes and put them in a digital format that will bring textbook prices down from their average cost of $100 to a much more moderate $15.

New Site Indexes Information on Digital Books

October 20 - The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group, has created a system for helping people find digital books on the Internet. The service, called BookServer, collects information on digital books that are available online, either free or for a fee. Those in charge of the project say they hope it will make it easier for people to use digital material online. Authors, publishers, libraries, and book sellers -- in other words, anyone who offers free or paid books online -- can index their materials so they appear when people conduct a search on BookServer.

Online Programs: Profits Are There, Technological Innovation Is Not

October 19 - Online programs are generally profitable. But despite the buzz about Web 2.0, the education they provide is still dominated by rudimentary, text-based technology. Those are two key findings in a recent report, “Benchmarking Online Operations: Snapshots of an Emerging Industry,” produced by the consulting firm Eduventures. The study found that nearly all programs were either profitable or breaking even. Overall, 65 percent reported that their online programs were profitable. For for-profits, 100 percent were profitable; for nonprofits, 62 percent were.

Regulation Woes

October 14 - Educational institutions in Washington agree that they want to improve access to “high quality” higher education. Indeed, many of the institutions represented wanted to talk about how they might be able to enroll students from across the country without having to contend with 50 different state-based approval agencies. Regulators from those agencies, meanwhile -- some of whom were also present at the conference -- remain concerned about maintaining the “high quality” aspect, especially since the online-only format, they fear, can leave people vulnerable to fraud at the hands of “diploma mills.”

Online Degrees Viewed More Favorably

October 14 - While there is still a stigma attached to online education, new data indicate that employer perception of online schools is changing. Adult mid-career professionals, in particular, are flocking to study in online courses and even earn entire degrees through distance learning. The benefits are obvious: They offer convenience, accommodating work and family schedules.

As Online Education Grows, National Providers Struggle With State Regulations

October 13 - In the 1980s, higher-education leaders convened to study the emerging issue of regulating distance-learning programs that cross state borders. As technology became more accepted, they predicted, the inevitable result would be a more coordinated, national approach to regulation. Not quite. Distance-learning technology has changed, with the Internet supplanting television, but the regulatory maze is getting worse, according to a recent report from a group of online providers calling for reform.

An Experiment Takes Off

October 7 - It will be a while -- years, probably, until outcomes on teacher certification exams are in and the U. of Southern California's online master's in teaching graduates have been successful (or not) in the classroom -- before questions about the program's quality and performance are fully answered (though officials there point out that the technology platform, like much online learning software, provides steady insight into how successfully students are staying on track). But USC officials say that short of quantitative measures such as those, they believe the online program is attracting equally qualified students and is providing an education that is fully equivalent to its on-ground master's program -- goals that the institution viewed as essential so as not to "dilute the brand" of USC's well-regarded program.

PBS and NPR Add to Trove of Free Online Lectures

October 6 - PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free lectures online. Their site, called Forum Network, says it makes thousands of lectures available.

YouTube EDU Goes International

October 1 - YouTube EDU, the Web site for video channels from universities, has recently added content from institutions in Europe and Israel.

Forty-five colleges and universities from those areas, including the University of Cambridge and distance-learning institutions like the Open University of Catalonia, now have channels on the site.

About 200 American and Canadian institutions also have YouTube EDU channels, where viewers can watch professors' lectures, famous people speaking on campuses, and even half-time antics at major college-football games. The site was launched in March.

More with Less: Seven ways to survive the budget crunch

February 2009 - What do recent financial troubles have to do with marketing, communications, and the web? Everything. According to a recent survey conducted by the communication consulting firm MStoner, more than half of 150 senior marketing, communications, and advancement professionals in higher education cited financial constraints or budgetary problems as the top challenges for 2009. This article presents ideas for using online technologies to help universities do more with less.

Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe Not

September 16 - For the new study, researchers surveyed undergraduate students about seven types of academic misconduct. These included cheating on tests, plagiarism, and aiding and abetting (letting a classmate copy a paper, for example). In both traditional and online classes, aiding and abetting was found to be the cheating method of choice.

Next: An Internet Revolution in Higher Education

September 14 - For centuries the university model dominated because nothing else worked. No technology existed that might deliver an interactive, engaging educational experience without gathering students and teachers in the same physical space. In the past century, a powerful social bias set in: Only accredited universities were allowed to grant degrees, and most professional jobs required an accredited degree. Even though technologies emerged that might foster new models of higher education, the neat accreditation ecosystem locked out innovative competitors. These days broadband Internet, video games, social networks, and other developments could combine to create an online, inexpensive, super-convenient model for higher education.

A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

September 13 - (The Washington Post) Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving.This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Ending the Standoff Between Faculty and IT

September 8 - When it comes time to request technology for the classroom, faculty members often ask the wrong questions. Warren Arbogast and Scott Carlson discuss the right way for professors to seek guidance from IT experts. (Listen to this audio article online.)

What Doomed Global Campus?

September 3 - Global Campus was conceived as a separately accredited entity that would eventually enroll as many students as the other University of Illinois campuses combined. It was meant to be a win-win: the university dramatically expands access to its vast resources and well-regarded degrees, while generating tons of revenue à la University of Phoenix Online. So, what happened? There were a number of contributing factors, not least of which was increasing competition for online students, which pitted Global Campus against dozens of low-cost, Web-based operations as it sought to grow enrollment and recoup its initial investment.

Utah State U.'s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes

September 3 - David Wiley, an associate professor at Brigham Young University and an open-education leader, characterized Utah’s open-course collection as apparently the second-largest in the country, behind MIT’s. Its demise, Mr. Wiley wrote, is “heartbreaking.”

The cause? The effort ran through grant money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and $200,000 from the state Legislature. It needed $120,000 a year to keep going. But it failed to secure any more state or university money, Mr. Jensen said, despite being the third-most-visited Web site hosted by Utah State University.

Report on Online Education Study

August - "More than one-third of public university faculty have taught an online course while more than one-half have recommended an online course to students . . . . In addition, nearly 64 percent of faculty said it takes 'somewhat more' or 'a lot more' effort to teach online compared to a face-to-face course. The two-part report, "Online Learning as a Strategic Asset," published by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, summarizes the results of the APLU-Sloan National Commission on Online Learning Benchmarking Study conducted in 2008 and 2009 that surveyed 45 public institutions across the U.S. The study was "designed to illuminate how public institutions develop and implement the key organizational strategies, processes, and procedures that contribute to successful and robust online learning initiatives."

Volume I: http://www.aplu.org/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=1877
Volume II: http://www.aplu.org/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=1879

Teaching With WEB 2.0 Tools Mashups

"It would be foolish to ignore the tremendous opportunities the Social Web offers to education. Societal growth is profoundly dependent upon the success of teaching and learning. Societies are founded on the propagation and dissemination of knowledge, and formal learning has become the prime gateway to knowledge. Teachers should therefore continue to explore new and dynamic ways of providing excellent pedagogical opportunities, with emerging social software tools assuming greater importance."

Carrying Out the Higher Ed Act

August 24 - The Department of Education is proposing a set of regulations for a broad range of provisions -- on such topics as campus safety, illegal sharing of digital files, and educating students with disabilities -- that Congress enacted as part of last year's renewal of the Higher Education Act.

Year-Round Pell Grants. Much to the delight of college officials, the Higher Education Opportunity Act, for the first time, made it possible for students to receive enough Pell Grant aid to attend college year-round, to "accelerate" their progress toward degree completion. During the course of three negotiating sessions, the Education Department proposed several different iterations of language designed to ensure that students were using the Pell aid to complete their academic work briskly.

At Distance-Learning College, Flash Drive Replaces Course-Management System

August 21 - Beginning this fall, students at the Trenton-based distance-education institution will have the option of using a 2GB flash drive instead of a course-management system to prepare for and complete their classes.

The flash drives are part of the college's Mobile Learning Initiative, developed after it discovered many of its students -- who were stationed with the military or frequently traveling -- couldn't access a course-management system on a regular basis.

How Students, Professors, and Colleges Are, and Should Be, Using Social Media

August 24 - The Chronicle spoke with S. Craig Watkins, an associate professor of radio, TV, and film at the University of Texas at Austin, about the new age of social networking and media, and what it means for the classroom of the future. His soon-to-be-published book, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future, touches on those ideas. Read the online interview.

Retaining Students in Online Education :: Conference

This conference is hosted by Academic Impressions. It will take place in San Antonio, TX September 28-30. For more information about the event or to register visit their website.

In Case of Emergency, Break Tradition—Teach Online

August 17 - If an outbreak of swine flu or some other crisis closes its campus, Northern Virginia Community College plans to still be open. The college is training classroom-based professors in the basics of online teaching as part of its emergency plan to shift large numbers of courses to the Web. The college is one of several institutions updating their emergency plans to include teaching in virtual classrooms if physical ones become unusable for a few weeks.

New Carnegie Mellon U. Project Will Build Online Community College Courses

August 14 - The Community College Open Learning Initiative is the second wave of an educational experiment that gained attention recently from the Obama administration. Carnegie Mellon's work has given about 300 classrooms around the world access to software-enhanced, college-level online-course material in subjects like biology and statistics. These digital environments track students’ progress, give them feedback, and tip off professors about where students are struggling so the instructors can make better use of class time.

Funding Tops Campus Information Technology Concerns

August 4 - Slashed campus budgets and dwindling endowments have spurred university IT officials toward cost-saving technologies, and a new survey shows that saving IT dollars has vaulted to the No. 1 priority of campus technology decision makers during the current recession.

The newly released 10th annual EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey, completed online in December 2008 mostly by campus chief information officers, ranked the most pressing issues in college IT offices. Administrative systems, an issue that has remained among the survey's top three issues since 2000, ranked second this year. Technology security--the No. 1 concern in 2008--and infrastructure ranked third and fourth, respectively.

Berkeley Gets Grants to Develop Open-Source Software for Online Lectures

July 29 - The University of California at Berkeley is moving forward with its plan to create open-source software that would let colleges around the world easily post lectures from their most popular professors.

The project, called “Opencast Matterhorn," received $1.5-million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations to begin developing software. The first version is scheduled to be released in July 2010, featuring a scheduling tool, software for uploading and encoding video and audio for distribution on iTunes and YouTube, an RSS generator, and a media player, says Adam Hochman, a product manager at Berkeley's Learning Systems Group.

Those interested in keeping up with the project can peruse wiki forums and sign up for e-mail lists on its Web site.

Jittery Economy, Relatively Low Cost Cited for Boom in Online Higher Education

July 28 - While the troubled economy may be bad news for GM dealers or people selling their houses, it's creating a greater demand for online college courses. Enrollment is growing steadily, especially among older, working students.

The courses offer them a way to gain additional skills that could provide insurance if they get laid off or give them better credentials in the job market. "Students are fearful of losing their jobs and want stronger skills," said Shirley Adams, provost of Charter Oak State College in New Britain, where enrollment in online courses has soared in the past few years. "They may have been working in a field for many years, but a lot of times, employers are looking for that degree."

Students Will Pay Extra for Online Courses at U. of Wisconsin at Milwaukee

July 27 - Students will be able to take a lot more online courses at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee this fall. But they will pay more for the privilege, according to an article in the Miwaukee Journal-Sentinal. The university will charge as much as $275 per course on top of regular tuition.

The university now is offering 90 more online classes than it did last fall, for a total of 366 online courses, the newspaper says. It also reported complaints from one student about the extra fee for an online class, because he did not feel he had the resources to wait a year for that class to be offered on campus again.

California Digital Library Offers Web Archiving Service

July 23 - Faculty, students, researchers, and librarians can now create archived collections of Web sites through the California Digital Library’s Web Archiving Service -- a way to preserve information on the Web that could otherwise be removed or deleted. With the service, clients -- which include the University of California -- can act as curators of a collection of Web sites, choosing which pages to archive and accessing them through a Web interface, Ms. Seneca said. Those collections can then be made available to the public.

Giving Away Academic Books Online Can Actually Help Print Sales

July 21 - In an economy where sales of everything are down, an increasing number of authors and publishers, especially in academic fields, are distributing their books free on the Internet. This contradicts common sense. After all, at a time when people are buying fewer books, won’t giving away books compound the problem?

Maybe not...

Online and Interpersonal

July 17 - It may seem paradoxical, but educational technology as a supplement to face-to-face learning could personalize the educational experience. That is, at least according to a presentation on student assessment and feedback given at the Blackboard annual conference. Two professors from the University of Westminster in London explained research finding that use of educational technology such as blogs and online questionnaires, combined with personal tutors, could enhance the feedback loop while also making face-to-face communication more efficient.

A Push for Free Online Courses

July 1 - Community colleges and high schools would receive federal funds to create free, online courses in a program that is in the final stages of being drafted by the Obama administration.

The program is part of a series of efforts to help community colleges reach more students and to link basic skills education to job training. The proposals are outlined in administration discussion drafts obtained by Inside Higher Ed. A formal announcement could come in the next few weeks. In addition to the free online courses, the plan would provide $9 billion over 10 years to help community colleges develop and improve programs related to preparing students for good jobs, and a $10 billion loan fund (at low or no interest) for community college facilities.

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The Evidence on Online Education

June 29 - Online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning, according to a new meta-analysis released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education.

The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took "blended" courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.

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Aligning Jobs and Training

July 14 - Jobs requiring only an associate degree or skills certificate are projected to grow slightly faster than those requiring at least a bachelor’s degree in the coming decade, according to a new report from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors.

The report comes on the eve of a massive federal plan President Obama is about to unveil to help America's community colleges. An early draft included billions for job training, low-interest loans for building projects and other funding streams to create free online courses.

More Colleges Push Online Programs Locally

July 7 - For years, some universities have dreamed of border-defying online programs that bring in tuition dollars from far places; but now a growing number of institutions are ramping up their efforts to attract working adults in their own backyards.

Commuter-serving urban universities can't match the marketing muscle of faster-growing, for-profit, online colleges. What they can try to do is parlay stronger local brands, cheaper tuition, and blended programs that shift a lot of class time online into an appealing package for area adults. The kind of adults who might value coming to campus periodically but struggle to do it three times a week.

Cell Phones Used to Deliver Course Content

July 6 - US Education Secretary Arne Duncan says schools and colleges should deliver course content to the cell phones that students use to talk and text every day. Some campus officials are listening, and classes via web-enabled cell phones could be mobile learning's next evolution.

Colleges Focus on Veterans as GI Bill Ups Numbers

July 6 - With a fattened GI Bill covering full tuition and more, the number of veterans attending college this fall is expected to jump 30 percent from last year to nearly half a million. That's left many universities looking for ways to ease the transition from combat to the classroom. In response, colleges across the country are offering veterans-only classes, adding counselors and streamlining the application and financial aid process.

Under the new GI Bill expanded by Congress last year, the number of military veterans either starting or continuing their studies this fall is expected to top 460,000, up from 354,000 last autumn, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Many of them will encounter a classroom culture shock that can leave them agitated.

New Online Journal on Instruction

July 1 - The first issue of the online peer-reviewed JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL PEDAGOGIES [ISSN: 1941-3394], published by the Academic and Business Research Institute, is available at http://aabri.com/jip.html

Papers in this issue that are related to instructional technology and e-learning include:

    "Student Perceptions of How Technology Impacts the Quality of Instruction and Learning" by Thomas Davies, et al.

    "The Effects of Self-Regulated Learning Strategies and System Satisfaction Regarding Learner's Performance in E-Learning Environment" by Jong-Ki Lee

    "Student Performance in Online Quizzes as a Function of Time in Undergraduate Financial Management Courses" by Oliver   Schnusenberg

    "Student Satisfaction in Web-enhanced Learning Environments" by Charles Hermans, et al.

The Academic and Business Research Institute supports the research and publication needs of business and education faculty. For more information about the journal, contact: Raymond Papp, Editor; email: jip@aabri.com

Downloading Textbooks for Free

June 8 - A new U.S. website called Connextions uses the Creative Common license to allow students and professors to add and edit material as long as the original author is credited. Instead of organizing material in a linear manner, like textbooks that list topic after topic, the site presents content in smaller “modules” that are connected to larger courses or collections. This allows students and professors to access information according to topic. Professors can also build reading packages by selecting material from various sources and adding their own, creating a custom-made, downloadable textbook for their students — for free!

Other online options include CourseSmart, a collaboration between six leading textbook publishers, and the Massachusett Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare. CourseSmart is a website where students can purchase digital copies of their textbooks straight from the publishers (ensuring the latest edition) at a discount of up to 50 percent.

6 Lessons One Campus Learned About E-Textbooks

June 10 - Northwest Missouri State University nearly became the first public university to deliver all of its textbooks electronically. The university ran a pilot study with the Sony Reader. University officials learned some sobering lessons about electronic books. Students who got the machines quickly asked for their printed books back because it was so awkward to navigate inside the e-books (though a newer version of the device works more gracefully). The six lessons were:

1. Judge e-books by their covers.
2. Learning curves ahead.
3. Professors are eager students.
4. Long live batteries.
5. Subjects are not equally e-friendly.
6. Environmental impact matters.

Higher-Education Bubble Could Burst Next

June 1 - Two prominent higher-education experts are warning that the financial structure of colleges and universities may be the next “bubble” to burst in America.

The result could be mergers, closures and even bankruptcies of smaller colleges that have spent too much and taken on too much debt based on a shaky system of student loans paying for ever-rising tuitions, say Joseph Marr Cronin, former secretary of education in Massachusetts, and Howard E. Horton, president of Boston’s New England College of Business and Finance.
The duo raised a stir within academic circles last week when they penned a joint opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?”

Their answer to their own quesiton: Yes.

The problem is colleges - funded by a seemingly unending stream of student-loan money, backed largely by the U.S. government - have kept raising tuitions at rates far ahead of inflation and then spent every nickel they got.

Lecture Capture is Getting Campuses Talking

June 10 - According to Nicole Engelbert, lead analyst with Datamonitor, two factors are driving the "stampede of interest" in lecture capture: First, students are asking for it. A survey (PDF) by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in September 2008 found that 82 percent of students prefer courses with an online option.

Second, higher education tends to be competitive. If a school aspires to compete for new students who are also considering an institution that provides lecture capture, it'll want to be able to provide and promote those capabilities too.

Plus, added Engelbert, the technology is attractively priced.

Read the full article to learn more about lecture capture technology and its uses, and find links to top vendors.

Financial Aid Simplification

June 25 - The Obama administration has put increasing Americans' rate of college going near the top of its agenda for economic recovery and progress, and that political imperative is creating movement on the idea of simplifying the financial aid process where it has been hard to come by previously.

The Education Department will, right now, make several changes that do not require Congressional approval. This summer, the department will take advantage of existing technology on the Web-based FAFSA to allow married or independent students to skip questions about their parents, among others. In January, the department will stop requiring students with low incomes to answer questions about their financial assets, and only returning students will be asked about prior drug convictions, since the question does not affect first-year students. Department officials said they would work closely with state officials to set up the electronic form to "make it easier to answer questions that the states need but the federal government does not."

Intellectual Property and E-Learning

"When we contrast the face-to-face learning environment with the online

(e-learning) environment, nearly all assumptions about IP [intellectual property] and copyright are called into question. Virtually all materials that contribute to e-learning are (or can be) digitized, retained, archived, attributed and logged. This single fact raises questions about IP [intellectual property] ownership, responsibility, policies, and procedures that are newly on the table."

In "Intellectual Property Policies, E-Learning, and Web 2.0: Intersections and Open Questions" (ECAR Research Bulletin, vol. 2009, issue 7, April 7, 2009), Veronica Diaz discusses how online learning has necessitated revising IP policies that were created for face-to-face instructional settings. She notes that higher education IP policies need to go beyond the assumption that "e-learning is contained within an institutional system" as Web 2.0 technologies and social networking expand the reach of the learning environment.

The report is available online to members of ECAR subscribing institutions at http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ecar_so/erb/ERB0907.pdf To find out if your institution is a subscriber, go to

http://www.educause.edu/ECARSubscribingOrganizations/957

ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research) "provides timely research and analysis to help higher education leaders make better decisions about information technology. ECAR assembles leading scholars, practitioners, researchers, and analysts to focus on issues of critical importance to higher education, many of which carry increasingly complicated and consequential implications." For more information go to

http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=4

Stimulus Aims to Help Close Digital Divide

May. 6 - With more than $7 billion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act set aside for increasing broadband access in the United States, the stimulus presents a huge opportunity for schools and communities to help close the digital divide.

The stimulus package authorizes the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to implement the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), which is a $4.7 billion, one-time competitive matching grants program.

The two-year, competitive BTOP grants will be available to states, nonprofit organizations (including schools and colleges that bring broadband services to their larger communities), and internet service providers, and they require a 20-percent matching investment from nonfederal funding sources.

Twitter Goes to College

June 3 - At the University of Texas-Dallas, history professor Monica Rankin needed a better way to get students involved in the classroom. The 90-person lecture hall was too big for back-and-forth conversation. So, with help from students in the school's emerging media program, she had her students set up accounts on Twitter—a micro-blogging service—and then use the technology to post messages and ask questions that were displayed on a projector screen during class. Rankin says that although the technology has its limitations, the experiment encouraged students to participate who otherwise would not have done so.

Though Twitter might not yet be quite as popular among students as Facebook or MySpace, a growing cadre of professors and administrators are embracing it and using it to introduce their classes to a different kind of communication and networking—one that doesn't involve "poking" friends or posting photos.

At Champlain College in Vermont, marketing and online business professor Elaine Young went from using Twitter—which lets people send 140-character messages, or "tweets," out for anyone to see—as a tool to help teach in the classroom to something that business and marketing students can call on to build networks and make connections in the professional world. Compared to other social networking sites, "Twitter is more about creating connections with others who may not be your real friends," she says.

The biggest challenge, Young says, is getting students who are convinced that they will never need the technology to give Twitter a try. But many of her students are jumping in and have taken on business projects with local companies and made recommendations on whether the firms should use services like Twitter, blogs, or E-mail newsletters. When the Internet-based marketing class ended in May, the Twitter accounts that were created were still active, Young says.

Online Educators Won't Have to Spy on Students Under New Federal Rules

June 3 - Distance educators won’t have to become FBI-style investigators, scanning fingerprints and installing cameras in the apartments of online students to ensure that people are who they say they are.

At least not yet.

The recently reauthorized Higher Education Act required accreditors to monitor the steps that colleges take to verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the work, leaving distance educators worried they would have to buy expensive technology to ensure that students didn’t have other people take their tests. They feared the cost could be so high that programs would be in danger.

But proposed federal regulations would allow colleges to satisfy the mandate with techniques like secure log-ins and passwords or proctored examinations, according to people involved in the negotiations that ended last month.

Online Students at Bryant & Stratton College Graduate Via Second Life

May 28 - Some students at Bryant & Stratton College will have a short commute to their graduation ceremony: All they need to do is turn on their home computers.

On June 10, approximately 40 students in the institution’s online-degree program will sign on to Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world, where they will watch computer simulations of the college’s vice president and a student speaker address them before their names, degrees, and honors are announced.

While several colleges have experimented with Second Life for college tours, debate tournaments, and more, Bryant & Stratton College claims it is the first to hold a commencement in the virtual world. It will also hold traditional graduations on its 15 campuses.

Opinion: Will Higher Ed Be the Next Bubble to Burst?

May 28 - Is it possible that higher education might be the next bubble to burst? Some early warnings suggest that it could be.

With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges now reaching $50,000 a year, the ability to sustain private higher education for all but the very well-heeled is questionable. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent — more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care. Patrick M. Callan, the center's president, has warned that low-income students will find college unaffordable.

In such a climate, it is not surprising that applications to some community colleges and other public institutions have risen by as much as 40 percent. Those institutions, particularly community colleges, will become a more-attractive option for a larger swath of the collegebound. Taking the first two years of college while living at home has been an attractive option since the 1920s, but it is now poised to grow significantly.

With a drift toward higher enrollments in public institutions, all but the most competitive highly endowed private colleges are beginning to wonder if their enrollments may start to evaporate.

Online Education Grows, But Painfully

May 22 - Evolve or dissolve. That advice, from a recent report on virtual universities, played out in two news stories this past week. The University of Texas’ online division is staring down a deep budget hole as it loses a longtime subsidy. And in Utah, budget cuts have killed a 10-campus online consortium. Those and other predicaments reflect the growing pains of public online education.

Technology growth in the 1990s prompted a surge of online-learning collaborations. The groups prodded member colleges to put classes online, pooled courses into collaborative degrees, and supported online programs with promotions. Some became little more than state- or systemwide online catalogs. Fast forward to 2009: With budgets strained, every state is looking at how it pays for online learning, which can be a big expense.

Analysts who praise consortia see a flip side: Colleges can be capable of running online learning themselves now; 10 years ago, they may have needed an impetus. Now they may end up absorbing the functions of some consortia.

U. of Illinois Weighs More Humble Version of 'Global Campus'

May 19 - Early hopes for Global Campus were as ambitious as its name: a distance-education venture that could draw 70,000 new students to the University of Illinois.

Now, facing unspectacular enrollment and a punishing recession, the Board of Trustees will consider a much humbler plan.

The board plans to take up a resolution, released late Monday, that calls for rebuilding the controversial project based on the blueprint laid out in a new report from a task force of faculty and administrators.

That plan would brake Global Campus’s current drive to become a separately accredited entity with its own programs. The venture wouldn’t compete with campus online efforts. Instead, “Global Campus 2.0” would shrink to a much cheaper office — from today’s $9-million budget down to $1.75-million — that supports those campus courses with centralized services like marketing, student recruitment, and technology help. The current Global Campus would be phased out this year. Its successor would open for business in January.

“It pushes the bulk of the initiative and the activities back down into the campuses,” said Nicholas Burbules, a professor in the department of educational-policy studies who worked on the report.

The scaled-back project appears to have broad support. The resolution that the board will address on Thursday notes that the university’s leaders — the president, chancellors, provosts, and vice presidents — have “reached consensus” that Global Campus 2.0 is the way to go.

But recent developments in Texas and elsewhere show that support-focused distance-education portals can run into financial trouble, too.

Students Turn to Commercial Sites for Study Aid

May 19 - In the old days, college students might turn to classmates for help during all-night cram sessions before final exams. Now their study buddies are just as likely to be commercial websites with step-by-step solutions to textbook problems, copies of previous exams, reams of lecture notes, summaries of literary classics, and real-time help with physics, math, and computer science problems.

As companies with playful names like Cramster, Course Hero, Koofers and SparkNotes are transforming the way undergraduates study, some professors and ethicists are questioning whether such Web sites encourage cheating and undermine the mental sweat equity of day-to-day learning by seducing students with ready-made solutions and essays.

(Note: A subscription to the New York Times online edition may be required to read the full article.)

Financing Gap Leaves Uncertain Future for U. of Texas' Online Arm

May 18 - The future of the University of Texas’ online-education arm is under scrutiny as the system phases out a major subsidy that has supported the venture for years.

The UT TeleCampus is the latest virtual university to confront hard questions about its business model as online education matures from its upstart days, as The Chronicle reports today in a story about the Texas situation. The University of Texas has invested roughly $22-million from endowment earnings into the TeleCampus over more than a decade. But it plans to end the subsidy by 2012, and some are worried about how the program will continue without the money.

This Thursday, meanwhile, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees is expected to revisit the issue of its Global Campus distance-education program, which has fallen short of enrollment projections and generated friction within the system.

Colleges Move Away from "Cafeteria-Style" General Ed Requirements

May 15 - The Association of American Colleges and Universities released findings today from a survey of its members revealing trends in undergraduate general education and the use of engaged and integrative curricular practices. The survey of chief academic officers at 433 colleges and universities of all sorts (public and private, two-year and four-year, large and small) suggests that many colleges and universities are reforming their general education programs and developing new curricular approaches and ways to assess key learning outcomes.

As institutions review their general education programs, many are choosing to incorporate more engaged and integrative curricular practices. Only 15 percent of colleges and universities are now using a cafeteria-style general education program alone.

For a full report on the findings of this survey, see www.aacu.org/membership/documents/2009MemberSurvey_Part2.pdf

A previous report on findings from this current survey on trends in learning outcomes and assessment was released in April 2009. For findings from that report, see: www.aacu.org/membership/membersurvey.cfm

Opencourseware: College Education, Without the Student Loans

May 14 - Spurred by advances in technology and people’s hunger to get an extra edge in a down economy, universities and colleges are posting course materials – including syllabi, class notes, and lectures – online for anyone to access. Universities and colleges are posting course materials online for anyone to access; the movement allows self-learners to save money on tuition, gives alumni a link to their alma mater, and enables prospective students to peek into university classrooms.

Are online classes a worthy replacement?

As technology opens up more avenues for learning, critics question whether the classroom experience can ever be replaced through open educational resources such as OpenCourseWare.

“Being in a classroom, you have classmates sitting side by side. You have a teacher in front of you who can respond in real time,” says Catherine Casserly, senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. With OpenCourseWare, “what you don’t have is primarily those two things.”

This is just one of the limitations of OpenCourseWare. Though the materials are free, there’s no access to professors or classmates, and there’s no way of obtaining a certificate or college degree by reading these materials on your own.

But “the degree,” says Ludlow, “is still very valuable. And it’s going to be valuable for the foreseeable future.”

That is, until something changes...

The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job

May 12 - The American Federation of Teachers has released a 10-year analysis showing the steady growth of adjunct positions and decline of tenure-track jobs in the academic work force. The overall number of faculty and instructor slots grew from 1997 to 2007, but nearly two-thirds of that growth was in "contingent" positions -- meaning those off of the tenure track. Over all, those jobs increased from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters of instructional positions. The growth in these jobs -- and the decline in tenure-track positions -- was found in all sectors of higher education, but was most apparent at community colleges.

Rise in Distance Enrollments

April 6 - Community colleges continue to see increases in distance education enrollments, according to a report released at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges. A national survey of colleges by the Instructional Technology Council found that distance enrollments grew 11.3 percent from fall 2006 to fall 2007, the most recent period for which full data are available. Last year, the survey found an increase of 18 percent over the previous year.

Impact of the Economy on College Enrollment

April 9 - This new survey measures the degree to which households are changing their college plans in response to the economic climate, finding that over 70% of prospective college students are altering their plans for the upcoming year. Read the full report by Longmire and associates by clicking on the link below.

Didaction - Tips for Effective Lectures

April 29 - Students in live classrooms have a hard time staying focused. These 10 tips for creating more interactive lectures are meant for live classroom settings but many of the principles are applicable to online lectures as well.

Assessment is Widespread, But...

April 28 - Remember all of that talk from the Spellings Commission about how American colleges were in danger of decline because they didn't assess learning outcomes and didn't even know the learning outcomes they favored? A study being released today by the Association of American Colleges and Universities finds that in fact assessment has been well accepted for years at most colleges, and is widespread, complete with learning outcomes.

What isn't widespread and should be, the study says, is communication with students about curricular goals and how the colleges measure them. And what also isn't widespread (and this doesn't bother many of those surveyed) are national comparisons. Much of the activity on assessment and learning outcomes takes place at the departmental level, the survey found. Read the full article for a summary of this studies most salient findings.

AAUP: Online Education Based on 'Slave Labor'

April 22 - "The economic underpinning of a lot of online education is that it amounts to slave labor," said Martin Snyder, director of the AAUP's Department of External Relations as well as its Planning and Development Office. The context for the quote was a story dealing in part with problems faced by faculty in online education, such as compensation and workload. Most who teach online courses "are part-time professors who can't get full-time work and are forced into taking a lot of part-time positions in order to try to make an equitable salary," Mr. Snyder said.

Purdue 2-Year Degree Targets Jobless

April 20 - A new Purdue University degree program will allow out-of-work factory workers to earn a 2-year bachelor's degree that could improve their job prospects. The Purdue College of Technology at Kokomo degree is geared toward former workers in the automotive and manufacturing industries. Purdue Associate Professor Thomas Cappozoli said the program is being offered in Kokomo because the area has been hit hard by the recession. He said displaced workers will be able to earn a bachelor's degree in organizational leadership and supervision with a concentration in industrial technology.

College Director Christy Bozic said the bachelor's degree in leadership can help students prepare for management careers in fields such as health care, banking, retail, government and manufacturing. "Those who enroll should treat this like their full-time job for the next two years, but the end result will be a much more qualified, marketable worker," she said.

Overture Technologies Announces New Online Student Loan Comparison Platform

April 20 - Overture Technologies has announced the development of an online service that will be able to provide a more secure, reliable way for students to shop for private student loans. The Student Loan Marketplace is an innovative education financing tool that can help students and their families learn about and compare loan terms in an open and transparent network of lenders.

Overture plans to launch the service through marketing partners, such as associations of colleges and universities, and with participating lenders. The Student Loan Marketplace is the first multi-lender platform that allows students to review reliable private student loan terms based on their own personal and financial information instead of "as low as" advertisements for rates.

Distance Learning Delivered by Central New Mexico Community College and Qwest Data Networking

April 17 - Metro Optical Ethernet platform, offering up to 100 megabits per second at each site. This Ethernet platform provides the capacity to deliver bandwidth-intensive learning opportunities to classrooms and online. CNM has one of the largest distance-learning programs in the U.S.

Tech Therapy: A College Leader Talks About Outsourcing E-Mail

April 16 - Students at Notre Dame had been unhappy with the e-mail system's performance, and officials wanted a solution that would be more secure and possibly save money. The university investigated a number of e-mail companies and ended up going with Gmail. "The students got a much faster and smoother e-mail experience," Mr. Turner says. "To move students to Exchange, it would have cost us $1.5-million. To go to Gmail cost us nothing." By outsourcing e-mail, the university IT staff is able to concentrate on other things.

Economic Turmoil Sends Enrollment at City Public Colleges Soaring

April 16 - Applications to the city's public colleges soared by 12% over last year, as students clamor for an affordable way to attend college, the Daily News has learned."

When the economy takes a dip [people] run to higher education institutions to shore up their skills," said Matthew Goldstein, City University of New York chancellor.

"When people are feeling a pinch, as we are now, they are obviously deeply concerned about the price," he added, noting that CUNY's reputation also has soared.

CUNY is on track for the highest enrollment in the university's history.

E-Learning and Its Challenges Increase at Community Colleges

April 14 - As the number of online-learning students increases at the nation’s community colleges, so do the challenges of providing them with good online instruction and providing faculty members with the tools to deliver it. That’s the message in the results of a new survey of community colleges.

The survey shows that enrollments in online courses shot up in 2008, by about 11 percent over 2007. The poll was done by the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges. The 11-percent figure is in line with the 12.9-percent growth in online enrollment for the previous year, reported earlier by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Completely online courses were offered by 72 percent of the institutions. Blended courses — with at least 30 percent of content offered online, augmented by face-to-face meetings — were offered by 14 percent of the colleges.

For a summary of other findings from this survey, please read the full article.

Online Learning Grant Program Eliminated

April 7 - Higher education officials will have to seek new avenues for funding and seed money for online programs after the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced this week that its online-education grant program will end this year. [E-school News login required to read the full article.]

Cash-strapped Iowa colleges benefit as online courses gain popularity

April 10 - Colleges across the country are seeing online education as a path to becoming leaner, more-efficient institutions while staying relevant to today's students. Tuition from online students has been a budget boost for colleges facing lower-than-expected state appropriations.The Iowa Community College Online Consortium, which offered nearly 1,300 online course sections in 2007-08, brought in a combined $9 million in tuition from those online courses after paying expenses that did not include instructor pay. Find out what's being offered online and who these colleges are attracting by reading the full story.

An Opening for Community Colleges

April 3 - A steady stream of students being educating through the Workforce Investment Act could accelerate into a torrent for community colleges, thanks to the federal stimulus package that is just beginning to course its way through the nation's economy. That is partially because the new American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, as the stimulus law is known, will nearly double the amount of federal job training money available through the Department of Labor over the next two years.

Wikis in Education: Teaching Students to Share Knowledge

Wikis are gaining popularity in an educational setting as a way to give students a hands-on learning tool. Providers see the demand and are creating wiki tools to help teachers make wider user of wikis in the classroom.

For more information, follow the link below.

More Use of Electronic Textbooks

[January 12] When Northwest Missouri State University (Maryville, MO) students start spring semester classes this week, most won't be lugging thick textbooks around campus; instead, most students will carry a lightweight electronic device that can fit in a coat pocket and hold the textbook material for all their classes.

The Evolution of Online Student Recruitment

February 19, 2009 - Tough economic times call for harder scrutiny of marketing dollars, among other belt-tightening measures. To help institutions hone in on the best use of marketing dollars, Campus Technology talked with higher education marketing expert Bob Johnson. Johnson has been studying, writing about, and lecturing on student recruitment practices since the early '80s and now consults with colleges and universities. His focus has shifted to online marketing in higher ed. In this first segment of a two-part interview, he talks about new ways in which technology is being used to connect with students and parents--and how students use technology to find schools.

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