Category: Distance-Education
September 15, 2010, 06:30 PM ET
MIT Looks to Make Money Online, but Not With an OpenCourseWare Paywall
MIT is exploring ways to make money off online learning. But the institute says it has no plans to raise cash by sticking its pioneering MIT OpenCourseWare project behind a paywall, a possibility raised in a news report today.
"That's news to me," Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare, said when Wired Campus called him up to learn about the supposed paywall. He added, "The content that’s available on MIT OpenCourseWare will continue to be free and available as it always has been."
Charging for access to basic content would be a radical shift for MIT OpenCourseWare, which has attracted millions of users to free academic materials like lecture notes, syllabi, and videos.
But some less radical possibilities have been discussed, Mr. Carson says. These include the idea of layering premium services on top of the free content, such as opportunities for user...
Read MoreJuly 23, 2010, 09:00 AM ET
Online Course Construction Gets a 'Do-It-Yourself' Web Site
A new player entered the field of open online education last week: Nixty, a Web site that allows any user to take and create courses for free.
The new learning platform started up with over 200 course offerings culled from open-source content already available online, such as courses from the Khan Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare Project. Nixty's users have begun developing about 120 new courses since its launch, said Glen Moriarty, the company's chief executive.
Nixty comes with all the trappings of most course-management systems: a grade book, testing, discussion boards. Mr. Moriarty used to head and is still in the leadership team at Scholar360, which develops course-management software. But right now, Nixty is meant to help make educational content free, open, and easy to access.
Other sites exist that put together the open-source educational ...
Read MoreJuly 22, 2010, 03:55 PM ET
Online University Aims to Build Sites in 6 Developing Countries
Through a new partnership with World Computer Exchange, the upstart online institution University of the People hopes to build communication centers in six developing countries over the next six months, allowing students without good Internet access to take online courses.
World Computer Exchange is a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding youth access to information technology in developing countries. “We’re trying to go into developing countries that [the university] might not have a lot of students in now,” said Timothy Anderson, World Computer Exchange president.
University of the People, founded in 2009, promises tuition-free education in business administration and computer science. The university says its enrollment includes approximately 500 students from nearly 100 countries.
According to Mr. Anderson, the two institutions are focusing on establishing sites in...
Read MoreApril 22, 2010, 01:59 PM ET
Bill Gates Says Open Courseware Is Good but Needs Improvement
The fragmented world of open courseware should
be transformed into "a worldwide resource that's very clear who
should use what," Bill Gates said in a speech
on Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Microsoft founder praised MIT as being "at the forefront" in open courseware, adding that he has taken many of the institution's OpenCourseWare classes. But he said some problems have yet to be solved in open courseware, such as how to make courses across campuses easier to find and how to best use interactive features.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is looking at how to help support innovation in open courseware, he said. "What's been done so far has had very modest funding. This is an area we need more resources, more bright minds, and certainly one that I want to see how the foundation could make a contribution to this."
The foundation announced $12.9-million...
Read MoreApril 14, 2010, 10:00 AM ET
Middlebury College Announces Online Language-Teaching Venture
Middlebury College has announced a partnership that will create online language programs for pre-college students.
The small Vermont institution will invest $4 million—a 40-percent stake—in Middlebury Interactive Languages; their partner in the venture will be the educational-technology company K12.
Language professors from Middlebury, which has about 2,400 students, will work with K12 to create and manage the content of the Web-based language classes. The first courses will be beginner French and Spanish for high-school students, set to be released this summer.
The college believes the project could "revolutionize the way languages are taught and learned in the United States" by allowing students to start learning languages at a much earlier age, said Ronald D. Liebowitz, president of Middlebury College, in a video available on the university's Web site.
"There is a huge language...
Read MoreApril 13, 2010, 03:54 PM ET
Distance Education's Rate of Growth Doubles at Community College
Distance education is growing quickly at community colleges, according to the results of a study published by the Instructional Technology Council. For the 2008-9 academic year, enrollment in distance learning at community colleges grew 22 percent over the 2007-8 academic year, up from a growth rate of 11 percent in the previous year.
The Instructional Technology Council, which is affiliated with the American Association of Community Colleges, conducted its annual survey by e-mail and received responses from 226 community colleges. The 22 percent growth from 2007-8 to 2008-9 is somewhat higher than the 17-percent growth that the Sloan Consortium noted for all distance education from fall 2007 to fall 2008 in a recent report. Overall enrollment in higher education grew less than 2 percent during that time.
Fred Lokken, associate dean for the Truckee Meadows Community College WebCollege...
Read MoreMarch 3, 2010, 04:30 PM ET
UCLA Will Resume Streaming Video After Legal Dispute
The University of California at Los Angeles has restored its streaming video service about two months after temporarily suspending the service amid complaints from an educational-media trade group.
The Association for Information and Media Equipment told UCLA in the fall that the university had violated copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, some of which were full-length productions. UCLA decided that beginning this semester it would suspend the password-protected video-streaming service, available only to students in specific classes.
UCLA announced Wednesday that it will restart streaming of instructional content. The university hopes material will be back up by the spring quarter, which begins March 29. L. Amy Blum, senior campus counsel for UCLA, says the university wants to take steps to ensure that faculty members explicitly say why they are using the copyrighted...
Read MoreFebruary 19, 2010, 02:39 PM ET
5 States Get More Than $300-Million to Expand Broadband Access
Five states have been awarded more than $300-million in grants to expand broadband access at their colleges. The money will be used in part to increase online education.
The U.S. Department of Commerce said on Thursday that the states are among those that will receive grants aimed at improving high-speed access. The five states whose awards specifically include higher education are:
Florida: The North Florida Broadband Authority will use $30.1-million grant, with an additional $9.2-million match by the applicant, to bring high-speed-broadband access to 14 north and central counties considered underserved. A 1,200-mile broadband network will link 300 colleges, libraries, and government agencies, among other entities.
Indiana: Zayo Bandwidth has received a $25.1-million grant, with an additional $10.7-million match by the applicant, to connect 21 Ivy Tech Community College campuses to...
Read MoreFebruary 2, 2010, 02:00 PM ET
Free Online Courses Don't Hurt Paid Enrollment
When customers visit Amazon.com, the Web site lets them sample
parts of books for free. Some open-education advocates think this
try-it-before-you-buy-it idea offers an answer to one of the
biggest questions facing the movement to publish course materials
free online: What
business model can support giving away your content?
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. Opening the courses “provided
neither a large positive marketing effect that boosted enrollments
nor a large...
November 9, 2009, 10:00 AM ET
Second Life Duty Is Now Required for Penn State's Online Advisers
Denver -- Plenty of colleges have a presence in
Second Life. Pennsylvania State University is taking that a
step further. Academic advisers at the university’s online campus
are now required to be available for meetings
with students in the virtual world every week, a Penn State
official said during last week’s Educause conference here.
Students on the real campus get to chat with their advisers face to
face. Now online students who never set foot there can do the
“exact same thing,” says Shannon Ritter, social-networks adviser
for the Penn State World Campus.
Almost the same thing, anyway. Second Life requires users to choose
avatars, or graphical representations of themselves. So students
who want to meet with Rachel Zimmerman will find themselves
chatting with a character called RachelM Snoodle. Looking for Karen
Lesch? The adviser goes by KarenM Magic. All advisers are required
to...
Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.