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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.”

Read the full article.

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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
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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.

Read the full article.

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Textbooks on the iPhone

The e-textbook company CourseSmart is making its books available on the iPhone through a deal with Apple, the Wall Street Journal reported. While company officials don’t expect students to do heavy reading on their handheld devices, the application will make the full electronic texts and digital notes accessible when students are looking for answers in study groups, for example, they say.

(To read the full article, you must subscribe to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal.)

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Obama’s Great Course Giveaway

Clues to a grand online-education plan emerge from the college and the experts that may have inspired it

Logan Stark’s classmates scramble for courses with professors who top instructor-rating Web sites. But when the California Polytechnic State University student enrolled in a biochemistry class on the San Luis Obispo campus, he didn’t need to sweat getting the best.

It was practically guaranteed. That’s because much of the class was built by national specialists, not one Cal Poly professor. It’s a hybrid of online and in-person instruction. When Mr. Stark logs in to the course Web site at midnight, a bowl of cereal beside his laptop, he clicks through animated cells and virtual tutors, a digital domain designed by faculty experts and software engineers.

By the time Mr. Stark steps into the actual lecture hall, the Web site has alerted his professor to what parts of the latest lesson gave students trouble. That lets her focus class time on where they need the most help.

Mr. Stark’s class is one of about 300 around the world to use online course material—both the content and the software that delivers it—developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative. If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a free library available to colleges nationwide.

Read the full article.

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eCornell Announces New High Performance Leadership Certificate

eCornell has announced the launch of Cornell University Professor Samuel Bacharach’s newest online certificate program, High Performance Leadership.  Bacharach, the McKelvey-Grant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Cornell’s ILR School and director of Cornell ILR’s Institute for Workplace Studies, developed this ten-course certificate program to develop the critical skills leaders need to execute and get things done in organizations.

“This program is for managers and leaders who are already experts in their functional areas,” says Bacharach. “It is for people who know what they want to do but don’t have the proactive leadership skills to do it. In order to operate and succeed in their organizations, high-performance leaders need to be able to be able to mobilize coalitions, maintain momentum, negotiate for results, coach others to achieve their potential, and above all, execute. This program teaches those skills.”

High Potential Leadership continues Bacharach’s work asking “What makes leadership work?” and developing rigorous and relevant courses to develop the skills necessary to lead at the highest levels. This program complements Bacharach’s first eCornell certificate program, Change Leadership, by adding courses in negotiations and coaching.

Bacharach is an active blogger on leadership issues at the Bacharach Blog.

Read the certificate description to learn more about High Performance Leadership.

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Obama Administration Pushes for Free Online Classes

The Obama administration is putting the final touches on a proposal to award federal funds to high schools and community colleges to develop free online courses. The program is part of a series of efforts to help community colleges
reach more students and to link basic skills education to job training. A formal announcement could come in the next few weeks. Read the full article.

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Kansas Is First Public University to Go Open Access

The University of Kansas is becoming the first public university–following moves by all or parts of institutions such as Harvard and Stanford Universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology–to make all faculty journal articles available free in digital form. Chancellor Robert Hemenway proposed the policy, which was endorsed by the Faculty Senate. The articles will be placed in KU ScholarWorks, a digital repository. Open access advocates see the creation of such repositories as a way to spread knowledge at a time that many journal subscriptions are too expensive for many academic institutions or individuals.

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Blackboard Loses on Appeal

On July 27, 2009, a federal appeals court invalidated Blackboard Inc.’s 1999 patent for its learning management software, overturning a lower court’s decision last year finding that the Blackboard competitor Desire2Learn had infringed the giant’s intellectual property.

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Monday’s ruling by the appeals court is the latest development in a several-year court battle initiated by Blackboard in July 2006. The behemoth accused Desire2Learn of infringing dozens of Blackboard patents for online course management and e-learning technologies, and sought $17 million in damages and an injunction barring the Canadian company from continuing to infringe the patent.

After a two-week trial in Lufkin, Texas, a jury in a district court seen as friendly to patent holders ruled that Desire2Learn’s learning platform used technologies for which Blackboard received U.S. patents, known collectively as the ” ‘138 patent,” in January 2006. But its verdict gave the company far less than it was asking for, awarding Blackboard $2.5 million for lost profits and $630,000 in royalties. The district court invalidated 35 of the 38 claims that Blackboard made against Desire2Learn, but backed three other claims related to what constitutes a “user” of a learning management system.

Both companies appealed the parts of the case they’d lost to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has nationwide jurisdiction over U.S. patent claims. Its highly technical decision upheld the lower court’s conclusion that Blackboard’s claims 1-35 were invalid. But the three-judge panel rejected the lower court’s finding that Blackboard’s patented learning system had originated the approach of giving a single user with a single log-in multiple roles, such as being a teacher in one course and a student in another.

But Blackboard has already initiated another lawsuit against Desire2Learn, accusing the Canadian firm in April of infringing new U.S. patents that the company received on its software. So while company officials continue to reassure higher education technology officials and others that Blackboard has no intention of asserting its patent rights against “open source or home-grown course management systems that are not bundled with proprietary software,” they show no signs of retreating in the wake of Monday’s stinging defeat.

Read the full article.

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A Gripe Session at Blackboard

At an open “listening session” with top executives of Blackboard on July 15 at the company’s annual conference, college officials
expressed frustration with many of the system’s fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed to turn into a communal gripe session, with complaints ranging from the system’s discussion forum application, to the improved–but still lacking–user support, to the training materials for faculty members. Participants’ concerns were often greeted with nods of agreement and outright applause from their peers as they spoke of their frustrations with the system.

“Every time we have a migration [to an updated version of Blackboard], we have new features to figure out. You should be
providing us workable faculty materials with your product,” one commenter said amidst applause by those in the audience. “You put the burden on ourselves … and then create the documentation and then train. That’s why so many of us struggle to move forward to the next [version]. We are Blackboard on our campuses, and for us to be advocates, you have to give us the tools to be successful — training.” She emphasized that she would rather see more of a focus on fundamentals like training than updated versions of the software. The commenter also mentioned technical issues with the system that she believes need fixing.

Read the full article.