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NY Times Expands Involvement in Online Learning

The New York Times Company plans to continue its slow advance into the realm of higher education, teaming with with the University of Southern California this fall to offer continuing-education programs in an effort to tap a growing market of adults looking to pick up new skills.

The new programs will comprise sequences of online courses taught by USC faculty through the Times Company’s online learning platform. While the programs will not count toward any degree, they represent the media company’s first foray into multicourse online sequences intended to confer a coherent body of knowledge. And that is yet another step toward full-fledged degree programs, which are coming, according to Felice Nudelman, the company’s executive director of education.

The Times Company, which has seen its annual revenues fall by about 30 percent in the last five years, has waded into the waters of higher education more deliberately than some of its peers—most notably the Washington Post Company, which now pays for its journalism operations largely off the back of Kaplan Inc., one of the country’s largest degree-granting enterprises.

To the extent that credentials are what many online learners want for their money, the Times Company’s new collaboration with USC represents a step backward from the certificate programs it is undertaking with institutions such as Fairleigh Dickinson University and Ball State University.

But Nudelman says the Times believes there is also a market for lifelong learners who are willing to pay to learn for learning’s sake. USC already runs face-to-face, noncredit continuing education courses that it says are profitable. The idea would be for the Times Company to help USC increase the scale of those programs by offering them online, while bolstering them by letting instructors draw on the New York Timesarchive and occasionally tap Times journalists for guest lectures.

There will be seven programs and 40 courses total in the NYT/USC partnership. The programs are in architecture, arts and culture, cinematic arts, global health, American politics, business and leadership, and executive education in business. There will also be a program in journalism aimed at high school students. But for the most part, the programs are tailored toward students “probably in their mid-20s through late 50s,” says Eileen Kohan, executive director of continuing education at USC. The length and price vary by course, but most last about four weeks and cost between $195 and $275, she says. Courses commence October 13.

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Disruptive Innovation and Higher Education

Clayton M. Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, coined the term “disruptive innovation” in a series of books (among them The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution) that examined how technological changes altered existing markets for key products and services, usually by lowering prices or making them available to a different (and usually broader) audience. While Christensen’s early work focused on manufacturing industries and commercial services like restaurants, he and his colleagues, in their more recent studies, have turned to key social enterprises such as K-12 education and health care.

. . . [W]hile the complex and multifaceted higher education “system” has grown and expanded its role over time, the authors argue, it has done so largely without any major disruption to the pattern in which colleges and universities are rewarded largely based on selectivity, research and wealth. Given that definition of “quality,” reinforced by rankings and other proxy measures, most institutions join the chase up that ladder.

Though those circumstances have “rendered higher education impossible to disrupt in the past,” the situation is changing, the authors write. Policy makers are demanding that they enroll and successfully educate many more students at a time when their “economic model is already broken”—with public pressure mounting against increasing tuitions and their ability to use “government dollars, . . . endowments and gifts . . . to paper over cost increases” waning, Horn said.

That environment creates an opening for the “disruptive innovation” that has unfolded in so many other industries, from airlines to health care, the authors write. . . . This is typically accomplished through what the authors call an “upwardly scalable technology driver.”

A set of institutions—many, but not all, of them for-profit—have grown significantly over the years by embracing online education more than their peers. Online learning, the authors write, “constitutes such a technology driver” and is essential, they say, as policy makers shift their focus away from “how we can enable more students to afford higher education no matter the cost” and toward “how we can make a quality postsecondary education affordable.”

The key question the authors pose is whether traditional institutions can adapt themselves enough to fill this role or “whether community colleges, for-profit universities and other entrant organizations aggressively using online learning will do it instead — and ultimately grow to replace many of today’s traditional institutions.”

. . . [T]he report acknowledges . . . that the expansion-through-disruption they envision will be meaningful and productive only if students receive an education that is both affordable and of high quality “that delivers on a student’s given job.”

One possible way to do so, the authors write, would be to create a new index that would allow innovative institutions to gain access to federal student aid not through accreditation, but by meeting a new set of metrics.

The “quality-value index formula,” as they call it, would rate an institution on four measures:

  • Its 90-day job-placement or school-placement rate.
  • A ratio determined through dividing the increase in its students’ salaries over a period of time after leaving the college by a measure of students’ cost (such as the total cost of attendance or revenue per student).
  • An alumni satisfaction rating (“would you repeat your experience at X university?”).
  • Its cohort default rate.

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Open Courseware Initiatives Confront Sustainability Challenge

Online education, all but cleansed of its original stigma, has become commonplace. This is especially true among big public universities, which have clamored to capitalize on new markets by enrolling far-flung students. The University of Massachusetts and Penn State University rake in tens of millions of dollars each year from their online programs. The University of California is considering using online education to help recoup the revenue lost to massive cuts in state funding.

But at elite private universities, the online revolution has unfolded differently. . . . Faced with the choice of either offering degrees online at a price or giving away courses for free, the elites took the road less traveled: they would publish the raw materials — and in some cases videotaped lectures — for certain courses on the Web, but would not offer online pathways for their coveted degrees.

Hundreds of millions of non-enrolled visitors, from nearly every country, have availed themselves of free online courseware from top American universities. Some are professors at foreign universities looking to model their own curriculums on the best of the West. In this light, free online courseware might be seen as a game-changing effort to level the playing field of international higher education.

In Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access to Their Courses (Princeton University Press), author Taylor Walsh profiles current online courseware projects at MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at Berkeley, and India’s National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. She also reviews the cautionary tales of Fathom and AllLearn, the profit-seeking harbingers of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, and thus lays out the conundrum facing their nominally successful offspring: As pressure mounts on online courseware projects to demonstrate their value and/or become self-supporting, will the world’s premier universities be able to stay above the fray of online degree programs and pay-to-play course materials? Can they afford to stay pure, righteous, and unaccountable?

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Online Exams and Cheating

The results of a new meta-study on cheating, published in this fall’s edition of the Journal of Distance Learning Administration, indicate that online courses that rely heavily on unproctored, multiple-choice exams are at greater risk of being cheated on than similar face-to-face courses. And while there are mechanisms available to forfend dishonesty in online exams, they can be costly and inconvenient, and may not be widely used.

The meta-study, conducted by researchers at University of Connecticut and Union Graduate College, looked at three prior studies examining cheating as it applies to online courses versus face-to-face, and three studies that looked at cheating as it applies to proctored exams compared to unproctored ones. “The six studies, considered as a group, imply cheating risk is less correlated with instructional format (online v. face-to-face), and more correlated with unproctored online assessments,” the authors write.

The problem, of course, is that online assessments can be hard to proctor. There are companies that offer proctors and testing centers where online students can go to take the exams in the same controlled environment as traditional students customarily use, the authors note. But those centers and proctors come with fees. And since many online students choose distance learning because they need the flexibility of a program that is asynchronous and non-placebound, having to show up at a certain time and place to take exams tends to defeat the purpose.

The efforts of many online programs to enroll international students might also undermine the secure-site method. For an online student taking a course from some far-flung locale, showing up at a testing center could go beyond mere inconvenience.

Software companies provide some potential fixes for the problem of proctoring online exams. Starting at $2,000 for an institutional license, a company called Respondus offers a product, which can be downloaded remotely, that integrates with the institution’s learning-management system and locks down an online test-taker’s ability to browse the Internet while taking an exam.

Of course, this does nothing to prevent students from Googling answers on another computer or on their smartphones — which is why another company, called Software Secure, Inc., offers similar anti-browsing software with its Securexam Remote Proctor — along with a $200 piece of hardware that takes periodic fingerprint readings as well as audio and 360-degree video recordings of the test-taking environment to make sure test-takers are not being fed answers the old-fashioned way.

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New Learning Platform from the University of Phoenix

In an effort ambitiously dubbed the “Learning Genome Project,” the for-profit powerhouse says it is building a new learning interface that gets to know each of its 400,000 students personally and adapts to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of their “learning DNA.”

Unlike analog forms of student profiling—such as surveys, which are only as effective as the students’ ability to diagnose their own learning needs—Phoenix’s Learning Genome Project will be designed to infer details about students from how they behave in the online classroom . . . If students grasp content more quickly when they learn it from a video than when they have to read a text, the system will feed them more videos. If a student is bad at interpreting graphs, the system will recognize that and present information accordingly—or connect the student with another Phoenix student who is better at graph-reading. The idea is to take the model of personal attention now only possible in the smallest classrooms and with the most responsive professors, make it even more perceptive and precise, and scale it to the largest student body in higher education.

. . . [I]n order to make the platform as flexible as it needs to be, Phoenix plans to phase out its current in-house learning management system and build the new one with open-source tools. It even plans to share some (but not all) of what it builds with other institutions . . .

Being so attentive for all its students at once will require a lot of data processing; whether the system—as Phoenix envisions it—can work reliably at scale remains to be seen. In any case . . . it will be expensive to make. And then there are the inevitable privacy issues: Some Facebook users have become more guarded in recent years about the personal data they feed the system due to concerns about how that data might be used; one could imagine a similar backlash against an online learning platform built on the same principles. A for-profit company that collects data not only on what students like but also on how their minds work might make some people uneasy. (. . . Phoenix is committed to “ethical use of the data” and letting students choose how much information they submit.)

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Results of 2010 Campus Computing Survey

Blackboard keeps losing market share to competitors. Information technology departments keep losing money to budget cuts—though not as many as last year. E-books, despite modest gains, are still marginal. Mobile apps and lecture capture are poised to explode.

These are among the findings of the 2010 Campus Computing Survey, the latest edition of the Campus Computing Project’s annual census. The organization released the new data, which are based on questionnaires filled out over the last month or so by technology leaders at 523 different nonprofit institutions, amid the hubbub of the EDUCAUSE 2010 conference.

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Arizona State Announces Partnership with Pearson to Deliver Online Learning

With budgets tight and the commercial market flush with companies willing to take on various tasks that come with running a university, it has become relatively common for institutions to outsource parts of their operations to outside companies.

It is less common for a public university to entrust an outsider with such a wide swath of duties that it calls that private company an equal partner in online education. But Arizona State University announced on Monday that it is doing just that with Pearson, the education and media company.

Under the agreement, the Arizona State faculty will teach online courses through Pearson’s learning management platform, LearningStudio, using the tools embedded in that platform to collect and analyze data in hopes of improving student performance and retention. Pearson will also help with enrollment management and “prospect generation,” while providing more “customer-friendly” support services for students, the university says.

Arizona State, meanwhile, says it will retain control over all things academic, including instruction and curriculum development.

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Battle for the Lecture-capture Market Heats Up

As higher ed technology leaders convene today in Anaheim for the annual meeting of Educause, the battle for the lecture-capture market is growing more intense—and the definition of the market may be changing as well.

At Educause a year ago, there was still debate regarding how to win over faculty members skeptical of lecture capture—a service in which class lectures are recorded and preserved in a digital library, frequently with additional materials such as relevant slides, quizzes or summaries. This year, the pre-meeting buzz has been less about debating whether lecture capture will take off than over which companies and which approaches are mostly likely to succeed. Some lecture-capture companies are aligning themselves with big publishers—while others say they are content not to.

One publisher-lecture capture partnership—Macmillan and Panopto—will today announce a plan to start pushing a business model in which individual faculty members would be sold on lecture capture and pass on the costs to students in the form of a low-cost licensing fee ($10 per student per course). The professors would assign a lecture capture purchase much the same way a textbook is assigned. While some in the industry see this as a way to expand lecture capture quickly beyond institutions that will pay for institution-wide licenses, others question whether this could anger students, and in turn frustrate professors who want to use the technology.

The Macmillan/Panopto push (which is a collaboration, not a merger or purchase) comes a week after McGraw-Hill Education purchased Tegrity, a lecture-capture company. . . .

The companies involved in lecture capture did tens of millions of dollars of business with higher education in the last year, and are expecting significant growth for the next five years, as more faculty members and more institutions embrace the concept.

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Making Online Learning Accessible to the Blind

Online learning is often heralded as a way to make college an option for people who would not otherwise have the money or mobility to access it. But for blind students, online learning can present more obstacles than opportunities — especially as e-learning materials become more technologically sophisticated. . . .

That new types of course content being developed for online learning might create accessibility problems is not a new revelation. But the courts have made little progress toward defining and enforcing accessibility standards for online education in the last decade, even as online degree programs have proliferated and been adopted into mainstream higher education. Only in the last few months has the federal government hinted that online education, and technological innovations associated with it, might soon face legal scrutiny.

In the meantime, advocates for the blind are worried that it is becoming harder for the assistive technology used by blind students to keep pace with advances in educational technology. “Dynamic” e-learning content — e.g., graphics that change as a user rolls over or clicks on different parts — could present huge challenges to blind students, says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation for the Blind, or NFB. Figuring out how translate static tables and diagrams for blind students was trouble enough, he says; it is not yet clear how to deal with newer, more interactive e-learning objects that may soon pervade online education. . . .

The chances of a successful lawsuit might become clearer sometime in the next year or two. The Department of Justice has suggested that it might soon articulate exactly what kind of legal recourse blind and otherwise disabled students have with respect to the accessibility of online courses. Last month, the department issued several notices, saying it is collecting public comment on a number of topics related to accessibility and the Web in preparation to lay out the specific obligations of various institutions under federal law.

In June, the Justice Department and the Education Department jointly released a “dear colleague” letter to colleges, warning them that the government plans to crack down on institutions that require disabled students to use emerging technology that does not comply with federal accessibility laws. This, again, did not explicitly mention online education, but Bridges says it was a shot across the bow.

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Continuing Debate Over Online Education

A new paper by the Community College Research Center has re-examined and challenged the studies that theDepartment of Education used in a meta-analysis that stated “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”—a conclusion that received much attention and applause among advocates for online education.

But the Education Department’s analysis was flawed, according to Shanna Smith Jaggars, lead author of the CCRC paper and a senior research associate at the Columbia University center. Based on its review of the data, the CCRC concluded that online learning in higher education is no more effective than face-to-face learning.

The CCRC report states that the Department of Education analysis’ flaws lie in the student populations studied and the conditions of the online courses. The meta-analysis examined the results of 51 published studies that looked at the effects of online versus face-to-face education. Of these, however, only 28 compared face-to-face courses with fully online courses. (The third option, hybrid courses, had most of the students experiencing as much face-to-face class time as they would in a normal course.)

The paper also states that most of these 28 courses studied contained conditions unrepresentative of typical college classes. Most of them looked at short educational programs (as short as 15 minutes) instead of semester-long courses, and some examined online learning in elementary schools or with postgraduate professionals. As a result, Jaggars narrowed the pool to only seven studies that accurately reflected fully-online learning in a college or university setting.

According to the report, these seven online courses “showed no strong advantage or disadvantage in terms of learning outcomes among the samples of students under study.”  . . .

But comparing online to face-to-face learning may not be the best approach to assessing online education, says John Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium, a group of colleges and other organizations that work on online education issues.

“I am exceptionally dubious of studies that tend to compare online education and on-the-ground education without even an attempt to understand the differences in the mechanisms of teaching,” he said, adding that he thinks both reports are flawed, albeit interesting. “The jury is absolutely still out on this, and I don’t believe for a minute that it’s about the delivery mechanism, but what the affordances are of the delivery.”

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