• 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 site lists eight new courses, all slated to begin later this year. The new offerings include classes on computer security and building Web applications. Students who finish a course will get a signed certificate.
• Coursera: Udacity isn’t the only online-education platform with roots at Stanford. Coursera, an offshoot of the university’s experiments in open online learning last fall, will offer 14 classes beginning in February and March. Professors from Stanford, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of California at Berkeley will teach the courses. Students won’t receive academic credit or have access to university resources other than an online forum where they can submit questions for the teaching staff.
• GoodSemester: This new company that rolled out its online-learning platform on Monday stands out because it was founded by a student. Jason Rappaport began working on the project as a Lehigh University sophomore, and has expanded it since graduating. GoodSemester allows anyone—students, nonstudents, and professors alike—to create courses on any subject. Mr. Rappaport calls it “the quintessential how-to site” that features interactive lectures, as well as productivity tools that let students take notes and complete their assignments without needing other software. So far, 700 users have joined, and courses on subjects like Web development, accounting, and game design are being offered. Though GoodSemester will not offer its own credentials or certificates, Mr. Rappaport said the company has plans to work with universities that can do so if they choose.
• Udemy: The free online-learning marketplace Udemy made a splash a few weeks ago with its announcement of the Faculty Project, which enlisted 13 professors from institutions like Northwestern University, Dartmouth College, and Duke University to teach a group of 13 courses on subjects like ancient Greek religion and business strategy. But Udemy offers more than just courses from high-profile professors, like music classes, programming tutorials, and poker lessons presented through a mix of video, audio, and other media. The Faculty Project courses and most of the others on the site are free, though a few charge rates from $5 to $250.

Know of other new free-course providers? Tell us about them in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by DeclanTM]

Sean Devine

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.

Paul Freedman

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.

But Eolas’s ownership claims were invalidated by the Texas jury’s decision on Thursday. According to Wired, that move canceled upcoming patent-infringement trials against eight technology companies, including giants like Google and Amazon. Mr. Doyle’s company had been seeking more than $600-million in damages. The high-profile patent showdown had put the university in “an unprecedented and awkward situation,” according to an earlier Wired report:

While the UC could reap many millions from an Eolas win, it is suing the world’s biggest internet companies—the same companies that recruit its students, and are enmeshed with the UC in many other ways. The plaintiff’s lawyers have been referring to the patents as the “university patents” and make reference to the innovative history of the UC to make their case to the jury.

In 2007, University of California and Eolas had settled another long-running patent dispute with Microsoft, a fight that involved a lucrative Web-browser technology.

“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 interests, like sports or environmentalism, or other shared characteristics, like students who are gay or foreign. The conversations are private. Ohio State knows only that the student demonstrated an interest (which looks good for the applicant). And the university receives anonymous data on what kinds of stuff students are asking about, such as scholarships or dorms (which could be useful for future marketing).

Ohio State employs its own university-trained student mouthpieces, but Mr. Kraus thinks CollegeSolved’s ambassadors may enjoy an extra edge of credibility. That comes at a cost: He sacrifices all control over the messages and interactions. Well, almost all. Ohio State, which contracted with CollegeSolved, did vet the company’s list of students to ensure none were “failing out or felons or anything along those lines,” Mr. Kraus says.

“This is a social media venture like any other,” he adds. “Whether prospective students interact with these students, or whether they go online and see any of 1,000 different YouTube videos that our enrolled students have put out there, or any of the blogs—one really can’t control this.”

CollegeSolved is the latest player to enter the market of middlemen that provide technology to connect colleges with prospective students—and to personalize those connections. Other companies in this world include Zinch, Cappex, and ConnectEDU. CollegeSolved, which started up in September of last year, specializes in selling access to two national online networks: one of enrolled college students and another of independent admissions counselors.

For college-admissions offices, Andrew Ullman, a former Goldman Sachs analyst who co-founded CollegeSolved, pitches his service as a way to better gauge students’ intentions at a time when they are applying to many more colleges, making it more more difficult to predict where they will enroll.

Admissions officers: Do you buy that pitch? Have you found these online middlemen useful? Which ones? And why? And how are you cutting through the clutter to reach prospective students? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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,” the letter reads.

The company’s message strikes a gentler tone than recent comments by Philippe Dauman, the chief executive of Viacom, Paramount’s parent company. He recently suggested in an interview that the strong public opposition to the Senate’s bill was driven by a “mob mentality” and “unfortunate rhetoric.”

Though Paramount’s letter attempts to foster a dialogue with law students, some believe the company is interested in broadcasting only its own views. Eric Goldman, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University, doubted that Paramount was humbled by the uproar that spurred lawmakers to walk away from the two bills. Though Mr. Goldman did not receive the letter personally, he posted a copy online on Monday. He has been working with colleagues via e-mail to reverse-engineer the recipients list, which he said appears confined to professors at top-ranked law schools.

“I don’t understand why, if they truly wanted to engage consumers, they would approach law professors, especially those at the most elite schools,” Mr. Goldman wrote in an e-mail interview. “There are at least a half-dozen ways that Paramount could get better marketplace feedback than eliciting the perspectives of law students, which reinforces why I think they intended to do more talking than listening.”

Mr. Goldman suggested that the kind of event Paramount proposed would not likely convince audience members to change their positions, and that it would instead allow them to give in to their already-held beliefs.

Rodney J. Petersen, senior government relations officer at Educause, was also puzzled by Paramount’s decision to approach professors instead of campus-technology officers. He said his organization was disappointed to learn secondhand of the letter’s distribution, because Educause officials have tried to conduct productive talks with the entertainment industry in the past. Mr. Petersen questioned Paramount’s use of the term “content theft,” language he said adds fuel to an already emotionally charged debate. He added that Paramount’s letter is insensitive to the many legal uses of content that occur at universities every day and is “unlikely to narrow the divide” between the opposing sides of the intellectual-property debate.

A Paramount source with knowledge of the effort who refused to be named claimed the outreach included just two dozen letters, and was targeted at law professors because “these professors and students dissect and analyze the law on a daily basis, and their academic perspectives would be incredibly valuable.” The source said it was conducted as part of a “learning process” that seeks common ground.

Despite being “deeply suspicious” of Paramount’s avowed humility when she received her copy of the letter, Jessica Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, said she invited Mr. Perry to speak to her copyright law class in March.

“I like my students to hear from people who disagree with me,” she said. “I was pretty confident that he would be one such, and I thought my students are adults—and I’m not worried they’re going to be snowed by Paramount’s pitch, so wouldn’t it be interesting to hear what Paramount has to say?”

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Mike Licht]

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, she said: “There were too many students who just couldn’t afford to pay that.”

Web platforms that make it easy for authors to write and revise contents have the potential to encourage lower-cost alternatives to traditional textbooks, she said.

Ms. Kanter highlighted three questions that open-education-resource providers should keep in mind as the movement grows: How can publishers establish peer-review systems to vouch for the quality of educational materials? What will the market for open-education resources look like? And how will these tools increase the affordability of education?

Michael W. Carroll, a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law, said openness and quality need not be in tension. Open content can easily be published using a peer-review system in which experts can maintain high standards, he said.

Mr. Carroll is a founding member of Creative Commons, an organization that provides easy-to-use copyright licenses that encourage sharing. The open-education movement’s growth, he said, reflects a “market failure” in the publishing industry that could be corrected with open content.

Even when peer-review systems aren’t available, one panelist noted that students sometimes police the material themselves. Sally Johnstone, vice president for academic advancement at Western Governors University, said students give vocal feedback about which tools work best. “Our students let us know immediately if certain resources are not useful to them,” she said. “Red lights go off.”

Although the panelists acknowledged that the open-education ecosystem is still immature, one key characteristic of these materials went largely unaddressed: their text-heavy format.

Recalling Apple’s entry into the e-textbook market, the education-technology expert David Wiley, in a blog post  last week, raised the question of how text-based open resources would survive as publishers begin to offer low-cost, fully interactive alternatives.

“Sure, there are ‘traditional’ OER textbooks available for free,” wrote Mr. Wiley, an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University. “But when you could have video, multimedia, simulations, and interactive assessments for $15, why would you take a traditional book (whether print or video) even if it is free?”

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by opensourceway]

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 similar effort announced at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in December.

Kristina M. Baumli, a lecturer in Temple’s English department, said she was motivated to join the project because textbook content doesn’t always meet the intellectual curiosity of students. Her students reacted “with glee” at the online book’s free price tag, she said. She used Blackboard to bring together content for the paperless text, but said that her students weren’t stuck reading in front of a screen every night. The course’s local ethnography project ensured that students could go outside and experience the material firsthand.

“It pushed them from the computer out into the real world,” Ms. Baumli said.

She acknowledged that her online text sometimes allowed students to get distracted by Facebook or other Web sites during class, but added that those same students would probably waste time sending text messages in a class using a traditional textbook anyway. By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book. One of her colleagues in the project even required students to submit assignments to be included in their marketing textbook, which was eventually used as study material for the final exam.

Mr. Bell said discussions were under way for a second round of the alternative-textbook program, which will likely include another 10 grants. For the next set of projects, Mr. Bell said faculty members would be encouraged to experiment even more with their alternative textbooks, incorporating student suggestions and using social media.

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 be free, but those who want a certificate after passing a series of online tests will have to pay a “modest fee.”

Q. I understand you held a forum late last month for professors at MIT to ask questions about the MITx effort. What were the hottest questions at that meeting?

Mr. Agarwal: There were a few good questions. One was, How will you offer courses that involve more of a soft touch? More of humanities, where it may not be as clear how to grade answers?

Mr. Reif: One particular faculty member said, How do I negotiate with my department head to get some time to be doing this? Another one is, Well, you want MIT to give you a certificate, how do we know who the learner is? How do we certify that?

Q. That is a question I’ve heard on some blogs. How do you know that a person is who they say they are online? What is your answer to that?

Mr. Agarwal: I could give a speech on this question. … In the very short term students will have to pledge an honor code that says that they’ll do the work honestly and things like that. In the medium term our plan is to work with testing companies that offer testing sites around the world, where they can do an identity check and they can also proctor tests and exams for us. For the longer term we have quite a few ideas, and I would say these are in the so-called R&D phase, in terms of how we can electronically check to see if the student is who they say they are, and this would use some combination of face recognition and other forms of technique, and also it could involve various forms of activity recognition.

Q. You refer to what’s being given by MITx as a certificate. But there’s also this trend of educational badges, such as an effort by Mozilla, the people who make the Firefox Web browser, to build a framework to issue such badges. Is MIT planning to use that badge platform to offer these certificates?

Mr. Agarwal: There are a lot of experiments around the Web as far as various ways of badging and various ways of giving points. Some sites call them “karma points.” Khan Academy has a way of giving badges to students who offer various levels of answering questions and things like that. Clearly this is a movement that is happening in our whole business. And we clearly want to leverage some of these ideas. But fundamentally at the end of the day we have to give a certificate with a grade that says the student took this course and here’s how they did—here’s their grade and we will give it to them. … But there are many, many ways the Internet is evolving to include some kind of badging and point systems, so we will certainly try to leverage these things. And that’s a work in progress.

Q. So there will be letter grades?

Mr. Agarwal: Correct.

Q. So you’ve said you will release your learning software for free under an open-source license. Are you already hearing from institutions that are going to take you up on that?

Mr. Agarwal: Yes, I think there’s a lot of interest. Our plan is to make the software available online, and there has been a lot of interest from a lot of sources. Many universities and other school systems have been thinking about making more of their content available online, and if they can find an open platform to go with I think that will be very interesting for a lot of people.

Q. If you can get this low-cost certificate, could this be an alternative to the $40,000-plus per year tuition of MIT for enough people that this will really shake up higher education? That may not threaten MIT, but could it threaten and even force some colleges to close if they have to compete with a nearly free certificate from your online institution?

Mr. Reif: First of all this is not a degree, this is a certificate that MITx is providing. The second important point is it’s a completely different educational environment. The real question is, What do employers want? I think that for a while MITx or activities like MITx—and there is quite a bit of buzz going on around things like that—will augment the education students get in college today. It’s not intended to replace it. But of course one can think of, “What if in a few years, I only take two MITx-like courses for free and that’s enough to get me a job?” Well, let’s see how well all this is received and how well or how badly the traditional college model gets threatened.

In my personal view, I think the best education that can be provided is that in a college environment. There are many things that you cannot teach very well online. Let me give you, for instance, an example of something that is important: ethics and integrity and things like that. You walk on the MIT campus and by taking a course with Anant Agarwal and meeting him and other professors like him you get the sense of ethics and integrity. Is it easy to transfer that online in a community? Maybe it is, but it’s going to take a bit of research to figure out how to do that.

My point is that for a while I view this as augmenting the education you get on a residential model. And yes, it may threaten, and if it does the residential model has to get better. Our objective is to actually use MITx to even increase further what we do on campus, to make it stronger and to be able to resist and survive and do very well in this potential disruptive situation.

Mr. Agarwal: The one piece I would add is that online technologies and online mechanisms will also improve the on-campus experience. For instance, making available a lot of the content in a way that more students can do things at their own pace will give both the lecturers and the students more time. If a lot of the grading and a lot of the mechanical and repetitive things that professors do can be offloaded to online technology, that gives professors more time and enables them, both professors and students, to participate in certain kinds of activities such as doing projects, being creative, the apprenticeship model of education. Many of these things will be given a lot more time and hopefully substantially improve on-campus experiences as well.

The retreat celebrated the 10^th 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 ownership concerning digital materials.

Larry Johnson, the consortium’s chief executive, said the meeting was important because it brought together groups from three different education sectors that don’t often collaborate. He said the retreat intended to “drive a conversation around how to think about the future.”

Of the top 10 trends the group flagged, Mr. Johnson said one of the most interesting conversations to emerge was about open data and open-educational resources. As the group discussed these issues, he said, the participants began to think about transparency “as a value” rather than a buzzword.

Later this year, the consortium will build on its retreat by publishing videos of the event, hosting a series of social-media conversations, and writing a more extensive report on its findings.

UPDATE: Here are the top 10 trends from the report:

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and time zones. Not only are teams geographically diverse, they are also culturally diverse.

2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone, tablet, and ereader. People now expect a seamless experience across all their devices.

3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network — and already is at its edges. Mobithinking reports there are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts. 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well, and 85% of new devices can access the mobile web.

4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. Our current expectation is that the network has almost infinite capacity and is nearly free of cost. One hour of video footage is uploaded every second to YouTube; over 250 million photos are sent to Facebook every day.

5. Openness — concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information — is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media.

6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. In an age where so much of our information, records, and digital content are in the cloud, and often clouds in other legal jurisdictions, the very concept of ownership is blurry.

7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. Access to learning in any form is a challenge in too many parts of the world, and efficiency in learning systems and institutions is increasingly an expectation of governments — but the need for solutions that scale often trumps them both. Innovations in these areas are increasingly coming from unexpected parts of the world, including India, China, and central Africa.

8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information and media are paramount.

9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia — and worldwide. As a result, credibility, validity, and control are all notions that are no longer givens when so much learning takes place outside school systems.

10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Libraries are deeply reimagining their missions; colleges and universities are struggling to reduce costs across the board. The educational ecosystem is shifting, and nowhere more so than in the world of publishing, where efforts to reimagine the book are having profound success, with implications that will touch every aspect of the learning enterprise.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Brett Jordan]