May 1, 2012, 12:01 am
By Nick DeSantis
More colleges are experimenting with online-learning platforms to meet the growing demand for higher education and to increase revenue in the face of budget cuts. But the next generation of online-learning systems faces several barriers to adoption, according to a new report.
Chief among them are professors’ desires to customize what they teach and their reluctance to use prepackaged course material. The most sophisticated of today’s online-learning systems rely on machine-guided instruction to adapt lessons to the needs of individual students. But most of those systems do not yet allow instructors to deeply tailor the material to meet their course needs. And highly-interactive systems are often too complex for pioneering professors to adopt and sustain on their own.
Those are the findings of a report issued today by Ithaka S+R, the research service of the nonprofit group Ithaka,…
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April 24, 2012, 10:31 am
By Nick DeSantis
Last fall, Internet2 began helping colleges drive down the price of cloud computing by negotiating group deals between its members and technology companies. The collective-bargaining project is now expanding to include new partnerships with firms including Dell and Microsoft, the group announced today.
The effort, known as Internet2 Net+ Services, brings together companies offering cloud services and the nonprofit consortium’s 221 member colleges. Internet2’s leaders say the program lets administrators save money by taking advantage of their collective buying power, and it gives them an organized method of selecting tools for their institutions. The first companies to sign on were the technology giant HP and the online file-storage service Box, which announced their participation in October. Today’s additions include prominent companies such as Dell and Microsoft, whose cloud…
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April 18, 2012, 6:45 pm
By Nick DeSantis
The theme of disrupting higher education was buzzing among hundreds of conference attendees this week at the Education Innovation Summit at Arizona State University. The event offered start-up companies a captive audience for pitching their products. Here’s a small sample of announcements they made:
Altius Education: This company has already gained prominence among educators for its creation of a “transfer college,” which gives students a bridge to a bachelor’s degree by helping them transfer to traditional four-year institutions. And now the chief executive of Altius, Paul Freedman, has bigger plans—he wants to put “the flying car of higher education” in the driveway of every student. The engine, he says, is called Helix, a new tool that seeks to reinvent what learning-management software can do. Altius bills Helix as a “learning environment” that uses personalized …
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April 17, 2012, 4:24 pm
By Marc Parry
Scottsdale, Ariz. — We’re used to personalization on the consumer Web, from book recommendations on Amazon to the news feed on Facebook.
But what will it mean for learning as colleges, too, increasingly mine data to shape the student experience? What does educational personalization look like? How finely should technologists try to parse it—down to individual learning styles? How will personalization conflict with existing regulations? And what are the risks?
Debating those questions was the focus of a panel this morning at an education innovation conference hosted by Arizona State University. Some 700 people—companies, investors, educators—are convening here over the next two days, many of them hoping to ride the surge of investment in education technology.
“We’re entering a world that is going to be so data-mined it will be unrecognizable to us in 20 years, the …
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March 2, 2012, 1:48 pm
By Nick DeSantis
The growing badge-based-learning movement, which provides students with digital credentials that challenge traditional measures of achievement like college degrees, got a boost yesterday. Winners of the Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition, which began in September, were announced at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, in San Francisco.
The contest is run in collaboration with Mozilla, developer of the Web browser Firefox, which is working on a digital “backpack” that will allow learners to collect and display the skill patches they earn. It’s part of the fourth Digital Media and Learning Competition, supported by the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation.
Submissions were judged by criteria including the effectiveness of the assessment process and the likelihood that the badges will be accepted by institutions and employers.
Among the winners was Carnegie…
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March 1, 2012, 5:00 am
By Nick DeSantis
Google’s new consumer privacy policy, introduced today, shares user data across the company’s stable of Web services in an effort to deliver better search results and advertisements. Though privacy advocates have criticized the revised document, which makes it easier for Google to bring together data on individual users, the company said its academic partners had little reason to be concerned.
Universities that use Google’s education platform for e-mail or other applications have contracts that determine how student data can be used. The terms of those agreements will supersede Google’s privacy policy, the company said.
Amit Singh, Google’s vice president for enterprise, said in a statement that institutions using the company’s suite of applications, which includes e-mail, calendars, and documents, will see no changes to their contractual agreements. But there is one…
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February 24, 2012, 2:34 pm
By Nick DeSantis
For many musicians, coordinating rehearsals can be a challenge. They have to bring everyone and their instruments together at the same time. But a new piece of software running on the high-speed backbone of the Internet2 network may make scheduling simpler by enabling musicians hundreds of miles apart to join in live.
The low-latency audio and videoconferencing software, dubbed LOLA, significantly cuts the lag time it takes for live sound and video to travel over a network. LOLA lets musicians play in concert over a network without sacrificing speed or sound quality.
According to Ben Fineman, manager of video services at Internet2, LOLA improves on consumer programs like Skype, which produce delays far too long for musicians to perform in sync.
“If you have that two-second lag between when you play a note on your instrument and the person on the other end is able to hear it…
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February 10, 2012, 3:11 pm
By Nick DeSantis
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 …
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February 9, 2012, 5:42 pm
By Marc Parry
Right now, college recruiters are blitzing high-school juniors with marketing e-mails and brochures—many of them much the same. Students often ignore them.
“None of us is naïve enough to hope for 10 percent of the population to open an e-mail,” says Allen Kraus, Ohio State’s point person on communications to prospective students.
So Ohio State decided to try a different approach to piercing the clutter. On Sunday night, the university e-mailed more than 100,000 high-school students with this pitch: Why not get to know “the real Ohio State” by connecting with a current student who does not work for the admissions office?
In the experiment, these would-be-Buckeyes can e-mail, instant-message, or telephone any of 68 Ohio State students who work for a start-up company called CollegeSolved. They can drill down into the company’s online network to find chat partners with common…
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February 8, 2012, 6:28 pm
By Nick DeSantis
Just weeks after a Web-fueled backlash stopped a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills from advancing in Congress, one movie studio is trying to cool the debate by courting law professors and asking them to hold conversations about how to prevent copyright infringement.
In a letter sent to dozens of law professors last week, Paramount Pictures’ vice president of worldwide content protection and outreach, Alfred C. Perry, wrote that the company was “humbled” by the strong public opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, two bills that sparked worldwide protests in mid-January. The backlash surprised the company, the letter states, and Mr. Perry asked professors to consider inviting representatives for campus discussions of intellectual-property laws. The goal would be to “exchange ideas about content theft, its challenges, and possible ways to address it,…
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