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 27, 2012, 4:51 pm
By Jennifer Howard
The Modern Language Association wants evaluators to get with the digital program. In a revised set of “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media,” the association urges departments and committees that evaluate academic work in digital media and digital humanities to give it the weight it deserves and to make sure they know how to assess it in the first place. Candidates for jobs and faculty members up for review should also make sure they understand how they’re going to be assessed, negotiate terms for evaluation, and document their work clearly, the group advises.
“Digital media are transforming literary scholarship, teaching, and service, as well as providing new venues for research, communication, and the creation of networked academic communities,” the updated guidelines say. “Academic work in digital media must be evaluated in the light of these…
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April 27, 2012, 4:10 pm
By Nick DeSantis
Pinterest, the social network on which users share collections of images inspired by their hobbies and design interests on digital pin boards, has exploded in popularity since coming online in 2010. The Association of College and Research Libraries hosted an online seminar this week dealing with Pinterest’s potential in academic settings, and some college libraries have already incorporated it into their social-media tool kits. Here are three ways college library staff members say they’re using it:
Promoting Campus Events: This week, Saint Mary’s College of California is marking De La Salle Week, a celebration of the life of St. John Baptist de La Salle and the college’s Lasallian heritage. The Saint Mary’s library’s Pinterest page features a board about the saint. Sarah Vital, a reference and instruction librarian at the college, says Pinterest plays into librarians’…
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April 26, 2012, 1:48 pm
By Jennifer Howard
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and other institutions are old hands now at taking course material from the classroom and lab and putting it online for learners anywhere to use. Yale University may be the first to reverse the process, using its Open Yale Courses as the basis for an old-fashioned book series.
This month, Yale University Press released the first batch of paperbacks based on lecture courses featured in the online-learning program. Priced at $18 and available in e-format too, the books are meant to expand the audience for the course material even further, according to Diana E.E. Kleiner. A professor of art history and classics at Yale, Ms. Kleiner is the founding project director of Open Yale Courses.
“It may seem counterintuitive for a digital project to move into books and e-books, because these are a much more conventional way of…
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April 25, 2012, 1:18 pm
By Marc Parry
Milwaukee — Digital natives? The idea that students are superengaged finders of online learning materials once struck Glenda Morgan, e-learning strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as “a load of hooey.” Students, she figured, probably stick with the textbooks and other content they’re assigned in class.
Not quite. The preliminary results of a multiyear study of undergraduates’ online study habits, presented by Ms. Morgan at a conference on blended learning here this week, show that most students shop around for digital texts and videos beyond the boundaries of what professors assign them in class.
“It’s almost like they want to find the content by themselves,” Ms. Morgan said in an interview after her talk, which took place in a packed room at the 9th Annual Sloan Consortium Blended Learning Conference & Workshop.
It’s nothing new to…
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April 25, 2012, 12:01 am
By Nick DeSantis
YouTube holds a rich trove of videos that could be used in the classroom, but it’s challenging to transform videos into a truly interactive part of a lesson. So the nonprofit group TED has unveiled a new Web site that it hopes will solve this problem—by organizing educational videos and letting professors “flip” them to enhance their lectures.
The new Web site, unveiled today, lets professors turn TED’s educational videos—as well as any video on YouTube—into interactive lessons inspired by the “flipped” classroom model. The site’s introduction is the second phase of an education-focused effort called TED-Ed, which began last month when the group released a series of highly produced, animated videos on a new YouTube channel.
The TED-Ed site is both a portal for finding education videos and a tool for flipping them. On one page, videos are organized by themes, such …
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April 24, 2012, 6:12 pm
By Joanna Chau
At community colleges, enrollment in online programs is growing at a faster pace than in traditional courses, and that means new challenges for administrators who must now provide student services and other support in a virtual realm. That’s according to a new survey by the Instructional Technology Council.
In this year’s survey, college administrators ranked “adequate student services for distance-education students” as their greatest challenge, raising it two spots from No. 3 in the previous year’s survey. For the past seven years, “support staff need for training and technical assistance” has been the biggest obstacle identified by administrators answering the survey. Other challenges included adequate assessment of distance-education classes, compliance with new financial-aid requirements, and operating and equipment budgets.
“With the greater focus on distance…
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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 18, 2012, 5:01 am
By Nick DeSantis
Last fall, two Stanford computer-science professors helped create an online course-hosting platform that opened some of the university’s classes to the entire world. Hundreds of thousands of students enrolled free of charge. Their start-up company, which grew out of that effort, now seeks to give millions a taste of top-quality education by expanding its platform to other elite universities.
Coursera, the online-education outfit founded by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, will grow its course platform through official partnerships with three more top-tier institutions, the company announced today. Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Stanford will use Coursera’s technology to offer a mix of classes including computer science, business, and literature. The young company already serves seven courses, and a…
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