Finding Solutions to Online Retention Rates

Getting students to sign up for online courses hasn’t been a problem, but getting them to finish the course has. The University System of Georgia (USG) has come up with a solution that is proving successful, according to a study from Education Sector.

The system determined that nontraditional students often take online classes with the misconception the course will be an easier version of what is being offered in the classroom. Those students tend to fall behind or drop out as they struggle with the difficulty of the online material.

To address the problem, USG developed a software program called eCore coupled with student success teams of full-time university employees to help the at-risk students. The eCore program provides instructors with alerts when students are having trouble with assignments or fail to attend online discussion boards. Team members then reach out to those online students during the first half of the semester, according to Education Sector blogger Mandy Zatynski.

“This semester, team members made 1,071 phone calls and sent 1,126 e-mails to students who hadn’t logged in by day three,” Zatynski told eCampus News. “The primary reason students hadn’t shown up? They couldn’t find or didn’t know their password.”

The program’s online retention rate for all USG campuses was up to 83% in 2012, an 11% increase over 2011. Zatynski pointed particularly to the University of West Georgia, where the retention rates are at 92%, up from 68% in 2007, when the team concept was launched.

“The lack of face-to-face accountability—and disapproving professor looks—requires online students to demonstrate more initiative and strong time-management skills,” Zatynski said. “And because half of eCore’s students are 25 years or older, chances are schoolwork is one chore on a long list of things to do and, thus, easy to push to the bottom if work or family demands more time.”

Use of Personal Printers on the Decline

There was a time not long ago when a new computer purchase came with an offer to receive a free printer. Those days may be gone for good, according to Education News.

The online publication produced a graphic that shows industry revenue for printers falling by an average of 5.5% each year since 2008 and demand for paper steadily declining since 2006. In addition, the graphic shows the cost of printer ink and claims that cutting paper consumption by 10% in the United States would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.6 million tons, or the same amount as taking nearly 300,000 cars off the roads.

Testing Ways to Make MOOCs Work

The state of California is taking a look at how massive open online courses (MOOCs) can provide credit for students and revenue for its institutions. A deal between San Jose State University and Udacity to test courses for credit and a fee comes at a the same time the community college system is exploring how MOOCs can help the hundreds of thousands of students who have been unable to enroll because of cuts in government funding.

At San Jose State, a pilot program has been created for three entry-level courses—math, elementary statistics, and college algebra—that allows students to take the Udacity online course and earn academic credit. The cost is $150 per student with the pilot limiting enrollment to 100 students per course. It’s hoped the program can help students succeed in remedial courses that often have long waiting lists and high failure rates.

The courses are designed by SJSU professors and use the Udacity online platform. The MOOCs will include videos that let students work at their own pace, while mentors will be available for student sessions, according to a report in eCampus News.

“This could be not the solution, but the key part of the solution,” said Gov. Jerry Brown at a press conference. “We know that, because of the billions we’re spending on schools, we have the right to better results.”

The community college effort includes “challenge exams” that allow students to prove they can pass for credit. The MOOCs would prepare students for the exams and providers could modify the course to the exam.

While some community college faculty members have voiced concerns about the initiative, the Academic Senate, which represents community college instructors, is so far satisfied with the system’s approach.

“We have a good dialogue with the chancellor’s office,” said Michelle Pilati, president of the Academic Senate and professor of psychology at Rio Hondo College. “As far as we know, there is nothing moving forward that we would take issue with.”

Saving Publishers, One Strategy at a Time

In view of the impact of online bookselling and self-publishing, technology commentator Guy Kawasaki thinks traditional trade publishers are in danger of going the way of the dodo. That’s the flightless bird eaten out of existence because it couldn’t adapt fast enough.

But, he says in a guest column for Publishing Perspectives, publishers who are able to “add value will profit and survive, and companies who don’t [will] wither and die.” He offers 10 strategies publishers can undertake to bring value to the process of developing, discovering, and distributing quality content.

Among those strategies are ditching the fight for digital rights management, a losing battle in Kawasaki’s view, and making it possible for print-book purchasers to receive a free copy of the electronic version every time they buy. The electronic version, of course, should be readable on any platform.

Kawasaki also thinks publishers need to support authors more, specifically by offering grants to help authors pay bills while they write, setting up a web marketplace for author services, and providing more assistance with marketing, especially in the social media realm. These strategies, he says, will not only boost the quality of books but also give publishers a better chance at unearthing standout authors.

The 10 strategies apply mostly to trade titles, not textbooks. However, given the recent hue and cry over open educational resources, the manner in which instructional materials are sourced and published is likely to shift. Cost concerns may force educational content to be published in smaller chunks that are not only cheaper and adaptable, but also produced by more freelance authors outside of academia.

McGraw-Hill Launches SmartBook at CES

An update to the college textbook was among the new innovations introduced at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. McGraw-Hill Education launched SmartBooks, an adaptive approach to textbooks that acts as a virtual tutor to focus on the individual student’s area of study needs.

“This is about breaking a model that isn’t really working,” Brian Kibby, president of McGraw Hill Higher Education, told The Wall Street Journal.

Available for PCs, Macs, and iOS and Android mobile devices, SmartBook give students an overview of the content in a preview of each chapter. Students then answer a series of questions presented by the software and the textbook recommends material to study, tracks the student’s progress, and continues to update material to view.

SmartBook is part of the LearnSmart Advantage software suite from McGraw-Hill and will be available in the spring for more than 90 courses. Prices for SmartBook were not announced, but the LearnSmart suite starts at $19.99 and can be purchased or rented semester.

Gaming No Game to Educators

Education experts today see gaming as an potential tool to increase student engagement. I look no further than my 10-year-old daughter as proof.

Having just spent the last 30 minutes of a drive home reading her assigned book, she closed it and went directly for her iPod to play some subway surfing thing. I asked why she would stop reading when we had another 15 minutes to go before reaching home. She shot back that her eyes were tired and she was falling asleep, unable to concentrate on the book. Yet she had no trouble obtaining her high score in the subway game.

The evolution of education is quickly following the evolution of publishing. In order to capture and hold the focus of students today, there must be more interaction than mere words on pages. Students need video, analytics, and interaction.

It should be no surprise that electronic educational materials have quickly gone from simple PDFs of printed pages to entire suites of adaptive learning products, which can include video games that use specific learning objectives in which students perform actions.

And they are not all games specifically designed for education. Some teachers are encouragingstudents to play Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and even Angry Birds as part of the learning environment.

StudyBlue Tools Attracting Students, Capital

A focus on mobile technology has made it possible for StudyBlue to sign up millions of students. The Wisconsin-based startup firm developed a “digital backpack” of web and mobile tools students use to organize their course materials into flashcards, quizzes, and study guides available anytime on their smartphone or tablet computer.

Students can use the tool to share content, which StudyBlue has collected a into a huge library of study materials created by its users. The free platform also provides premium subscriptions for services such as advanced search filters and an offline study mode that students pay a monthly fee to use, giving the company a way to produce revenue.

The service has 2.5 million users, adding 1.5 million new users in the last year alone, while increasing its user base from 100% college students in 2009 to more than 30% of the total now being high school students and their teachers. StudyBlue recently made it possible for teachers to identify themselves so their students can find the material they are sharing. The company plans to expand tool functions for teachers.

The growth has also allowed StudyBlue to attract venture capital, including $9 million from Great Oaks Venture Capital on Jan. 4.

“We are experiencing rapid growth and this financing allows us to further expand our community and platform to help students master their course material faster and connect students to a comprehensive crowdsourced library of content on nearly any subject, and to each other, in a highly relevant way,” StudyBlue CEO Becky Splitt told TechCrunch. 

Flexible Screen Technology on Display at CES

Plastic Logic and flexible-screen devices re-emerged last week during the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, although the technology still doesn’t appear to be ready for prime time. Plastic Logic and Intel partnered with the Queen’s University Human Media Lab to introduce PaperTab, a 10.7-in. tablet device that users control by moving or bending, according to a report in Campus Technology.

PaperTab can offer a viewing angle of nearly 180 degrees and can bend to act as if the user is turning a page. It also allows for more than one unit to transfer documents by touch or proximity and work together as windows of a single application. However, the device was only built as a model.

“PaperTab is a concept design created by Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab using Plastic Logic’s flexible displays,” a spokesperson for Plastic Logic told Campus Technology. “As such, it is not a finished device intended for release, but much more a vision of how computing will develop over the next three to five years.”

Samsung, a company that has been working on flexible-screen technology for more than a decade, also showed its Youm line of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display devices with wraparound screens that can be used as a smartphone and opened to form a tablet with twice the screen size. It also requires further research before coming to market because OLEDs can disintegrate when exposed to air and moisture.

“The difficulty isn’t making the screen work, it’s making it work well,” Rob Enderle, analyst for the Enderle Group, said in an article for TechNew World. “These screens break after being folded a few times but consumer products need to be able to last through thousands of times of being folded.”

Study Shows Online Learning Still Growing

A new Babson study found that enrollment in traditional for-credit online college classes remainded steady and adoption of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is still lukewarm by most institutions. Nearly one-third of all students were enrolled in at least one postsecondary online course for credit in the fall of 2011, an increase of 9.3%, according to Changing Course:Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States.

The increase was actually the smallest in the 10 years Babson had done the research, but coincided with the first overall enrollment decline of students on campus in 15 years. The report found that while the rate of growth slowed, online enrollment continues to make up a large part of all enrollments in higher education courses.

Three of five responding chief academic officers (CAO) agreed that MOOCs could help their institutions understand online pedagogy, but nearly half were neutral on whether they can be sustainable, according to a report in Inside Higher Education.

The survey also found that 77% of responding CAOs say learning outcomes in online classes are the sameas  or superior to traditional courses, up from 57.2% when the question was asked in 2003. Conversely, just 30% of the CAOs believe their instructors on campus accept the value of online education, with less than 3% planning to offer MOOCs on their campus, and just 9.4% planning to do so.

“It’s clearly not ready for prime time,” Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, said about MOOCs in a Bloomberg article. “People are saying this could make a real difference, but they’re not convinced there’s a sustainable business model.”

Transition to BYOD Doesn't Have to be Hard

While there are still many educators and parents who view electronic devices in the classroom as a problem, allowing students to bring their own devices is gaining traction. Jonathan P. Costa Sr., director of school and program services at the Education Connection, used a post on EdTech K-12 to discuss how the transition can be made easier.

First, a district must share its plans before launching such a program because parents need to understand what procedures will be in place to protect their children while online. The district must also assure parents it will provide devices to students unable to bring their own.

Technology has to be up the challenge, but Costa said he is convinced that concerns such as distribution, technical assistance, or searching for the “right device” are unnecessary. He also believes students will take care of the devices and that loss or damage is not that big an issue.

Finally, district leaders need to start the process.

“Let the learners drive the change,” Costa wrote. “Teach them to make good choices and then watch as they focus this energy on new ways to engage and learn your content. This is their world to create. The sooner we get out of their way, the sooner our investment in digital learning for all will pay its performance dividends.”

Free Is Key for UW Online Courses

Like dozens of other universities across the country, the University of Washington, Seattle, has offered free massive open online courses through companies such as Coursera and edX. The school is now experimenting with a way to produce revenue by charging for more rigorous versions of the free courses for credit.

University officials figure classes could pay for themselves if just 30 to 40 students would be willing to pay for each for-credit offering, which includes extra work and allows students to either attend the class in person or participate through live video/audio. However, what seemed like a good idea in theory has yet to work well in practice.

For instance, the university offered a computational finance course through Coursera last quarter that had an enrollment of more than 30,000 people, but just two chose the for-credit option. A scientific computing class attracted nearly 15,000 people, but none of them were willing to pay.

David Szatmary, vice provost of UW Educational Outreach, told The Seattle Times that late sign-up and poor advertising for the course may have caused the low paid participation rate.

“We’ll give it a year and then decide how many other courses we want to put on,” he said. “Right now, we’re serving a lot of people who would not otherwise be touched by the University of Washington.”

Emerging Education Tech Trends

While massive open online courses (MOOCs) received a lot of attention last year, they weren’t the only thing to impact technology in education during 2012. In this five-minute video, Jeff Young, technology editor for The Chronicle of Higher Education, talks with Educause Review Online about some of the trends that emerged last year and what he thinks will be the big ed-tech stories in 2013.

Among the points Young makes is that IT staffs on higher education campuses are being stretched to the limit by more demands for technology in coursework and for support of an ever-proliferating array of personal devices.

ERO Video Conversation: Looking Back and Looking Forward from EDUCAUSE on Vimeo.

MOOC Provider Starts Career Services

Coursera reaches more than two million students and is partnering with 33 universities around the world through its offerings of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Now, it’s getting into the job-placement service, matching students with employers through its Coursera Career Services.

The program is a database where employers can find potential job candidates from top Coursera students. Students must opt into the service and employers must agree to keep the information confidential, but Coursera has already placed some students in at least one software firm to work on a pilot program.

The new service has potential to create revenue for the online educational platform. The Coursera contract with the University of Virginia even lists “employee recruiting” as a possible moneymaking  plan, with a percentage of the revenue going to the university.

UW Competency-Based Degree Program Ready to Go

Working adults are the focus of the Flexible Option degrees, a new competency-based online degree program which the University of Wisconsin System will begin in the fall through UW-Milwaukee and the two-year UW Colleges. The program will begin with degrees in health care, information technologies, and business and management, targeting the estimated 700,000 to one million Wisconsin residents who have earned some college credit but have not completed a degree.

“It gives nontraditional learners another way to finish their degrees,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said in an article in eCampus News. “With the strongly underlined emphasis on competency, it’s not about becoming a degree factory. I think there’s a way to maintain that high standard and still be adaptable and flexible.”

The UW system currently offers 4,600 online courses and 120 online degrees, but this is the first time it has offered degree programs that allow students to work at their own pace while paying a flat fee for as many courses as they can finish.

Students only have to take courses needed to attain the degree they are working toward. Students can move through the coursework quicker if they can pass the competency exams for the class.

UW faculty will oversee the academic quality of the coursework and will design and assess the specific competencies students must master to move on to the next course. Working adults will be able to start the Flexible Option at any time during the calendar year and advisors will be made available at the estimated ratio of one to every 85 students.

“It’s visionary and evolutionary,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. “This is acknowledging the growing diversity of who college students are and finding an effective way to give them the first-rate opportunities traditional students on campuses have had for decades.”

Caesar Aims for Faster Feedback to MIT Students

An issue facing online education is students getting feedback on assignments and tests from instructors in a timely manner. The crowdsourcing system Caesar is providing a solution for some students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“The students in our programming courses write a lot of code and it takes a long time for a small staff of human graders to read and grade,” said MIT professor Rob Miller, who developed Caesar through the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence lab, in an article for eCampusNews. “The old way, it might take a few weeks to get feedback about what they’d written, and in that time they’ve written more programs—often repeating the same mistakes over and over.”

Caesar prioritizes submitted assignments and sends them to teaching assistants, course alumni, and computer-science students for review. Multiple reviewers are sent the assignments and all are able to offer comments and advice on the work, generally within three days and well before students have finished their next assignment.

The system is being expanded to other MIT programming courses and could be adopted by edX, the massive open online course platform founded by MIT and Harvard University. Miller also believes Caesar will work for more than just computer programming classes.

“The essential idea of crowdsourced review—dividing student work into smaller pieces and distributing those pieces to a mixed crowd of reviewers who comment on and discuss them—is likely to be applicable to many kinds of courses, including liberal arts, business, and social sciences, not just technical [courses],” he said. 

Geofencing Taking Aim at Showrooming

Geofencing may go mainstream this year, says the Things to Watch in Retail 2013 report from JWT. The global marketing company formerly known as J. Walter Thompson predicts the practice will become an effective weapon in retailers’ fight against showrooming.

Geofencing refers to an opt-in text-messaging system triggered whenever the recipient walks into a store or its nearby environs. Stores are able to text special offers aimed at clinching an immediate sale on the premises.

Although geofencing has been available for several years, it’s been used mostly by specialty retailers on a limited basis. Now, though, JWT sees signs that it’s expanding into mall chain stores such as Best Buy as a means to persuade shoppers to purchase in person rather than just browsing in the store and going online to buy from another merchant.

For retailers catering to young adults, or really anyone trying to get the attention of the college student-aged cohort, text messages could be the most effective means of reaching this age group, better than e-mail, snail mail, or possibly even social media. A new survey of 1,500 smartphone owners conducted by Experian Marketing indicated 85% of 18- to 24-year-olds use their phones weekly for texting, compared to just 59% of owners across all ages.

On average, according to the survey, the under-24 set sends and receives more than 120 text messages a day. Many keep their phones bedside every night just in case they get a message and consider texts to be on the same personal level as phone calls.

Professors Can Set Their Own Price for Online Courses

A new educational platform allows professors to set the price charged for their course. Professor Direct establishes a base price of $49, with all additional revenue going to the instructor.

While Professor Direct prepares the core set of materials for the class, the instructor can decide on any extra services students are offered. Dan Gryboski, who has taken a year off from teaching at the University of Colorado to stay at home with his kids, is promising quick e-mail responses to all student questions, two hours of online office hours each week, and additional tutorial videos to supplement the materials for his two math courses.

“Students pay a premium to have professor contact,” Gryboski told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Professor Direct is part of the service from StraighterLine, which provides paid, online, self-paced introductory courses that some colleges will accept for transfer credit. Udemy also allows instructors to teach courses for profit, but none of the company’s classes are approved for credit and most people teaching on the site are connected to a college or university.

David Janzen, associate professor of computer science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, is one of the traditional instructors to use the Udemy service, charging $89 per student for his courses. His class is based on free videos available on his own web site, but he created additional instructional videos to help Udemy students work through the online labs.

“I’m charging them for the videos I’ve created,” he said, adding that he also gives free passes to the course to anyone he thinks can’t afford the tuition.

Technology and Education in 2013

The spectacular growth of massive open online courses (MOOCs) turned higher education on its head in 2012, according to Chris Proulx, president and CEO of eCornell. MOOCs allowed students to learn from top universities and at their own pace, and got discussions started about for-credit curriculum.

That was 2012, so Proulx looked ahead to 2013 in a predictive blog post for Forbes.

He projected the growth of MOOCs to continue in 2013, particularly at top-tier schools, while the availability of online courses at selective schools will increase. He also anticipated that universities will find even more ways to use the “flipped classroom” model, where students use class time to enhance prerecorded lectures.

While MOOCs are growing, there are still questions to be answered about the programs, such as the cost to sustain the courses and finding ways to make credit for the courses available to students. Proulx predicted a hybrid model that has both online and in-person components will be embraced this year, as will peer-to-peer and peer-to-faculty instruction. He even forecast that the cost of education will decrease—just not in 2013.

“As institutions experiment with the pedagogical formula of what content is delivered online, how peer-to-faculty interact in both the online and ‘flipped-classroom’ environments, and faculty explore new models of assessment, some institutions could potentially find educational models that begin to bend the cost curve,” Proulx wrote. “The first step is to continue to nurture faculty across the country to embrace online teaching, and from there we just may see a shift in the business of education.”

Pearson Makes Investment in B&N, Nook

Pearson announced it would invest $89.5 million in Nook Media just three days after Christmas, joining Microsoft as a partner with the Barnes & Noble subsidiary. It was a move aimed at delivering the publisher’s digital content to college students.

“With this investment, we have entered into a commercial agreement with Nook Media that will allow our two companies to work closely together in order to create a more seamless and effective experience for students,” Pearson North America CEO Will Ethridge said in the release announcing the deal. “It’s another example of our strategy of making our content and services broadly available to students and faculty through a wide range of distribution partners.”

Pearson is banking that pairing with the Nook Media expertise in online distribution and customer service will make it easier for customers to find and access its digital learning material. However, the purchase also comes on the heels of news that holiday sales at B&N were weak and that the Nook segment would continue to be lower than expected. 

A New Year's Break for The CITE

The CITE will take another couple of days off to observe the incoming year. Look for new posts starting on Jan. 2.

Predictions Continue for 2013

With 2013 just a few days away, here are more predictions for the new year:

The Harvard Business Review blog says 2013 will be all about the “Content Economy.” Content—essentially data and intellectual and creative properties in all forms—will become the most valuable asset any organization possesses. It’s not much of a stretch to claim mobile will be big next year, but HBR adds that web, social media, and mobile will all become “co-dependent,” meaning that people will expect anything they can access on the web or through a social network to be optimized for mobile devices, or what HBR calls “smobile.”

Mobile, integrated commerce (a blend of online and offline), and the growing importance of social media will also be the three top trends for retailers, in the view of Forbes blogger Lydia Dishman.

In “TenBold Predictions for Ebooks and Digital Publishing in 2013,” Digital Book World anticipates continuing consolidation among publishers. Those that remain in business will sell more directly to consumers, bypassing booksellers, both physical and online. Dedicated e-readers will plunge in price, maybe all the way to zero, yet publishers will boost promotions of e-books and add more extras to digital titles.

Like DBW, the TeleRead blog expects to see a variety of enhancements for e-books, reading apps, and mobile-device interfaces. But, as a result, consumers will pay higher prices for e-books, most likely price points similar to softcover print books.

The CITE’s own forecast: Some of these predictions will be right on the money; others will miss by a mile. And something that nobody expected will emerge as a game-changer.

What do you think will happen in 2013? Add your predictions to the conversation.

A Look Ahead into 2013

Mobile devices, cloud computing, and social media were among the booming trends of 2012. What does 2013 hold in store for technology, digital content, e-commerce, communications, and education? The pundits are already gazing into their crystal balls. Here are a few predictions:

In the view of C/Net, 2013’s biggest technology trends to watch are already in motion. Microsoft will make a big comeback based on Windows 8 and the Surface tablet, while at the same time Apple’s star will fade as Android devices lock in more consumers. Although some think Facebook is doomed, C/Net sees the social network hanging in there as a formidable player.

From the perspective of IT professionals, CIO identified seven tech trends that have the potential to affect business in the coming year, starting with “bring-your-own-device.” A growing number of employees want to use a single mobile computing device of their choice to handle both work and nonwork responsibilities and communications. It means organizations may pay less for hardware but much more for support. CIO’s list also includes online classrooms, 3-D printing, and apps for TV.

Is e-mail nearing death? Not in the opinion of marketer ClickZ. E-mail will remain a potent marketing tool in 2013, but only for those who recognize more consumers will be accessing messages on smartphones, not laptops or desktops. Marketers will need to come up to speed with responsive design, a concept that means online content is optimized for any and all devices.

Watch for more predictions tomorrow in The CITE.

Facing Accessibility Issues Head On

Keeping up with the rapid pace of technological change can be daunting, but on campus it too often comes at the expense of disabled students. Things don’t have to be that way, according to accessibility experts who discussed proactive IT solutions with Campus Technology.

“There is a lot of pressure on IT because of budget cuts and being asked to do more with less, so it is easy to ask what the payoff is for [making technology accessible],” said Greg Kraus, IT accessibility coordinator, North Carolina State University, Raleigh. “But what is the cost of not doing it? It’s like people who don’t buy insurance until something bad happens, and then say, ‘Oh, I guess I should have bought insurance.’”

First, few schools have accessibility requirements built into their IT procurement process. NC State is an exception, requiring every IT product to be evaluated for accessibility. Kraus complies with the requirement by adding his own research to the information provided on the voluntary product accessibility template (VPAT) form that most vendors supply on each product.

“They can be a starting point, but they are self-disclosing and not independently verified,” he said. “I always get my hands on the product and do my own testing.”

Second, faculty must be able to develop content that every student can access. Penn State University is working to help instructors understand the issues of students with visual and audio impairments and make developers available to help faculty develop online courses.

“I go to meetings and help developers design for accessibility,” said Anita Colyer Graham, manager of access for the Penn State online campus. “Often, it’s not that they are reluctant—they are unaware of accessibility design issues.”

Finally, a systemwide approach should be put in place to promote the sharing of problems and solutions. The California State University system created its Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI) to help set goals and deadlines for improvements, such as its Roadmap for Accessibility in Postsecondary Institutions, which was created to develop a plan to institutionalize accessibility and measure the progress across the system’s campuses.

Because of the ATI program, most CSU campuses have purchased web-evaluation tools that have resulted in cost savings. Cal State Northridge and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo even worked with the evaluation tool to develop accessibility checkpoints that check web pages and applications used by the system. In addition, CSU is working on systemwide services to provide captioning for course videos.

“We are also piloting RoboBraille, which allows users to submit text materials and receive them back in a variety of accessible formats,” said Cheryl Pruitt, director of the ATI program.

A Brief Vacation for The CITE

The CITE's contributors are taking a short break.

We'll be back on Wednesday with a fresh batch of posts. Coming up: What are the predictions for 2013?

NYT Explores New E-Book Projects

Like other newspapers and magazines, The New YorkTimes has struggled to find fresh revenue sources to replace dwindling advertising sales and print subscriptions. In a new two-pronged effort, the paper hopes to leverage its formidable reporting depth to sell short e-books on a variety of topics ranging from business and health to sports and entertainment. If it works out, other publications will no doubt follow suit.

The Times has previously attempted a number of online publishing business models, with limited success. This time it’s partnering with digital startup Byliner to co-publish as many as 12 e-books per year, each about 10,000 to 20,000 words.

The content will be original, although in some instances the topic may build off reporting in the print edition or on its web site. The first e-book is about a group of skiers hit by an avalanche; the e-book debuted Dec. 17, the same day a much shorter article about the incident appeared in The Times.

In a corollary program that also launched Dec. 17, The Times is using the Vook platform to assemble articles from its extensive archive into themed e-books. Twenty-five titles have been produced so far, with “many more expected to come in 2013,” according to a press release.

Both Byliner and Vook products will be sold through Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and the NYTStore.com, with retail prices starting at $1.99. Byliner will also sell the titles it co-produces.

For Young Adults, Smartphones = Life

While still in bed each morning, most young adults check their smartphones for text messages. They peruse their Facebook feeds while brushing their teeth. They update their status online over coffee.

Connectivity is part of daily life for college students and young professionals aged 18 to 30, according to Cisco’s 2012 ConnectedWorld Technology Report.

The new study could be somewhat skewed—most of the nonstudent survey respondents work in information technology fields—but the results still confirm this age group is firmly welded to their smartphones. Some 90% said they look at their mobile devices first thing every morning for messages and 60%, especially females, repeatedly recheck throughout the day. Roughly half admit they text and do social media during meals with family and friends at the table.

Cisco claims this compelling need to connect is “meaningful” for employers because “it demonstrates that the workforce of the future is more agile, more informed, and more responsive than any previous generation.” Employers may be more concerned about whether young workers are distracted by their smartphones.

There was one surprising outcome of the study: Despite all the time they spend with smartphones, this age cohort doesn’t download a lot of apps. About 70% said they have fewer than 10 apps on their phones. Half mainly use apps for games and entertainment, and another 27% have work-related apps.

E-Reader May Find Niche Beside Tablet

If you own a full-size oven, why buy a toaster? Any oven can toast bread. But a toaster produces tastier toast, and is cheaper, faster, and more energy-efficient to boot.

A similar scenario may be developing with tablet and e-reader ownership.

Earlier in December, after HIS iSuppli released a special report showing that sales of e-book readers were plummeting while tablet sales rocketed upward, dozens of blogs and news sites trumpeted headlines such as “Tablets Make Ebook Readers an Endangered Species” on EFYtimes.com. The CITE took note, too.

The assumption, of course, was that since tablets can do everything e-book readers can, consumers don’t need or want e-readers any more. For some consumers, that’s true.

Others, though, may not want to schlep a $350 tablet to the beach or entrust it to a child but don’t mind doing so with a cheaper e-reader. Those who like to read in bed before turning out the lights may prefer to keep an e-reader, not a tablet, on their nightstand. Multi-user households may supplement their communal tablet and laptop or desktop with one or two e-readers, in the same way families have a variety of TVs.

One indication that e-book readers aren’t yet the slate equivalent of an eight-track player comes from a report in The New York Times about how independent bookstores are managing to stay afloat despite the behemoth competitors and e-books on tablets. The article mentions indie stores are selling a significant number of Kobo e-readers, to their pleasant surprise.

The Kobo allows independents to earn small commissions on e-book sales referrals through store web sites. That’s appealing for customers who really want to support their local bookstore but also crave the convenience of e-books. 

Sail Fail May Flag SOS for Mobile POS

A mere seven months after its launch, VeriFone has decided to sink Sail, the company's mobile payment-processing solution for small merchants. That could signal the start of a mass exodus from the mobile point-of-sale market, especially those solutions designed for small businesses, according to Mobile Commerce Daily.

The cadre of mobile solutions providers grew rapidly in the last year or so, in the belief there was a reservoir of untapped potential in the many thousands of small merchants out there who can't afford the more elaborate and expensive solutions.

The scaled-down solutions were welcomed by such merchants. Sail, like its better-known competitor Square, was easy to use: The merchant simply attached a small device to a cellphone in order to take credit and debit cards away from a cash register. The service enabled a mom-and-pop cafe, for example, to quickly process payments at outdoor tables or a college bookstore to sell sweatshirts from a tent at football games.

However, as it turns out, a lot of smaller businesses don't do all that many mobile sales transactions, at least not yet. The reasons vary, although one problem is that mobile POS isn't always compatible with merchants' primary systems. In order to manage inventory and run reports, merchants must manually enter mobile transaction data into the main system, something most smaller sellers don't have time to do.

That means there's not enough profit for all solution providers, and some will probably choose to follow VeriFone's example and get out, or else sell out. The consolidation will leave fewer choices for small businesses and maybe higher costs.

Insuring Devices Becomes a Big Business

Many schools are using precious funding to put the newest technology in the hands of their students. However, with those costs comes concern about protecting the investment, which has led school districts, colleges, and universities to make insuring those devices a big business.

“A lot of districts don’t want to deal with the claims process,” said Quang Ha, sales director of Worth Ave., a company with more than 1,000 clients in the education field, talking to eSchool News. “Can you trust an eight- or nine-year-old to take care of technology? Things are bound to happen. We manage the whole repair process.”

The Farmington, MN, district plans to spend about $3 million over the next four years to put iPads into the hands of students in grades 4-12. The system has developed an 11-page loan agreement that provides insurance at a cost of $28 per year, along with a plan for how the gadget can be used in and outside of school by students to help prevent damage.

Parents can opt out of the contract if they agree to pay for the device if it's damaged, but the district is hoping parents will want to participate and that the detailed plan will provide incentive for students to handle the devices with a bit more care.

“Part of it is the replacement factor and the budget consideration,” said Carl Colmark, finance director of the Farmington school district. “And part of it is I think it will bring a greater level of responsibility for both parents and kids.”

Animation Used in MOOC Preview

Robert Ghrist, the professor of mathematics and electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, developed a 13-week massive open online course in single variable calculus that Coursera will offer beginning Jan. 7. Ghrist has created nearly 60 animated lecture videos for the course, along with this introductory preview.

E-Reader Sales Crumble, Tablet Sales Explode

It appears the e-reader market has bottomed out.

A new study from HIS iSuppli Consumer Electronics reports that shipments of the devices will fall 36% by year’s end, down to 14.9 million units from 23.2 million units in 2011. The study predicts shipments will drop another 10.9 million units in 2013 and total just 7.1 million units by 2016.

“The versatility of the media tablet—able to serve as a reader of e-mails as well as books, while capable of surfing the web and playing movies—has even overcome the cost advantages of the e-book reader,” the report said.

Dedicated e-readers will have to sell at cost or less to maintain their market, according to the report, which points to the Txtr Beagle device, which has a 5-in. screen and a potential selling price of $13, as an example. However, iSuppli predicts that even such a low price won’t be enough to help e-readers regain their popularity.

The clear winner is tablet computers, with shipments expected to reach 122 million this year and 172 million in 2013. Growth is being fueled by strong sales of Android tablets, along with the addition of the iPad mini to the Apple product line.

“Tablets continue to captivate consumers, and as the market shifts toward smaller, more mobile screen sizes and lower prices points, we expect demand to accelerate in the fourth quarter and beyond,” said Tom Mainelli, IDC research director in a statement to Campus Technology. “Android tablets are gaining traction in the market thanks to solid products from Google, Amazon, Samsung, and others. And Apple’s November iPad mini launch, along with its surprise refresh of the full-sized iPad, positions the company well for a strong holiday season.”

SNHU Taking Different Approach to Textbook Costs

An internal study showing 49% of its students were either buying textbooks at places other than the campus store or not buying them at all, prompted administrators at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) to look for a solution. It was decided to negotiate savings for students in the new campus store contract.

Instead of trying to hash out a deal with publishers, SNHU is working with the potential vendors of its campus store. The university was willing to waive the commission it would normally receive, reported by Inside Higher Education to be $500,000 for the 2011-12 school year, if a vendor would pass those savings on to students in the form of lower textbook prices.

The university is hoping reduced markups on textbooks will translate into more students buying their textbooks and doing so in the store, which will mean greater volume for the vendor. SNHU estimates the three bids it has received could save students up to $1.8 million on textbooks in the 2012-13 school year, based on the proposals and expected enrollment.

SNHU was able to consider such a move because of the success of its online learning program, which has brought in $12 to $14 million each of the last few years. But SNHU President Paul LeBlanc also saw dealing directly with publishers as a potential threat to the freedom of instructors to pick the textbooks they want.

“What goes out the window is choice,” he said.

Amherst Launching 'Wildly Idealistic' Academic Press

Amherst College, Amherst, MA, plans to get into academic publishing next year, but not in the usual way. The school intends to offer up to 15 digital-only titles per year that will be subject to traditional peer reviewing and editing, and also free to use. The college library is a driving force behind the project, which was called “wildly idealistic” in the school’s announcement.

“We’re going to lose money, and that’s fine,” said Amherst Librarian Bryn Geffert, in an article for Inside Higher Education.

School and library officials say they believe an academic press is consistent with the mission of the college. Geffert hopes that by employing the same sorts of quality controls used in traditional academic publishing, the Amherst effort will prove to critics that digital material can be of equal value to its print counterpart.

Geffert also said he hopes that Amherst will create a model for other libraries to produce digital academic content at lower costs.

“My grand dream—quixotic though may be—is that if enough libraries begin doing what we’re doing, at some point there’s going to be a critical mass of freely available scholarly literature,” he said. “Literature that libraries don’t have to purchase. And if they use those savings to publish more material, you reach a tipping point.”

Teaching the Student Teachers First

When K-12 school districts rush to buy tablets for classes, often as a cost-saving strategy, one of the criticisms is that the technology will be underutilized. Many teachers aren’t yet prepared to integrate the devices into their day-to-day curriculum.

The Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education at the University of Oklahoma is trying to make sure its next crop of teachers is indeed prepared. A pilot program for the spring 2013 term will train 575 students enrolled in the university’s undergraduate teacher education courses how to use iPads for classroom work and developing lesson plans.

Each student will receive a shiny new fourth-generation tablet this month before the holiday break begins. Students pay nothing for the devices—it’s all covered by the pilot—and they can keep the devices when the program is over. The idea is they will continue to use the iPads when they start their teaching careers.

The teacher education faculty got their own iPads last fall and have been preparing coursework with the devices.

“The goal is to have the faculty use the technology as a tool to incorporate the activities that they are already doing, such as lesson planning, and to extend to such activities as reviewing apps that would further enhance what they are teaching,” said associate professor Teresa Cullen in OU’s press release about the pilot.

Gaze-Based Technology Is Coming

Gaze-based technology has been around for years, but it could on the shelves sooner than you might imagine. A Danish firm, The Eye Tribe, has for about a year been trying to develop mobile devices that people can control with their eyes.

“You have infrared light that is projected toward your face,” Sune Alstrup Johansen, usability expert of the Gaze Group at the IT University of Copenhagen, explained in a National Public Radio report. “And the infrared light is then reflected in your pupil. And by seeing those reflections we can pretty easily—well, not easily—with our algorithms, we can easily calculate where you’re looking.”

The Eye Tribe has even created a variation on the gaming app Fruit Ninja, in which the user slices flying fruit with his eyes instead of a swipe of the touchscreen.

iPad Is Not Killing the Printed Book

A Simba Information study reported that while one in five U.S. adults own an Apple iPad, only about half use the device as an e-reader. Simba, which has been following e-book publishing and reading devices since 2009, also found that tablets have been gaining on dedicated e-readers for the last 18 months.

However, the findings do not support the idea that tablets will replace the printed book, according to Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba.

“There are certain things about print that are incredibly valuable to consumers,” Norris told TeleRead. “I have a book on my shelf at home that is nine decades old. It was published by Popular Mechanics in 1919, I think. It will work when I open it up. Print books are something you can pass on and give as gifts. That is something where the physical book has had a big strength.”

Norris also advocated finding ways for print and digital to work together. He suggested placing a tracking code on the spine of a book that, when scanned, could provide sales information for the audio or e-book versions of the book and lead the reader back to the bricks-and-mortar retailer that originally made the book sale.

“Say you’re standing across the train platform from someone who’s reading a book your interested in,” Norris said. “You could just scan the spine. Not only does the publisher continue to bring in revenue, but so does the physical retailer associated with that book.”

Survey Shows Online Student Numbers Growing

The report Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States found that current college students are no longer primarily going to school full-time or living on campus. The study reported that more than 1.6 million students in the United States took at least one online class in 2010. That has some colleges and university focused on providing online degrees.

Ohio’s Clark State Community College, Springfield, experienced a 72% rise in the number of students taking online classes over the last five years. The summer online enrollment at Miami University, Oxford, grew 26% in 2012 while its overall summer enrollment declined, and the eLearning OHIO program at Ohio University, Athens, saw an 800-student increase in the fall.

“It’s getting harder and harder to support a program that is just on campus. There’s a lot more expense to it. And we see online as a way of helping diversify our revenue,” Andy Runyan, associate vice president of extended learning and dean of graduate studies, Cedarville University, Cedarville, OH, told eCampus News. Cedarville is working on a new online master’s in business administration degree and already offers online classes for undergraduate, graduate, and high school students.

In addition, Jonathan Robe, research fellow at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, reported that many colleges have yet to find a way to lower tuition for their online courses, other than the money students save by not living or commuting to campus.

“I’m hopeful that we can figure out a way to bring more online programs up and running, but I do think it will take some time,” he said. “We still have some work to do.”

Khan Academy Launches iPhone App

The Khan Academy, which started as a way for Sal Khan to help his cousin do math homework, has blossomed into nearly 3,600 teaching videos that have been viewed more than 210 million time worldwide. Now, Khan is expanding his reach with the creation of an iPhone app for viewing the tutorials.

The new app will not allow users to download videos for offline viewing on their phones, as is the case with the iPad app already in use. However, the iPhone app will make it possible for busy students to watch the lesson while on a bus or in a car.

“This might make the app seem undercooked—and in a way it is—but it could actually be a smart move given the limited form factor,” wrote Rip Empson in his TechCrunch blog. “Stuffing the entire Khan Academy experience onto the iPhone’s screen would likely diminish the experience of its visualization tools, interactive transcriptions, and some of its better gamification and progress-tracking features.”

With an Android app to surely follow, the strategy should also expose a lot more potential learners to the Khan videos.

E-Text Pilot Results Point Out Areas to Improve

Brian Jacobs, founder and president of the virtual bookstore and marketplace Akademos, was anxious to review the results from an e-textbook pilot done last spring at five universities, but not surprised when they proved to be less than positive. The results simply highlighted improvements to digital course materials that are necessary going forward.

According to Jacobs, the primary development must come in interactivity. It’s not enough to digitally highlight content; the material needs to offer more than its print counterpart and faculty must be willing to take the lead in producing the annotations.

“A successful digital initiative will be one in which the faculty is strongly committed to actively participating in working with course materials—when  the course materials act not as passive appendages to classroom teaching but rather as direct extensions of that teaching itself; when they are less interchangeable commodities and more directly reflective of the learning environment itself (the institution or the classroom),” Jacobs wrote in this blog post.

Jacobs said he also believes limiting access through digital rights management must change and that lower pricing of digital content is not enough in itself. Lower cost is important, but the device used must also provide a satisfactory experience for users.

“What this e-textbook study and others like it tell us is that the technology of the textbook—with its physical interactivity, rich graphics, and tactile experience—raises the digital transition threshold for study materials well beyond what it is for general reading books,” Jacobs continued. “And that’s probably a good thing, for when the transition comes (and it will), it should be one that fundamentally changes not only course materials but the very relations of teacher, student, and text.”