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…
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…
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 …
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.
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.
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,…
Washington – Open-education efforts like the free lecture materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and producing free online textbooks are relatively new, and advocates face questions about how to pay for such projects and how to maintain their quality.
A panel of higher-education experts gathered on Tuesday to discuss those issues and the future of the movement. Earlier in the day, Rice University announced that its open-education platform, Connexions, would soon offer free online textbooks for five popular courses.
At the meeting, Martha J. Kanter, U.S. under secretary of education, said her experience as chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, in California, had taught her how high prices can put textbooks out of reach for many students. Her institution offered training for aspiring emergency medical technicians, but the textbook cost $500, …
When students groan about buying traditional textbooks, their grievances follow a familiar refrain: They’re expensive and usually boring. So this fall, a team of Temple University professors heeded those complaints and abandoned the old-fashioned texts for low-cost alternatives that they built from scratch.
The pilot project gave 11 faculty members $1,000 each to create a digital alternative to a traditional textbook. To enliven their students’ reading, the instructors pulled together primary-source documents and material culled from library archives. Steven J. Bell, the associate university librarian for research and instructional services at Temple, said the project tried to create new kinds of learning experiences while saving students money at the same time. The textbooks covered a variety of subjects, including biomechanics, writing, and marketing. The Temple program mirrors …
A group of education leaders gathered last week to discuss the most important technology innovations of the last decade, and their findings suggest the classroom of the future will be open, mobile, and flexible enough to reach individual students—while free online tools will challenge the authority of traditional institutions.
The retreat celebrated the 10th anniversary of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, whose annual report provides a road map of the education-technology landscape. One hundred experts from higher education, K-12, and museum education identified 28 “metatrends” that will influence education in the future. The 10 most important, according to a New Media Consortium announcement about the retreat, include global adoption of mobile devices, the rise of cloud computing, and transparency movements that call into question traditional notions of content own…
The eminent mathematician Timothy Gowers vows to do no work for Elsevier.
Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important journals; the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning mathematician.
Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.
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.
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:
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.
Washington – Open-education efforts like the free lecture materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and producing free online textbooks are relatively new, and advocates face questions about how to pay for such projects and how to maintain their quality.
When students groan about buying traditional textbooks, their grievances follow a familiar refrain: They’re expensive and usually boring. So this fall, a team of Temple University professors heeded those complaints and abandoned the old-fashioned texts for low-cost alternatives that they built from scratch.
A group of education leaders gathered last week to discuss the most important technology innovations of the last decade, and their findings suggest the classroom of the future will be open, mobile, and flexible enough to reach individual students—while free online tools will challenge the authority of traditional institutions.
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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.