Feds to Launch Online Skills Academy

The Second Open Government National Action Plan, released last fall, spells out ways the government plans to improve public services. Part of the plan calls for a commitment to expanding the use of open educational resources (OER), a pledge that was reaffirmed during Open Education Week 2015, according to a report in Campus Technology.

“There’s a growing body of evidence that the use of open education resources improves the quality of teaching and learning, including accelerating student comprehension and by fostering more opportunities for affordable cross-border and cross-cultural educational experiences,” wrote the authors of the plan.

The plan includes an online skills academy that will offer open online courses to create high-quality but free or low-cost ways for students to earn degrees, certificates, or other employer-recognized credentials. The Departments of Labor (DOL) and Education (ED) will provide around $25 million in competitive grants to launch the academy this year.

Courses offered by the skills academy will be free and available on an open learning platform, while credits would be made available at low costs. The academy will also use OER for course materials, including content developed through a DOL community college grant program.

In addition, the State Department plans to conduct overseas pilots using OER to support learning. The results of those pilots will be made available to the public and to interested educators.

UC Irvine Offers Chemistry Curriculum

The University of California Irvine is making its university-level chemistry curriculum and educational resources available through a new partnership with the University of California (UC), California State University (CSU), and the California Community Colleges (CCC) systems. The partnership will make full-captioned lecture videos freely available to students and faculty around the world.

As part of the collaboration, UC Irvine’s Open Chemistry (OpenChem) curriculum will be offered to the CSU and CCC systems. OpenChem consists of 16 quarter-length undergraduate and select graduate lecture classes and is available at no cost.

UC Irvine is also collaborating with other providers of open educational resources, such as the UC Davis ChemWiki textbook.

“This partnership extends UC Irvine’s commitment to open education and its worldwide impact, with a focus on the needs of students in the California public education system,” said Gary W. Matkin, dean of continuing education, distance learning, and summer sessions at UC Irvine. “It advances our goal of a world where high-quality education is available to all for free.”

Old-Fashioned Note-Taking Works

One solution for increasing student success has little to do with interactive content and electronic course materials. It’s as simple as taking better notes.

Carol E. Holstead, associate professor of journalism, University of Kansas, Lawrence, decided she had had enough of students mesmerized by their laptop computer screens instead of listening to her lectures, so she banned the devices from her classroom. She did continue using PowerPoint presentations to outline her lecture and provide examples, but also instructed her students they needed to be more selective in writing down important points.

“It turned out my theory was right and now is supported by research,” Holstead wrote in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “A study published last year in Psychological Science showed that students who write out notes longhand remember conceptual information better than those who take notes on a computer.”

The problem for students who used laptops is they become so intent on capturing every word of a lecture they don’t always listen to what is being said. Students who used paper and pen to take notes were more selective because they couldn’t write fast enough, allowing them to retain more information and understand it better, according to the research.

Holstead ended her first semester without laptops by having students fill out a questionnaire. Nearly 52% of the 95 responding students said they paid more attention without a computer in front of them. More importantly, test scores went up in her classes.

“Their answers reinforced the note-taking study,” Holstead said. “The students who tried to transcribe my lectures, even without a laptop, hated taking notes longhand. The students who figured out how to take selective notes liked it.”

A New Way to Provide Proactive Learning

A study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that students learn better when they use active forms of learning.

The group found students with no access to active learning methods, such as peer discussions and group work, are 1.5 times more likely to fail. In addition, students taught with active learning outperformed those taught by lectures by six percentage points on exams.

To provide more avenues for active learning, a tech firm has launched a video classroom that allows students to create and control live video study rooms. The tool, created by Newrow, allows students to form their own online study groups and instructors to create on-the-spot, in-class group video discussions.

Students will be able to use the tools to start learning conversations on their own that can last throughout the semester. The videoconferencing will be similar to face-to-face study groups with text chat functions and real-time resource sharing.

The tool also allows instructors to generate breakout groups of up to 10 students during online lectures. The sessions can be recorded and stored in an online learning library for future reference or group project management.

“Our goal is to remove learning barriers for students by giving them a seamless way to facilitate the discussions they want and need to have with peers,” said Rony Zarom, founder and CEO in an article in eCampus News.

Retailers Pick Mobile Sites over Apps

The cost of developing a mobile app for shoppers is prompting many retailers to opt for a cheaper, albeit less personal, alternative: building a mobile-optimized e-commerce website.

A new study by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Forrester Research, as reported by CNBC, indicated that 58% of retail companies are placing a high priority on mobile commerce this year but they’re balking at the expense. For a national retail chain, that might top $2 million in development fees, not to mention the costs to market the app to consumers.

A campus bookstore could get a decent app for much less, maybe four figures, but that would still represent a fairly large piece of the budget for such a store.

Retail apps do boost online sales—possibly as much as 30% for some merchants—and help strengthen customer loyalty to the store, according to the NRF/Forrester study, although the bump may not compensate for the yearly maintenance and upgrade costs.

The majority of shoppers are using apps to determine if sellers have certain merchandise on hand. A mobile-friendly website, if designed correctly, can provide the same information to consumers.

Lynn U. Testing App to Track Attendance

Lynn University, Boca Raton, FL, is planning a beta test on a new iPad application that notifies students when they miss a class. The app, Class120, will send students a reminder when they are not in the classroom.

The app could also be used to notify the student’s academic coach and parents, although Lynn is not planning to reach out to Mom and Dad.

“We’re not interested where you are on Friday night,” Christian Boniforti, chief information officer at Lynn, said in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “We’re just interested in whether you’re in the classroom when you’re supposed to be.”

Downloading the app is optional, although the university wants all of its students to use it. Lynn already has a strict attendance policy that includes weekly reporting from instructors.

The app is considered an intervention tool because weekly attendance figures show students who miss 25% or more of their classes have a 68% chance of getting a grade-point average below a C. A Harvard study also showed that class size falls throughout the term unless attendance is measured and graded.

Free Community College Works in Tulsa

The idea of tuition-free community college is not all that new. Tulsa Community College, Tulsa, OK, has been offering students the credits to earn a free associate degree since 2007.

The program, Tulsa Achieves, pays tuition for three years of college for high school grads from Tulsa County. The only stipulations are the students must enroll right out of high school, maintain a 2.0 GPA, and perform 40 hours of community service each year they’re in the program.

The college even covers book costs for several hundred of the students through a textbook trust created through private donations. The school enrolled 1,350 students the first year of the program and has had about 1,500 local students sign up each year since then.

There is a cost, of course. Tulsa CC paid nearly $3 million in additional aid in the program’s first year and $3.7 million last year. However, 44% of the first class transferred to a four-year institution and 22% of those first students have earned since a bachelor’s degree.

“We consider it a strong economic-development tool for Tulsa County,” Lauren Brookey, vice president for external affairs at Tulsa CC, said in a report for Inside Higher Education. “People in Tulsa love this program.”

Why Students Prefer Print

Surveys have shown that readers, particularly college students, still prefer print. A University of Washington study even found that a quarter of its students still bought print versions of e-textbooks that were available for free.

Researchers have found the location of information on a printed page plays a key role in comprehension. The problem for on-screen reading is that users tend to skim and comprehension suffers because of it, according to Naomi S. Baron, a linguist at American University and author of Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World.

“These are people who aren’t supposed to remember what it’s like to even smell books,” she told The Washington Post. “It’s quite astounding.”

Online distraction is another issue. Baron found that 90% of the students reported they were more likely to multitask while online. Students also seem to have a lazy streak. Many told her they preferred renting textbooks that have important passages already highlighted and have notes in the margins.

Students do prefer digital for science and math classes, especially course materials that include online portals to help them work through problems. They also prefer digital materials that help them locate information quickly and—no surprise here—content that is free, even though Baron found that many would take the printed book if price wasn’t a factor.

Purdue Expanding It's Use of OER

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, recently partnered with Amazon with the intent of saving its students money on everything from soup to textbooks. Now, the institution is working to take textbooks out of the equation altogether, or at least some of them.

The university is hoping to save geometry and calculus students up to $1 million by expanding its use of the Learning Online Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach (LON-CAPA), according to a report in The Lafayette Journal & Courier. Professors can use the open education resources (OER) that make up the LON-CAPA program instead of textbooks or the university’s WebAssign program, which offers online lessons and grades assignments based on content from major publishers and can cost more than $100 per course.

Purdue’s biology department has been using LON-CAPA since it was developed by Michigan State University in 1992; physics, chemistry, and political science are also using similar programs. With 4,500 students enrolled in geometry and calculus, Purdue will be among the first to launch the program on such a large scale.

“It used to be a student could get by maybe without buying a book or buying a used book or sharing a book,” said Frank Dolley, vice provost for teaching and learning. “Now, these courses have access codes. You have to have the code to get into the class because you have to have that system to submit your homework. The students are somewhat trapped.”

Initiative to Provide More Tech Workers

TechHire was launched to provide more U.S. workers in the growing technology field. More than 300 employers and local governments from 21 regions across the country have committed to the initiative, announced by President Obama at the National League of Cities.

The Obama administration pledged $100 million in competitive grants to fund joint initiatives to target workers who may not have access to tech training. The money for the grants will come from fees companies already pay to hire skilled foreign workers under the H-1B visa program.

“We’ve got to keep positioning ourselves for a constantly changing global economy,” Obama said during the announcement of the initiative. “If we’re not producing enough tech workers, over time that’s going to threaten our leadership in global innovation, which is the bread and butter of the 21st-century economy.”

Business leaders are also committed to offer free online training to prepare workers for higher-paying technology positions, such as software development, network administration, and cybersecurity. The communities involved are working on ways to use data-driven assessments of employer workforce demands; recruit and expand accelerated tech-learning programs such as coding bootcamps and online training; and find ways to connect people with the jobs.

“The world’s technology needs are just moving a lot faster than traditional education solutions. That’s the fundamental problem here,” said Greg Fischer, mayor of Louisville, KY. “So that’s why these nonconventional methods are needed right now.”

Students Turning to Paper for PARCC Exams

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is an effort to provide information on how prepared students are for higher education or work after high school. The exams are based on Common Core standards for reading and math, but technical glitches in the computer-given tests are driving some districts to turn to paper instead.

“Our concern was really that the results of this testing taken online wouldn’t necessarily give clear data on what students know and should be able to do,” a spokeswoman for one school district told The Chicago Tribune.

The Tribune reported that one in four students in Illinois will use paper to take the exams during the spring testing period, costing districts an additional $2.4 million. The percentage of students taking the test online vs. paper is about the same in other states giving the test, according to PARCC officials.

About 11% of the school districts in Illinois plan to use paper and pencil to give the exam and another 34% will use a combination of paper and computer exams. The cost to administer the test to grades 3-8 is about $24 per student, but it rises to $33 each for paper testing.

The Tribune also reported that some students are planning to not take the exams at all, but opting out could be an issue. State officials said that if more than 5% of students statewide opt out, Illinois could fail federal requirements and face sanctions and that the state could then penalize districts for not testing enough students.

Report Promotes Way to Make CBE Work

Many colleges, particularly community colleges, view competency-based education (CBE) programs as a way to improve learning opportunities while lowering costs for students. One problem has been finding ways to use CBE programs in an environment dominated by the use of credit hours to reward student achievement.

The solution may lie in an integrated and transparent competency management framework, according to a report from Tyton Partners. The report, Evidence of Learning: The Case for an Integrated Competency Management System, found that colleges and universities should focus on ways that allow students to reach college and career goals and that knowledge, skills, and experience an individual achieves during their lifetime should be part of the process.

“As the bridge between students and the workforce, postsecondary institutions are uniquely positioned to find and deliver the best tools and resources to capture and communicate evidence of learning,” Adam Newman, co-founder and managing partner at Tyton said in an article for eCampus News. “Colleges and universities must rise to this opportunity or risk erosion of a core value proposition in linking learning and employment and lifelong development.”

The way to begin, according to the report, is for institutions and business to work together to provide students the skills that employers need. Colleges and business must also find ways to award proper credit for accumulated skills and maintain files to record that progress.

There should be ways for students to promote the skills they have already accumulated, along with access to feedback, coaching tools, and services so they can see how they are progressing. Schools need ways to evaluate that progress and employers must be willing to provide feedback to the institutions so they can adequately prepare their students.

“There’s no quick fix to this,” Newman said. “Institutions need to think internally about how connected their own departments are to one another in order to provide an effective learning experience and about whether or not outside experiences are valued. That’s the first wave of this: Institution-centric discussion.”

Online Testing Has Become Big Business

Online testing and assessment is a growing business for software vendors and publishers. The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) reported digital assessment products brought in $2.5 billion in revenue in the 2012-13 school year.

The report, The U.S. Education Technology Market: PreK-12, estimated that the amount spent on software and content in the U.S. for preK-12 education was up $480 million to $8.38 billion, according to a report in The Journal. The SIIA researchers noted that 39% of the revenues were used on content, with language arts and math listed as the largest academic areas covered by the content.

The study also found that revenue for online courses grew 320% percent when compared to the 2011-12 school year.

“The rapid growth of testing and assessment will slow but remain an important area of investment in school districts and states,” said John Richards, president of CS4Ed. “Digital assessments and interest in personalized learning contribute to this growing market.”

Chegg Goes All-In on Digital

Chegg rented $213 million worth of textbooks online to students in 2014. The company recently turned that part of its business over to Ingram Content Group so it could focus on digital products.

Students will continue to be able to rent textbooks through the Chegg platform, but Ingram will be managing and shipping the physical inventory. Chegg plans to put more time, money, and effort into improving and enhancing its digital operations, which range from college admissions to internship placement.

“The rental model is where we started; the real product is what you’re seeing today,” Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig told Fast Company. “Everything we think students want is online.”

The strategy could cost the company in the short term, since Chegg will only receive 20% on the books Ingram rents. Chegg earned $91 million last year, but projects revenues to increase to $133 million-$143 million in the next two years as more colleges and employers pay it for leads and students pay for learning materials and services.

Ingram will start taking over the physical textbook rental business for Chegg by May 1 and be running all warehousing operations by the end of the year, according to a report in Ink, Bits, & Pixels.

Some Questions for Amazon@Purdue

Purdue University went all out for its new Amazon@Purdue bricks-and-mortar location in the Krach Leadership Center on the West Lafayette, IN, campus. The university president was there to cut a ceremonial ribbon and student employees in Amazon gear gave away gift cards and apparel to students in attendance.

But not everyone was impressed.

Tom Frey, owner of the University Book Store, which is technically off-campus but only by a few feet, has given lawyers a list of 57,000 titles Amazon is selling below his costs, according to a report by the public broadcasting station on campus. The University Book Store has been a licensed retailer of Purdue items and has sold textbooks to Purdue students for 75 years.

Bobby Haddix, the Purdue student body president, also questioned giving space in a building designed for students to an outside corporate entity. Amazon even flew Haddix out to Seattle so he could learn more about the company after he made two presentations against the idea to school trustees.

“This is a brand-new building. It was supposed to be specifically dedicated for students,” Haddix told the radio station. “And the decision was made over the summer while there weren’t a lot of students here to share their input to give this conference room away.”

Online Reading Needs to Improve

Students have become very proficient in operating technology, but that doesn’t mean they comprehend what they are reading on-screen. Online learning requires students to use the Internet to read and grasp new information, but a study by the University of Connecticut found a large achievement gap.

The New Literacies of Online Research and Comprehension: Rethinking the Reading Achievement Gap studied the reading habits of seventh-graders in two Connecticut school districts. The two groups of students were asked to complete online reading assignments in science and then write reports on their findings, but both did poorly.

“They tend to be strong in social networking, texting, video, and gaming, and incredibly weak with information,” Donald Leu, director of the new Literacies Research Lab at UConn, said in an article for District Administration. “We’ve learned that it’s important to look at those categories of skills very differently and not to assume that students are strong with online information use when they are strong with social networking.”

There was also an income gap between the two districts studied. Students who lived in the district with a median family income of $119,000 got about half of the questions right, while students in the district with a median family income of $59,000 responded correctly on fewer than 25% of the answers.

Leu said the difference may be due to spending more time teaching students to do well on standardized tests rather than to online literacy skills. He suggested students should be doing more online reading and that librarians trained in online research need take a lead role in the instruction.

OER Can Keep Students in Class

Open educational resources (OER) are often presented as a way for college students to save money. The discussion should perhaps focus on how OER can keep students in class.

Many studies report that some students put off buying textbooks because of cost. When that happens, they often fall behind in their assignments, which can lead them to withdraw from the institution. Matt Reed, vice president for academic affairs, Holyoke Community College, Holyoke, MA, said he believes OER should be considered a retention solution, since having course materials at little or no cost would contribute to student success.

Institutions will still have to find affordable ways to put larger electronic devices in the hands of all students, but Reed is optimistic it’s an issue that can resolved.

“I can’t help but think that the device issue is much more solvable than, say, the political opposition to free community college,” Reed wrote in his Inside Higher Ed blog. “And the payoff isn’t merely economic. Students who have class materials from day one are likelier to succeed academically than students who don’t. This is an economic issue, but it’s also a retention issue. And it’s one we can solve without waiting for the political winds to shift.”

Mixed Messages from Online Students

It’s said you can make statistics mean anything you want. That appears to be the case with a pair of recent surveys focused on how students view their online education.

The National Survey of Student Engagement reported that students earning online degrees felt as connected and engaged as their on-campus peers. The report, which polled more than 350,000 students, singled out the online, competency-based Western Governors University after its students ranked the institution 20% higher than the national average for quality of interaction with faculty and 23% higher for quality of academic support.

On the other hand, students taking online courses at Kent State University said they missed the personal interaction with their professors. A survey of 250 students found they reported online courses to be much harder than expected, but they had more success with an online course when the professor created a personal connection, even if it was done by computer.

"I was surprised that was at the forefront of students’ minds and they were so aware of what was missing from the online classroom,” Bethany Simunich, KSU’s director of online pedagogy and research, said in an article in The Akron Beacon Journal.

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.”