by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed In the past few years, many colleges have expanded the scale and scope of centers that support teaching and learning with technology, as part of an effort to build a new "innovation infrastructure" for instruction. That’s according to the results of a new survey of directors of academic-technology centers at 163 colleges and universities, released last week at the annual conference of Educause, an organization that supports technology on campuses. One key change has been the creation of new or redefined administrative jobs at colleges intended "to lead their academic-change initiatives." And the survey found that several colleges have reconstructed their centers for teaching and learning to focus more on student success than just on faculty development, working more often across various departments such as student services and academic affairs. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/many-colleges-now-see-centers-for-teaching-with-technology-as-part-of-innovation-infrastructure/57593 Share on Facebook

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive Apple TV is introducing online learning as an embedded element of its product for the first time, adding television to Coursera’s platform flexibility. Coursera announced the partnership on its blog, saying the TV compatibility will give people access to videos from top academics and industry experts from the comfort of their own living rooms. The company’s entire catalog of courses will be available through the new platform. http://www.educationdive.com/news/coursera-is-apple-tvs-first-online-learning-partner/408499/ Share on Facebook

by DEREK NEWTON, the Atlantic Today, entrepreneurs and freelancers openly advertise services designed to help students cheat their online educations. These digital cheaters for hire will even assume students’ identities and take entire online classes in their place. I reached out to one of these companies—the aptly named No Need to Study —asking, for the sake of journalism, if it could take an online English Literature class at Columbia University for me. I got an email response from someone on its customer-relations staff who told me that, not only could the company get a ringer to take my online class, it could also guarantee I’d earn a B or better. I was told the fee for such an arrangement was $1,225.15. When I asked for more information to be absolutely sure I understood the company’s services, the reply was crystal clear: "We offer the services of a pool of experienced academic tutors to take classes and complete course work for our clients." http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/11/cheating-through-online-courses/413770/ Share on Facebook

by Anya Kamenetz, NPR As one of the biggest, most successful tech companies, Google can hire pretty much anyone it wants. Accordingly, the company tends to favor Ph.D.s from Stanford and MIT. But, it has just partnered with a for-profit company called General Assembly to offer a series of short, noncredit courses for people who want to learn how to build applications for Android, Google’s mobile platform. Short, as in just 12 weeks from novice to employable. This is just one of a slew of big announcements this fall coming out of a peculiar, fast-growing corner of the higher education world: the coder bootcamp. This is really an entire new industry within higher ed that’s grown up in about five years. http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/11/03/451999158/the-un-college-thats-training-100-000-app-developers Share on Facebook

by Jennifer Reingold, Fortune The massive disruption of the education industry is well underway, but the biggest tremors are yet to come—disruptions so dramatic that many universities will cease to exist in the next few years. That was the conclusion of the panelists at the Fortune Global Forum’s session on Ed Tech. Said Alan Arkatov, a professor in USC’s Rossier School of Education: "Think Jurassic Park," he said. "I would say 500 to 1000 colleges across the country will not be around, or will have morphed into something else, because they do not have a sustainable business model. The market will annihilate those folks." Two of the would-be annihilators—Dennis Yang, founder of Udemy, and Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera, weren’t disagreeing. Yang’s company, which allows anyone to offer a course and relies on the market to sort out the good from the bad, now offers 30,000 different classes in 80 languages. And Koller says Coursera has reached 4 million "learners," with much of the company’s growth coming from outside the U.S. http://fortune.com/2015/11/04/ed-tech-at-fortune-global-forum-2015/ Share on Facebook

by Kirk Wickersham, Alaska Dispatch News During the Great Recession, no state was hit harder than Arizona. Arizona State University took successive double-digit budget cuts. They used that crisis as an opportunity to transform into a university of the 21st Century. Today, ASU advertises "70 bachelor’s and master’s degrees available entirely online" on the Anchorage NPR station. Why? Because they can, and because it works for them. They are apparently getting good Alaskan students. Similarly, the University of Alaska system needs to use our state budget crisis to transform itself into a 21st century university. With the smallest and most geographically dispersed student body in the nation, it needs to commit to standard course offerings, academic calendars, programs and degrees, and centralized, uniform, online delivery. Not in two years, but now. http://www.adn.com/article/20151104/university-alaska-needs-focus-nontraditional-students-and-online-learning Share on Facebook

By Meris Stansbury, eCampusNews If online learning is to succeed as not only as a legitimate option for learning but as a respected platform within an institution, leadership has to build that respect through calculated risks and building multi-departmental relationships. That was the main takeaway from an EDUCAUSE conference panel on the "Hallmarks of Excellence in Online Learning," based on a newly released report from UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association). "We wrote this report to serve as an aspirational model for the approach to online learning," said Vickie Cook, director of Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois at Springfield and one of the authors of the report. http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/online-learning-leader-265/ Share on Facebook

by the University of Arkansas Self-paced courses offer the most flexibility of any university credit course, while meeting the same academic standards as face-to-face or traditional online courses. Self-paced courses allow students to set their own learning tempos, rather than following structured learning environments led by faculty or instructors. Students are not required to be formally admitted to the university to take self-paced courses, but students should consult with an academic adviser regarding course selection to ensure courses will count toward their degree requirements. Students should be aware that self-paced courses require a high degree of self-discipline and most require proctored exams. http://news.uark.edu/articles/32775/deadline-approaches-for-final-fall-session-of-self-paced-online-courses Share on Facebook

by Maria E. Cruz Lopez, MIT Tech The increasing popularity of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has created new pathways to education, connecting diverse groups of learners not bound by geography. But what happens when these online students engage and interact? Do they build bridges of healthy discourse or do they form siloes of insular thinking — and is it possible for instructors to forge communities founded on conversation rather than conflict? Education researcher Justin Reich, executive director of the Teaching Systems Lab within MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, intends to find out. Reich, along with associates from Princeton University and Harvard University, was recently awarded a $400,000 research grant from the Spencer Foundation. The grant is part of the foundation’s "Measuring the Quality of Civic and Political Engagement" initiative. http://news.mit.edu/2015/grant-enables-research-into-online-course-mooc-forums-1105 Share on Facebook

By David Nagel, Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology The numbers are in: Our survey of higher education IT professionals gathered salary data for hundreds of tech leaders and staffers in colleges and universities across the country. As readers we’ve always approached salary surveys with conflicting sensations — trepidation that we might be wildly underpaid; and hope that, if we’re not, there’s still room for growth in salary so that if we chose to leave the jobs we had, we wouldn’t be priced out of the market. If you’re the same way, let’s get the jolt over with quickly: The average salary of respondents to Campus Technology’s IT salary survey was $75,621 (plenty of additional details to follow). People are generally positive in their outlook and don’t plan to switch jobs anytime soon. Most do not expect promotions in the near future, and just a few foresee any kind of raise over the next year. https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/11/03/campus-technology-2015-salary-survey-it-pay.aspx Share on Facebook