by  David Schejbal, e-Mentor There is a buzz, even a frenzy, about competency-based education (CBE). Brought together by the Lumina Foundation-sponsored organization C-BEN (the Competency-Based Education Network), 30 institutions and 4 university systems have developed or are developing competency-based programs. About another 600 schools have claimed to be developing CBE programs, though there is no accurate data to substantiate that number. Why and why now? To understand the reasons for the interest in CBE in the U.S., it is important to understand the broader context that is significantly impacting higher education1. As with most things, one primary driver is money. http://www.e-mentor.edu.pl/artykul/index/numer/61/id/1197 Share on Facebook

By Bradley Fuster, US News While there are benefits to live online learning, such environments are not ideal for all students. Here are five things to watch out for when considering live online classes. Online students should carefully consider prior to enrollment if they are the type of learner who is set up for success in a live online class​. While the opportunities for lively interaction are plentiful, the obstacles might be overlooked. http://www.usnews.com/education/online-learning-lessons/2015/10/30/overcome-5-obstacles-of-live-online-classes Share on Facebook

By Amanda Porterfield, Illinois Home Page The University of Illinois is making cuts as the state continues to operate without a budget. They’re also making additions that will help bring in more money. It’s typical for U of I students to cram as many credits into two semesters as they can. University officials say it was such a success this year they’re offering 17 credits, predicting the online semester will bring in about a million dollars. http://www.illinoishomepage.net/news/local-news/online-classes-bringing-u-of-i-money-during-budget-crisis Share on Facebook

by Udacity Fact - India has the largest population of software developers, outside of the US, at 3 million. By 2018, this number is estimated to increase to 4 million - making India a country with the largest number of software developers. Fact - And yet, with such large numbers of software developers, there are only 2% of apps developed in India that make it to the top 1000 Google apps and none to the top 100. Industry Experts in India believe the reason behind this seems to be due to the options available in the ecosystem of upgrading skills once a student finishes his basic degree and enters the job market. As a first in India, Udacity has collaborated with the tech giant Google. The company believes this service model of job training can be scaled up to teach coding to millions of people. For India, additionally, there is a definitive price advantage as well. The discounted price for India is Rs. 9,800 per month. This compares favorably with the US where it costs $200 a month. http://yourstory.com/2015/11/udacity/ Share on Facebook

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News It’s called the Office of Analytics at University of Maryland University College (UMUC), and it began with the vision of President Javier Miyares, who wanted to not only unlock the potential of institutional data across multiple areas, but turn the data into a profit for the college. "The problem is most presidents have heard the word but don’t know how to execute," explained Miyares during a session at last week’s EDUCAUSE 2015. "We have less than 10 percent of revenue coming from the state and had a 50 percent decline in enrollments in 2012. We had to cut 60 million from the budget and fire 300 people, and that’s when we knew we had to take what we had left and invest in the priority: analytics." Darren Catalano, the Vice President of Analytics for UMUC, says "Our approach is to demonstrate the "art of possible" to the institution," said Catalano; "in other words, to make complex data simple." According to Miyares, there are 5 lessons in leveraging analytics to deliver what’s possible. http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/office-of-analytics-265/ Share on Facebook

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology Gerry Hanley has a vision. He wants to plant a big thermometer on California State University Web sites to show how much money students are saving by not having to buy traditionally published textbooks or ancillary resources. His rough estimate: As of a few years ago, learners at the 23-campus, 460,200-student university system were spending $300 million a year on course materials — about $651 per student per school year. His goal is to cut that in half, and he believes the result will be higher graduation rates and better quality of education. "If I could save 50 percent for students, that’d be great," said Hanley, Cal State’s assistant vice chancellor for academic technology services and executive director of MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching). https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/10/28/affordable-learning-at-scale-with-oer.aspx Share on Facebook

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

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology An online digital repository for academic researchers is being updated. The newest version of Figshare from Digital Science puts an emphasis on controls for more granular management of data. This repository allows users to make their research available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner. People can upload any file format — figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets — to be made viewable in a browser. According to the company, increasingly, researchers must develop a data management plan as a requirement of their funding or must address data sharing in interdisciplinary or cross-institutional projects. To address these changes and other areas of usage, the new release focuses on three areas: control, discoverability and usability. https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/11/05/online-research-repository-adds-finer-access-control.aspx Share on Facebook

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News EDUCAUSE panelists say a dynamic university website is becoming critical for recruitment and sustainable alumni support. University-website-designAdd together social media strategy and digital marketing tactics, sprinkle with interactive design flare, then let rise in the hotbed of a campus community and you’ve got a .edu site that not only improves students and staff recruitment, but keeps alumni engaged. Just ask the website wizards at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) that helped the University win the prestigious interactive media award. http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/university-website-2016-765/ Share on Facebook

By Mike Cummings, Yale News Yale’s latest round of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will provide learners across the globe instruction on legal concepts, negotiation strategies, and the details of 2008 financial crisis. These courses are the first Yale has offered on Coursera’s new "on-demand," cohort-based platform. The platform responds to two requests Coursera received from global learners. Learners wanted course material to be much more accessible, but they also wanted their learning process to retain some structure. The cohort-based platform creates a new course session every three weeks, complete with automatically generated (soft) deadlines and fresh discussion forums. The hope is that this will allow cohort-based courses to maintain the robust student-to-student interaction of a session-based course, while drastically reducing the time a learner has to wait before accessing course material. http://news.yale.edu/2015/11/06/free-online-learning-yale-experts-now-offered-demand Share on Facebook

by Olivia Vanni - BostInno Taking courses online can be the true test of self-discipline. At any moment, you could feel weak and direct your focus to a world of websites rather than your work. So when you’re learning a skill that needs your full attention, like coding, opting to do an online program is risky business. Launch Academy, which has offered on-campus coding coursework for the past couple of years, is trying to mitigate any issues virtual learning has posed in the past with its upcoming online program. In December, Launch Academy will be starting its first online coding program. When I spoke with the company’s co-founders Dan Pickett and Evan Charles, they said they’re taking a new approach to virtual learning by making it more like the real deal. Looking at what’s helped on-campus students and translating that to the online realm, Launch Academy is hoping to enable a broader range of professionals be successful. http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2015/11/06/launch-academy-online-code-course-and-professional-program/ Share on Facebook

by Smart Data Collective The world of education has forever been changed by the development of big data e-learning. This technology provides a variety of effective online learning systems.In the e-learning industry, big data refers to the data obtained about individuals as they are involved in the learning process. Some companies provide their employees with training models designed to teach company policies. The learning progress of an employee, test results as well as assessments are able to be used to improve the training model. If a number of learners require too much time to complete a specific module, it could mean the module needs to be changed to make it more effective for those using it. The act of data mining for education is considered any amount of data obtained during the learning process. http://www.smartdatacollective.com/sarah-smith/356047/big-data-e-learning-improving-education Share on Facebook

by Stanford The medical school is debuting new online continuing medical education courses that show how information freed from words-only presentation can be an effective medical education tool. The Stanford Center for Continuing Medical Education has debuted new online courses that show how information freed from words-only presentation can be an effective medical education tool.  It has debuted new online continuing medical education courses that show how information freed from words-only presentation can be an effective medical education tool. It’s show, not tell, with animation and video, and a minimum of talking heads. http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/11/stanford-medicine-debuts-new-formats-for-continuing-medical-education.html Share on Facebook

By Darwin Green, US News Nontraditional students with outside responsibilities can benefit from the flexibility online courses offer. ​After a long and difficult decision, I decided to return to college after a 12-year gap between my sophomore and junior years. Things had changed since I had been to college, both for me and in education. I now had a pregnant wife and bills to pay - something I never had to consider as a young man in my early 20s. And an undergraduate degree somehow became the new high school diploma. I needed a way to find financial security while maintaining my responsibilities as a father, a husband and as an adult. I decided to apply to an online program. As an adult, I found there are three advantages of online degrees: http://www.usnews.com/education/online-learning-lessons/2015/11/06/3-challenges-online-education-helps-adult-learners-overcome Share on Facebook

By: Maryellen Weimer, Faculty Focus "Based on the results in this study, students in online courses, with unmonitored testing, are no more likely to cheat on an examination than students in hybrid and F2F courses using monitored testing, nor are students with low GPAs more likely to enroll in online courses." (p. 72) Some had suggested that because students who had not taken an online course reported that they thought it would be easier to cheat in online courses, students with lower GPAs might be motivated to take online courses. There were only 19 students in the online course in this study, but across these three sections, GPA did not differ significantly. Using this interesting model to predict cheating, there was no evidence that it occurred to a greater degree in the unmonitored tests given in the online course. That’s the good news. The bad news: "There is ample opportunity for cheating across all types of course delivery modes, which has been demonstrated through decades of research." (p. 73) In other words, we still have a problem, it just isn’t more serious in online courses, based on these results. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/do-online-students-cheat-more-on-tests/ Share on Facebook