Tandberg, Cisco and Lecture Capture

The October 1 announcement of Cisco’s offer of $3 billion to buy the video conferencing company Tandberg could potentially have significant implications in the lecture capture market. …

Lecture and presentation capture will be as important in the higher education space as video conferencing is in the enterprise (and increasingly small business) sectors. Tools, platforms and services to easily record campus activity – whether this activity is a regular lecture, an invited speaker, or a voice-over recording made from a professors desk – are poised to become ubiquitous on campus. Students will expect the ability to time shift their learning. Faculty will come to understand that recorded presentations offer the potential to free class time for discussion and debate, as students escape the pressure of having to take exhaustive notes during the lecture. Parents will look for schools that record lectures as an aid to their child’s learning, as students with diverse learning style can take advantage of recorded classes to review materials at their own pace.

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An Experiment Takes Off

When Karen Symms Gallagher ran into fellow education deans last year, many of them were “politely skeptical,” the University of Southern California dean says (politely), about her institution’s experiment to take its master’s program in teaching online.

Many of them seemed to appreciate Gallagher’s argument that the traditional model of teacher education programs had largely failed to produce the many more top-notch teachers that California (and so many other states) desperately needed. But could a high-quality MAT program be delivered online? And through a partnership with a for-profit entity (2Tor), no less? Really?

Early results about the program known as MAT@USC have greatly pleased Gallagher and USC. One hundred forty-four students enrolled in the Rossier School of Education program’s first full cohort in May, 50 percent more than anticipated and significantly larger than the 100 students who started at that time in the traditional master’s in teaching program on the university’s Los Angeles campus.

And this month, a new group of 302 students started in the second of three planned “starts” per year, meaning that USC has already quadrupled the number of would-be teachers it is educating this year and, depending on how many students enroll in January, is on track to increase it a few times more than that.

It will be a while — years, probably, until outcomes on teacher certification exams are in and the program’s graduates have been successful (or not) in the classroom — before questions about the program’s quality and performance are fully answered (though officials there point out that the technology platform, like much online learning software, provides steady insight into how successfully students are staying on track). But USC officials say that short of quantitative measures such as those, they believe the online program is attracting equally qualified students and is providing an education that is fully equivalent to Rossier’s on-ground master’s program — goals that the institution viewed as essential so as not to “dilute the brand” of USC’s well-regarded program.

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How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can’t easily improve efficiency.

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can’t cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then — before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world’s largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world’s largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.

But higher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT’s courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation’s students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world’s most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. “Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies,” says Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at Virginia’s University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days’ growth of beard, coined the term “edupunk” to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. “Edupunk,” he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, “is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing
their own mission.”

The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that’s structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor’s degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.

The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores. “If universities can’t find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them,” professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, “universities will be irrelevant by 2020.”

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A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. … Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. …

This doesn’t just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

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What Doomed Global Campus?

By now, the University of Illinois Global Campus–an exclusively online branch of the Illinois system designed to offer high-demand degree programs to non-residential students–was supposed to be well on its to way to enrolling 9,000 students by 2012, and 70,000 by 2018. It was going to be a giant step into the 21st Century; proof that a traditional public university can use Web-only courses to educate non-traditional students on a large scale. It was also going to be a cash cow.

Instead, it’s kaput. The university system’s board voted in May to phase out the embattled project by New Year’s, rolling its remaining 500-odd students into existing programs in the system that offer online courses.

Global Campus was conceived as a separately accredited entity that would eventually enroll as many students as the other University of Illinois campuses combined. It was meant to be a win-win: the university dramatically expands access to its vast resources and well-regarded degrees, while generating tons of revenue à la University of Phoenix Online.

The initial vision for Global Campus was akin to that of the most successful of private for-profit institutions: The project would appropriate syllabuses and course materials from its professors, reorganize them into its course management system, then hire outside instructors totally off the tenure track to teach. But that plan was rejected by the faculty senate at each of the three campuses. The professors insisted on a not-for-profit model that would not seek independent accreditation and would offer courses through existing programs on the university campuses; they also insisted on supervising their courses.

With few courses being developed by faculty, Global Campus was unable to grow its enrollment at the ambitious pace it had set for itself. At the time the trustees nixed it, the project had half the programs it had hoped to have after two years.

… [O]ne of Illinois’s biggest missteps was to spend large sums right away building an independent administrative structure from scratch, before the academic programs were in place. That huge upfront investment increased the pressure to show speedy returns, he said, thereby creating a need for speedy program development, which was contingent upon the for-profit model of buying syllabuses and hiring cheap instructors. When the faculty used its clout to burden Global Campus with the anchor of curricular oversight, speedy returns went out the window.

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The Wall Street Journal Weighs in on the Value of a Certificate Program

In Search of Cachet
Online programs from top-notch schools gain, as students look to add luster to their résumés

Many people are finding there’s a way to get some of the benefits of an M.B.A. degree from a top-flight school but at a fraction of the usual cost. They’re heading online.

Instead of sitting in a classroom, they’re taking career-specific courses and certificate programs over the Web that enable them to put a prestigious name on their résumé without breaking the bank or upending their schedule.

Consider Benjamin Berry, a project-management consultant in Eugene, Ore. Late last year, the 45-year-old noticed that the market for his type of work was drying up but the price tag and time commitment deterred him from going back to school for an M.B.A. So, he enrolled in a $3,200 certificate program from eCornell, the online arm of Cornell University.

Mr. Berry, who received his undergraduate degree from Presbyterian College in Atlanta, says the program was an inexpensive way to gain Ivy League credibility. “A lot of people out here have never heard of Presbyterian College, but everyone knows Cornell University,” he says.

A Full Class

In addition to Cornell, such well-known schools as Boston University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California at Berkeley have introduced business-related certificates to their online offerings. A handful of other big schools, such as the University of Notre Dame, the University of San Francisco, Tulane and Villanova, are offering certificate programs through partnerships with University Alliance, a Tampa-based group that provides the marketing and technology for schools’ online efforts.

University Alliance has seen jumps in enrollment at all of its partner schools recently, according to Amit Sharan, the group’s assistant brand manager for business-certificate programs. The people choosing these programs “need relevant skills that they can attain, and apply, immediately,” Mr. Sharan says.

What’s more, large companies are partnering with prestigious schools to develop online programs to train and retain employees. At eCornell, 60% of students take classes through corporate partnerships, says eCornell’s president and CEO, Chris Proulx. “Our students are professionals looking to advance their career in an accelerated way,” he says.

One of the school’s most popular certificates is in hotel revenue management. Cornell University’s hotel-management program is widely regarded as top tier, and the certificate gives nondegree students the opportunity to engage with professors from the full-time program. The 23 eCornell certificate programs cost $2,000 to $6,000 about the same as students would pay for similar in-person programs.

For Mark Delisi, director of corporate responsibility at Computer Sciences Corp. and former head of the company’s Leadership Academy, a partnership with eCornell over the past six years has been a success. Initially, he says, the company was looking for an Ivy League executive-education program for senior executives in the company who are spread out around the globe. Later, Computer Sciences expanded it to include managers.

“Content-wise, access-wise, [the online program] is as good if not better than the in-person experience,” Mr. Delisi says. Inside the company, he adds, the program is seen as “clearly adding value; it’s helping our executives and senior-level people do their jobs better.”

At Your Convenience

For workers, the programs offer a number of advantages. Chad Pollitt, who works for DigitalHill.com, a Web-design and marketing firm in Goshen, Ind., says an online certificate was the only way to advance his marketing career, because there weren’t any schools nearby offering a program. He could “study any time of day and anywhere in the world,” he says.

The Internet marketing certificate, through the University of San Francisco and University Alliance, cost $6,000 and took about 100 hours and 12 weeks to complete. Students could choose to participate in real-time class sessions or review the lectures later on their computers.

“My boss was skeptical at first because our industry is constantly changing,” says Mr. Pollitt. “Once I started bringing the ‘latest and greatest’ strategies and methodologies from the program to work, he became a believer.”

Mr. Pollitt credits the program with helping him double his sales, and he adds that early on in his course work, co-workers began coming to him with their Internet marketing questions. “It’s made me, our team and our company more successful,” he says.

Another upside of programs from well-known universities is the perception that they are more rigorous and high level than some other online offerings something critics often argued was lacking from upstart online programs. “These are not ‘book in a box’ programs,” says University Alliance’s Mr. Sharan. “They are taught by the university’s faculty, and in order to receive a certificate of completion, the student must complete a mastery exam.”

Of course, not every online program is worthwhile, and online certificates aren’t for everyone, says John Fernandes, president and CEO of AACSB International, the main accrediting body for business schools. Students should have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve, he says. “You need to do your homework. Ask yourself, ‘What is this course yielding for the starting point of future employment?’ “

Executive recruiter Nancy Keene agrees. “No matter what school, it is important to know the brand of the school, what it might add to your [qualifications] package and how it will be received by your target hiring managers,” says Ms. Keene, a director in Stanton Chase International’s Dallas office.

She suggests contacting hiring managers and graduates of the program to find out how valuable the certificates have proved in the workplace before signing up. If the program checks out, Ms. Keene adds, a targeted certificate can be especially valuable when recruiters ask what you’ve been doing while laid off.

In the early summer of 2009 eCornell was approached by the Wall Street Journal requesting interviews from our students on the value of a Certificate vs. a Degree:

A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive. The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999.

Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters’ pay is vanishing. Colleges also sell information, with a slightly different promise — a degree, a better job and access to brilliant minds. As with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere. A student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other “students,” and links to free academic literature.

Online qualifications cost a college less to provide. Schools don’t need to rent the space, and the glut of doctoral students means they can pay instructors a fraction of the salary for a tenured professor, and assume that they will rely on shared syllabuses. Those savings translate into cheaper tuition … Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.

Just as the new model of news separated “the article” from “the newspaper,” the new model of college will separate “the class” from “the college.” Classes are increasingly taken credit by credit, instead of in bulk–just as news is now read article by article.

Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. … At noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States. … The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

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New Player in Course Management Software

It’s Learning, Inc., a Norwegian company, is looking to take a share of the U.S. market from Blackboard and other top learning-management software providers after cornering the learning-management markets in Norway and Britain, and gaining “substantial” shares in Sweden, Denmark, and Holland.

The company caters to professors who put a special emphasis on personal attention in the classroom. Many classrooms — especially those at community colleges — include students with a broad range of capabilities, said Jonathan A. Bower, the president of the U.S. branch of It’s Learning. And while Blackboard “does a superb job of supporting the delivery of lessons in the classic fashion” — that is, to everybody at once — it is less useful for professors who wish to simultaneously challenge advanced students and reach those who may need remediation.

“Instead of creating one assignment for everybody,” Bower said, “as I get to know my students, what I can do is create supplemental assignments, remedial assignments, extra credit assignments,” and assign them to different students — or groups of students, in a large classroom — in order to “deliver a dramatically more individual, nuanced, and ultimately successful individual experience.”

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eCornell Programs Eligible for National Emergency Grants

eCornell is a NY state eligible training provider under the Federal
National Emergency Grant (NEG) program which is designed to help former
employees of 31 financial service businesses who were dislocated as a
result of the mass layoffs in 2008.

Each individual displaced from their position after May 31, 2008 can qualify for a grant up to $12,500 worth of career training.

eCornell is registered with the New York State Board of Education and is eligible to administer training to those who qualify.

Eligible employers:

Alliance Berstein LPBank Hapoalim
Bank of America NABank of New York
Barclays Capital, Inc.Bear Stearns & Co. Inc.
Capital One National Assoc.Citibank NA
Citigroup Global MarketsCommerce Bank
Countrywide Funding CorporationCredit Suisse Securities
Financial Guaranty Insurance CompanyUBS Securities
Goldman, Sachs & CompanyHSBC Bank USA National Assoc.
Indymac BankJP Morgan Chase
JP Morgan Chase Bank NAJP Morgan Securities, Inc.
Lehman Brothers, Inc.McGraw Hill Company
Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & SmithMerrill Lynch
Morgan StanleyRadian Asset Assurance, Inc.
Teachers Insurance & Annuity Assoc.UBS Investment Bank
GE Capital Corporation/Citi CapitalUniCredit Banca di Roma
Washington Mutual Bank

Going for Distance

Online education is no longer a peripheral phenomenon at public universities, but many academic administrators are still treating it that way.

So says a comprehensive study released today by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) and the Sloan National Commission on Online Learning, which gathered survey responses from more than 10,700 faculty members and 231 interviews with administrators, professors, and students at APLU institutions.

According to the study, professors are open to teaching online courses (defined in the study as courses where at least 80 percent of the course is administered on the Web), but do not believe they are receiving adequate support from their bosses. On the whole, respondents to the faculty survey rated public universities “below average” in seven of eight categories related to online education, including support for online course development and delivery, protection of intellectual property, incentives for developing and delivering online courses, and consideration of online teaching activity in promotion and tenure decisions.

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