MOOCs Will Grow Up, Must Become Sustainable

Burck Smith, CEO and founder of online education firm StraighterLine, may be showing his age in his recent blog post. After all, he references Marky-Mark, the leader of a 1990s hip-hop group who ultimately grew up into award-winning actor Mark Wahlberg.

Smith’s point is that massive open online courses (MOOCs) will almost certainly grow up, just as Wahlberg did, once the excitement of the moment dissipates. When that happens, firms such as Coursera and Udacity are going to have to produce revenue, which will likely mean they will no longer be massive, open, or free.

“As providers of open content and open courseware have recognized over the past 15 years, simply making content free doesn’t change the dynamics of the higher education market at all,” Smith wrote. “Further, free content isn’t very good business, just ask the newspaper industry—and their content changes every day.”

Students earning credit for online courses taken will be the key to sustainability.

“Only those who have created a low-cost, low-risk pathway to credit will have results to show,” Smith continued. “It is the hard work necessary to create this pathway that transforms flash-in-the-pan Marky-Mark organizational models to mature and sustainable Mark Wahlberg ones.”

K-12 Schools Trying Out Tablets

A growing number of K-12 school districts, anxious to save money while preparing students for 21st-century work, are purchasing iPads in lieu of print textbooks and sometimes instead of desktop computers. Districts view the tablets as more budget-friendly than computers and more versatile than books for class use.

Across the U.S., there are tales such as this one in Seattle where the district decided all 181 middle-school youngsters should bring their own iPads to class this year. Students who couldn’t afford to buy one could borrow from a pool of 100 tablets bought with funds originally designated to replace several computers.

According to an investors’ report cited by C/Net, PC sales to the K-12 market are dwindling at about the same rate as K-12 iPad sales are rising, indicating schools are switching to tablets. They’re not just buying iPads, either.

Kuno, a tablet created specifically for K-12 use by the CurriculumLoft company, is among the Android gadgets competing head-to-head with the iPad for school sales. Business2Community says Kuno is attractive to district decision-makers because its base model costs 25% less than an iPad and it comes with built-in filters to protect kids from accidentally (or intentionally) accessing web content they shouldn’t.

Samsung is also working with Memphis, TN, schools on a new tablet system geared to K-12 grades. Each tablet comes with a stylus that lets students hand-write notes, which can be converted to type and saved.

Why are tablets getting all the attention from school districts and not e-readers such as the Kindle or the Nook, given their lower price point? In the view of Good E-Reader blogger Michael Kozlowski, it’s mainly because most e-readers lack text-to-speech software for vision-impaired pupils and can be more cumbersome to use.

MOOCs on a Smaller Scale

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have become big news in higher education. Tens of thousands of students are taking advantage of the free, not-for-credit courses offered by some of the most prestigious universities in the nation.

Now, throw LOOCs and anti-MOOCs into the mix.

LOOCs, or little open online courses, are being tested at the University of Maine, Presque Isle. The pilot program, called OpenU, offers four online courses open to between two and seven online students for free, in addition to the regular paying students taking the class. The online students get no formal credit for completing the course, but, unlike MOOCs, can receive personalized responses from instructors on assignments and tests.

“Students are not paying, but they are getting the full experience,” said Presque Isle Provost Michael Sonntag in an article about the program in Inside Higher Education. “If they want to write every paper and take every test, our faculty members have agreed to give them feedback.”

There are even ways for students to receive some credit for the course. OpenU students can earn up to six credit hours through the UMPI prior-learning program if they enroll in the school, according to the university web site.

The UnderAcademy College appears at first to be a joke, with courses such as Grammar Porn and Underwater Procrastination and Advance Desublimation Techniques. However, it is also “offering serious content taught by professors at some well-known institutions,” according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

UnderAcademy offers classes limited to 15 students. The goal is to deliver quality liberal arts and humanity classes by providing “students with the opportunity to focus on the process of learning and control the courses themselves rather than worry about the end product,” Talan Memmott, founder of UnderAcademy and lecturer of digital culture and communications at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

“Based on some spirit of humor that seemed to underlie everything, I assumed it was largely a joke,” said Mark C. Marino, associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California, who taught his “Grammar Porn” class last spring. “But Talan would say that this project is research into alternative pedagogical practices that are collaborative, less hierarchical, and take place online. That piqued my interest.”

Course Builder Brings Google into Online Education

Google is taking a step into online education with the release of open-source software called Course Builder. According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the search giant has talked to edX, the partnership between Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley that is already offering free massive open online courses. Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, told The Chronicle it has also reached out to Stanford University.

“We’re close with Stanford—Coursera and Udacity both came out of Stanford,” Norvig said. “They’re working on their own open-source project, and they’re also interested in working with us. I think schools are experimenting and they don’t know quite yet what they want to do.”

Google attracted 155,000 registered students during the summer with its Power Searching software.  Course Builder is designed to package the software and technology used in Power Searching to create online courses that can include lessons, student activities, and assessments.

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Print-On-Demand Opportunity to Pilot

NACS Media Solutions (NMS) is seeking up to 25 college stores to participate in the next stage of its regional print-on-demand network service. NMS is trying to evaluate and fine-tune its R-POD network, which has been created to fulfill orders within two days and afford lower shipping costs through a regional print model.

To participate in the pilot program, college stores must have rights-negotiated content to print through the R-POD network and be willing to provide feedback. NMS does not provide any content licensing services.

Content will be submitted to NMS for inclusion in the POD catalog. The content can remain private and accessible only to the store submitting it, or can be public, depending on the option specified by each store in the pilot.

For formatting requirements and addition Regional POD information, go to www.nacsmediasolutions.com. To participate, contact Veronica Gancov, digital media project manager, at vgancov@nacs.org or (800) 622-7498, ext. 2343.

Dial 'S' for Smartphone Surge

At this point in the academic term, no doubt hundreds of professors are sick and tired of seeing students pull out their smartphones during class lectures. Profs may be fighting a losing battle.

NPD DisplaySearch, a market research firm, predicts some 567 million smartphones will be shipped this year, and that number will nearly double by 2016. Of this year’s shipments, close to 177 million will be to first-time smartphone owners, many of them teens and college students. As the baby boomlet (kids born to the famed Baby Boom generation) begins to peter out in the college enrollment ranks over the next few years, NPD sees the number of new smartphone buyers dwindling somewhat.

On the other hand, the number of people replacing existing smartphones with new, jazzy models will skyrocket. Because many people tend to buy new phones whenever their current two-year mobile contract is up, it’s expected phone manufacturers will work with carriers to offer shorter contract periods to encourage more frequent upgrades.

Faculty might as well get used to the fact that students will bring—and use—these devices in the classroom. But they’re not the only ones who need to get up to speed.

The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Europe blog reports that a study by London-based investment banking firm GP Bullhound shows many companies, particularly retailers, haven’t built mobile apps and optimization into their e-commerce offerings yet. As a consequence, they may be missing out on sales. Purchases from mobile devices, according to the report, accounted for 11% of all 2011’s holiday season sales, almost twice as much as the year before.

Unlikely Trio Partnering on In-Store POD

An intriguing triad was announced recently. Kodak, the iconic film company still grappling with bankruptcy, is partnering with On Demand Books, maker of the Espresso print-on-demand book machine, and ReaderLink, distributor of books to nonbookstores, that is, discount stores, drugstores, and the like.

The threesome will be working together to merge Espresso’s book-printing functions with the image- and color-printing capabilities of Kodak’s photo kiosks. ReaderLink will help get the machines into the distribution channels where it already sells hard-copy books. Much of the focus, at least initially, will be on marketing the services to consumers or small groups who want to create photo books, such as family albums or local histories. Later, the emphasis may shift to providing access to backlist titles.

Publishers Weekly’s coverage of the announcement drew some skeptical remarks from commenters, who doubted the venture would get off the ground, given the availability of other services for creating custom books and for buying e-book versions of the backlist.

Kodak’s involvement was something of a surprise, as some have written off the company as near-dead. But back in May, the company’s POD group unveiled new workflow solutions for color printing. One drawback for the Espresso has been its inability to print color on inside pages. Kodak’s solution resolves that problem.

Who's Going to Pay for Online Education?

It’s been 20 years since the Michigan State University began its Computer-Assisted Personal Approach (CAPA) project.

Within five years, the award-winning program multi-media project that offers mostly science and math courses reached more than 6,000 students on the MSU campus and was available at 40 institutions nationwide. By 1999, it became a LON-CAPA (Learning Online Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach) program offered at more than 70 institutions that had received funding from the Sloan and Mellon Foundations.

The problem for online education, massive open online courses, and open-source software is not necessarily the funding. Firms are investing millions of dollars in these start-up firms, but the question remains if it’s a sustainable business model.

Gerd Kortemeyer, associate professor of physics, education, has seen how the project works as director of the LON-CAPA project at MSU and identifies the biggest question facing online learning is who’s going to pay for it? He talked about his concerns in a recent post on the Educause listserv:

A lot of bandwidth gets spent these days arguing that open education and free stuff is good … and that traditional colleges and textbooks are quickly approaching obsolescence. I am oscillating between enthusiasm and cynicism.

Our open-source content-sharing project, LON-CAPA, just celebrated its 20th anniversary: www.lon-capa.org/anniversary.html , and we are starting a successor project, www.courseweaver.org/.

Looking back over those 20 years, it's been an almost constant uphill battle for funding. Some money came from grants, but that model is inherently unsustainable: you can get money for new initiatives, but you cannot get grant funding to sustain something that works. Some research funding was even harmful to our project, as it made us do experimental stuff that did not benefit the majority of our users. The remainder of the funding has come from traditional colleges and universities.

Looking at MOOCs, open content, open-source software, etc., I still do not understand the business model, and I don't see it seriously discussed, except occasionally like in the Chronicle article about Coursera: http://chronicle.com/article/How-an-Upstart-Company-Might/133065/ —notice the "might" in the title.

Somebody in the end has to pay for salaries, retirement, health insurance, connectivity, hardware … at the moment, it seems like the business model is parasitic on traditional higher education. How is it going to move out of that mode?

My cynical self is reminded of the infamous dot-com business model: "We make a loss with every customer, so let's get more." Are we heading toward a dot-edu bubble? Please convince me of the opposite.

A good question, indeed.

Free Webinar on Professors and Technology

The new study Digital Faculty: Professors, Teaching and Technology, 2012, found that professors are excited about technology trends in education, including the growth of e-textbooks. This is the type of information that should be important to collegiate retailers as the industry moves forward.

Inside Higher Education is now offering a free hour-long webinar Sept. 24 at 2 p.m. Eastern to discuss the findings. The panel will be made up of Inside Higher Ed editor Scott Jaschik; Joshua Kim, a blogger for the publication and director of learning and technology, Dartmouth College; technology reporter Steve Kolowich; and Jeff Seaman, co-director, Babson Survey Research Group.

Registration information will be shared with sponsor companies CourseSmart, Deltak, Pearson, and Sonic Foundry.

Results Should be Interesting from Expanded E-Text Pilot

The results from the first round of the e-textbook pilot program from Internet2 and Educause showed students liked the savings and portability of digital content, but weren’t as thrilled with the reading experience or the fact that instructors often failed to use collaborative features built into the platform.

This fall, the program has been expanded from the original five schools to 26 nationwide, with each paying between $20,000 and $35,000 to collect feedback from the fall 2012 semester. While the 2012 pilots use McGraw-Hill Education e-titles on the Courseload software platform to replace paper books, Internet2 and Educause are planning a new test next year using multiple platforms and publishers.

“It’s important for higher education and, most importantly, for students to have options going forward,” said Shel Waggener, senior vice president for Internet2, in a Center for Digital Education article. “Now, we have the option to rethink the integration of content with the pedagogy with collaboration between students in very new ways.”

The pilots provide a way for the industry to work out issues such as accessibility, according to Waggener, who encourages other universities to jump on the e-textbook bandwagon.

“Universities should not sit on the sidelines and wait for this to become resolved because resolution is not going to be absolute; it’s going to be a continuum, and we all need to have a stake in the game to influence the outcomes,” he said.

Weggener acknowledged the college store in his “do and don’t” list in a blog post at Educause Review Online. Even though the reference is a “don’t,” his suggestions providesome thoughts stores might want to focus on. Since stores are not often invited to participate and more than half of the institutions in the fall 2012 pilot have independent campus stores, collegiate retailers need to find ways to be part of the discussion.

Big Investments Being Made in Online Education

Investing in online education has become big business. Since the beginning of September, news reports have surfaced of $5.7 million in venture capital going to a Chicago-based education startup called eSpark Learning. At the same time, the Canadian firm Desire2Learn reversed its strategy of not using external funding and raised $80 million.

eSpark, described by its founder and CEO as the Pandora radio for education, targets students in grades K-8. Students are given a custom playlist of apps and then asked to rate how much they like the app or how much they are learning, similar to the way Pandora listeners rate songs played, according to an article in TechCrunch.

Desire2Learn, which develops cloud-based learning systems, changed its funding strategy, in part, to keep up with the rapid pace of change in the online learning market. Blended learning programs, personalized learning, and open online courses have all contributed to that growth. Desire2Learn has responded by hiring 200 new employees in the past year, according to a report in Reuters.

Finally, the online educational startup Straighterline recently announced it will begin allowing college professors to attract online students to their for-credit courses through Straighterline and even set their own price for the course.

The company landed $10 million in investment capital last April and plans to use the funds to expand its marketing to institutions across the country. It already offers online learning in nearly 40 courses for a fee of $99 a month and a $39-per-course registration fee. Its long-term goal is to create a platform where students can pick and choose courses created by professors for credit.

“The idea is the student has those choices,” Burck Smith, founder of Straighterline, told The Baltimore Sun. “It’s really an experiment in creating a market for professors and students to meet up.”

The Pros of Mobile Learning

The web site Edudemic has been making its case for mobile learning for the last couple of months. The site started by pointing to a survey which found that 45% of students use their smartphones for learning, and then provided 10 real-world examples of schools putting the bring-your-own-technology idea to work in their classrooms.

The Edudemic argument for mobile learning continued with its four big reasons why instructors should give it a try.

First on the list is the accessibility of mobile learning content. Not only is it easy for students,  it’s also simple for teachers to update and review the content they upload. The article even provides a link to an app that allows teachers to make m-learning quizzes.

Edudemic says m-learning allows teachers to customize content to fit the needs of their students while providing an easy and time-saving way for instructors to follow a student’s progress online.

Finally, Edudemic views mobile learning as a way to give students variety when it comes to content. Online presentations, videos, discussions, and online exams are just a few of the options that are available, which should keep things interesting and fun for both students and teachers.

Group Nears Online Education Compact

One issue facing online learning has been finding ways for institutions to offer online programs that meet the Department of Education’s state authorization rules. Those regulations force colleges and universities that offered online programs to register in every state.

While the authorization requirement was struck down by the federal courts earlier this year, most experts believe it will be back when Congress gets around to reauthorizing the Higher Education Act next year. So, state regulators, staff from regional higher-education compacts, key stakeholders, and other experts have been meeting to draft an agreement that would make it easier to get state approval for online classes that are available to students throughout the nation.

The goal of the agreement would be to “eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies for states and higher-education institutions by establishing ‘reciprocity’ among states that sign on to the effort,” according to a report in eCampus News. The project, a joint effort by the Council of State Governments and The Presidents’ Forum, would reform the regulatory review and approval process that governs postsecondary institutions offering degrees across state lines and require each state to approve the terms of any agreement.

“I’ve looked at the authorization issue from all sides and reciprocity is still the best answer to meet everyone’s needs, especially the student,” said Russell Poulin, deputy director of research and analysis at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s Cooperative for Educational Technologies.

Judge Agrees to E-Price Fixing Settlement

Despite plenty of objections, federal district court judge Denise Cote has approved the settlement reached by the Justice Department and three of the five publishing houses in the e-book price-fixing case.

The settlement mandates that Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster discontinue current e-book sales agreements for the next two years and pay $69 million in damages to customers who purchased e-books between April 1, 2010, and May 21, 2012. Apple has said it will appeal the judge’s decision. The ruling means retailers can set their own prices, regardless of publisher pricing.

Amazon has indicated it is ready to resume “aggressive” e-book pricing.

The judge dismissed all objections, finding those concerns to be unreasonable. However, she also sided with the NACS position that e-textbooks should not be part of the settlement.

“While disappointed that the settlement agreement was upheld, we are pleased that the judge agreed in her ruling with our opinion that e-textbooks are not covered by the final judgment,” said Charles Schmidt, director of public relations for NACS. “By making this distinction, we hope that competition and innovation in the higher education textbook market continues.”

What's Next with E-Book Pricing?

While Penguin, Macmillan, and Apple continue the e-book pricing fight with the Department of Justice, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster have decided it’s better to pay $69 million now than risk further damage to their reputation and possibly even higher fines that could result from losing a court case.

The three agreed to give refunds in the form of account credits or checks, ranging from 25 cents for each non-bestseller sold to $1.32 for books that appeared on The New York Times bestseller list from April 1, 2010-May 21, 2012. Just don’t expect your refund any time soon.

“Consumers aren’t going to see any payouts right now,” Laura Hazard Owen, a reporter covering e-book publishing for paidContent, said to The Boston Globe. “There’s still a lot of waiting ahead.”

The Globe article goes on to predict consumers could see e-book prices drop as much as 30%. Amazon said it would lower prices when the initial settlement with the Department of Justice was announced in April and other e-tailers will likely follow suit to keep pace.

“When retailers or manufacturers conspire to set prices, consumers lose,” said Edgar Dworsky, founder of consumer resource guide ConsumerWorld.org. “So this is a good result.”

The three settling publishers also agreed to change the pricing of their e-books, but that’s where things could get a little murky, according to Billy Pidgeon, analyst at M2 Research.

“The devil is in the details,” he told the eCommerce Times. “There’s a lot of issues with the price of digital media. There are expectations that digital should be priced more cheaply as there are no manufacturers. But this really hasn’t been the case.”

iTunes U Course Manager Just Might Be Big

Apple’s iTunes U Course Manager is a web-based tool that allows instructors to create “courses” that can be downloaded and synced to the iTunes U iPad app. That could be a very big deal for higher education if the platform can jump a couple of pretty big hurdles, according to Joshua Kim in a Technology and Learning blog post.

Courses created in the platform can include documents, audio, and video files, which can be read on whatever iPad app a student chooses. The information can be viewed both online and offline, provides additional features that allow students to create and share study notes, and enables course materials to be delivered to students without going through a third-party publishing platform.

The biggest obstacle to making this work on any scale is also the most obvious: Students have to be hooked into an iOS device, preferably an iPad. The student experience on an iPad is great, according to Kim, but those students without Apple devices are out of luck.

Another concern for Kim is students will have to go outside the Apple setting at some point because the platform separates content for iOS devices from the creation of blogs and discussion boards that appear on learning management systems.

“Despite these challenges, I see the evolving Course Manager and iTunes U Courses as a compelling development,” Kim writes. “We have struggled to find a robust way to deliver a combination of text and multimedia curricular content that is organized around a course narrative to mobile devices. Apple seems to be offering us, or at least those of us in the Apple universe, a solution.”

Coursera Turns to Student Honor Codes

Media reports have described how students are cheating in at least three Coursera classes. The charges came to light when students complained on course discussion boards about plagiarism, leading the massive online open course site to institute additional honor-code reminders students must read and sign off on before submitting assignments to be graded.

That development probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since student cheating is nothing new. In fact, a 2011 Pew survey found that 55% of college presidents responding to the poll said they'd seen a rise in plagiarism over the last 10 years and 89% of those presidents blamed it on Internet and online classes.

The real question is why bother to cheat at all since the class is free and the student doesn’t receive credit?

Torrie Bosch, editor of Future Tense, which covers emerging technologies for Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University, says she believes it has to do with the “gamification.” Some individuals are so driven to do better in everything, whether a game or an assignment, that they’ll turn to cheating when it becomes frustrating.

“Technically, using cheat codes while playing a game at home for fun or copy-pasting a couple of sentences from Wikipedia on a Coursera assignment doesn’t hurt anybody,” Bosch wrote. “But it does diminish the experience for those who are playing by the rules, as evidenced by the many Coursera students who took to their class discussion boards to complain when they uncovered instances of plagiarism.”

EPIC 2020: A Bleak Future for Higher Ed

William Sams, recently appointed interim associate provost for information technology and chief information officer at Ohio University, has a rather dark view of the future of higher education.

In his world, campuses will be reserved for the ultra-wealthy or athletically gifted because most college degrees will have been replaced by badges earned through free online courses. In addition, Apple will buy Amazon to become a learning resource giant, Google will deliver free online classes called Evolving Personal Information Construct (EPIC) where students can earn those badges, and all of it will happen by 2020. Sams presented his observations in a web video called EPIC 2020 (embedded below).

“It’s not my sole objective to be right or wrong here, but to get people talking about things that need to be discussed,” Sams told eCampus News. “All of us are trapped in the paradigm of how things have been, the system we’ve existed in all our lives. A lot of [educators] have a worldview that makes it impossible for them to even see solutions to problems that exist today.”

In the video, Sams predicts Congress will eliminate Pell Grants next year, students will demand colleges only charge for learning assessment, and new funding will go to free online learning platforms to fill the void left by the disruption of traditional higher education. In addition, Apple buys Amazon to create the world’s largest content-distribution site, called Applezon.

“I see some of those things happening,” Martin Van Der Werf, a blogger for The College of 2020 ed-tech site, told eCampus News. “They won’t replace higher ed altogether, but serve some pockets of higher ed. The video is almost a work of science fiction, and the value in sci-fi is that it helps you image worlds that don’t exist yet. Sci-fi stories draw plausible scenarios that make you think of what is possible, and that’s why this video might be valuable.”

One of Sams’ projections is already starting to come to fruition. On July 10, Google launched its first free online class, called Power Searching with Google. Students will use Google+ groups to discuss class materials and will earn a certificate when they finish the course.

Survey Gives E-Text Pilots Mixed Grades

As 27 colleges and universities get set to launch a second round of e-textbook pilot programs, Internet2, the high-speed networking group partnering with Educause on its program, has released a study of five universities that conducted similar e-text pilots last spring.

Students liked saving money with the e-text alternatives, but were not as impressed by reading on electronic devices, found the e-book platforms hard to navigate, and on a whole, preferred to stay with print books. In addition, professors in the survey did not use the collaborative features built into the platforms, such as the ability to share notes or create links, according to a report in the Chronicle for Higher Education.

That report found that cost and portability were deciding factors for students to buy an e-text. However, they proved to be difficult to read and, because faculty didn’t use the enhanced features available with the platform, the e-books failed to help students interact with classmates or the instructor.

“With technology, many things change with repeated use,” said Bradley Wheeler, vice president for information technology, University of Indiana, Bloomington. “People have lots of early first impressions as they experience new things, and then over time you start to see things become more mainstream as technology improves and skills and even attitudes toward use improve.”

Wheeler developed the program at Indiana, in which the university negotiated with publishers to buy e-textbooks in bulk to get a better per-book price and then charged students a mandatory fee to cover the cost. Cornell and the Universities of Minnesota, Virginia, and Wisconsin at Madison participated with Indiana in the pilot program and survey.

The research also had recommendations for schools considering this e-text approach, including making sure e-texts are available in a variety of formats and training instructors to use the features built into digital course materials.

Survey: Professors Open to Modern Techniques

Professors have mixed feelings about technologies in the academic world, but most are trying to get their arms around new ideas and processes. That’s the conclusion of a new survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed and the Babson Survey Research Group focus on faculty views of online education, in addition to professors’ outlook on the growth of e-textbooks, digital library collections, data monitoring, and the idea of moving away from traditional lecturing.

The survey is based on the responses of 4,564 faculty from various types of institutions, and 591 administrators responsible for academic technology at their campuses.

Tech tools intended to help faculty manage tasks and, by extension, reduce their stress seem to be having the opposite effect. The increase in technology appears to increase stress levels for some professors. Some suggest that has to do with professors being available 24/7 through e-mail and text.

Music Suit May Decide Fate of Used E-Books

Come Oct. 5, the music and publishing industries will probably be glued to the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Capitol Records against ReDigi, an online startup selling previously owned digital music. The suit is slated to head to U.S. District Court in New York City to decide whether ReDigi has the legal right to buy digital songs from their original purchasers and resell them to other consumers.

 

Although the suit deals with music files, publishers are watching carefully because ReDigi expressed to Publishers Weekly an intent to resell used e-books in the same manner. Publishing companies that were counting on e-books to zap the used-book market out of existence may now be faced with the prospect of an even larger market if ReDigi prevails in court.

However, unlike the secondary sale of CDs and print books, the musicians and authors would receive a payment from ReDigi for each used digital item sold. ReDigi has plans to let recording companies and publishers get a cut, too. MIT’s Technology Review explained the details of ReDigi’s business model, but in short it works like this: ReDigi transfers a music file to its cloud servers while simultaneously deleting the file from the seller’s synched device. When the file is resold, the reverse occurs. The sum received is split among ReDigi, the seller, the artist, and eventually the producing company.

Capitol’s lawsuit claims ReDigi violates copyright law because it’s actually making a copy of the music file when it’s uploaded to the cloud servers, then making another copy when it’s downloaded to a new buyer.

For its part, ReDigi has built some antipiracy controls into the transaction. Music files are checked for legal ownership before being accepted for resale; “ripped” files are rejected. A digital signature is added to each file when it’s resold so that companies could track any illegal activity thereafter.

If it gets the chance to resell e-books, ReDigi also plans to sweeten the deal for publishers by harvesting and sharing reader data from the used titles—such as length of time spent, number of times the e-book was accessed, and skipped sections—that could aid publishers in better understanding their audience. That’s information that could be particularly handy for textbook publishers.

New Site Helps Sort Through Online Course Offerings

College students can go online for everything from a pizza to their textbooks for the upcoming semester. Now there’s a web site that purports to help them get a better job after graduation.

Skilledup.com is a portal for online courses and practical training programs. With a sluggish economy and a tight job market for college graduates, the site has been designed to make it easy to find and compare course options through the use of keyword searches. It claims to have more than 40,000 online courses from hundreds of providers, and is working to include massive open online course sites, such as Udacity and Coursera.

“If education doesn’t have [return on investment], it probably doesn’t deserve to be called education,” said Nick Gidwani, who launched the site Aug. 21. “There are so many kids out there earning seven bucks an hour who can have a decent life in a short period of time. … And this is one way to achieve that.”

Gidwani created the site after watching two interns he had hired for $12 an hour land high-paying jobs in just months after taking a series of low-cost online courses. The site was his solution for workers to sort through all the possible courses available online.

“There are so many kids graduating these days who are smart and really computer-savvy, but don’t really have any skills that translate on Day One,” he told eCampus News. “So many people spend $100,000 on a college education and don’t have much to show on the first day of work. That’s unfortunate.”

Opinions Changing About Electronic Devices in Schools

A new back-to-school poll from SodaHead found that attitudes about digital device usage in schools are changing. Nearly 75% of respondents were against banning cellphones from school property and 31% felt laptops should be allowed in high school classrooms.

SodaHead is a polling site that allows people to share their opinions on topics ranging from entertainment and gossip to education and politics. While the school survey questions are a bit vague, opinions expressed on the polls may be helpful to track trends of the young people the site targets.

Just 27% of the more than 2,000 respondents were in favor of banning cellphones, with 41% willing to let students bring them to school, if they are off during class time. Texting during class didn’t fare well, with 52% voting no and another 31% saying it should be allowed only during an emergency.

When it came to tablet computers, 29% felt they should be permitted in high school and 21% would like to see them used in middle school. Thirty-one percent of respondents would allow laptops in high school, with another 25% willing to allow them in middle school.

Views on replacing printed textbooks with e-books were mixed, with 30% approving of the idea, 34% saying no, and 36% saying they would like to see e-books introduced in some classrooms, but not all.

The poll remains open to anyone interested in participating.

Udacity Pulls Math Course over Quality Concerns

Udacity, a start-up firm offering massive open online courses (MOOCs) taught by “world-renowned university instructors,” recently decided to cancel its Logic and Discrete Mathematics course because it didn’t live up to the quality standards set by the company.

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, told The Chronicle of Higher Education in an e-mail that while the entire class was recorded and edited, it didn’t meet the “quality bar” during the firm’s internal testing. Thrun did not say what that quality bar was, how many students had signed up, or whether the course would be offered in the future, but did praise the work done on the project by Jonathan D. Farley, associate professor of computing and information science, University of Maine at Orono.

“We want to make clear this disappointment is in no way a reflection on Jonathan, but on the Udacity team and the constraints we put on ourselves,” Thrun wrote.

Farley said he spent 45 hours recording the lectures and three hours of preparation for each hour recorded, but he also agreed with Udacity’s decision to pull the plug on the course.

“I blundered when recording some of the logic, and the camera was not on,” he said. “And also some of the mathematical proofs needed to be explained in a different way. It’s a totally different way of teaching because you have to figure out how you can reach 100,000 people.”

MOOCs make headlines for offering an online alternative to traditional educational programs, often free or practically no charge, but critics remain. As one commentator to the Chronicle article suggested, “Quality control is particularly important at this stage, when so many critical eyes are looking at online curricula,” so Udacity’s proactive approach could be the kind of move that may silence some detractors.

Broadband Access Still and Issue for Schools

While many educators are excited about the possibilities online and blended learning have to offer, digital access continues to be a stumbling block.

“Across the country, within many—if not the majority—of states, there are still areas where broadband access is very, very limited, and oftentimes these are schools and students who would most benefit through online and blended learning,” said David Teeter, director of policy for the International Association for K-12 Online Learning during an Internet Innovation webinar on broadband in education. “That gap still exists, unfortunately.”

Having broadband is the logical and necessary first step to adopting online and blended learning, but progress is being made. For instance, 30 states currently have virtual schools or initiatives, 30 states and Washington, D.C., operate more than 200 virtual charter schools, and 70% of school districts in the U.S. offer online courses to students, according to a list of statistics Teeter provided.

When broadband access is available, educators are able to use data systems and platforms to support learning. Broadband use will also make it easier for schools to prepare for the expected shift from printed textbooks to digital formats and make educational records more consistent across school and state lines.

“[These are] really exciting opportunities, but it’s really important that schools, districts, and states make sure the broadband capacity is in place to enable this,” Teeter said.

Media Company Looks to Profit from Education

The Association of American Publishers estimates the K-12 textbook market approaches $3 billion in the United States, with an additional $4 billion spent on teacher guides, testing, and reference material. So it should come as no surprise that companies other than traditional publishers are looking to grab a piece of that pie.

Discovery Communications, which owns the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and TLC, is doing just that with the introduction of a line of digital textbooks called Techbook that will provide video, virtual labs, and downloadable content, according to a report in The New York Times.

“It’s kind of perfect for us,” Discover Communications CEO David M. Zaslav told the Times. “Educational content is core to our DNA, and we’re unencumbered—unlike traditional textbook publishers, we’re not defending a dying business.”

Tough words perhaps, but education publishers are not going to concede their turf without a fight. Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have all introduced digital educational products and recently teamed with Apple to sell high school textbooks through its iBook store.

“Over the last 10 years alone, we’ve invested $9.3 billion in digital innovations that are transforming education,” said Will Ethridge, CEO of Pearson North America. “One way to describe it would be an act of ‘creative destruction.’ By this I mean we’re intentionally tearing down an outdated, industrial model of learning and replacing it with more personalized and connected experiences for each student.”

In the meantime, Discovery has a staff of 200 working on its Techbook project. The cloud-based technology works on any hardware a district might be using and will cost about $38 per student for a six-year subscription, compared to the $70 average price for a traditional textbook.

“Television is always going to be our primary focus, but we’re incredibly excited about the business potential of the Techbook,” Zaslav said. “Education is an area of solid, sustainable growth.”

Techbook is only targeting K-12 students for now, so it’s just scratching the surface of education’s “business potential.”

Students Produce Ed-Tech E-Text for iPad

Nine graduate students at Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, produced an e-textbook that just might be the starting point for more educational technology, according to this article in eCampus News. The group introduced its free e-textbook for iPads, Using Technology in Education, through the Apple iBookstore last January.

The e-text is full of video and images covering topics ranging from use of social media to advances in assistive technology to e-readers in higher education.

“This movement toward electronic textbooks and tablet computers could revolutionize K-12 and higher education,” said Chris Greer, associate professor of instructional technology at the John H. Lounsbury College of Education at Georgia College and instructor for the students who produced the e-text. “Digital textbooks are inexpensive and can be updated more quickly and easily. Our textbook strives to look at technology and education together.”

Greer added he believes textbooks for iPads will be even more useful once more educators adopt e-readers. That day may be coming, as more than 600 school districts around the country have iPad programs in place, according to Greer, while a recent Student Monitor survey found that six in 10 college students and seven of 10 high school seniors think tablet computers will replace traditional printed textbooks within five years.

Another e-text scheduled to be available for this fall term is Introduction to Sociology from education startup Highlighter and the 20 Million Minds Foundation. This e-book is being described as the “first student-faculty interactive textbook” because it offers social highlighting and commenting features that can be shared.

Highlighter expects the e-text will allow professors to track a student’s progress through its note-taking feature. Plus, the app is HTML5, which makes it compatible for use on all devices.

“I recently wrote that the latest round of textbook-related news was banal at best,” Audrey Watters said in her Inside Higher Education blog. “But the social components (of the Highlighter project), along with the OER materials and the flexibility therein, do offer something a lot more interesting here, I think.”

Can Online Education Replace College?

David Youngberg, an assistant professor of economics at Bethany College, was worried all the talk about massive open online courses (MOOC) might put him on the unemployment line. After all, Udacity founder and Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun has been quoted as saying that only 10 institutions of higher education will remain worldwide within 50 years because of the video lectures, online discussion boards, and instruction from some of the top minds in the world his company offers.

So, Youngberg signed up for one of the first courses offered by Udacity to see what the all the fuss was about. After taking the course, he came up with five reasons why MOOCs are not all they are cracked up to be in a commentary piece that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Youngberg outlines the problems with MOOCs as he sees them (easy to cheat; top students can’t shine; employers expect applicants with traditional education; computers can’t grade essays; and cheap classes cheapens the value of education), and explains why he thinks each is an issue. For instance, he suggests many employers look first to hire team players and not people who might be attracted to unconventional degree programs.

One interesting thing about the column is not the ideas Youngberg presents, but the strong reaction to them. In fact, the reason related to earning traditional degrees elicited responses that range from “nonsense” to “plain dangerous.”

Youngberg goes on to admit that there’s much to learn from online education. Perhaps his real point is near the end when he writes, “If we don’t learn from MOOCs, we will disappear.”

Education Tech Can't Leave Disabled Students Behind

The Department of Education estimates 11% of new college freshmen will arrive on campus with some sort of disability. That’s become a huge issue as institutions try to keep pace with technological changes while providing accessibility to all its students, whether they have vision or hearing problems to learning and cognitive disabilities.

State and federal legislators have stepped up with laws and regulations to provide equal access, and the industry is making progress. Blackboard claims its products meet industry standards and must gain approval from people with disabilities through partnerships with organizations such as the National Federation for the Blind before they ever reach the market.

But laws often have no teeth, according to Dianne Hengst, director of disability services at the University of Texas at San Antonio in a recent article that appeared at mysanantonio.com. Not only that, Hengst has also found students with disabilities do not always register with her office.

“(People with disabilities) don’t want to be segregated,” said Marti Hathorn, a blind graduate of UTSA and assistive technology supervisor at the San Antonio Lighthouse for the Blind. “We don’t want our own computer lab. I didn’t want to be left out of anything or cut corners. I wasn’t (in school) to get by, I wanted to do better than everyone else.”

Assistive technology could be as simple as curbs with handicap ramps and speech recognition software to more controversial ideas such as cochlear implants for children. For Hathorn, it included a screen magnifier, a closed-circuit television, and a scanner for her textbooks.

“When computer usage first took off, accessibility wasn’t even brought to the table,” she said. “Now it is starting to be a priority and is part of the discussion and more people with disabilities are speaking up.”

Online Course Services Reaching Milestone Numbers

Coursera announced recently it has registered one million students for its free online courses, while rival Udacity says it has more than 739,000 students signed up for its massive open online courses (MOOCs).

The idea of free online courses is attractive, even though no university credit is earned in many MOOCs. It helps that a number of top-flight universities have signed on with Coursera and Udacity has some of the best-known scholars in the country providing its educational material.

While a million registered students sounds impressive, some details—such as whether a student signed up for a course but didn’t actually follow through on the assignments—are not spelled out. However, such milestone numbers are the type of figures that will make news as the media tries to explain how education is coping in the age of high tech.