Colleges Need to Upgrade Mobile Presence

Recent studies from Pew Research and Google showed that 85% of cellphone users aged 18-29 use their devices to go online and half of that group turn to their phones to surf the web before thinking about using a desktop or laptop device. The studies also found that 61% of all cellphone users said they would probably never return to a website if they had trouble viewing it on their mobile device.

Despite those findings, a new survey reports that a lot of colleges and universities fail to communicate with their target audience through their mobile devices. A survey of 200 public and private schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania by the marketing agency Princeton Partners found that more than 70% lack a mobile presence and 50% of the schools with a mobile presence were deficient in terms of technology, mobile content, or both, according to a report in University Business.

The survey found that colleges and universities don’t often replicate the content, design, and navigation tools used in their PC-based websites for mobile applications. They also don’t create “mobile responsive” technology solutions that adjust to individuals browsers and devices.

That’s a problem because there’s so much more competition for potential applicants, who are constantly using mobile technology.

“An effective mobile capability can validate that a school is technologically savvy,” said Jeanne Oswald, former executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education and an industry advisor to Princeton Partners. “As potential students comparatively shop and learn online, institutions of higher learning can enhance brand perception and market engagement by communicating effectively with teens and young adults through their mobile devices.”

PCs Aren't Dead Yet

Sales of personal computers are declining, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the PC is near. While tablet computers are a hot commodity, there are good reasons why PCs remain useful, according to Chris Hoffman in a post at How-To-Geek.

“In reality, there are more different types of hardware and software than ever,” he wrote. “Not everyone is forced to use a beige tower running Windows. But PCs aren’t dying just because people have more choice. Some people will always need large screens, multiple windows, mice, keyboards, and all that other good stuff. Not everything will be done on a 10-in. or smaller touchscreen.”

To prove his point, Hoffman referred to a Gartner Inc. report which showed that 82.6 million PCs were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2013, a 6.9% drop from the fourth quarter of 2012 and the seventh straight quarter with a decline. However, web traffic analysis from StatsCounter showed that PC browser-usage data in January 2014 accounted for nearly 72% of visits, compared to just 22.42% for smartphones and 5.69% for tablets.

And while tablet shipments continue to rise, it was at a much slower rate. International Data Corp. found that 76.9 million tablets were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2013, which represented growth of 28.2% in a market that had increased 87.1% over the same quarter in 2012.

“The statistics show that PCs are still selling in large numbers and are used much more than tablets,” Hoffman wrote. “But we don’t need statistics to see this—we all know that huge amounts of people still use and need PCs.”

M-Commerce a Hit with College Students

College students like the speed and convenience of mobile commerce, and are coming to expect it at retail establishments, if the experience of the Alvin Community College Store, Alvin, TX, is any indication.

After Manager Victoria Marvel added a mobile solution to her store’s point-of-sale system in order to facilitate remote sales at events such as ACC baseball games, she didn’t need to do much training with her student employees. When she showed them the handheld checkout device, “our student workers just grabbed it out of my hand and wanted to play around with it,” she said during her educational presentation on Go to Your Students: Mobile Commerce at CAMEX 2014 in Dallas, TX.

Her student customers were equally excited. These days, with students preferring not to carry around much cash, they were thrilled to be able to buy spirit merchandise at games with their debit or credit card.

“Students absolutely love it,” Marvel said. To complete the sale, all she has to do is scan the bar code on the product tag, swipe the customer’s card, and find out if they want a receipt.

She can print out a paper receipt from the mobile device, or email a digital version to students if they prefer. “They don’t really care about receipts,” Marvel commented, “but probably 20% to 30% have it come to email.”

Gaming Growing for Hi-Ed Teaching

Whether you call it "play-based learning" or "serious games," the use of gaming elements in higher education classrooms "is taking off," according to Mark Milliron, co-founder and chief learning officer of Civitas Learning, Austin, TX, and formerly chancellor of the Western Governors University-Texas, in his Thought Leader presentation at CAMEX 2014 in Dallas, TX.

Acceptance of the value of educational gaming in higher education is rising, Milliron said, partly because neurological studies show that gaming does enhance higher-brain functions. The military is already using simulation gaming in its training.

For college and university teaching, games are able to engage students in ways that traditional lectures and other methods cannot. The gaming format is already familiar to students, some of whom don't really feel at ease in the regular classroom.

"Anyone who has said kids can't concentrate haven't observed this behavior at all," Milliron noted, referring the way young people are able to focus their attention for long periods of time while playing a video game.

Some games allow students to work together to build skills and solve problems in an online environment, rather than learning on their own in isolation. That also helps to keep students engaged and on track. "The social connection of games really matters," Milliron said.

Newer Faculty Like Digital Better

College students and tenured faculty agree: When all else is equal, they'd rather use print textbooks. But newly minted faculty may be predisposed toward digital course materials.

Guy Adams, who's in charge of academic publishing and outreach for the UCLA Store at the University of California Los Angeles, has noticed that the newer faculty on his campus are the ones most comfortable with online materials. Adams was part of a panel presentation addressing Best Practices in Course Materials on March 7 at CAMEX 2014 in Dallas, TX.

He said the new faculty became accustomed to using online resources while preparing their dissertations and doing other work for their doctorate studies. That comfort level is now carrying over into their teaching and they're more apt than older faculty to choose digital materials for their courses, often materials accessed through the school's learning management system (LMS).

"They're very facile with using this and teaching with this," Adams told the audience. "The bookstore is not involved with this process at all." For that reason, he advised campus bookstores to learn as much as possible about their institution's LMS and look for opportunities to get involved.

Covering the Cost of OER

While free to users, most quality open content still incurs costs for development and distribution. How can costs for academic content be recouped while still ensuring students have free access?

In his Thought Leader presentation March 7 at CAMEX 2014 in Dallas, TX, Charles Key noted that a number of business models for open educational resources are emerging. "There's a lot of money coming in from government and college systems," said the director of adoptions, grants, and the College Open Textbooks project for the Open Doors Group, a nonprofit dedicated to education affordability.

These funds are paying for development of course content intended to be shared among institutions. For-profit publishers are also providing some digital content at no charge while offering other formats and enhanced services for a fee.

The concept of assessing a special student fee "hasn't caught on but is increasingly being looked at," Key said. Typically, the fee runs around $100 per term.

In some cases, individual schools and academic departments are choosing to produce course materials out of their own budgets. The mathematics faculty at one community college, for example, decided to collaborate on writing textbooks for all classes; the books have been used by some 600,000 students so far.

Some professors are also willing to take time to create their own course materials, a trend Key said is on the rise since textbook affordability has become a hot issue.

Yale Experimenting with Google Glass

Yale University is set to rent out Google Glass devices through its Bass Library in the fall. The program is a partnership between the Instructional Technology Group, the Student Technology Collaboration, and the library.

Students and faculty are being asked to propose fall-semester research and teaching projects using the device. Library staff is working on ways to use the devices, such as assisting handicapped library patrons and as a scanner to fill student requests from the book stacks.

Google Glass caught the attention of the university last fall when Henry Furman, a senior quarterback on the football team, wore the device during a team practice. The feed Furman recorded was turned into a video that gives fans a quarterback’s perspective of the game.

Texas Launches Low-Cost Degree Program

In 2011, Texas Gov. Rick Perry challenged education leaders in his state to develop a four-year baccalaureate degree that cost no more than $10,000 to complete. Officials responded with a three-year degree program that costs $13,000 and uses online courses to deliver on the low-cost promise.

The Texas Affordable Baccalaureate Degree Program allows students to earn 90 credit hours online, with the last 30 offered in both traditional classrooms and online settings. Students are also allowed to earn credits for lower-division coursework by proving they have mastered the concept.

The cost is $750 for each seven-week period and includes e-textbooks. Students are able to complete as many courses as they can within that seven-week period without additional cost.

The program was launched in early February at South Texas College and Texas A&M-Commerce. It is supported by the College for All Texans Foundation and a two-year, $1 million grant from Educause and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Its goal is to teach skills employers view as necessary for students to join the workforce.

“We also listened to what national and regional employers are saying they really want: graduates with critical thinking skills who are quantitatively literate, can evaluate knowledge sources, understand diversity, and benefit from a strong liberal arts and sciences backgrounds,” said Van Davis, director of innovation, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. “This isn’t just another business degree.”

CAMEX Digs into Tech, Content, Commerce

College and university campuses are possibly the only places where consumer technologies, higher learning, new media, electronic and mobile commerce, libraries, retail technologies, and digital content intersect. Educational sessions coming up March 7-8 at the 2014 Campus Market Expo (CAMEX) in Dallas, TX, will address just about all of those areas.

Among the presenters for the Thought Leader series will be Charles Key, director of adoptions, grants, and the College Open Textbooks project for the Open DoorsGroup in San Jose, CA, a coalition of organizations working together to make education more accessible, and Mark Milliron, chancellor of the WesternGovernors University-Texas, a nonprofit institution providing online and blended degree programs.

Key will address Open Educational Resources and the Economies of Sale on Friday morning while Milliron’s Saturday session will discuss Technology, Education, and the Road Ahead.

Concurrent CAMEX educational sessions will explore new retail technologies for campus textbook sellers, how campus stores can work with other entities to support student retention and success, updates on the Higher Education Act and Department of Education regulations, how faculty and students are using technology for their studies, digital content pilots on college campuses, mobile commerce developments, connecting with students through social media, trends in higher education course materials, and integrating e-commerce and digital content platforms.

Flash Sessions (shorter takes on topics) will look at how campus stores can support student learning outcomes, helping students understand interactive digital homework solutions, selling textbooks online, using Google Analytics to track web traffic, what technology products students are buying, licensing course content, and where massive open online courses (MOOCs) could be headed.

Watch The CITE for reports from several of these sessions.

Following the session days, CAMEX will continue March 9-11 with its trade show for retailers serving students at higher education institutions and prep schools. CAMEX is owned and produced by the National Association of College Stores.

Colleges, K-12s Need More Collaboration

Administrators on both the college and K-12 level agree they need to collaborate more. The problem is few actually do.

A recent telephone survey of 104 public school superintendents and 101 leaders of public and private two- and four-year colleges and universities found that most superintendents (90%) and college system leaders (80%) say they believe their collaboration is extremely or very important. At the same time, just 33% of superintendents and 34% of postsecondary leaders say they do collaborate extremely or very effectively.

“K-12 is much more top-down than higher ed and decisions can be made more quickly,” Jacqueline King, director of higher education collaboration for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, told Education Week. “This can be frustrating to K-12 to have higher-ed people want to talk [issues] to death.” On the other hand, college administrators often believe K-12 leaders don’t understand they just “can’t snap fingers and make things happen,” she added.

The research, The Collaborative Imperative, also showed both groups tend to have different priorities and question whether their counterparts view collaboration as that important. Superintendents want to see an improvement in the development of teachers and in ways to align instruction with higher ed, while postsecondary leaders are focused on improving students’ transition into college and reducing the need for remedial courses. College administrators tend to blame budget constraints as a barrier to collaboration with their public school counterparts, who say they are just too busy to make time for collaboration.

“Although not insurmountable, these barriers especially require fresh and innovative thinking about how resources can be marshaled or pooled if we are serious about functioning as a coherent educational system, rather than separate sectors,” the report said. “We especially recognize the promise of regional collaboration, organized among schools and colleges who share students and teachers in common and who, therefore, have clear connections to shared outcomes and compelling overlapping interests.”

Comic Books Subject of New MOOC

Educators have turned television shows into massive open online courses (MOOCs), so it should come as no surprise that comic books would find their place in the MOOC world. In fact, a Ball State University instructor has already taught the MOOC Gender Through Comic Books, with another, Social Issues Through Comic Books, set to begin March 10 on the Canvas Network.

The new course will use comic books, lectures, and live interviews with academics and comic-book authors to cover topics such as addiction, immigration, privacy, and sex. Students will “learn about social issues and how they are presented in comic books and the impact that those books have had on the issues whether large or small scale,” according to the course description.

Christina Blanch uses comic books in MOOCs to show how teachers can incorporate them into their own classes. She started using comic books in courses she taught at Ball State and found they engaged all students.

“It got them actually reading the academic books because they wanted to do well on the assignment and understand it,” Blanch told Campus Technology. “It also created this kind of equality in the classroom, where everybody was reading the same thing and they started talking about it inside the class and outside the class and in other classes.”

Blanch had 7,200 students enrolled in her first MOOC, with nearly 3,000 responding to a postcourse survey. She used that survey to make changes for the second class, such as  scheduling the MOOC from March through August to allow students time to keep up, instead of the six-week timeline of the first course.

“Every week we had a new unit and they just didn’t have enough time,” she said. “A week just wasn’t enough for the amount of material because it’s not just reading one or two things; there are articles, quizzes, live interviews, discussions. There are a lot of components to it, so people got behind and felt like they couldn’t catch up.”

University of the People Earns Accreditation

In April, the first seven students will graduate from the University of the People. The nonprofit, tuition-free online institution, based in Pasadena, CA, recently reached an even bigger milestone by earning accreditation from the Distance Education and Training Council.

The university, founded in 2009, has an enrollment of about 700 students from 140 counties. The staff consists primarily of volunteer instructors and class size is limited to 20-30 students. While there are no tuition fees to attend, students do pay a registration fee based on income and country of residence, and a $100 administration free for each exam taken.

Accreditation should help the school attract more students and donors. Donations provide funds for scholarships that help defray the cost of the examination fees.

“It’s thrilling to think that with this accreditation, more students, employers, and leaders will begin to recognize the worth of a University of the People degree,” John Sexton, president of New York University, told eCampus News.

On the heels of the University of the People announcement, Thomas Edison State College (TESC) said it would begin offering an open-course option that provides credits to students for passing a preapproved credit-by-exam program. The TESC option is free and designed to attract adult learners returning to school.

“This is an interesting option for adult learners who prefer to work independently, enjoy credit-by-exam programs, and are interested in prior learning assessment,” said Michael Williams, dean of the TESC school of business and management. “This model offers students a more flexible, efficient way to completing their associates’ degree that has the potential of saving time and tuition dollars.”

Patent Issued for Library E-Book Sales

Libraries claim to be places where readers can discover authors and titles, even more so now that there are fewer traditional bookstores. However, unlike bookstores, libraries generally aren’t able to monetize a patron’s enthusiasm over a new find.

That might change. On Feb. 18, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent to Ronald Dicke and Gordon Freedman, both of Ottawa, ON, Canada, for a system to enable libraries to sell e-books to borrowers.

Here’s how it works: Once a borrower downloads an e-book to a reading device, the system tracks how much of the e-book the borrower actually accesses. When the lending period is almost up and the e-book is about to disappear from the device, the system determines whether the borrower finished the book. If not, the borrower receives an on-screen offer to buy the e-book on the spot and keep it permanently.

The assumption is that some borrowers may be willing to pay for the ability to complete the book at their own pace. The system also allows borrowers to purchase the e-book as a gift for another borrower, or even to donate another copy to the library (although at three to four times the retail price, since the library’s copy will be available for lending).

In effect, the system would permit readers to try before they buy, giving them a way to browse through an entire tome—not just a sample chapter or two—prior to purchasing.

Students Report Shift to Digital

College instructors are moving away from print textbooks and using more digital course materials, according to students surveyed for the most recent Book Industry Study Group survey. The report, Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education, also found that use of tablet computers is on the rise, but textbook rental numbers have dipped.

“Today’s students are becoming increasingly flexible about their course materials selections, and more open to new product innovations than ever before,” said Nadine Vassallo, project manager, research and information, for BISG.

The survey found 11% of responding students reported their classes required “no formal course materials” in October 2013, up from 4% just three years earlier. Students also said they preferred tablet versions of textbooks over PDFs or print textbooks.

At the same time, about 17% of students said they rented textbooks, down from 19% last spring. Three quarters of the students who did rent said they were either somewhat or very satisfied with the experience.

Degree Programs Offer at UF Online

The University of Florida has teamed with Pearson Education to offer an online undergraduate degree program for new and transfer students. Florida is hoping that UF Online will reach 24,000 students within 10 years.

The program started in January with degree programs in business administration, criminology and law, environmental management in agriculture and natural resources, health education and behavior, and sports management. Plans call for bachelors’ programs in biology and general psychology to be added in the fall.

The cost to students is estimated to be about $112 per credit hour, or about $10,800 less than students on campus pay.

Pearson will provide technology, recruitment marketing, enrollment management, and student support services, along with e-textbooks upon request from instructors. The goal is to offer the same academic quality and content that students get on campus, but with the flexibility to complete a degree program from anywhere. 

Paying Tuition with Bitcoins

Bitcoin is a digital currency that uses cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money. Users earn bitcoins by processing transactions through specialized computer hardware or in exchange for products, services, or other currencies.

The University of Cumbria in Great Britain is planning to accept bitcoins as tuition payment for two degree programs by the end of the year, but not everyone is impressed.

“Target students probably don’t already have ready access to bitcoin and will have to buy it in order to pay their tuition fees, so the move is probably best seen as a publicity stunt than a real convenience,” Mark D. Ryan, professor of computer security at the University of Birmingham, wrote in a post on phys.org.

One bitcoin costs about $800 in a constantly changing market. Last year, Merrill Lynch and the Bank of America released a report that predicted bitcoins could account for 10% of online transactions, but that the unregulated nature of the currency made it a favorite for cybercriminals.

“The university is not taking any financial risk by accepting bitcoin,” Gordon Fletcher, senior lecturer in information systems at the University of Salford, told TechWeek Europe. “At a simple transactional level, the announcement is the equivalent of stating that students can choose to pay in U.S. or Zimbabwean dollars.”

Making Faculty Cough Up Textbooks

When people get into a discussion on how to ensure college students can afford to buy textbooks, inevitably someone suggests that instructors could create the reading materials for their own courses—usually without asking whether instructors are willing to take on that added work, especially if they don’t get compensation or recognition for it.

But two law professors seem to think it’s an idea worth exploring, at least for law classes. In a back-and-forth exchange on their separate blogs, Matt Brodie, a professor at the St. Louis University School of Law, and Christine Hurt, co-director of the Program in Business Law and Policy at the University of Illinois College of Law, talk about work-for-hire and self-publishing arrangements for producing course materials.

In a post about academic publishing on Prawfs Blawg, Brodie questions whether it makes sense for schools to incorporate the authorship of textbooks into their faculty’s contractual work for the institution, with the royalties going to the school in the same way that research grants do.

On The Conglomerate blog, Hurt responds that the small royalties wouldn’t make much difference to the schools’ revenues, but they provide some incentive to professors to spend time creating textbooks. She suggests, however, that some textbooks—law casebooks, in particular, which are mostly public information—could be assembled by faculty (or departments working together) in a reasonable amount of time and given to students at no charge. Hurt says she already puts together casebooks for her own classes.

Brodie, in a follow-up post, says a possible business model would be for schools to pay faculty to write textbooks, with the money coming from a course materials fee included with tuition. The fee would be less than what students now spend on course materials, and the books could be tailored precisely to the needs of each course.

If schools don’t want to get involved with textbook publishing, he adds, they could still institute the fee and buy textbooks at bulk wholesale rates for distribution to students.

Digital Textbooks Study Students

Student study habits and learning problems are part of the information available to educators through predictive and learning analytics.This software is now being installed in digital textbooks, giving researchers the opportunity to learn more about how students use the course material.

When CourseSmart commissioned a study of 236 students in a 2013 pilot program, it found that students read an average of 551 pages through a 16-week semester and spent, on averaged, 442 minutes reading their digital textbook. Students used their digital textbooks for 11 days over the semester and engaged in 17 reading sessions, creating an average of four highlights, 42 bookmarks, and 16 notes in the digital material.

“No matter what a student’s prior academic ability, which may not be specifically known, the course instructor can have an unobtrusive real-time method to identify students at risk of academic failure that is not tied to activity on a learning content management system,” the authors of the report wrote.

The report indicated that, generally, the more a student engaged with the digital textbook, the better their final grade. However, engagement didn’t always lead to better outcomes.

“What was especially interesting was that highlighting was related to student course outcomes, although not in the way that you might think,” wrote Reynol Junco, associate professor of library science at Purdue University. “Those students who were in the top 10th percentile of number of highlights had significantly lower course grades than students in the lower 90th percentile.”

Junco attributed the difference to the fact that lower-skilled readers often highlight more text than better readers.

Baraniuk Bullish on Future of Free Content

You might think there wouldn't be much room for traditional publishing in the world of open and free educational content. However, Richard Baraniuk, director of the Connexions and OpenStax initiatives at Rice University, would disagree.

Baraniuk is already using open educational resources (OER) to create free learning materials through his nonprofit organization, OpenStax College. If traditional publishers can build on the material, he's all for it.

"We're trying to provide better access to all high-quality learning experiences," he told University Business. "If what we offer saves traditional publishers money, they're able to lower their costs and that will help advance education."

Textbooks will be modular, allowing instructors to choose multiple sources for each class. They will then be able to modify the difference sources of content to suit each student, who will also be able to collaborate on developing the text, according to Baraniuk.

"There's nothing stopping students from becoming authors," he said. "The students in my engineering class conduct a research project every year and then archive their results in Connexions, so they're published authors. These projects get used by people around the world and they get referenced and built on by others." 

Technology Slows Down Online Cheating

When it comes to massive open online courses (MOOCs), completion rates and cheating have been lightning rods for public opinion. Plagiarism-detection software may be the solution to the cheating issue.

A study from Turnitin, an online plagiarism-prevention service, found that schools using its software had seen a 39% drop in unoriginal writing since 2009, according to a report in eCampus News. More than 55 million online assignments from 1,000 colleges and universities over a five-year span were used in the study.

Additional results showed that two-year colleges with between 3,000 and 5,000 students had the largest reduction (78%) in unoriginal writing for online assignments. Four-year institutions with fewer than 1,000 students saw a 19% decrease in plagiarism, the smallest change in the study.

More than 75% of institutions have adopted academic-integrity policies for nontraditional courses, according to a report released in December from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). That study also found that 40% of the responding schools use technology to authenticate student test-takers and another 14% said they had adopted policies to curb cheating in online courses.

Students and Their Tech tools

Students are pretty tech savvy. The Chronicle of Higher Education asked three students from Georgetown University about the tools that make their lives easier.

Gauging Teacher Readiness for Digital

Just how well prepared is the next crop of new K-12 teachers to deploy digital learning materials and online resources in the classroom? Project Tomorrow aims to find out by asking education majors and their professors.

Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit education advocacy group, conducts the annual Speak Up survey of K-12 students, teachers, and parents to track how new technologies and new media are being used in schools and at home. Again this year, the Speak Up research will include a separate survey for students and faculty in undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs.

Through the survey, Project Tomorrow hopes to discover how student-teachers are being trained to use tech tools and how they anticipate such tools will help their productivity and improve student achievement. As this is the fifth year for the Speak Up for Higher Education survey, it should yield some comparative data to show if and how teacher preparation is evolving. The survey is now open until May 16.

Results from the survey will be released in a report to Congress next fall. Colleges and universities that promote the survey to their School of Education will receive a separate report with findings about their own students and faculty.

Lessons from the MOOC Phenomena

Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance, Stern School of Business, New York University, doubted massive open online courses (MOOCs) were actually going to be the “next big thing” in education. Then, he watched as the initial buzz over MOOCs gave way to criticism about completion rates, which has some administrators ready to scrap the idea entirely.

That would be a mistake on the level of record companies celebrating the demise of Napster only to have Apple iTunes blow the industry apart just a few years later, according to Damodaran.

“The MOOC model represented the first serious foray of online entities into education and, like Napster, it failed because it not only came with flaws, but because its promoters failed to fully understand the business it was trying to disrupt,” he wrote in a column for eCampus News. “It is also worth nothing that the failure of MOOCs really rests on your definition of the word ‘fail.’”

Damodaran points out that his own MOOC on corporate finance had a completion rate of about 10%, but also saw more than 50,000 people registered, meaning around 5,000 individuals finished the course. Those are enrollment and completion numbers that would take years to achieve in a traditional classroom.

The problem lies in the perception of what college tuition actually pays for, and it’s not always about education. According to Damodaran, colleges and universities are really more than just a collection of courses taught in a classroom. He points to networking, career advice, and entertainment as part of the bundle.

“As my third child went off to college last year, I had a chance to revisit the question of what it is that you get in return for that check you write out to the educational institution of your choice,” he said. “The first thing to note is that universities operate like cable companies (and other monopolistic entities) and force you to buy a ‘bundled product,’ whether you want the individual piece or not. The second is that classes are only a piece, and perhaps not even the most critical piece, of the ‘education’ bundle.”

Students Learn By Creating Content

Students becoming content creators rather than merely content consumers is a trend identified in the New Media Consortium Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition (page 14). The trend started with “makerspaces,” a communal place where a group of people join forces to purchase a range of tools that are then shared among the group.

Colleges and universities are developing the concept on campus, providing students with spaces where learning and content creation is integrated as part of their instruction. The spaces provide traditional tools, along with electronic equipment and 3-D printers, to allow students to work on class and self-directed projects.

“A shift is taking place in the focus of pedagogical practice on university campuses all over the world as students across a wide variety of disciplines are learning by making and creating rather than from the simple consumption of content,” the authors of the report wrote. “Creativity, as illustrated by the growth of user-generated videos, maker communities, and crowdfunded projects in the past couple years, is increasingly the means for active, hands-on learning.”

The report highlights the work at Indiana University, Bloomington, which uses its Make-to-Learn Initiative to examine how a do-it-yourself culture can advance learning. Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, has created its Student as Producer program that creates semester-long opportunities for student-centered activities, such as creating podcasts and multimedia entries on course blogs.

Campus libraries have become the location of choice for makerspaces because they also provide students with video equipment loans and studios, digitizing facilities, and publication services. The report predicts the trend will reach its full impact on campus in three to five years.

Parents Question Mobile Education Apps

Data from The Joan Ganz Cooney Center showed that parents believe their children are spending more time each day on mobile devices, but learning more from television. The parents reported their kids spend 2.5 hours each day on screen-based devices, but time with educational material decreases as children get older.

The study found that toddlers spent one hour and 16 minutes each day playing with educational media, but that kids ages 8-10 spent just 42 minutes a day doing so. The report added that most of those 42 minutes were in front of a television.

Parents also said 52% of the TV programming their children watched was educational, while just 36% of their time spent on mobile devices was for educational purposes. Nearly 57% of the parents said all education media did help for subjects such as math and reading, but those same parents were not as confident about the value of educational media when it came to the arts and sciences.

“Most parents don’t consider television or interactive digital media such as computers, video games, and mobile devices to be very important sources of learning,” the authors of the report wrote.

Google Glass Gets Fashion Boost

Thinking about buying Google Glass when the device is available to the public? It just got a touch of fashion with trendy frames and sunglasses, but the upgrades won’t come cheap.

Sonification Enhances E-Book Audio

Although e-books have had mixed success in the classroom—with many students still preferring print books—new assistive technologies can make digital books more accessible to the visually impaired.

The new technologies go beyond just the usual text-to-audio provisions. One new e-book, Reach for the Stars: Touch, Look, Listen, Learn, created by software developer SAS through an education grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, uses sound cues in a process called sonification to help demonstrate information presented in a diagram on an iPad screen. For example, when the user touches the screen, levels of pitch indicate the brightness of individual stars in the solar system relative to their surface temperature.

All of the content in the e-book can be accessed through read-aloud functions, including images. It also comes with a high-contrast feature for readers with low vision and an option for refreshable Braille displays. SAS also created tactile screen overlays to use with some images.

The e-book can also accommodate those with hearing impairments. All audio features are captioned and there is a compatibility option for use with hearing aids.

Reach for the Stars was written for the 10-12 age group, but its technologies could be applied to course materials at any level. As part of the grant funding, the e-book will be available free from the Apple iBooks Store this summer.

Faculty Starting to Tweak MOOCs

The massive open online course (MOOC) movement is still in its infancy, but some faculty members are already tweaking the format. One form emphasizes interaction between students, whether between high-achieving students and their peers within a MOOC or between online and on-campus students.

“In a classroom or a learning setting, people want to connect with others,” Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, told University Business. “My big insight is not that they want to connect with the teacher. It’s that connecting with other students is equally important.”

Seelig taught a MOOC last spring that had 25,000 registered students. She reported that 50% of the students who completed the first assignment finished the course, but she also recruited the most active students onto a teaching team to respond to the thousands of comments that appeared on the discussion board for the course.

Gordon Mitchell, associate professor of communications at the University of Pittsburgh, has developed a hybrid open online course that gives online students the chance to interact with graduate students on campus. The graduate students teach lessons, which they prepare themselves to the online students, who participate by posting comments on Twitter.

“It’s a symbiotic evolution for two courses that are happening at the same time,” Mitchell explained. “They’re working on a parallel, evolutionary path.”

Blackboard Opening Virtual Campus Store

Blackboard is branching out, testing a virtual bookstore within its learning management system that allows faculty to choose content and students to buy online. Content offered will run the gamut of new, used, rental, e-text, open source, and material faculty members produce themselves.

The store is designed to provide students with the required content for all their classes in a shopping cart ready for checkout. Blackboard is working with MBS Direct to provide the content.

The bookstore service is being tested on about a dozen campuses this spring and will expand in the summer, according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“We simply thought there was room for something different: A convenient, student-focused option designed specifically to support the educational experience,” Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt told The Washington Post. “Students already use their learning platform to find out which materials they will need for their courses. It just makes sense that they should be able to buy or rent the materials in the same environment without having to go somewhere else or having to worry about whether they are getting the right items.”

Google Wants to Watch You

Google would love to know how readers on its site react to content. The company has even gone so far as to apply for a patent on ways to collect information captured by a device’s video camera.

Many online companies collect customer information, but Google proposes to gauge readers’ reaction to content through video and audio analysis, eye-tracking, head position, body inclination, and physical expression, according to a report in InformationWeek. There’s no mention of advertising in the application, but understanding user interest would certainly be useful.

“Providers of the media content find great value in determining the user’s attentiveness to the displayed media content, as knowing the user’s interest in media content can help media providers tailor future content or recommendations more closely to the user’s interest,” Google wrote in the patent application. “Accordingly, in some implementations, a user’s interest in displayed media is determined by analyzing visual data of the users (such as visual data from photographs or video) for physical indicia of user interest.”

E-Readers Not Welcomed in This Class

Textbook costs have been in the headlines since the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) released its survey that found 65% of students said they did not purchase course materials because of the price. It also reported that 82% of students said they would do better in a class with free online access to course materials.

A professor at Temple University understands the angst, but is unmoved. Students of Meredith Broussard’s digital journalism class are asked to leave their electronic devices at home and bring the textbook, or at the very least a printout of the class assignment, because she’s found that digital-native students really have nothing more than a basic understanding on how to operate the gadgets.

“For a couple of semesters, I patiently endured students announcing their technical difficulties to the entire class,” Broussard wrote in an article for The New Republic. “After a while, I realized that I was spending an awful lot of class time doing tech support.”

Broussard admitted there’s a time and place for electronic devices in the classroom and she likes reading on her Kindle, but she’s come to the conclusion that the printed book is just easier to use. Legislative initiatives, like the one in Florida to switch to digital textbooks in public schools by 2015, make her nervous.

“E-books are not the best format for the way the American education system works right now, nor do they allow students equal opportunities for education,” she wrote. “When the myriad human-computer interface issues get ironed out, and when e-books are logistically better than print books, I’ll be happy to switch over. That day hasn’t arrived yet. Sometimes, innovation means sticking with what works.”

Net Neutrality in the News

Net neutrality—the idea that all data on the Internet should be treated equally without discriminating or charging differently—was in the news recently when a federal appeals court ruled that regulations established in 2010 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) went too far.

Open Internet rules prevented Internet Service providers (ISPs) from blocking or discriminating against any legal website or online content. The appeals court ruled the FCC cannot enforce those rules because the Internet isn’t considered a crucial utility, such as telephone service or electricity.

Verizon, the company that brought the lawsuit, argued the new ruling would provide customers with more innovation and choices. Education experts worry the ruling will allow ISPs to control delivery of services depending on how much content providers are willing to pay for.

“This is a terrible idea on every ground,” wrote Ravi Ravishanker, chief information officer and associate dean at Wellesley College, in his institutional blog. “Given that everything happens on the Internet now, unless those dreaming up creative ideas can pony up a lot more money to get the attention of the ISP, they are dead in the water.”

Others are not so sure since the court also ruled the FCC still has legal authority over broadband. Phil Hill, co-founder of the education technology consulting firm MindWires, told Campus Technology the ruling should provide more freedom of access to Internet services.

“This should allow the FCC to implement new rules that don’t step on the toes of the common-carrier rules,” he said. “In other words, as long as the FCC doesn’t screw up, it should be able to regulate and enforce net neutrality with future rules. But there will be a lot of overheated rhetoric in the meantime.”

A Look Ahead from the Inside Out

People who don’t actually work in education, bookselling, or print publishing spout plenty of dour speculation about the survival of these industries. When people who do work in these industries come together, such as at Digital Book World’s recent conference, they explore worrisome trends but also see a definite future.

NACS’ own Tony Ellis, vice president of industry advancement, was among the participants at the Making Information Pay in Higher Education event, produced by the Book Industry Study Group in conjunction with the DBW conference. A few of his key takeaways from conference presentations are:

• More college students say their classes have no assigned textbooks. In many cases, faculty are opting to use content within integrated learning systems, such as Pearson’s MyLab online products.
• Textbook prices continue to be a deal-breaker for many students, with more engaging in “illicit acquisition behaviors” to obtain their course materials. Once a book price crosses the $30-$40 line, students are more likely to be tempted by pirated content.
• Even though students prefer to study from print and e-book sales are slowing across all reading genres, publishers are gung-ho about digital books, despite difficulties with technology, standards, and data analytics. Still, they acknowledge print will stick around for quite a while.
• Bookstores and libraries are expanding into new roles. Libraries are helping patrons learn how to use digital materials. Stores are providing more services to help authors, especially self-published ones. Both aim to be the place where readers can discover titles and connect with authors.
• Word of mouth matters more than ever. The opinions of others, as expressed on social media and other online sites, have more influence on consumers (especially those of college age) than marketing, branding, and customer service.

Students Finish Online Courses on Campus

Completion rates of massive open online courses (MOOCs) may be low, but a survey by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) found that more students are finishing online classes taken on campus. The study, Managing Online Education, reported that 78% of the students completed online courses taken on campus, just 3% lower than the rate for in-person classes.

The problem, according to the WICHE report, is publicity surrounding the much lower MOOC completion rates.

“Some have confused MOOC completion rates with those of ‘traditional’ online courses,” the report said. “These results show that online completion rates track more closely with those in on-campus courses than is found in MOOCs.”

The study also found that more than 85% of responding institutions have developed standards for online course, but 65% were unable to provide on-campus completion rates and 55% didn’t report the online rates.

“As is the case with all of higher education, there is room for improvement,” the report concluded. “Perhaps the needed improvement is not as much as some critics might claim.”

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology followed the WICHE study with data from 17 MOOCs offered by the two schools over the last two years. The study found completion rates are misleading when judging the potential of MOOCs.

“People are projecting their own desires onto MOOCs and then holding them accountable for criteria that the instructors and institutions, and, most importantly, students don’t hold for themselves,” Andrew Dean Ho, associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and director of the MOOC research at the university, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Study Reports a Dip in Online Education

The percentage of academic officers who said online learning was important to their institution has fallen from 69.1% to 65.9%, according to the 2013 Survey of Online Learning from the Babson Survey Research Group.  The report blamed the decline on schools that don’t have online offerings and have no plans to start.

The percentage of academic leaders who rated online learning outcomes as the same or superior to face-to-face instruction rose from 57% in 2003 to 77% in 2012, but slipped to 74% in the 2013 report. The survey noted more 26% of respondents from institutions without online offerings said that learning outcomes were worse online, an increase of 3% since the 2012 report.

However, 90% of the respondents also said it was likely or very likely that every college student will be taking at least one online course by 2018, according to a report in eCampus News.

“Baccalaureate institutions continue to hold the most negative views toward online education and are the largest proportion of institutions with no online offerings,” the authors of the report wrote. “That said, a majority of these institutions provide some level of online instruction. Associate institutions have among the most favorable views towards online and were among the earliest institutions to embrace online instruction.”

Most Americans Still Read Print Books

A new study from the Pew Research Center showed that the number of adults who read an e-book rose from 23% at the end 2012 to 28% by the end of 2013. It also reported that 69% of Americans read a tradition book in the past year, up from 65% in 2012.

More than 1,000 adults, 18 years of age or older, were surveyed between Jan. 2-5, 2014, for the study.

“Though e-books are rising in popularity, print remains the foundation of Americans’ reading habits,” the authors of the report wrote. “Most people who read e-books also read print books, and just 4% are ‘e-book only.’”

Those statistics could soon begin to change. The survey also found that in the final four months of 2013, ownership of tablet computers rose from 34% to 42%, while adults who own dedicated e-readers jumped from 24% to 32%.

The report indicated reading on e-readers has risen from 41% to 57% since 2011, while reading on tablets went from 23% to 55%. Cellphone reading rose from 28% to 32%, but reading on computers fell from 42% to 29% over the same period.

Textbook Cost-Cutting Tests Tempers

Many colleges and universities are looking for ways to shrink the out-of-pocket expense of course materials in response to pressure from students, parents, policymakers, and legislators. However, as campus administrators investigate possible solutions, they’re sometimes coming under fire from faculty.

For example, at Alamo Colleges in Texas, faculty were not at all happy with the chancellor’s recent proposal to cut textbook costs by requiring each course section to use the same materials, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Alamo comprises five community colleges, with a number of the same courses taught by different faculty at different campuses.

Faculty viewed the proposal as infringing on their academic right to assign whatever course materials they deem most suitable for the class. The chancellor saw it as the means to negotiate bulk purchases of textbooks or license digital materials to secure a lower per-unit cost.

For at least some courses, only a digital version of the textbook would be available to students, which also raised a red flag for faculty. They expressed concerns about students without Internet access at home.

The University of Utah is trying to avoid that kind of conflict. The UU Academic Senate appointed a committee to come up with ways to snip as much as $500 annually from each student’s textbook tab, according to The Daily Utah Chronicle. The committee has representatives from faculty, staff (including the bookstore), and students, who will work together to develop recommendations.

E-Learning Caucus Educating Congress

Perhaps it comes as no surprise, but members of Congress really don’t have a firm grasp on what online education is. In fact, a 2011 survey of representatives found that many thought distance learning was basically correspondence classes. That led to the formation of an e-learning caucus.

The primary goal of the caucus is to educate elected representatives about online learning. The group has plenty of work to do since members still fail to understand just how much online learning has advanced or who the classes target.

“There’s this thought that most participants are just coming for one or two classes, that online education is just used for shorter-term certificate programs,” Julie Peller, director of federal policy at the Lumina Foundation, told eCampus News. “The number of students taking online courses, either completely or as part of a brick-and-mortar program, is not widely known or discussed.”

That can be a problem when 14% of the college population in the United States is taking courses entirely online, according to a study from Learning House Inc. and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. A Sloan Consortium survey also found that 30% of the student population took at least one online course in 2012.

“The goal has been to increase awareness of e-learning, online education, and the issues that affect it,” said Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), who created the caucus with Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD). “We plan to continue to have a good schedule of briefings to bring these issues to the broadest audience of policymakers.”