U.S. News Names Top Online Programs

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Worldwide and Pennsylvania State University-World Campus were named the best online bachelor’s degree programs by U.S. News & World Report. The 2016 report ranks the academic quality of more than 1,200 U.S.-based distance-learning degree programs.

Only degree-granting programs at accredited institutions are considered for the rankings. Student engagement, faculty credentials, student services, and technology are among the categories used to rank the programs.

“Online learning is becoming an integral part of higher education, and consumers are hungry for information related to legitimate online degrees,” Anita Narayan, managing editor of education at U.S. News, said in an article for eCampus News. “The Best Online Program rankings can help prospective students begin their search for a program that suits both their academic and career goals, as well as their work and family schedules.”

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, was ranked first for the second straight year for its online MBA program, while Indiana University-Bloomington earned the top spot for its non-MBA business program. Other top-ranked online programs were Boston University for criminal justice; University of Florida for education; University of South Carolina for nursing; University of California Los Angeles for engineering, and the University of Southern California for computer information technology.

Apple Updates Its Education Platform

The Google Chromebook has become the tech tool of choice for many K-12 schools, but Apple isn’t going to let the business just walk away without a fight. The computer company is revamping its iOS education platform that allows student sharing of a single device.

“Apple is clearly gunning for Chromebooks,” Eric Zeman wrote in a post for InformationWeek. “The iPad maker would prefer to see students using its tablet instead of Google’s inexpensive laptops.”

Using the new Apple platform, students will be able to log into any school-issued iPad with their Apple ID and find their individual apps, books, and documents on the device. The Shared iPad feature uses a photo login system so students find their assigned iPads. There’s also a PIN system to make it easier for younger children to log on.

The new iOS 9.3 upgrade lets teachers launch and close apps remotely. The Screen View feature allows teachers to view what’s on a student’s iPad at any time and provides locks to keep students on task, according to a report in MacRumors.

“Apple’s strategy means to make tablets more flexible in the classroom, both for teachers and their students,” Igor Bonifacic wrote in a tech blog for MobileSyrup. “With iPad sales stalling over the last two years, this could be a way to spur sales, especially of older, less expensive models.”

Liberal Arts Group Starts Academic Press

Faculty members from liberal arts schools now have a new and easier way to publish research material. Lever Press, an initiative from liberal arts colleges that make up the Oberlin Group, was launched to provide scholars who feel “disenfranchised” by large publishing firms with an outlet to make their work available.

“This is all about libraries thinking about scholarly communication in a new way and putting their money where their mouths are,” Charles T. Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press and associate university librarian for publishing, said in an article for Inside Higher Education.

The Lever Initiative conducted a faculty survey in 2013 that showed little satisfaction with options in the publishing market. That information led the Oberlin Group to begin work on establishing the publishing enterprise.

Amherst College Press was selected for the project because of its expertise as a digital-first, open-access publisher and will head the editorial side of the venture. Michigan Publishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library, was selected for its knowledge in distribution, publishing platforms, and other technical areas.

Nearly half of the 80 members that make up the Oberlin Group have pledged more than $1 million to fund the press, which plans to publish 60 titles over the next five years.

“Those of us who are supporting this would like to see a serious systemwide transformation of scholarly publishing,” said Bryn I. Geffert, librarian at Amherst College. “If liberal arts institutions are serious about that, they have to put some skin in the game.”

More Twitter Characters Does Make Sense

Twitter is expected to raise the number of characters in a tweet from 140 to 10,000 sometime in the next few months, according to a report in Re/code. It’s a move that makes sense to business writer Thomas Claburn.

In a column for InformationWeek, Claburn said the move could make Twitter a more valuable advertising platform and allow it to offer news-publishing services, such as the one Facebook provides with its Instant Articles. Another way it could boost revenues for the company is by keeping users on the site longer instead of sending them to other sites through links as it currently does.

Twitter is testing a format that only shows 140 characters with a link that expands the message to reveal the rest of the content. The idea, according to Re/code, is to retain the look and feel of the users’ timeline.

“Twitter needs all the revenue growth it can get,” Claburn wrote. “Its stock price remains below its IPO debut last year. Whether or not epic tweets become a reality, Twitter needs ways to generate more revenue.”

Distance Learners Need Support

New research found that first-year online students have incorrect notions about how the educational process will work. That leads to unrealistic study choices and could be a major factor in high dropout rates for online learning.

The report, Stories from Students in Their First Semester of Distance Learning, was compiled from video diaries of 20 first-time full-time online students by the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. The study showed that factors such as family circumstances and employment directly influence the study habits and motivation of the students.

Researchers noted how students perceive the flexibility and the self-paced nature of online courses can lead some to ignore assignments viewed as nonessential and to disengage from the course. Those preconceived notions make it more important for institutions to provide support students during the enrollment period, according to a report in eCampus News.

The data indicated that a strong sense of belonging keeps students engaged in a course and that digital skills are important, especially for older students. The researchers also found a “high-risk” period near the end of the semester, when institutional support services can help keep students on track.

“Distance providers and prospective students alike need to work together to design what is achievable in a way that is not just a crude calculation of hours available, predicated on the ill-formed assumption that distance learning is a ‘lone wolf’ experience offering more flexibility than on-campus learning,” the authors of the report wrote. “Courses need to be designed to complement their busy lives and support services need to adequately help them survive beyond the first few weeks in an environment that is most likely starkly different from that of a campus learner.”

Profs, Students Like Tech But Need Help

College students and college faculty are equally interested in greater use of technology for teaching and learning, according to the latest ECAR (Educause Center for Analysis and Research) Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, released in December 2015.

With both teachers and learners amenable to academic technologies, what’s keeping higher education from putting more tech tools in the classroom?

“This year’s study also suggests that the greatest current impediment is probably undersupported faculty,” said the ECAR report. “Faculty need reasonable evidence about which technologies most benefit students, and they need help incorporating those technologies into their teaching.”

The study found that students also agreed with the need for support in order for technology use to pay off. “Many of the students who have used technologies in at least one course say they could be more effective if faculty used them even more and if they (the students) were better skilled at using them,” the report said.

Students expressed a desire to try out three technologies that aren’t yet in high use: recorded lectures or lecture capture, simulations or educational games, and 3-D printers. However, while almost three-quarters of students had used e-books or e-textbooks for at least one class, fewer than half wanted professors to use them more often.

Phablets Surge in Holiday Activations

Phablets were the technology gadget of choice for many holiday gift-givers. Flurry, a firm that provides mobile advertising solutions for marketers and monetization solutions for app publishers, reported that the large-screen smartphones made up 27% of all device activations during the week leading in to Christmas, up from a 4% share of the market in 2013.

Nearly 50% of all device activations during Christmas week were of Apple products, with its phablet—the iPhone 6s Plus—accounting for 12% of the total. Samsung’s share of device activations was 19.8%, while Nokia finished with a 2% share.

The Apple activation share was actually down 2.2% from 2014. Flurry added that more than half of all Android activations were completed on phablets, such as the Samsung Galaxy Note or those devices popular in Asian markets. Samsung’s activation share rose 2.1% in 2015.

“This year, the larger trend Flurry uncovered was what it dubbed the ‘death of small phones,’” wrote Sarah Perez for TechCrunch. “That is, for the first time in 2015, consumers appear to be opting for phablets over smaller-screened phones. And phones with a screen smaller than 3.5 inches (e.g. most Blackberry devices) are practically extinct.”

A Student's View of Social Media

All those studies that say Facebook users are just getting older are true—to a point. Parents and grandparents of students are trying to figure out the social media site, but it’s still an “indispensable” part of college life, according to Drexel University senior Josh Weiss.

Weiss, an editor of the Drexel student newspaper, was asked by CNBC to write about hot trends in social media.

“Personally, I am an avid user of social media, something I am both proud and ashamed to admit in equal measures,” he wrote. “Yes, it can be a waste of time and we’ve all run out the clock, scrolling through a newsfeed we’ve seen a million times. At the same time, it allows you to stay connected with the world. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I don’t get the vast majority of my news from Facebook. I also use it to stay in touch with friends. While some students may use it at its bare minimum to stay up to date, with the world or group projects, I see it as a time-wasting means to an end.”

Facebook and Twitter are important tools at Drexel, used by student groups and the university to update people on happenings around the campus. Weiss uses both tools to provide readers with real-time updates.

He also mentioned Snapchat, Yik Yak, and Instagram as part of the social media mix at Drexel. Snapchat is becoming one of the most used platforms at the university, but Weiss suggested that Yik Yak and Instagram are primarily used to find parties or campus groups promoting their activities.

“Social media can end up running our lives—or even enabling our bad behavior—but if we harness it right, it can help us connect with people and run our lives more efficiently, old and young alike,” he wrote.

Privacy Group Complains about Google

Google has become a dominant player in educational technology, with its Chromebook making up 51% of device sales to schools in the third quarter of 2015. Part of the reason for this rise is that Chromebooks are available to school districts at a fraction of the cost of other devices and come complete with free software used by more than 50 million students and teachers worldwide.

That’s an issue for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit privacy organization, which filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing Google of collecting and data-mining Internet searches by children. The group claimed Google is using some of the collected information to sell targeted ads.

In addition, the EFF said Google is tracking user activity through the Chrome Sync feature, which automatically is turned on in Chromebooks. That tracking function is being used without parental consent, the group argued.

“In some of the schools we’ve talked to parents about, there’s literally no ability to say, ‘No,’” Nate Cardozzo, staff attorney for the EFF, told The Washington Post.

Google countered with a blog post claiming its educational apps comply with the law, while admitting that it does collect data of student activities to improve its products. In addition, both the Future of Privacy Forum, which authored the student privacy pledge that was signed by Google, and the Software and Information Industry Association sided with Google.

“We have reviewed the EFF complaint but do not believe it has merit,” said Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum.

Along with lack of parental consent, school districts are also not informing parents of online service policies. A 2013 study of found that 95% of the surveyed school districts relied on an online cloud service, but only 25% informed parents.

“Despite publicly promising not to, Google mines students’ browsing data and other information, and uses it for the company’s own purposes,” Cardozo said in a statement to CBS News. “Making such promises and failing to live up to them is a violation of FTC rules against unfair and deceptive business practices. Minors shouldn’t be tracked or used as guinea pigs, with their data treated as a profit center. If Google wants to use students’ data to ‘improve Google products,’ then it needs to get express consent from parents.”

MOOCs Had a Very Good Year

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) had a banner year in 2015. According to an EdSurge report, enrollment doubled to more than 35 million students, with more than 4,200 courses offered by 550 colleges and universities.

There were 2,200 courses offered for the first time in 2015, with computer science and programming courses growing by more than 10%. The MOOC listing provider Class Central analyzed reviews of the courses and determined that A Life of Happiness and Fulfilment, offered by Indian School of Business and Coursera, beat Introduction to Programing with MATLAB, offered by Vanderbilt University and Coursera, as the top-rated class of the year.

Issuing credentials to students was a top MOOC trend of 2015, with more than 100 credentials available from providers. Credentials have become the main source of revenue for both Udacity and Coursera, while edX focused on providing MOOC students with credit by teaming with Arizona State University on its Global Freshman Academy and working on partnerships with credit-granting schools.

Many MOOC providers no longer offer free certificates upon completion of a class and are now targeting high school students trying to prepare for college. The platforms also offer more than 800 self-paced classes with soft deadlines that give students plenty of flexibility for completing a course.

“In 2016, we can expect to see a lot more credentials and credits,” Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, wrote for EdSurge. “But as MOOC providers try to aggressively monetize, early adopters many find that critical components of the learning experience will no longer be free.”

App Helps Students Pick a School

Now there’s an app to help students find the perfect college match. The “school matcher” feature added to the Prep4SAT and Prep4GMAT adaptive standardized test-prep apps uses algorithms that identify institutions that align with users’ interests.

A short survey helps determine a student’s preference on school size, tuition range, and location. The app, developed by the Boston-based firm LTG Exam Platform, then shows which strengths and weaknesses the students needs to focus on to gain admission to the college of their choice.

Teachers can use the app to track the progress of their students and develop customized lesson plans that address student weaknesses.

“Apps that are a 24/7 companion and make the best recommendations at all times will be the most useful in the future,” Elad Shoushan, founder and CEO of LTG Exam, said in an article for eCampus News. “That’s what we’re building at LTG: a 24/7 companion that effectively learns about the user in their process of learning and then aids them in the process of admissions. Why pay for an expensive course and books when a student can try a better, more personalized service for free on their phone?”

Prep4Stat is a free download in both the App and Google Play stores. It adds about 40,000 new users each month, making it the top SAT app in the Google Play store and No. 3 in the iOS store.

Students Say Social Media's for Socializing

College students regard social media sites mostly as means for catching up with friends and family and amusing themselves in their spare time. Shopping activities and connecting with brands and companies don’t rank very high on their list of primary reasons to use social media.

According to the December 2015 monthly survey fielded by NACS OnCampus Research, most students don’t mind that commercial entities are staking out turf on social media. Only 8.3% of students agreed or strongly agreed that companies, brands, and/or retailers don’t belong on social media.

About 42.7% of students responding to the survey said they don’t interact with any company, merchant, or brand through social media. The rest, however, indicated they have contact with companies and brands on Facebook (40.8%), Instagram (22.3%), Twitter (13.1%), LinkedIn (8.4%), YouTube (6.9%), Pinterest (6.9%), SnapChat (3.1%), Google+ (2.1%), and less than 2% for other sites.

It’s hard to say whether social media is helping companies attract more business from the student demographic. More than 77% of student respondents said they liked or followed a commercial site on social media because the brand or company was already one of their favorites, but about 60.7% also said they did so to get a coupon or free item. Some 38.8% clicked Like or Follow in order to enter a contest.

Many students are interested in learning about new products through social media sites (53.9%), as well as gaining tips on how to use products (42.7%).

MOOC Students Need a Little Nudge

The problem with massive open online courses (MOOCs) has nothing to do with quality of content or access, according to a Northwestern professor. Students have no compelling reason to finish.

Gad Allon conducted a study of students participating in a Coursera MOOC he was teaching, sending out email reminders to a group of 175 students who had already responded to a survey. The number of visits to the class discussion board by students who got the reminder increased by 28%, while the number of posts grew by nearly 97% when compared to the control group of 160 students who didn’t get the email.

On average, students who received email reminders visited the discussion board four more times than the students in the control group and were 13% more likely to complete the quiz the next week.

In a separate experiment, Allon invited nearly 1,000 students to take part in an online discussion about the material used in the course. Only 6% accepted the invitation, but those students were 10% more likely to complete the weekly quizzes and their scores on the tests increased by 2% to 10%.

“One of the biggest issues in education is not the lack of resources, it is actually [a lack of] commitment and accountability,” Allon said in an article for Chicago Inno. “What is really missing, and what the nudge is trying to do, though it is really clearly not enough, is to create some commitment from the students.”

Happy New Year

The NACS staff wishes you a save and successful New Year.

Pearson Wins in Starbucks/ASU Initiative

It appears that Pearson Education may be the big winner in the program that allows Starbucks employees to earn online degrees through the Arizona State University. A new report said enrollment into Pearson’s online higher education segment increased by 24% during the first half of 2015 and a key part of that growth was the ASU Online program.

The growth couldn’t come at a better time for Pearson, which experienced a 40% decline in its stocks in the last three months, according to Brett Hershman, founder of Leverage Equity Research Group.

“This powerful connection will provide growth to ASU online enrollment for years to come,” he wrote. “With Pearson operating as a provider and manager of the online platform, the company will benefit from the growing online higher education segment.”

Starbucks is paying 100% of the online tuition fees for more than 140,000 full- and part-time employees eligible to participate in ASU Online. The initiative is helping Starbuck retain employees, while ASU has been named the most innovative college in the nation by national publications.

Video Lectures Are Not That Effective

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, have found that online lectures are not really very good teaching tools. Ken Koedinger and his team studied results of nearly 28,000 students who took massive open online courses (MOOCs) on the Coursera platform and found that video lectures were actually the least effective way to learn.

Students who only watched the provided video lectures did the worst on the 11 quizzes and final exam given during the 12-week course. Those students who used a combination of reading and video lectures did only slightly better. Students who did nothing more than complete the interactive exercises used in the course did about the same as those who combined reading and watching the lecture videos.

“People have such strong intuitions about their verbal learning experiences: ‘I learn from listening to a lecture,” Koedinger said in an article that appeared in U.S. News and World Report. “It sure feels that way. But in fact, lectures do very little to change your brain.”

The study recorded every mouse click to calculate how often a student read a passage, watched a video, or completed an interactive exercise, according to the report. Findings from the report were presented by Koedinger at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Learning at Scale conference.

“We have all kinds of assumptions about what works in learning and education,” Koedinger said. “But what we find out, not just in this field, but in almost every field, is that when you put those assumptions to the test, they’re more often wrong than right.”

Regulatory Roadblock for CBE

There are still challenges ahead for competency-based education (CBE), but none may be bigger than the one from the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General. Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, said he believes the critical audit from the Office is preventing more CBE programs from being developed in higher education.

The audit criticized the way the Higher Learning Commission considered proposals for new CBE credentials. The inspector general panned the way the commission approved programs based on “regular and substantive” interaction between faculty and students.

“I, along with many others, have pointed out numerous times that this particular regulation makes little sense in today’s world of emerging online, competency-based programs—and we should instead be moving toward outcomes-based judgments around institutions,” Horn wrote  in a column for CompetencyWorks. “But the friction is also entirely predictable as competency-based education simply does not fit into the traditional value network and associated regulatory structures of higher education.”

Evaluating CBE programs using the same metrics employed to assess on-campus programs just doesn’t work, according to Horn, particularly when it comes to online interaction between students and faculty. The issues will eventually be worked out, but students who could benefit from CBE now will have moved on.

“At a high level, the solutions to these problems both have challenges today,” Horn wrote. “One is to stay out of the government funding streams, as some online, competency-based programs have tried but struggled to do, or to try to launch a more systematic effort at reform through a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act—an effort that will not be an easy climb with the various lobbying factions that will support the existing orders and thus would likely try to stifle innovation.”

Smartwatches Changing Wearables Market

Many college stores have found success selling wearable technology to students on campus, but that could soon change as sales of smartwatches are projected to outpace other wearables.

International Data Corp. (IDC) found that wearable shipments will be around 80 million this year, with smartwatches making up a quarter of the total. Shipments will increase to 111 million units by the end of 2016 and will double by 2019, according to IDC research.

The company estimated that shipments of smartwatches will rise from 34.3 million units next year to 88.3 million by 2019. Fitness bands will take a direct hit because of that jump.

“Cellular connectivity, health sensors, not to mention the explosive third-party application market, all stand to change the game and will raise the appeal and value of the market going forward,” IDC analyst Ramon Llamas said of smartwatches in a report for InformationWeek.

The Apple Watch will lead the category in 2016 with a 61% share of the market, with the Android Wear platform a distant second at 15.8%. Apple could ship as many as 45 million watches by 2019, according to IDC, but Android Wear will become a more formidable competitor by then, with a share of 38.8%.

At the same time, Rick Yang, a venture-capital partner at New Enterprise Associates, told CNBC that wearables will disappear next year in favor of newer and more fashionable products. He said luxury brands will soon enter the smartwatch field and that technology embedded into clothing and tattoos could become the next big trend in the industry.

“Our big thesis has been that wearables will mirror fashion.” Yang said. “I think tattoos are one of the ultimate fashion statements and so it’s only a matter of time before that gets penetrated by technology as well.”

Happy Holidays

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 healthy holiday season.  

Americans Spend a Lot of Time Online

A new study from the Pew Research Center found that Americans head online quite often. In fact, 73% of respondents said they use the Internet “almost constantly,” while just 7% reported using it less often than “several times a week.”

Younger generations lead the Internet charge. More than 90% of teens said they go online daily, while 36% of those ages 18-29 claimed they were in the “almost constantly” category. Time on the Internet dropped as the age groups got older.

More than 85% of the respondents who owned either a smartphone or a tablet, or both, said they used the Internet daily. Even 65% of those who didn’t have a smartphone or tablet reported logging in on a daily basis, according to a report in Pymnts.com.

Twenty-nine percent of college graduates reported being on the Internet more, compared to just 14% of those with a high school diploma or less. In addition, those earning $75,000 a year (28%) went online more than those earning $30,000 or less (14%).

New Polymer Could Change E-Reading

E-reading may be about to take a giant step forward. Researchers in Sweden have created a new material called power paper that can be formed into thin flexible displays storing an enormous amount of content.

One sheet of power paper has the capacity to store as much as 1 farad, or the same amount of information store by supercapacitors currently on the market. In addition, the material can be recharged hundreds of times and recharging only takes seconds to complete.

The cellulose material already set a world record for simultaneous conductivity for ions and electrons. It still must be developed at industrial scale to be practical, but has the potential to be used in folding or rollable screens and horizontal display technology.

“We could end up with e-paper devices that are actually paper thin, foldable, or rollable, and yet still fully powered,” wrote Paul St. John Mackintosh in a blog post for TeleRead.

Students Shop on Phone or Laptop, Not Tablet

College students prefer to shop online from their laptop or smartphone, rather than using a tablet or other computerized device.

In a new student panel survey from NACS OnCampus Research, 82.5% of respondents said they had shopped on their laptop at least once in the preceding 90 days. On average, they made 3.2 purchases via the laptop.

More than 70% indicated they shopped on their smartphone during the same time period, transacting almost two purchases on the device on average. In contrast, just 29.7% went shopping on a desktop computer, 28.2% on a tablet, 5.2% on a transformer or hybrid device, 2.2% on a netbook, and 1.4% on an e-reader.

Approximately 37.4% of students admitted to browsing for merchandise information or buying something on their phone every single day. Even so, shopping ranked just 11th on the list of 13 daily activities students conduct during the 5.2 hours they average on their phones. Topping that list, not unexpectedly, was text messaging (96%), searching the Internet (89.3%), accessing email (89.2%), social networking (80.7%), and phone calls (78.6%).

At the bottom of the list were video messages (11.4%) and reading books, magazines, and other materials (17.2%).

The survey also showed that many students don’t regard certain small electronics to be “mobile.” Nearly all students consider a smartphone to be mobile and 63.2% would apply that term to tablets. However, fewer than half of students think of iPods, laptops, e-readers, hybrid devices, and netbooks as mobile—possibly because they don’t use these devices away from home, unlike phones and tablets. Educators, marketers, retailers, and others who refer to “mobile” devices in discussions and promotions might want to clarify that for a student audience.

Teachers Want More Say in Ed Tech

There have been numerous reports on the growing use of technology in K-12 schools—tablets issued to students, educational software and games, online course materials, and much more—and a lot of speculation on whether it improves teaching and learning.

A new study, however, indicates that the majority of K-12 teachers say they weren’t included in decisions about educational technology at their schools, according to T.H.E. Journal. Yet, 63% of teacher respondents felt they really should lead the exploration of ed-tech platforms and applications to choose which are the best for students.

In most cases, the teachers pointed to school and district administrators and other leaders as responsible for making technology decisions, often with limited input from the teaching staff. “Forty-eight percent of respondents said they believe cost is the primary influence on ed-tech selection—much more so than student outcomes (22%) or teacher buy-in (9%),” said T.H.E. Journal.

Most teachers (62%) would prefer for someone else to do the basic research on ed-tech systems and provide a list of options to them for a final review and decision; only 26% would rather do all the legwork themselves. However, they don’t see much of a role for parents. In ranking all the stakeholders in order of importance in educational technology decision-making, 49% of teachers put parents dead last.

The survey of 4,300 teachers was conducted by TES Global, an online community for teachers, and the Jefferson Education Accelerator, which develops ed-tech solutions.

Shedding Light(sabers) on Learning

Forget adaptive learning. Toss out gamification and videos. Who needs lecture podcasts or any other educational techno-tool intended to help students learn better? If you want young people of any age to master academic concepts, you should head to a galaxy far, far away.

Star Wars may provide everything that instructors need to illustrate their lesson plans. Using elements from the famed movie franchise, instructors can construct mathematics problems, explore scientific ideas, or explain literary themes. The Star Wars in the Classroom site offers ideas and resources for incorporating Luke, Leia, Han, and the gang in teaching.

Two professors, one at the University of Auckland in Australia and the other at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, wrote a series of papers for Academic Psychiatry recommending that university faculty use the behavior of Star Wars characters to demonstrate psychiatric principles.

“For instance, Luke Skywalker’s moody behavior in the original 1977 film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (not doing chores, hanging out in bars, animal cruelty when ‘bullseyeing womp rats’ on his home planet) might be analyzed by students when talking about manifestations of teenage depression,” said a report by Times Higher Education.

Luke also suffers from Oedipal issues as the result of treatment by his “deadbeat absentee father,” Darth Vader, who in turn exhibits borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. C3PO has obsessive-compulsive personality disorder and Obi-Wan Kenobi displays symptoms of major depression and pseudo-dementia.

The idea is that a cultural phenomenon like Star Wars might hold students’ attention more than traditional textbook content and provide examples of concepts that are easier to understand and retain, helping to awaken the force of learning.

Consumer Acceptance Pushes Biometric ID

Once the stuff of spy thrillers and futuristic movie sagas, biometrics appear ready to ramp up in the next year as an accepted system for authenticating user identity, according to a report in Mobile Commerce Daily.

One company, Mitek Systems, even goes so far as to predict that biometrics will be incorporated in almost 50% of mobile financial transactions in 2016, thanks to new programs such as Apple’s Touch ID.

“We see a lot of interest in the kill-the-password movement,” said Sarah Clark, Mitek’s vice president of product.

A number of financial institutions have been piloting identity verification systems due to the rise in customers wanting to open accounts through their mobile devices. These customers don’t want to deal with a bricks-and-mortar location and they may not have a secure computer. According to Mitek, 86% of the millennial age group handle financial transactions on a mobile device, usually a smartphone.

At one time people may have been spooked by the idea of using their fingerprints or facial and voice recognition as an ID. Now consumers seem totally comfortable with the concept.

Biometric authentication is likely to spread to other applications, such as point-of-sale systems, campus ID cards, and online test-taking.

Use of E-Portfolios Growing in Higher Ed

There was a time when portfolios were primarily used by faculty as a way to gather information on student progress. Times have clearly changed because the California State University system rolled out an e-portfolio initiative in November that is available for use by more than three million students and alumni.

An e-portfolio provides students with a place to collect evidence of lifelong learning and skills. The electronic repository provides employers information that help match students with jobs. Colleges and universities are also using e-portfolios to identify tools and training needed to help students become more attractive job candidates.

“Tuition costs are up, perceived value is down,” Ryan Craig wrote in a report for TechCrunch. “Reports suggest that half of recent graduates are unemployed or underemployed. Colleges and universities need to provide students and graduates with additional training and tools to improve immediate employability.”

More than 30 states now require students as early as middle school to create e-portfolios and individualized learning plans. Students will be able to provide colleges and universities with examples of their best work, helping to make it easier identify the abilities and potential of prospective applicants.

“Once a sideshow, e-portfolios are beginning to play a more central role in higher education, connecting both forward (graduates to jobs) and backwards (high school students to admissions),” Craig wrote. “Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the days of viewing e-portfolios as peripheral rather than central are dead.”

More Learning Innovation Needed

The New Media Consortium listed adoption of digital textbooks, mobile learning, innovations in web and print design, and the merging of online and learning analytics as the trends that are reinventing what course materials can do for students. However, the potential has yet to be realized.

“Each of these trends is spurring new visions of what digital course materials could look like and how they can foster more engaged learning; together, they are fueling a grass-roots wave of innovations,” authors of the report Course Apps wrote. “Two of the trends in particular, digital textbooks and design, have not yet reached their full potential in higher education, and there is space for institutions and education-focused companies to take them to the next level in service of teaching and learning.”

Textbook publishers are taken to task in the report for watching from the sidelines as others innovate. Digital tools still need to include “social, interactive, and immersive capabilities inherent to the connected devices on which these materials are experienced.” The report also pointed out that most content creators don’t have the expertise to develop their own materials.

“There is a need for user-friendly tools that empower faculty to design the kinds of compelling resources that will comprise the next wave of instructional resources and materials,” the authors wrote.

Technology Alone Is Not Enough

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, celebrated the birth of their daughter by announcing they would invest nearly their entire fortune in good causes, with personalized learning topping the list. While certainly a magnanimous gesture, there is one small problem: There’s little evidence that technology by itself can replace good schools.

Studies have shown that creating personalized learning tools that allow students to learn at their own pace, provide constant feedback, and recommend lessons based on previous work can produce improvement in learning results. But students still need support from teachers and parents.

Jason Reich, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported in a paper published in Science that 38% of students enrolled in online courses from Harvard and MIT live in more affluent neighborhoods. Reich also found students with college-educated parents were nearly twice as likely to finish the online courses they take.

“The history of education technology shows emerging technologies tend to disproportionately benefit affluent people,” Reich said in a National Public Radio report. “Designing for digital equity is really hard.”

The good news is Zuckerberg has shown a willingness to do the hard work necessary. Facebook engineers are already working on a personalized learning platform with Summit Schools, a chain of technology-centered charter schools. In addition, Zuckerberg has invested in AltSchool, a Bay Area startup that blends Montessori educational concepts with high-tech tools. He also plans to build free-standing private schools for low-income students.

“The technology is important, but it’s not really the hard or the expensive part,” said Michael Feldstein, co-founder of the education blog e-Literate, in the NPR report. “These challenges are particularly hard for poorer schools where there is less money and less support for teachers.”

Fitbit, Apple Top Wearables Market

Wearable technology continues to grow as a product category, according to a new report from International Data Corp. (IDC). Worldwide shipments increased 197.6%, to 21 million units, in the third quarter of 2015 compared to the same quarter of 2014.

Fitbit is the undisputed leader, with a 22% share of the market. Apple is second with a 18.6% share, thanks to sales of the Apple Watch, according to IDC. Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi finished third ahead of GPS-maker Garmin.

Samsung’s share of the market slipped to sixth behind Chinese vendor XTC, because of a late start in shipping its Gear S2. The “others” category of manufacturers represented a 34.6% share of the worldwide wearables market.

“It’s still anyone’s game at this point,” Ramon Llamas, research manager for wearables and mobile phones at IDC, said in a report for InformationWeek. “The fact that two Chinese vendors can play catch-up rather quickly is perhaps indicative of other companies doing the same. Until that happens, expect the popular brands to have a spot—Fitbit and Apple most ostensibly.”

Students Do Just as Well Using OER

Studies continue to find students saying they prefer printed textbooks over online course materials. New research, though, has found the type of course material may not matter all that much.

The study by Brigham Young University and the Michigan State Department of Education reported students who used open educational resources (OER) online did just as well or better than those assigned commercial printed textbooks. The findings compared the success rates of 5,000 students using digital OER to a control group of 11,000 students using traditional textbooks enrolled in 15 undergraduate courses.

Researchers found no significant difference between the groups when it came to completing a course. In the area of passing with a grade of C- or better, both groups passed at the same rates in nine of the courses while digital OER students did better than the control group in five other courses. In the 15th course, students using printed textbooks did better than those using digital content.

The average credit load for the OER students was 13 in the fall and 11 for the winter, while commercial textbook users averaged 11 credit hours in the fall and nine for the winter. Students using OER enrolled in more credit courses the following semester as well, according to a report in Campus Technology.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars and person-hours have been invested in improving in-class instructional designs, intelligent tutoring systems, adaptive instructional systems, and other design-related innovations intended to improve student outcomes,” the researchers wrote. “The current study demonstrates that at least one noninstructional design option exists that can effectively improve student outcomes.”

Support for Apple in Antitrust Fight

Apple hasn’t had much success convincing federal judges that there was no antitrust violation when it came up with the agency pricing model for e-books with five major publishers. While the publishers decided to settle instead of taking on the government, Apple fought and has lost at practically every turn.

With the case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, the American Booksellers Association, Barnes & Noble, Authors United, and the Authors Guild have chimed in on Apple’s behalf, asking the court to review the case in a friend-of-the-court brief. The document contends that instead of stifling competition, Apple’s entry into the market increased competition.

The brief lays much of the blame on Amazon for the anticompetitive atmosphere that existed before Apple got into the game. It also points to the 2014 dispute between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing as an example of punitive measures taken by Amazon against a publisher, according to a report in Shelf Awareness.

“We authors feel strongly that diversity, competition, and the free flow of ideas are key to a healthy marketplace of books,” Douglas Preston, founder of Authors United, wrote in the friend-of-the-court brief. “The numbers unequivocally show that Apple’s entry into the e-book market increased competition and gave authors and publishers greater choice in how content was delivered to the reading public.”

NOVA Provides Access to OER Program

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) has developed two zero-textbook-cost degree programs that can be adapted for use by other institutions. The courses use open educational resources (OER) and fulfill all requirements for associate degrees in general studies and social sciences offered by NOVA.

The institution claims it’s the first community college to fully share its OER courses, according to a report in eCampus News. Other colleges can use the program, developed through the NOVA Extended Learning Institute, to fit their own learning outcomes.

NOVA has partnered with Lumen Learning to create the courses, which are available through the Lumen website. For a fee, institutions can access additional services from Lumen, such as faculty training, technical and OER program design support, and help in customizing course materials.

“This step by NOVA goes far towards putting OER degree programs within reach for other colleges,” said TJ Bliss, program officer in the education program at the Hewlett Foundation. “It gives academic leaders a vision of what is now possible in open education, as well as the means to get there. For institutions struggling with affordability and access, OER degree programs can catalyze systemic change towards open education, and colleges can reap the benefits in terms of student success.”

#GoOpen Has Game Developers Worried

Although gamification and open educational resources (OER) are current buzzwords in education, game developers are concerned about the #GoOpen initiative from the U.S. Department of Education, which directs organizations receiving federal grants to make copyrightable intellectual property part of the public domain when completed.

The fact that more teachers will be turning to digital tools and resources is good news for game developers, according to a column by Lee Banville, editorial director of the Games and Learning Publishing Council. Another positive to the #GoOpen initiative is more open-source tools should also free up more funds for schools to spend on digital content.

However, a world full of free educational tools could also mean fewer educators willing to pay for learning games.

“So the Department of Education’s new push could go either way for learning-game developers,” Banville wrote. “It if goes the way some seem to hope, the far larger budgets connected to textbooks may soon become more available for schools to invest in digital learning tools, including games. The danger is if the perception is most educational content, like OERs, is free, then why pay for digital games?”

E-Book Borrowing Outpaces Borrowers

The number of e-books borrowed from public libraries may be growing at a fast clip, but the number of library patrons doing the borrowing may not.

According to a survey conducted last summer by e-book provider OverDrive in conjunction with the American Library Association, some 30 million e-books were loaned to users through public libraries in the second quarter of 2015, representing a 19% jump over the same period in 2014.

However, a new survey by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) revealed that just 25% of library patrons had downloaded an e-book from the library in the previous 12 months, according to a report in Publishers Weekly. That indicates a minority of library users are generating most of the e-book traffic.

In fact, the patrons who got one or more e-books from their local library would have liked to obtain more, but were often stymied. They said the titles they wanted weren’t available in e-book formats, were on an e-book waiting list, or could only be borrowed for a period too short to complete the book.

In the BISG survey, 44% of library patrons reported reading an e-book in the previous year, far more than had borrowed an e-book. That jibes with librarians’ contention that there is pent-up demand for e-book loans, provided they have popular titles on hand.

And it’s not the mobile device-toting younger generation that’s borrowing e-books. In OverDrive’s survey, only 5% of respondents were less than 25 years of age while 52% were more than 54 years old.

Graphene Back in Flexible-Display News

A new technique to manufacture graphene could lead to a new era for electronic displays, according to a report published by a team of researchers from the University of Glasgow. Graphene is a thin layer of carbon that is more than 200 times stronger than steel, conducts heat and electricity, and is nearly transparent.

By using the ultrasmooth copper foils found in lithium-ion batteries, researchers were able to drive down production costs from $115 per square meter to $1. Devices using the graphene sheets performed better in tests.

“Large-scale and low-cost synthesis of high-quality graphene films and the compatibility of our method to the roll-to-roll fabrication would open an avenue through the realization of graphene-based flexible optoelectronic systems such as cellphones with roll-up displays, e-paper, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, as well as medical patches that can be attached to the skin,” the researchers wrote in their report.

Graphene has been touted as the material that would become the e-reader display of the future before. The difference this time is the focus on display applications and the cost of the process, according to a report in TeleRead.

The Impact of MOOCS

There’s no lack of opinions about massive open online courses (MOOCs). Some view the free online classes as making inexpensive learning possible for the masses, while others point out that thousands sign up but few actually finish the courses.

The real impact, according to Joshua Kim in his blog for Inside Higher Education, is in residential learning. The innovations from MOOCs have been a catalyst for more attention and investment in traditional classroom instruction.

“The impact of MOOCs is that no institution wants to have residential courses that are comparable in quality (and outcomes) to MOOCs,” Kim wrote. “Residential classes must add value beyond that which can be gained (and measured) in open online education.”

That’s particularly true of introductory classes that traditionally have large enrollment. These classes will either need much more funding or be offered as online classes. At the same time, large-enrollment introductory classes can provide a path to making big residential courses even better, according to Kim.

“The same team of faculty, instructional designers, media educators, librarians, and assessment experts who have gained trust and experience in working on MOOCs will also work on redesigning large-enrollment residential classes,” he wrote. “The desire to leverage data and analytics to evolve pedagogical practices that has been so much a part of the MOOC world also applies to residential teaching and learning.”

Will Credentials Displace Degrees?

Students expect education to improve their job prospects. At the same time, employers want job candidates who have acquired the high-tech skills and qualifications as they enter the job market.

This is causing a shift away from the traditional college degree and toward credentials, such as online badges, course certificates, and dynamic assessments, according to Aaron Skonnard, CEO of the online training provider Plurasight. In a post for TechCrunch, Skonnard predicted that credentials will at least be as relevant as the college degrees because they offer “more insight into hard skills.”

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) got the discussion started by making higher education somewhat more accessible. Completion rates proved to be an issue, so MOOC providers adapted and expanded beyond free education to create training and certification programs that use credentials for skills that employers want.

“We live in a time of real-time analytics, and we dashboard everything inside the organization, from sales to operation costs to customer sentiment,” Skonnard wrote. “It’s only natural that this trend should extend into the way we vet, assess, and track the skills and abilities of our prospective and current employees. The more data options we have, the more deliberate we can become about making good hiring decisions, and the more prescriptive we can be about addressing monumental skills gaps in the workplace. The college degree alone can’t provide this kind of holistic insight.”