Online Learning Update

by National Public Radio

Some college athletes are cheating, and the NCAA is cracking down on universities that enable them to do it. Earlier this year, the NCAA came down hard on Syracuse University for academic fraud. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is awaiting its punishment for guiding athletes to enroll in sham classes, among other infractions. Will the University of Texas at Austin be next?

http://spokanepublicradio.org/post/academic-foul-some-colleges-accused-helping-athletes-cheat

by Paul Jarvis, the Next Web

I don’t have a magic bullet for building online courses, but because I’m a cheap bastard, I’ve figured out a way to run a course that makes sense financially, regardless of whether 20 people buy or 2,000. To some, having an affiliate program is necessary. I’ve never bothered with those, simply because if someone’s going to promote my work—they do it because they want to, not because they’re getting paid to. That’s how I promote from others. I don’t have a problem with affiliate programs and know lots of people that make a huge chunk of income from them, it’s just a personal choice on my end not to use them for the products I sell. Below is how I run my own course, The Creative Class, which launched on October 15, 2014. There are at least eight billion ways to create an online course, and lots of great options out there, this is just how mine works.

http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2015/06/13/how-i-setup-a-100k-online-course/

by Jeanne Meister, Forbes

Companies have discovered the power of the MOOCs as a new way to design and deliver online learning, where learners become peer reviewers, collaborate with each other, are highly engaged in watching short videos, participate in threaded discussion groups and some arrange local meetups to continue their learning. And for those learners who complete all the assignments, there is the ability to earn a certificate from a university and post this on their LinkedIn LNKD -1.02% profile. The bar for corporate learning has been raised and the revolution there is now just beginning. Large organizations such as Microsoft MSFT and Tenaris are piloting their own custom created MOOCs. Others such as Bank of America BAC and Qualcomm are developing a strategy to curate publicly available MOOCs aligned to their core competencies.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/06/10/moocs-emerge-as-disruptors-to-corporate-learning/

By Josh Dulaney, Long Beach Press Telegram

Roughly 625,000 students are now enrolled in community college online classes throughout California. Only about 60 percent of them successfully complete the classes, with completion rates for black and Latino students even lower, according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank based in San Francisco. “Most students do successfully complete online courses, but it’s still a pretty high failure rate,” said Hans Johnson, PPIC senior fellow and co-author of the report. The report, titled “Successful Online Courses in California’s Community Colleges,” looked at data from the CCC’s Chancellor’s Office and found that the median passage rate was about 10 percentage points higher for traditional courses, at 69 percent, than for online courses, which was 59 percent.

http://www.presstelegram.com/social-affairs/20150610/community-college-online-classes-lag-behind-in-success-report-says

by Inside Higher Ed

Most people agree that faculty performance evaluations should be based on more than student feedback, grants and publication counts. But what does a more complete evaluation process look like? And how would a more progressive department function? The New American Colleges and Universities’ answer is Redefining the Paradigm: Faculty Models to Support Student Learning. The new monograph is based on new faculty evaluation models at NAC&U member institutions, and pushes other colleges and universities to rethink traditional department structures and processes to better support student learning. The monograph promotes the development of “holistic departments” that reject the arguably outdated scholarship-teaching-service faculty evaluation model in favor of processes that are more fluid and responsive to the changing faculty role and departmentwide needs. It also promotes active learning, in which professors are not “sages on the stage” but rather guides in research and other experiential learning. The Teagle Foundation supported the project.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/06/11/redefining-faculty-paradigm

by Human Resources

A new study from EdAssist™ found Millennials prioritise tangible learning opportunities over salary levels when applying for a job. More than four out of 10 (41%) of Millennials stated they would choose a job with a potential for regular pay raises. However, more than half (59%) chose a job with a strong potential for professional development. In fact, Millennials were found to be so interested in development that most stated they are willing to make personal sacrifices to learn while working.

http://www.humanresourcesonline.net/millennials-prefer-learning-opportunities-higher-pay/

By Devon Haynie, US News

For prospective online students, searching for a degree program can sometimes feel like being adrift in the wilderness, with no map and no way of gauging the intention of approaching strangers. Students have so many online programs to choose from – some with promises of quick, effortless degrees that seem too good to be true. Unfortunately, they sometimes are. And students who are duped by the schemes are left with a hole in their wallet and no legitimate credential. While anyone can fall prey to an online degree scam, international students and first generation college students can be particularly vulnerable to degree mills, says Karen Pedersen, chief knowledge officer for the Online Learning Consortium, a group dedicated to advancing the quality of online learning. “If you don’t know what you don’t know, it can seem like a really intricate maze,” she says.

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2015/06/09/7-warning-signs-an-online-degree-is-a-scam

by Inside Higher Ed

The Public Policy Institute of California released a report Tuesday identifying successful online courses in the state’s community colleges. Success was defined as having at least 70 percent of students earning a passing grade, and if student performance is at least as good as face-to-face versions of the same course. The study also defined success as when students in an online course continue to do well in subsequent same-subject classes either online or in a traditional setting. The study found about 11 percent of online courses in 2013-14 were “highly successful” and they varied widely from one another. The courses were successful due to their design and the way they were delivered to students, although there wasn’t a systematic pattern in online course success.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/06/10/report-finds-successful-online-2-year-college-courses-california

By Lily Abromeit, The Gazette

Steffen Schmidt’s email and phone inboxes are flooded every day with questions about the Iowa caucuses. Schmidt, a professor of political science at Iowa State University, started to realize there’s a large number of people who don’t understand the caucuses and the impact they can have in deciding the next president. To help, he created ISU’s first MOOC — short for massive open online course — that will focus on how the caucuses came to be what their future may hold.

http://thegazette.com/subject/news/education/higher-education/anyone-can-sign-up-to-learn-online-about-iowa-caucuses-with-new-caucus-mooc-20150608

by MIT

MIT Professional Education will offer its first online course on Cybersecurity to a global audience of professionals from Sept. 15 – Oct. 27, 2015. This course, featuring 14 faculty from the world-renowned MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is offered in support of a campus-wide MIT initiative to counter the real and damaging threat of cybersecurity attacks facing organizations around the globe. Additional sessions of the course will also be offered from Nov. 10 – Dec. 22, 2015 and Jan. 12 – Feb. 23, 2016. The course launching on Sept. 15 is being offered at an introductory price of $545.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150609005477/en/MIT-Professional-Education-Launches-Online-Cybersecurity-Global#.VXeAxdJViko

by Meg Bernhard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Representatives of the California Community Colleges on Monday announced upgrades in their online-course system, the California Virtual Campus, that are intended to improve students’ completion rates. The college system said the effort was designed to make it easier for students to find courses that fulfill transfer requirements and create pathways to the California State University system. Among the improvements are a design that works better on mobile phones and includes an improved search function. The community-college system also has increased efforts to improve the quality of its online courses, to better prepare students to take such courses, and to train instructors to teach them. Those efforts fall broadly under the system’s Online Education Initiative.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/2-year-colleges-in-calif-hope-online-course-upgrades-will-improve-completion/100429

by ANYA KAMENETZ, NPR

Barring a last-minute legal decision, as of July 1, the nation’s for-profit colleges are going to be subject to a new Education Department rule known as gainful employment. That is: Do students end up earning enough to pay off their loans? A trade group of career colleges is suing to stop the rule, but this is far from the only monkey on the sector’s back. As recently as 2010, these schools enrolled one in nine college students. Today, some are shutting down, cutting back, tanking in the stock market, even going bankrupt. The bellwether was the giant Corinthian Colleges a year ago, but many others are in trouble as well. Even the University of Phoenix, which five years ago had 460,000 students, has seen that number fall by half.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/06/08/412024783/the-forces-behind-the-decline-of-for-profit-colleges

by Carol Ann Alaimo, Tucson.com

When Starbucks recently went searching for a school to provide online education for baristas and selected ASU, it didn’t look twice at the University of Arizona. The UA had nothing to offer the world’s largest coffee chain since none of its bachelor’s degrees is available online. Now that’s about to change. After years of delay, the UA is launching a new chapter in its history by offering some of its undergraduate degrees over the Internet, beginning with the fall semester.

http://tucson.com/news/local/education/university-of-arizona-will-offer-bachelor-s-degrees-online/article_455d41b9-6f30-5f19-b6ee-e3b62e76445f.html

by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

A few colleges are trying a new incentive to get professors to participate in professional-development workshops: digital badges. The idea of offering badges has become popular in education-technology circles in the past few years, in most cases as an alternative to a traditional college diploma, or even as a different way of giving grades in courses. The goal is to create an easy way for people to show employers they have attained a given skill. After all, who ever looks at a college transcript?

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/can-digital-badges-help-encourage-professors-to-take-teaching-workshops/56901

By BENJAMIN BELL, ABC News

Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor who is considering a bid for the White House, told ABC News that the possibility of taking online courses to finish his college degree — if he were to win the presidential election and found himself at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in early 2017 — is “interesting.” “I’ve got two sons who very, very well, before the next election, at least one of them, may have his degree and the other would be just a year out,” Walker told ABC News’ Jon Karl. “Part of it was I wanted to make sure they went through and got what they needed,” he said.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gov-scott-walker-calls-possibility-taking-online-courses/story?id=31593687

By CAROLINE PORTER, Wall Street Journal

At Reynoldsburg schools, middle-school students choose among four academies to attend for high school. The academies specialize in engineering and design; the arts; business and law; and health sciences. There are no desks permanently lined up in rows and, in one building, no bells signaling the end of class. College isn’t some far-off place: Students can take classes from a community college on school premises. Most students don’t even have to take gym in high school. At the heart of the overhaul that is aimed at all grades is a personalized learning model combining computer-based and in-person instruction that the district says has held down costs, sustained above-average test scores and put students in greater control of their learning.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ohio-school-district-bets-on-technology-in-creating-new-learning-model-1433712447

by Seb Murray, Business Because

Evolution of online learning forces business schools to rethink how they deliver content, as competition with innovative digital providers heats up. The digital revolution in education is in full swing, spearheaded by online companies deploying technology that is disrupting the sector with courses on everything from data analytics to advanced accounting. Digitally focused education companies such as Coursera, the Mooc or massive open online course developer and 2U, whose tech powers business school programs on the web, have emerged in the past decade along with dozens more who are shaking up the traditional university. The evolution of online learning has forced business schools to rethink how they deliver their content. Tech has enabled schools to provide flexible learning solutions by beaming lectures directly to computers and mobile devices.

http://www.businessbecause.com/news/mba-distance-learning/3305/blended-online-and-campus-learning-embraced

BY GREGORY L. FENVES, 29th President of UT Austin, the Star-Telegram

A goal of any higher education institution should also be to influence and energize the greater society. Innovating excellence culminates by doing that — transforming lives by sharing our many resources. We will employ premier online learning programs for students and learners beyond campus. We will cultivate our vast cultural collections, make our arts available to all who are interested and ensure that our athletics teams continue their tradition of winning with integrity.

http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/other-voices/article23248470.html

by Sarah Marsh, the Guardian

Principal Isora Bailey says her school in lower Manhattan was designed to be a school for the future. It would be easy to walk past the New York iSchool without giving it much thought. The small grey-bricked building in lower Manhattan looks like just another public (state) high school, but behind its light blue doors a new approach to education is being pioneered. Seven years ago New York’s state government set the school’s founders the challenge of rethinking the high school experience for the digital age. They hoped it would act as a model for other schools in the city to follow. The woman who has led this revolutionary approach for the past three years is principal Isora Bailey. She says the main ways they met the brief was by changing how they use their time – mixing online learning with traditional teaching – and re-evaluating what they teach beyond the curriculum.

http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/jun/07/the-new-york-ischool-reinventing-the-high-school-experience

by LAURA MCKENNA, the Atlantic

Imagine meeting your English professor by the trunk of her car for office hours, where she doles out information like a taco vendor in a food truck. Or getting an e-mail error message when you write your former biology professor asking for a recommendation because she is no longer employed at the same college. Or attending an afternoon lecture in which your anthropology professor seems a little distracted because he doesn’t have enough money for bus fare. This is an increasingly widespread reality of college education. Many students—and parents who foot the bills—may assume that all college professors are adequately compensated professionals with a distinct arrangement in which they have a job for life. In actuality those are just tenured professors, who represent less than a quarter of all college faculty.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/the-cost-of-an-adjunct/394091/