Online Students Could Use More Support

A new report on online learning found that the more virtual courses students take, the worse they do. The study on virtual learning effectiveness in K-12 schools, mandated by the Michigan legislature, reported that the number of students taking online courses increased in the 2013-14 school year by 38% over 2012-13.

However, the completion/pass rate fell from 60% for the 2012-13 year to 57% last year.

The research also found that while 65% of students were taking at least one online course, the completion/pass rate slipped dramatically as more courses were added to the schedule. Only 42% of students who passed three online classes and just 24% passed six online classes. At the same time, 40% of students who took six online courses were failing all of them.

“Good local policy ought to be such that they temper the number of enrollments a kid can take virtually at any given time until there’s evidence the kid is successful,” Joe Freidhof, executive director of the Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute, told The Detroit Free Press. “It really is a different skill set, from what they’ve done traditionally to what they’re doing in an online environment. They’re going to need more support.”

Amazon Giving Bricks-and-Mortar a Try

Amazon’s first bricks-and-mortar location is aimed squarely at fostering customer loyalty with the millennial generation, according to a report in ZDNet. Amazon@Purdue at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, provides the online retail giant with a way to conveniently reach the 18-34 demographic.

“The millennial generation of customers, which includes those in college right now, is going to be the most important generation of consumers our country has ever known,” said retail consultant Micah Solomon. “There are more of them than the baby boomers and they will soon control a dominant share of the purchasing power as well.”

The Purdue location is really more of a post office, with pickup lockers and a staffed counter where students can claim their orders. It’s also an expansion of the Amazon Student initiative that provides students with discounts and perks on textbooks and college essentials for a subscription fee.

While Amazon@Purdue allows the e-tailer a way to give bricks-and-mortar locations a try, some wonder how pickup locations will work off campus. After all, one of the reasons Amazon became an online retail powerhouse is because it has avoided the costs associated with physical locations.

“Amazon is the acknowledged king of online commerce, but there are many things about physical commerce that cannot be replicated online,” Solomon said.

CSU Libraries Launch OpenStax Initiative

California State University libraries are working with OpenStax College to provide free and low-cost digital and print textbooks to students on 13 CSU campuses across the state. The initiative is the largest coordinated library showcase of open educational resources (OER) in the nation.

The initiative includes rotating displays, copies of published books, and information on digital offerings and supplemental materials. The effort gives faculty the opportunity to review and evaluate the resources.

The OER content is professionally produced, peer-reviewed, and developed to meet the requirements of introductory college courses. Instructional resources are also available, along with PowerPoint slides and test banks for faculty.

“It is clear that we must take every effort to lower the cost of education for students,” Gary Michelson, who contributed more than $1.3 million to OpenStax College through his 20MM foundation, said in a release. “One area that is often overlooked is the skyrocketing cost of textbooks, which are an underreported financial burden on students. This program will help grow awareness of open textbooks and more affordable education options across a wide swath of the CSU system.”

Digital Textbooks Growing, But Slowly

Does the future of higher education textbooks lie in digital? If so, then that future’s still a ways off, according to data gathered by Verba, which developed software allowing campus stores to let their customers view competitors’ prices on course materials.

Jared Pearlman, co-founder of Verba, shared the findings of his company’s data-gathering in the session Data-Driven Strategies for Course Materials at CAMEX 2015 in Atlanta, GA. Verba tracked actual textbook purchases made by students through the Compare software and found that sales of e-books doubled in the past year, but still only accounted for 2.42% of total textbook sales.

“Digital is still too expensive but, overall, we’re seeing some changes in the marketplace,” Pearlman said. Those changes may bring prices down.

In cases where students have a choice between a used print book or an e-book, about half the time the used book is cheaper than the digital, he noted.

Most academic e-books are available only as rentals. On average, a digital rental is five times more likely to cost more than a print rental, Pearlman said. As a result, print rental “outperforms digital by seven-and-a-half times,” he said.

But there’s a potential game-changer in the works, according to Pearlman: inclusive access pricing, also known as academic content licensing, subscription model, text with tuition, course-fee model, and 100% sell-through model. This involves providing each student with digital access to the required textbook for a fee, which may be folded into tuition, that’s discounted from the usual retail price because the publisher and store are guaranteed sales for the entire class.

Trend Ahead: Change for Publishers

It's no secret that the course materials world is being turned on its ear, with new forms of content, delivery, and distribution. In a Thought Leader session Feb. 20 at CAMEX 2015 in Atlanta, GA, presenter Richard Katz gave a few glimpses of the disruptions facing course materials providers. Katz has been working on a new study, underwritten by the NACS Foundation, to map the current and future course materials ecosystem.

Among the disruptions identified in the study may be a major shift in the role of publishers. Already, publishers are tilting toward developing chunks of academic material, rather than longer book-length materials. Chunks can be better targeted to the objectives of a course and combined to suit the professor's needs.

However, the study's preliminary findings spotted a long-term trend (more than five years away) that may be even more disruptive: publishers may give away course materials. In this business model, publishers would make revenue from a variety of educational services ranging from courseware development to assessment and certification. Many textbook publishers already dabble in such services.

The ecosystem study report will be released in about two months.

The CITE Goes to CAMEX

The CITE’s writing and research team is heading for NACS’s Campus Market Expo (CAMEX) in Atlanta, GA, to cover presentations on digital content platforms and distribution, mobile and web commerce, retail and educational technologies, open educational resources, data mining, academic content licensing, and course materials affordability, among others.

Watch The CITE for upcoming posts on what retail experts, academic leaders, and campus store professionals had to say about these topics.

If you’re also attending CAMEX sessions, be sure to share your own thoughts and observations in the comments.

Online Students Focused on Outcomes

Transferring credit and total degree costs are among the issues most important to online college students, according to a report. Online College Students 2014: ComprehensiveData on Demands and Preferences found that the majority of the 1,500 students surveyed were taking online courses to improve their job status and were satisfied with their studies.

A majority (54%) said they were taking online courses because they were unemployed and that high job-placement rates was the best message to attract them. Business is the most common field of study, while reputation and the price of the institution are key selection criteria.

The number of online students enrolling at institutions within 100 miles of where they live slipped from 80% in 2012 to 54% in 2014. A majority reported that cost and financial aid were not deciding factors in their selection of a program.

“As competition intensifies, the convenience of online study is less compelling to students,” wrote the report’s authors. “Outcomes such as placement rates and features such as price and credit transfer are gaining importance as attractive points of difference. Institutions need to articulate clearly what makes their online programs distinct and track student outcomes to provide quantifiable data to prospective students.”

Higher Ed Heads for the Cloud

Some higher education campuses are cautiously trading in their well-worn learning management systems for cloud computing, reported EdTech magazine. Schools are also shifting other technology services to the cloud, such as student email accounts and administrative applications.

The move isn’t usually about cutting costs. “Cloud services are not necessarily cheaper,” noted a university official. “The value lies in the ways they accelerate the speed of innovation and free you from day-to-day maintenance.”

The colleges and universities highlighted in the article chose cloud services as a means to scale technology services as necessary, remain more nimble as each school’s needs change, and provide reliability to students, especially for schools with a large commuter enrollment.

With many schools tapping into licensed reading materials through their learning management systems, it’s possible cloud services could offer the same. Marian University, Indianapolis, IN, used the cloud to provide electronic textbooks to students at its medical school, along with lecture capture, electronic polling, and assessments.

Online Learning Important on Campus

Online education has become a critical component for colleges and universities, according to the 2014 Babson Survey Research Group report. That’s particularly true for smaller campuses, where 70% of the academic leaders from schools with fewer than 1,500 students told Babson researchers that online education was a critical long-term strategy at their institutions.

Overall, 71% of respondents said online education was an important part of the educational plans at their schools, up from 66% in the 2013 report.

The study, Grade Level: Tracking Online Education inthe United States, also reported that 74% of academic leaders said they believe online courses are at least as good as face-to-face courses, but that most professors continue to be wary of online courses. In fact, just 28% of the academic leaders said their professors thought online courses were legitimate, the same percentage from the 2002 survey, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The study reported just a 3.7% increase in the number of distance-education students in 2014, the lowest increase in the 13 years of research. It also found that only 8% of the institutions in the survey offered massive open online courses (MOOCs). Just 16% of the academic officers said they believe MOOCs are a sustainable way to offer online courses.

Freshman Year for Free Initiative Launched

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been hampered by low completion rates and the fact that no credit is being offered. Steven Klinsky, founder of the private equity firm New Mountain Capital, believes he has a better plan.

Klinsky recently launched the Freshman Year for Free initiative, which will offer a full range of freshman-level courses to anyone for free online. These courses, unlike MOOCs, will prepare students to take exams that can earn college credit. The courses could potentially allow students to earn enough credits to skip their freshman year.

“It’s not meant to attack the traditional system,” Klinsky said in an article in Wired. “What we’re trying to do is have an on-ramp that helps you with the initial costs.”

Klinsky has already donated $1 million to the MOOC platform edX to develop courses for the Freshman Year for Free program. The funding will help edX create 20 test-prep courses that will be available though a portal from the Modern States Education Alliance, a nonprofit organization founded by Klinsky.

“There’s a clear need for wider universal access to postsecondary education, and a lot of people are thinking about how to solve it,” he said. “The revolution started totally separate from us. We’re just trying to make it useful for people.”

Students Rewarded for Not Using Phones

There are plenty of smartphone applications focused on college students, ranging from study guides to textbook markets to games and quizzes. One new app helps keep students focused on class.

Two students from California State University at Chico created Pocket Points, a smartphone app that provides students coupons from local businesses as a reward for keeping their phones in their pockets during class. The app was launched last September and had 3,000 users and 15 local businesses participating within the first month.

“I looked around in my class of 100 people or so and I see half the kids with their heads down,” Rob Richardson, a junior computer-science major at CSU Chico who helped create the app, told a Chico news site. “Our initial name was going to be ‘heads up’ or something like that.”

Students earn points for keeping their phone locked based on the number of people in the class using the app. Once the class is finished, students simply swipe the Pocket Points notification to unlock their phone and see how many points they’ve earned.

Points can them be redeemed for coupons and discounts from businesses around the Chico campus. CSU Chico professors have inquired about providing extra credit or attendance points as rewards through the app and there’s a leaderboard and ranking that adds a gaming element to the app.

Richardson and his partner, Mitch Gardner, have taken a leave of absence from school to expand the program to more colleges and high schools. They are even working on plans to take the app off campus and offer it everyone.

“We want to be the biggest coupon outlet in the country, and we think we can do that,” Gardner said.

Campus Stores Scoping Out Texts and Tech

Collectively, campus bookstores still remain the dominant purveyor of course materials for college and university students. Making those materials available is becoming increasingly complex, with new formats for textbooks and new options for providing them.

On Feb. 20-24, campus bookstores will gather in Atlanta, GA, for the annual Campus Market Expo (CAMEX), a combined professional conference and trade show put on by NACS for collegiate retailers. The stores’ course materials managers and coordinators will be focusing on the ConTEXT track, designed to explore new trends in textbooks and supporting technologies and allow stores to share what’s working.

This year, ConTEXT will discuss the preliminary results of a six-month study of digital course materials, sponsored by the NACS Foundation. Other educational sessions will examine mobile course materials; parsing textbook sales data to help keep prices affordable to students; new software tools for course materials management; how to get started in selling digital content; open educational resources; providing publishing services for faculty-created materials; academic content licensing; research data on student and faculty attitudes toward course materials; trends in health-science textbooks; purchasing habits of students; how adaptive content fits in with print and digital books; sourcing textbooks more efficiently; and what stores can learn from Amazon’s sales tactics and its new campus program.

The Course Content Technology Fair will allow stores to see some of the latest offerings in course materials and related technologies from publishers, digital content platform providers, and textbook management systems. More demonstrations will take place in the designated ConTEXT Pavilion during the trade-show portion of CAMEX.

Since students can’t take advantage of digital tools and content without the necessary hardware, software, and accessories, stores that provide technology products will also head for CAMEX for the related CCRA (Campus Computer Resellers Alliance) Conference. Tech sellers will learn how to better meet the needs of students and faculty, as well as campus IT and other departments.

Study Shows Need for Technology Access

A study on the impact of mobile devices on teaching and learning found technology is helping students achieve more in their studies. Making Learning Mobile 2.0, a two-year study by wireless service provider Kajeet and the educational nonprofit organization Project Tomorrow, looked at one-to-one tablet implementation to evaluate how students used the devices in and outside of the classroom.

The research focused on 127 fifth-graders from Chicago. A majority (93%) of the students were low-income and 45% were considered English language learners. About a third said they didn’t have home Internet access at the beginning of the study.

The report found that home Internet access increased by 53% after the tablets were issued, which led to more reading and writing homework and an increase in reading and writing fluency. In addition, 60% of the students said the tablets helped them improve their reading and writing skills.

“As technology spreads through schools, students are proving eager to embrace it, but that same technology increasingly demands mobile Internet connectivity—preferably broadband—to be fully effective as a tool,” Daniel Neal, CEO and founder of Kajeet, said in an article for eSchool News. “There are still many schools without adequate wireless Internet connectivity to allow mobile devices to function to their full capability. Studies like this one show teachers, students, parents, and administrators the value of not only the technology, but the necessity for connectivity as well.”

University Servers Could Be Targets

Hackers may be turning their attention to data stored on college and university IT infrastructures. A hacker gained access to data from an unnamed U.S. university early in 2014, according to a warning issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The hack initiated a denial-of-service attack against the servers and used about 98% of the school’s bandwidth. The DHS memo warned that government-funded research programs are appealing targets and university networks can offer hackers a way in.

“University networks, which often have multiple levels of connectivity and accessibility to fuel collaboration, may present easier targets for cyber-espionage actors than sensitive government or private-industry networks,” the memo said.

The memo also warned that less sophisticated cybercriminals may look to hack university networks to carry out phishing scams, insert ransomware, or create havoc with student financial information. The university network can also be used as a base for cybercriminal attacks on other IT systems because constant use by students can mask the criminal activity.

Individualized Courses Isn't College

There have been predictions that technology will drag down textbook publishing, just as it did the music industry. Now, some experts suggest that the same consumer demand for single tunes will impact higher education as a whole.

“This last decade of the music industry presages the coming decade of education,” wrote Martin Smith, chief revenue officer of Noodle, a company that creates interactive tools designed to help students with online research, in an essay for Quartz. “Choice is expanding at every level, from pre-K to graduate school. The individual course, rather than the degree, is becoming the unit of content. And universities, the record labels of education, are facing increased pressure to unbundle their services.”

While Smith may have a point, it doesn’t mean he is right. Music lovers may have had little trouble turning away from $20 compact discs in favor buying a song for 99 cents or paying a monthly fee for a music-streaming service, but students deciding on college are not the same sort of consumer.

“The consumer choice is for the bundler—the brand, the label, university—and not the individual course content,” Derek Newton, senior communications director at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, wrote in an article for The Atlantic. “Consumers buy Stanford or Princeton in a way no one ever bought EMI or Universal.”

To Newton, turning the college experience into individual courses may provide plenty of great content, but also much less to study.

“In the current system, it may not be efficient to maintain fine-arts programs, but most people think it’s important to have them,” he wrote. “It has long been part of colleges’ mission to expose students to new ideas and disciplines. On campus, even business students, for example, are typically required to study literature and other topics in the humanities. Some may call that inefficient; others call it essential.”

Apple Not Worried about iPad Sales

The iPhone 6 produced record sales for Apple during the fiscal quarter that ended Dec. 27. The iPad failed to impress, however, with unit shipments falling by around 4.5 million in 2014 over the total shipped in 2013.

At the same time, Apple still sold more than 21 million iPads in the quarter and first-time-buyer rates remained strong. Apple CEO Tim Cook reported at a recent press event that about 50% of iPad buyers in the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom were first-time customers, adding that rate is more than 70% in China.

Cook also noted that user rates are six times higher for iPads than its nearest competitor. He said iPad usage, measured in web browsing, is more than 70%, while 80% of e-commerce on tablets is being done on iPads.

In addition, no other tablet-maker can claim it shipped more tablets than Apple during the holiday season. The company also sold nearly four times more iPads than Mac desktop computers in the most recent quarter, according to a report in InformationWeek.

LED Devices Interrupt Brain Chemistry

College and university students, who already prefer to study from printed pages rather than digital, may have yet another reason to stick with paper textbooks. A study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that sustained reading from a tablet or e-reader right before going to bed can disrupt sleep and diminish mental capacity the following morning.

The study group was small—just 12 students—and involved reading for four hours in a dimly lit room prior to bedtime, first with e-books for five nights and then with printed books for five nights. Then the participants switched the order for the next 10 nights.

On average, after reading the e-books, the students took about 10 more minutes to fall asleep and felt more drowsy in the morning. Researchers concluded that the light emitted by many tablets and e-readers delayed production of melatonin in the brain by more than 90 minutes. Production of the hormone peaks during sleep.

The concern, according to the research report, is not just the cumulative impact on readers’ sleep and alertness. Ongoing suppression of melatonin production has been linked to cancer and other serious illnesses.

The report noted students could reduce the negative effects by limiting the use of light-emitting devices at night, including phones and computer monitors, or using only devices that don’t put out light.

More Innovative Learning Needed

While colleges and universities are good at creating outside opportunities for their students to learn—such as study-abroad programs, internships, and service learning—the core learning experience remains centered on courses taught in classrooms on campus.

“Many of our students are too bright and too entrepreneurial to be the recipients of the kind of education acquired in traditional lecture halls, laboratories, or even seminar rooms,” Steven Mintz, executive director of the Institute for Transformational Learning, University of Texas System, wrote in an Inside Higher Education column.

Mintz said a solution would be to organize undergraduate education into project-based learning experiences. For instance, the University of Texas at Dallas is merging computer science and engineering with creative arts and the humanities for a program that teaches technical skills while trying to provide an understanding of the impact that technology has on communications, culture, and commerce.

“They merge the innovation process of artists, scientists, and engineers and explore experimental models through new technologies,” Mintz noted. “Departments are transformed into innovation labs and students into innovators.”

Digital Learning Software Studied

A recent study looked at 137 online and hybrid courses to determine what parts of the learning software helped students the most. The research was commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Postsecondary Success initiative.

Researchers found that math courses and those that featured problem-solving produced the most positive learning effects. Individualized pacing received high marks from the study, while the learning impact from digital courseware was greater in community colleges than for four-year institutions.

The report recommended colleges and universities should invest in high-quality courseware for lower-division courses and that these innovations should be phased in. Institutions should also use third-party evaluators to get an objective look at the data on how well the courseware works.

“Our goals were to determine courseware features associated with greater learning effectiveness and to provide guidance for funders as they look to make learning technology investments in the future,” said Barbara Means, director of the Center for Technology in Learning, SRI Education. 

Badges Part of CBE Degree Program

Competency-based education (CBE) matches workplace skills with a formal degree program, normally using digital badges to confirm the skills and abilities a learner has acquired. Brandman University, a private nonprofit institution, is helping its students use the badges they earn through its online CBE program more effectively.

Brandman partnered with Credly, an online platform for managing the credentials, to provide students with a way to share badges. The badges link back to the issuing source and deliver data about the criteria and issuer, giving the credential context for LinkedIn profiles, talent-management systems, e-portfolios, social networks, online communities, and websites.

“Employers inform us that there is a need to validate the skill set of business students and graduates,” said Gary Brahm, chancellor of Brandman University, in a press release. “Digital badges will arm our students with a form of professional capital that has immediate value in the workplace.”

Brandman is approved by the U.S. Department of Education to award financial aid to CBE students and is the first institution to issue digital badges certifying skills as students work through their degree-based program. It uses the Credly Enterprise edition, a cloud-based platform to manage and display the badges.

College Affordability Is Topic of NJ Study

A new report offers recommendations for making college more affordable and easier to complete. The report, Finding Solutions, Building Public Trust in an Era of Change, included a survey that found New Jersey residents say they believe state colleges provide excellent/good quality (87%) and high value (90%).

At the same time, it reported that 87% of respondents felt there needed to be changes in educational and business practices to increase value (87%), according to an article in eCampus News. The study was conducted by the Higher Education Strategic Information and Governance Project (HESIG) at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

The HESIG report recommended that colleges work with high schools to help better prepare students and with community colleges on transferring credits. It also suggested expanding partnerships with business to combine workforce and academic skills; allowing students to earn credit for knowledge gained outside of college; providing a clear set of skills students are expected to master; and restructuring financial aid to increase affordability and reduce debt.

“What’s at stake is citizens’ future opportunity to compete and prosper in New Jersey,” said Darryl Greer, the HESIG senior fellow who headed the project. “This initiative goes to the heart of fulfilling the promise of the benefit of a college education.”

More Educational Apps Needed

A study of smartphone application usage found users spend 50% of the time on their devices accessing digital media, while the 18-to-24-year-olds are the heaviest users. Smartphone owners also spend about three times longer using apps vs. browsing websites, according to the study by comScore.

While many colleges and universities are launching smartphone apps, are they missing the potential of apps in the educational process?

“Apps are purpose-built, so it’s not a stretch to imagine one app for Economics 101 and another for Psychology 110,” Ryan Craig, founder of University Ventures, wrote in a VentureBeat post.  “Apps are ideal for simulation and gamified learning experiences. They’re also perfect for incorporating real-world inputs (such as location of the student) into learning.”

Most schools aren’t using apps for mobile learning, focusing instead on course selection and campus maps. Even the Blackboard Mobile Learn product doesn’t access course materials, according to Craig.

“So, although most online degree programs are now delivered via learning management systems that claim to be ‘mobile platforms,’ believing that the solutions to the mobile problem is simply allowing mobile access to a course with traditional online architecture is tantamount to believing your institution’s online strategy is effectively addressed by putting lectures on YouTube or iTunes,” he wrote.

Game Makes Creative Writing Fun

A new video game that teaches the fundamentals of composition and creative writing is attracting attention and awards. Students playing Elegy for a Dead World explore and write about past civilizations that are based on the works of British Romantic poets.

The mission of the game is for students to compose firsthand accounts of new worlds they explore. The game prompts the players to complete sentences on what they’ve seen and then fashion those into short stories.

Challenges become more advanced as students move through the game, sending them on different paths that force them to come up with different conclusions and still finish with logical endings. The game is meant to be fun and thought-provoking, but also provides fill-in-the-blank questions that help students learn proper grammar usage.

“What we’re trying to do is motivate people so they get into a mindset where they have something they want to put out and write,” Ziba Scott, game co-creator, told Eurogamer.net. “We found just dropping them in a blank slate is too much. It’s intimidating. The roles are about giving them something to play as to set the stage for their writing.”

Amazon Launches E-Textbook Creator

Amazon is targeting educators and textbook authors with its new Kindle Textbook Creator. Authors use the tool to create PDFs of educational content that works on multiple devices.

Once the content is finished, it’s uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing for use by students. The tool allows students to highlight in multiple colors, store notes in a single location, create flashcards, and find definitions and information for difficult terms, while providing authors with 70% royalties.

Blogger Nate Hoffelder sees even more benefits for Amazon.

“There may not be much money in digital textbooks, but there is value in getting teachers and students to use the Kindle apps,” he wrote in The Digital Reader. “This keeps them in reach of the Kindle Store where Amazon can sell them other e-books.”

Website Matches Students, Online Instructor

An online education company has developed a system that uses algorithms to help students determine the best instructor for them. MindLaunch redesigned its website to be an educational support platform for students of any age and in any subject.

The platform allows students to select the type of instruction they prefer and then schedule learning sessions with teachers. Only vetted, U.S.-licensed instructors are used for the online classes, which are equipped with two-way video and audio, interactive whiteboards, and real-time lessons.

Students use an online questionnaire about their learning style, preferences, and desired subjects. The algorithm developed by MindLaunch then matches them with teachers certified in the subject.

Once the student has registered and paid for the instruction, classes are automatically scheduled with a confirmation showing subject, teacher, dates, and login information. Classes for all grade levels are available, along with college entrance prep and corporate skills.

Students Need More from Instruction Software

Adaptive learning products are one of the hotter trends to hit the academic world lately, largely because of their potential to customize instruction to each student’s capabilities and comprehension. That’s easier said than done, according to a new Dutch study published in the Review of Educational Research and reported by the blog Education by the Numbers.

The adaptive function typically kicks in when a student gives a wrong answer in the assessment portion and tries to help the student understand the correct answer, sometimes simply by flagging an erroneous response and inviting the student to pick another. The idea, apparently, is that the student will immediately understand how they goofed.

“But just the opposite is true,” noted the blog’s post. “Simply marking wrong answers was the worst form of feedback.” Some students using this type of software even got lower scores than students without any sort of feedback at all.

Providing the right answer helped students more, the Dutch researchers found, but an even more effective method was offering an explanation or at least some kind of clue that might steer a student toward the correct answer. However, the study determined it was difficult to customize explanations or hints because students may be misunderstanding the material for different reasons.

The study also discovered that adaptive learning software sometimes jumped in with the correct answer or explanation a little too quickly, before the student had time to digest the lesson. When the topic was “something more complicated, students learned more when the feedback was delayed a bit, perhaps until after the student had answered all the questions,” the blog noted.

Community Colleges Bolster Online Enrollment

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported in December that nationwide enrollment at community colleges dropped 6% in 2014. However, online enrollment is on the rise, up more than 15% at some two-year colleges.

To accommodate online students, community colleges are trying to provide additional support for students and more professional training for instructors. The schools are also trying to create new online programs that meet the needs of local businesses.

Offering flexible scheduling, such as semesters divided into two eight-week blocks instead of the standard 16-week track, is one way community colleges are trying to make online programs more accessible. Some even offer tutoring, counseling, and additional resources to help students. Seminole State College, Seminole, OK, provides students with a team of advisors who can be reached by Skype, phone, or email, while online students at Odessa College, Odessa, TX, are assigned a success coach.

“The traditional approach is that teaching online courses is easy. Once you set it up, you can mail it in,” Don Wood, vice president of institutional effectiveness, Odessa College, said in a report in U.S. News & World Report. “It is actually much more challenging for faculty to teach online than face-to-face.”

Not Everyone Is High on OER

In North Dakota, the governor set aside $220,000 in the state budget to fund open education resources (OER), including the North Dakota University System sharing resources provided by the University of Minnesota’s Open Textbook Library.

David Ernst, executive director of the open textbook initiative at the University of Minnesota, even gives seminars around North Dakota to educate faculty on using the library.

“Our focus has been on open textbooks,” said Ernst. “And it’s really meant to be an open resource for faculty to find textbooks to consider that are openly licensed and freely available for their students.”

Not everyone is impressed.

“What the stupidity of this is is pointed up by the fact that the state officials in North Dakota—and other states as well—see nothing wrong with the oil industry, the health-care industry, or any other industry making profits from the fruits of their labors, but when it comes to education, well … people should be willing to work for free or produce scholarly work for free,” Dana Eugene Creasy, assistant professor of communications, University of Jamestown, Jamestown, ND, wrote in the comments section of the Prairie Public Radio article. “I am in debt over $150,000 for a college-teaching career in North Dakota that pays less than a third of that on an annual basis—one reason why I’m leaving the state in May.”

Learning App Allows 'Real-Time' Access

Technology continues to up the ante when it comes to mobile learning.

The online learning company WizIQ developed a mobile app allowing teachers to schedule live classes that students can join from anywhere. In addition, students can use the app to access recorded classroom sessions, course videos, class documents, and presentations via their smartphones or tablet computers.

The platform makes it possible for teachers and students to communicate in real-time, allowing them to stay current on classes, tests, and assignment deadlines. The app is an enhancement to the cloud-based management system WizIQ launched in the fall and requires no dedicated IT support.

“After all, people are now accessing more content on mobile devices than anywhere else,” WizIQ CEO Harman Singh told CampusTechnology. “Why should education be any different?”

The app is available through the App Store for iPhones and will soon be launched in the Google Play store for Android devices.

Conference Ponders Cost of Textbooks

As college and university students head back to campus for another term, they may feel no one cares how much they pay for course materials—if the online complaints are any indication.

However, the stakeholders involved in the development, selection, and distribution of course materials are taking students’ concerns seriously. They will explore challenges and solutions at the inaugural Textbook Affordability Conference on Feb. 11-13 in San Diego, CA.

NACS is joining with the Independent College Bookstore Association (ICBA), Verba Inc., and the California State University System’s Affordable Learning Solutions (ALS) program to co-host the event, which is open to anyone interested in textbook affordability.

The conference will approach the question of affordability from various aspects—teaching and learning, content and platform development, libraries, campus administration, sales and distribution, governmental policies, and open resources—with a particular focus on the role of campus bookstores, where the majority of students still acquire the bulk of their course materials. Stores already work with instructors, publishers, and distributors to obtain materials for students and generally serve as students’ go-to helpdesk when they have questions.

TAC attendees are also invited to take part in the ALS conference on Feb. 13.

Text Comparison Plug-In Causes a Stir

A textbook price-comparison tool has been making a lot of news, particularly after reports surfaced the tech start-up that developed the Chrome plug-in was threatened with a lawsuit by a campus retailing company. Texts.com only had about 200 downloads for its add-on software before news of the lawsuit went viral, which swelled to 15,000 downloads within days of the report.

The Chrome plug-in is an opt-in feature students can install that will show prices from third-party vendors such as Amazon, Valore, and Chegg. It interacts with the end-user’s browser and works with bookstore websites maintained by Barnes & Noble College, Follett Higher Education Group, and Nebraska Book Co., according to The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ also confirmed that Follett sent an email to Texts.com expressing concern that the extension was changing “the presentation of information on the screen.” The start-up rebuilt the extension and rebranded it as #OccupyTheBookstore.

U.S News Ranks Top Online Programs

U.S. News & World Report has been ranking the best colleges in the United States for years. The publication now ranks online programs and released its most current list.

The Best Online Program Rankings lists more than 1,000 programs in eight categories. The survey now includes the Best Online Graduate Criminal Justice Program, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts an 11% increase in law-enforcement careers by 2016, and the Best Online MBA Program, because of the increased popularity of that degree.

The University of California-Irvine beat out Arizona State, Boston University, and Pace University for the top spot in the criminal justice program, while the program offered by the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, finished first in the MBA category.

The Penn State University-World Campus was ranked first among online baccalaureate programs and the University of Houston was named No. 1 in the graduate education program category. The University of Southern California had the top-ranked online graduate information technology program and Medical University of South Carolina was on top in the graduate nursing program ranking.

EdX, Microsoft Partner on Office Mix

Office Mix is an application to the Microsoft Office platform that makes it easier for users to create PowerPoint presentations. EdX, the massive open online course (MOOC) provider, collaborated with Microsoft on the project, which it’s betting will make online learning more interactive for student and easier to use for instructors.

The initiative allows developers to create new learning courseware for the online learning platform. Office Mix includes a software development kit using the XBlock platform that allows instructors to include editable audio and video, hyperlinks, white board-style writing, animation, and clip art into lectures.

Through the app, course creators can embed programs into their presentations, such as quizzes and polls, and applications in support of concepts being taught. An analytics feature provides instructors with insight on how the course keeps students’ attention, allowing for quick changes when necessary.

The focus is on keeping things simple for teachers, letting them create lessons one slide at a time while giving them the ability to update as needed. In addition, the courses can be shared on the Office Mix website and published on edX.

“The motivation and action for the Office Mix project was that we believe online and blended learning will be big, and we want to create tools that will be used to enable new scenarios for students,” said Anoop Gupta, a Microsoft scientist who worked on the project.

ACE Pilot to Help Nontraditional Students

The America Council on Education (ACE) launched a pilot providing nontraditional learners a more flexible pathway to a degree. To be part of the pilot, 25 colleges and universities institutions agreed to accept all or most transfer credit from a pool of about 100 low- or no-cost lower-division general education online courses.

The program, made possible by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is focused on the more than 31 million adults who finished some college-level coursework but not enough to earn a degree or credential. Each institution will provide ACE with data regarding the credits accepted, along with progress and success rates of the students in the project.

ACE is also working on ways to develop new guidelines for issuing college credit for digital micro-credentials, competency-based programs, and nondegree certificate programs.

“This project will yield multiple and long-lasting benefits to the participating institutions, the wider higher education community, and, potentially, millions of nontraditional learners,” said Deborah Seymour, ACE assistant vice president for education attainment and innovation. “It will help lead to great acceptance of alternative forms of credit in a way that ensures quality and encourages more people to complete their postsecondary education.”

Teaching Teachers Could Be Key to MOOCs

Massive hype surrounded massive open online courses (MOOCs). They were going to revolutionize higher education, offering college-level courses to anyone with a computer and Internet access as a no-cost alternative to heading to campus.

Of course, MOOCs are not all that, but they can be a valuable tool, according to Justin Pope, chief of staff at Longwood University, Farmville, VA.  Pope argued in a guest column for MIT Technology Review that colleges and universities just have to figure out the proper way to use MOOCs, pointing to the all-MOOC master’s program in computer science at Georgia Tech as a first step.

“It’s not clear how well such programs can be replicated in other fields, or whether the job market will reward graduates with this particular Georgia Tech degree,” he wrote. “But the program offers evidence that MOOCs can expand access and reduce costs in some corners of higher education.”

One area of promise is new ways of thinking when it comes to teaching. Pope reported that current or former teachers made up 28% of the students taking 11 MOOCs offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last spring.

“This is particularly promising because teachers pass what they learn on to their own students. When they make use of edX and other resources in their classrooms, they multiply the effect,” he said. “As Coursera moves explicitly into teacher training, its classes could have as much impact by reaching a few hundred teachers as they would with thousands of other students.”

Digital Dominates Campus of 2023

Eight years from now, today’s fourth-graders will be finishing up high school in preparation for their higher education experience. The campus classroom will be much different by then, in the view of several experts interviewed by eCampus News.

For starters, they think more students will arrive on campus with a number of college credits already under their belts, thanks to more Advanced Placement courses and partnerships with colleges near their high schools. That’s assuming students even need to show up on the physical campus.

“The average student, an admittedly fluid term that will be even harder to define a decade from now, will likely take some courses on a traditional campus, but also an equal mix of online courses, flipped or blended courses, and massive open online courses (MOOCs),” wrote Jake New.

Some—possibly many—traditional universities may go out of business. The Clayton Christensen Institute, founded by a notable Harvard business professor, puts the bankruptcy rate at 25% to 50% of universities by 2030. Those that survive will have to reimagine graduation requirements, breaking the normal 15-week courses into shorter, more focused learning segments that award certificates for successful completion to students who may never need degrees as long as they continue to update their knowledge and skills.

“Big data” systems and digital apps will also help colleges and universities track student progress, help those who are struggling with certain concepts, and steer others to the right courses.

Ed Tech Will Continue to Grow in 2015

Educational technology has become very big business, according to a market study from Futuresource Consulting. The firm reported that classroom tech spending reached $13 billion in the United States last year, up 11% since 2012, and predicted it will continue growing over the next three years.

“Despite a lull in some technology markets, education technology continues to perform, even with pressure being applied to education budgets across the world,” said Colin Messenger, senior market analyst for Futuresource. “Our annual strategic report also shows that there’s growth aplenty to come, with the total value expected to reach $19 billion by 2018.”

All that spending is an opportunity for ed-tech developers. Optimized distribution tools and video streaming for flipped classrooms, device-agnostic services, more mobile learning applications, and better personalized blended-learning experiences are just a few, according to Harman Singh, CEO of the education platform WizIQ, in a column for InformationWeek.

“Different approaches to learning, such as project-based learning, maker education, game-based learning, and more will continue to be explored as part of personalized blended-learning models,” Singh wrote. “Accordingly, such innovations will push ed-tech vendors to deliver more than technology or content, but will require them to demonstrate how their product or service improves learning outcomes.”

Apple tops Christmas Tech Gift List

College students told a Chegg survey they wanted electronic devices for Christmas and most said they preferred an Apple product. The mobile analytics firm Flurry found they most likely got what they wished for.

Flurry looked at activation statistics from Dec. 19-25 and found more people fired up an iPhone, iPad, or a new iPod than all other devices combined. Apple accounted for 51% of the new activations, with Samsung coming in a distant second with about 18% during the six-day stretch.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus probably helped spur the Apple dominance, according to Flurry, which reported a more than 300% increase in new activations of large-screen smartphones during Christmas week over the same period in 2013. The iPhone 6 topped the list of new devices activated and the iPhone 6 Plus was in the top five.

Flurry also found there were 2.5 times as many apps downloaded on Christmas day than in any December day leading up to the holiday. Apple iTunes and App Stores, along with the Google Play Store, were slow to respond during the Christmas-day rush because of the heavy volume.

“If Christmas is a bellwether for the year ahead, we should expect strong performance from iOS devices and a continued shift to the once-derided phablet form factor,” wrote Jarah Euston, vice president, analytics and marketing, at Flurry. “This was the year that time spent on mobile finally eclipsed TV and the data shows that we are spending this time in more apps than ever.”

App Provides OER Attribution Solution

One goal of open educational resources (OER) is to make it easier for teachers to find high-quality content at lower costs than textbooks and other classroom materials. Making sure that content is properly attributed has become a roadblock for many instructors in the state of Washington.

The State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) developed a solution, providing users with a way to cite sources correctly through its OPEN Attribution Builder application. The app, part of the OPEN Washington site launched by the SBCTC in July, was designed to simplify the attribution process and advocates hope that will lead to an increase in OER adoption, according to a report.

Much of the OER content available is released through Creative Commons, which requires users to properly attribute the author and licensor. The app provides users with a form that automatically finds the correct attribution, along with a default attribution statement.

“We’ve found that confusion over attribution and licensing is a pain point for many in our system who otherwise want to take advantage of OER,” said Mark Jenkins, SBCTC director for e-learning and open education. “OPEN Attribution Builder solves problems for them by eliminating a barrier to using OER easily and correctly.”

Khan Teams with Xbox on Learning Apps

The popular Xbox gaming platform is expanding into education. The Khan Academy is making it possible, launching a free app that makes more than 5,000 of its learning videos available through the Xbox One Live app.

“We’ve heard from many students who want to watch Khan Academy videos in a lean-back experience on their big screen and are excited by the ease of use in Xbox One apps,” a Khan Academy spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Khan Academy already makes its videos available through Microsoft desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices. The Khan app also helps Microsoft in its multibillion-dollar battle with Sony’s PlayStation 4, which has no learning apps.

The app is available to Xbox One users in Australia, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Microsoft also reported that there are 48 million Xbox Live account holders.

Happy New Year

From all of NACS Inc. staff in Oberlin, Westlake, and Cincinnati, OH, as well as our staff in California and Washington, D.C., have a safe and successful new year.