February 17, 2012, 03:56 PM ET
2 New Platforms Offer Alternative to Apple's Textbook-Authoring Software
Apple’s recent release
of free software to build e-textbooks has brought attention to
custom publishing of academic materials. But Apple's software,
called iBooks Author, lacks easy tools for multiple authors to
collaborate on a joint textbook project. Since most books aren’t
written in isolation, two new publishing platforms seek to make
that group collaboration easier. The first, Booktype, is free and
open-source. Once the platform is installed on a Web server, teams
of authors can work together in their browsers to write sections of
books and chat with each other in real time about revisions. Entire
chapters can be imported and moved around by dragging and dropping.
The finished product can be published in minutes on e-readers and
tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also comes
with community features that let authors create profiles, join
groups, and track books...
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February 15, 2012, 02:07 PM ET
University-Press Association Speaks Out on Public Access to Research
The Association of American University Presses does not support the
proposed Research Works Act, the group said in a
statement released Tuesday. But it also does not support an
opposing bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would
require public access to the results of federally financed research
no later than six months after publication. The other bill would
prevent federal agencies from imposing such mandates. Both
bills would "short circuit the process of creating appropriate and
sustainable public access policy currently being undertaken by the
Office of Science and Technology Policy, as mandated by current
law, the America COMPETES Act," the group said. "AAUP supports the
COMPETES process, and is hopeful that a better and more informed
policy will result that will help to best disseminate the fruits of
publicly funded research." The Research Works Act has come...
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February 14, 2012, 03:45 PM ET
Text4Science: Donate Your Text Messages for Research
Your text messages may be
worth more than you think. They could help advance the
understanding of just how language changes—or at least that’s the
theory behind Text4Science, a global project to gather 100,000
donated texts. Linguistic researchers from three Canadian
institutions—the universities of Montreal and Ottawa, and Simon
Fraser University—are collaborating to build a database that will
depend on the public sending old texts to the project’s Web site. The Canadian
researchers hope to dispel the theory that texters "r" lazy and
fully expect to find that texters are instead creative, literate
people who have found imaginative ways to use the medium. They
dismiss the idea that people sending text messages are illiterate.
"When they talk to their friends, they speak differently than if
they were to speak to [Canadian Prime Minister] Stephen Harper or
the queen or to a...
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February 13, 2012, 03:58 PM ET
Ed Tech Podcast: Turning a Traditional Master's Program Into an Online Success
Many
colleges look to online education as the path to growth, but it is
often a bumpy road. At the Higher Ed Tech summit in January, a dean
from the University of Southern California told me how she avoided
the potholes. Karen Gallagher, dean of the university's Rossier
School of Education, took her school's master's degree in teaching
online with the help of 2tor, a
company that builds digital teaching platforms for traditional
universities. "It's our degree," she says, "and our faculty." That
faculty had to learn a new way to teach for online students,
however, and 2tor helped with that, as well as recruiting and
placing students in teacher-training positions. The company had to
learn that "we are not the Wild West and we have rules," Ms.
Gallagher says. But the partnership is a success: Today the
university's program has 2,000 students in 43 states and over 20
countries, reflecting ...
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February 13, 2012, 03:25 PM ET
Ed Tech Podcast: Keys to College Success Hidden in High-School Transcripts
Improving college retention and graduation rates
are tops in the nation's higher-ed "to do" list. At the Higher Ed
Tech summit in January, high-school and college transcripts were
touted as unexpected keys to these goals. Matthew Pittinsky, chief
executive of Parchment, a digital transcript company, and a founder
of Blackboard, points out that transcripts capture the strengths of
relationships between particular high schools and colleges because,
taken together, they record the numbers of shared students. They
reveal where students applied and where they got in, and what
courses successful students had in common.
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February 13, 2012, 12:01 AM ET
MITx Opens Enrollment for First Interactive Online Course; Pilot Certificates Will Be Free
Want to
learn the basics of what goes inside your smartphone and computer?
You can get a better grasp of that gadgetry in a free online course
announced today by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the
first class to open in the institute's closely watched
new interactive online learning venture, MITx. And if you pass
the course, MIT will award you a certificate for free. The
prototype class, "6.002x: Circuits and Electronics," opens for
enrollment today (sign up here). The course will run from
March 5 to June 8. Modeled on an introductory class typically
offered to between 100 and 250 undergraduates on campus, the course
will help students make the transition from physics to electrical
engineering and computer science. Teaching it will be Anant Agarwal
and Chris Terman, co-directors of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory; Piotr Mitros, a research...
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February 10, 2012, 03:11 PM ET
4 Start-Ups Are Offering Free Online Courses
The market for free online courses
is growing every week, with new companies emerging to offer open
courses to anyone who wants them. Some of them have forgone the
support of traditional institutions to try the for-profit waters
instead. For anyone who might be struggling to keep track of the
ever-growing field—the companies' names can sound similar or
stretch the bounds of the dictionary—below are four recently
created start-ups challenging the traditional degree model with
their free online courses:
- Udacity: The free education platform that grew out of Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s huge artificial-intelligence course has its own plans to expand. When Udacity appeared a few weeks ago, two courses—one on building a search engine and the other on programming a robotic car—were in the works. They start on February 20 and will last seven weeks. And now, Udacity’s Web...
February 10, 2012, 02:59 PM ET
Ed Tech Podcast: Big E-Textbook Companies Try to Make Things Easier for Faculty
At
the 2012 Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas, I talked with the
chief executive of the e-textbook giant CourseSmart, Sean Devine,
about making digital materials easier for professors to use. The
company distributes digital versions of 30,000 texts—from Pearson,
Cengage, Wiley, and others—across 7,000 campuses. New versions will
allow professors, within a learning-management system, to annotate
book pages for students, and link pages of the book to other course
elements using a drag-and-drop system. Mr. Devine also talks about
his new deal to expand access within fast-growing Western Governors
University.
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February 10, 2012, 02:52 PM ET
Ed Tech Podcast: A New Kind of Institution—the 'Transfer College'
From
the 2012 Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas, I explore the
innovations of the online "transfer college," community colleges
solely focused on moving students to four-year institutions. My
guest, Paul Freedman, chief executive of Altius, describes how his
partnership with Ivy Bridge College and Tiffin University helped
them negotiate transfer agreements with 130 universities, including
many public flagships, across the country. He explains the
prominent role of success counselors who help students navigate the
bridge between two- and four-year colleges, a bridge that has
historically been blocked for many potential transfer students.
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February 10, 2012, 12:56 PM ET
Jury Decides Against U. of California in Major Patent Fight Over the Interactive Web
A Texas jury on Thursday sided
against the University of California in a major fight over patents
to interactive Web technology, Wired reports.
The case revolved around Michael Doyle, a Chicago-based biologist
who asserted that, while working at the university's San Francisco
campus in 1993, he invented the first program that enabled
users to interact with pictures within a Web browser. Mr. Doyle's
patent-holding company, Eolas Technologies, and its partner, the
University of California, claimed that their ideas underlie key
Internet functions such as pop-up search suggestions, music clips,
and maps. But Eolas's ownership claims were invalidated by the
Texas jury's decision on Thursday. According to Wired,
that move canceled upcoming patent-infringement trials against
eight technology companies, including giants like Google and
Amazon. Mr. Doyle's company had been seeking more than $60...
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Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.