Author Archives: Jeffrey R. Young
February 6, 2012, 3:23 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
The recent announcement that Massachusetts Institute of Technology would give certificates around free online course materials has fueled further debate about whether employers may soon welcome new kinds of low-cost credentials. Questions remain about how MIT’s new service will work, and what it means for traditional college programs.
On Monday The Chronicle posed some of those questions to two leaders of the new project: L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s provost, and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They stressed that the new project, called MITx, will be run separately from the institute’s longstanding effort to put materials from its traditional courses online. That project, called OpenCourseWare, will continue just as before, while MITx will focus on creating new courses designed to be delivered entirely online. All MITx materials will…
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January 30, 2012, 5:56 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
A football-field-size computer room at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been sitting nearly empty for months, waiting for parts, in a stalled effort to build what researchers are calling the “Hubble telescope of supercomputers.” IBM, the original supplier, abruptly withdrew from the project last summer just as it was to deliver racks of computer servers, forcing the university to shop for new parts for the unique project.
Last week dozens of computer servers began arriving—this time from Cray, the project’s new supplier. IBM had fallen behind its original schedule to have the supercomputer up and running sometime in 2011. Officials at Urbana-Champaign say that Cray will now deliver a computer more quickly than IBM actually could have, and that the resulting machine is expected to be faster and 10 percent cheaper to build.
“It will be much more attractive to the …
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January 22, 2012, 4:42 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
Last week Apple released free software to make e-books for the iPad, declaring that the company intended to “reinvent the textbook.” Apple also updated its iTunesU service, first released four years ago, to make it possible for professors to put syllabi, lecture videos and audio recordings, and e-textbooks into one spot for students.College administrators and professors had mixed reactions to the news: some said it could spur far greater adoption of digital textbooks, while others criticized the product for relying too heavily on Apple products, leaving out key support for PC’s and tablets running Android software.
Below are some points made by campus leaders, in interviews or on their blogs:
Making it easy-to-create books will help authors keep textbooks more up-to-date.
“Providing constant content updates through the Cloud is key,” argues Jed Macosko, associate professor of…
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January 19, 2012, 6:52 am
By Jeffrey R. Young
New York — Apple managed to make news simply by announcing that it would hold a press conference on the topic of education. All week long, other education-technology companies have seized the moment to push out their own announcements, trying to ride a wave of mainstream attention to how technology is changing education.
This morning starting at 10 a.m. EST, the company is set to make its announcement, and The Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, along with the ProfHacker blog, will be there, posting live updates.
[Update: Below is an archive of our live blogging. For more coverage, see a story in The Chronicle and a post on the ProfHacker blog.]
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10:57: Presentation is over. Now we’ll have a chance to demo the new software tools here. Stay tuned for a Chronicle article later today.
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@kfitz: Back to Phil. “Apple exists at the intersection between liberal arts and…
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January 9, 2012, 5:07 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
Last month we asked for your help in identifying the top technology innovators in higher education. The response has been exciting. So far we received more than 200 nominations, pointing us to groundbreaking professors and administrators in various areas of education technology. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
We wanted to provide a quick update on our project. A team of reporters and editors here held a series of meetings to narrow down the list of innovators. We’ve selected 12 to profile in an upcoming issue of The Chronicle. As we said in our previous post, our goal is to focus on some of the most influential new ideas out there and to provide a sense of who their champions are.
Chronicle reporters are in the process of writing those profiles, which we hope to publish next month. We also plan to organize all the online nominations and share those in an easy-to-read format….
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December 20, 2011, 2:21 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
October 25, 2011, 12:32 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had discussed plans to shake up the textbook industry, including an effort that would have included free textbooks with iPads, according to a biography released this week.
“Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform,” says a passage in the new book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. It notes that Jobs said he had met with several major textbook publishers, including Pearson. It appears that his primary focus was on the K-12 textbook market. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” Mr. Jobs is quoted as saying. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
Mr. Jobs was less…
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October 20, 2011, 4:09 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
Philadelphia—When Pearson officials talk about their new learning-management system, OpenClass, they like to mention Google. They note that the software is distributed through Google’s App marketplace, and say that it was inspired by Google’s popular e-mail and Web services platform. Pearson drops the company’s name so much that many college officials assume that Google is jointly building the new system, something that officials have long speculated that the search company might one day do.
But other than routine help it gives to any app in its marketplace, Google is not directly involved with the new learning-management system, and Google officials say they have no plan to jump into developing learning software.
“There were some misleading headlines with the Pearson’s announcement,” said Tim Drinan, a Google spokesman, when asked to clarify the nature of the…
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October 19, 2011, 12:01 am
By Jeffrey R. Young
Professors who use Blackboard’s software have long been forced to lock their course materials in an area effectively marked, “For Registered Students Only,” while using the system. Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online.
The move may be the biggest sign yet that the idea of “open educational materials” is going mainstream, nearly 10 years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first began giving away lecture notes online. Blackboard made the change after college officials complained that the company’s software, which more than half the colleges in the country use for their online-course materials, was holding them back from trying open-education projects.
The president of Blackboard’s learning division, Ray Henderson, plans to send an e-mail to customers today that effectively …
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October 17, 2011, 6:15 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
One sign of the growing presence of technology on college campuses is the rising numbers at the annual meeting of Educause, which kicks off Tuesday in Philadelphia. This year more than 7,300 people are signed up to attend, up from 6,500 at last year’s meeting.
The bulk of the attendees work as technology leaders on campuses, though many others represent the 266 tech companies setting up booths at the show to persuade colleges to use their products to support teaching, research, or administrative functions. (This year’s attendance is not technically the largest ever, but officials say it is “near peak,” which in this economy, counts as a kind of record.)
The Chronicle’s Wired Campus team will be there to file reports on new ideas, as will representatives of the ProfHacker blog.
All week long, the conference will offer sessions on campus technology trends—so many that…
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Developing online and blended learning programs requires research and collaboration. Learn how top technology companies are partnering with campuses across the country to advance online learning as it becomes an increasingly important aspect of higher education.