Building off recent momentum behind their cause, a group of public-access advocates has started a petition asking the Obama administration to require that work supported by taxpayer money be accessible online. The petition, from Access2Research, went live on the White House’s We the People public-petition site late Sunday night. Organizers got the word out quickly and broadly via social media (see the Twitter hashtag #OAMonday) and with the help of like-minded groups.
By Wednesday afternoon, close to 13,000 people had signed, more than half the goal of 25,000. According to the site’s rules, if a petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it goes to the president’s chief of staff and will get a response from the White House.
Only two paragraphs long, the petition gets to the point quickly: “We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education….
Washington — The nation’s archives contain multitudes of documents that detail the lives and experiences of individuals, families, and groups. Archivists don’t lack for material to manage. What they could use is a consistent, broadly used standard for so-called authority control—a way to reliably, thoroughly describe archival holdings and contexts so that they’re discoverable by anyone who might want to use them.
A fairly new archival-authority standard, released in 2010, could change that. It has the less-than-euphonious name of Encoded Archival…
Washington — A computer gamer who struggles through a series of challenges to advance to the next level is demonstrating some of the characteristics that employers are seeking, particularly in technology-related fields where jobs are going unfilled, a White House official told about 250 education, government, and nonprofit representatives here on Tuesday.
“The game industry has done a good job of grabbing and maintaining the attention of both young people and adults,” said Thomas Kalil, deputy director for policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The industry has also managed to keep players on the “knife’s edge” as they persevere through tough challenges without getting frustrated and giving up, he said.
He delivered his comments at a forum, presented by The Atlantic, that examined how educational technology could help students land the…
Students learn just as much in a course that’s taught partly online as they would in a traditional classroom, but such courses won’t reach their potential until they are both easier for faculty members to customize and more fun for students, according to a report released today.
The report, “Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence From Randomized Trials,” is based on a study conducted by Ithaka S+R, a consultancy on the use of technology in teaching.
The finding that hybrid courses are no better or worse than traditional ones isn’t, as it might appear, “a bland result,” said one of the co-authors, William G. Bowen, president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“One of the responses most frequently raised in efforts to experiment with this kind of teaching is that it will expose students to risk,” he said in an interview. “The results of this…
Purdue University today joined the group of universities that have recently announced plans to experiment with online courses aimed at a global audience.
The new effort, called PurdueHUB-U, will serve up modular online courses with video lectures, interactive visualizations, and tools for students to interact with their peers and the professor. The project’s leaders hope it will improve face-to-face classes and bring in revenue by attracting students around the world.
PurdueHUB-U grew out of a course taught this year on Purdue’s nanoHUB, a collaborative platform for nanotechnology research. The course, on the fundamentals of nanoelectronics, was broken into two parts that lasted a few weeks each. It attracted 900 students from 27 countries, most of whom paid $30 for the class and a certificate of completion. Students also had the option to turn their certificates into…
Update (5/9/2012, 9:48 a.m.):The list of student names has been removed from PSUacb. In a new note, the site’s creator wrote, “I’m not cruel enough to embarrass someone in front of the whole country for something stupid they did in college, especially when everyone at Penn State (or at least 7,846 people) has already realized you suck.”
Campus-gossip Web sites like JuicyCampus and CollegeACB used the lure of anonymity to entice students to post on them. The cloak gave students a virtual bathroom wall on which to write racy rumors and explicit insults about their peers without fear of being exposed.
Now, the creator of a similar site at Pennsylvania State University has apparently turned that veil of secrecy inside-out, hoping to teach students a public lesson about cyberbullying.
In a bait-and-switch prank, the creator of PSUacb.com has revealed information about students who…
The Saylor Foundation has been building an online catalog of free, self-paced college courses since 2010. But students who completed those courses could not typically earn credit toward a degree, since the nonprofit group is not an accredited institution. Saylor’s new partnership with the online course-provider StraighterLine seeks to change that, giving students an inexpensive way to earn academic credit using freely available materials.
The collaboration, announced today, will give students two different ways to save money when pursuing academic credit. Beginning in the fall, students can study free courses on Saylor.org and then enroll at StraighterLine to take an exam. After passing, they will receive American Council on Education recommended credit. Students could also enroll in a StraighterLine program, using Saylor’s free course materials as they go along.
The group of elite universities offering free online courses just got bigger.
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced a partnership that will host online courses from both institutions free of charge. The platform, its creators say, has the potential to improve face-to-face classes on the home campuses while giving students around the world access to a blue-ribbon education.
The new venture, called edX, grew out of MIT’s announcement last year that it would offer free online courses on a platform called MITx. The combined effort will be overseen by a nonprofit organization governed equally by both universities, each of which has committed $30-million to the project. Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who led the development of MITx, will serve as edX’s first president.
Throwing its weight behind open access, the British government has declared it wants to make all research paid for with public money freely available online. If it succeeds, the move is likely to have significant consequences for publishers, and will boost the international momentum of the open-access movement. But the government won’t share details about how it will make the plan a reality.
David Willetts (left), Britain’s minister for universities and science and a member of the Conservative Party, made the announcement today at the general meeting of the U.K. Publishers Association in London. (The full text of Mr. Willetts’s remarks is available here.) He shared the gist of the news in a column published yesterday in TheGuardian newspaper.
“Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and…
The University of California at Berkeley has won a $60-million grant from the Simons Foundation to create a new center for theoretical computer science, the university announced today.
The center, called the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, will give researchers a place to explore complex mathematical algorithms that could help solve everyday problems in climate science, health care, economics, and other fields. The Simons Foundation, which focuses on advancing research in science and mathematics, selected Berkeley from a group of three finalists.
Richard M. Karp, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the university, has been named the institute’s founding director. He noted that the new institute won’t be a simple computing center where researchers will process their data. Instead, researchers there will train the methods of theoretical…
The MIT Press and other critics say proposed legislation to
limit public access to the results of some studies would work
against the open exchange of ideas.
Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.
Purdue University today joined the group of universities that have recently announced plans to experiment with online courses aimed at a global audience.
Update (5/9/2012, 9:48 a.m.): The list of student names has been removed from PSUacb. In a new note, the site’s creator wrote, “I’m not cruel enough to embarrass someone in front of the whole country for something stupid they did in college, especially when everyone at Penn State (or at least 7,846 people) has already realized you suck.”
The Saylor Foundation has been building an 
The group of elite universities offering free online courses just got bigger.
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Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.