College Presidents Are Bullish on Online Education but Face a Skeptical Public - Technology. By Jeffrey R. Young Delivering courses in cyberclassrooms has gained broad acceptance among top college leaders, but the general public is far less convinced of online education's quality, according to new survey data released this week by the Pew Research Center, in association with The Chronicle. Just over half of the 1,055 college presidents queried believe that online courses offer a value to students that equals a traditional classroom's. By contrast, only 29 percent of 2,142 adult Americans thought online education measured up to traditional teaching. The presidents' survey included leaders of two-year and four-year private, public, and for-profit colleges and was conducted online. The public survey was conducted by telephone.
The gauge of differing perceptions comes at a critical moment for online education. Presidents "should be more visible in making the assertion" that online education is high quality, said A. Fighting Popular Culture William J. Mr. Kenneth E. Mr. Early Finding of Cal State U. E-Textbook Study: Terms Matter - Wired Campus. California State University is running one of the nation’s largest pilot studies of e-textbooks, involving thousands of students on five campuses, and one of the biggest findings so far boils down to the cliché the devil is in the details.
Whether or not students liked their digital textbooks depended on what rules publishers set on how the digital books could be used. “Every publisher has a little bit different terms and conditions,” said Gerard L. Hanley, senior director of academic technology services at California State University’s office of the chancellor. Such rules, including whether a student can print the whole book or only a portion of it, or whether the text can be downloaded to a computer or only accessed online, “really impact the students’ ability to use the content,” he added.
The university system has prepared a preliminary report on the project, which Mr. Results so far have been mixed. “It’s not a question of if we’re going to digital resources—that is coming,” Mr. Wired Campus. Traditionally, students shopping for textbooks have faced a simple choice: buy new or buy used? But recently things have gotten complicated. Publishers now offer digital editions. Rental programs let students lease printed books. And Amazon recently opened a site that rents out digital editions that self-destruct at the end of the semester. To help students sort through all those options—and compare prices—several new services have emerged that aggregate offerings from various retailers: • This month Amazon released a free iPhone application called Amazon Student, designed to help students make price comparisons of textbooks sold by the online retailer. . • Several campus bookstores are fighting back against online retailers by offering their own price-comparison Web services—even though doing so risks directing students away from their own stores.
Return to Top. Wired Campus. Wired Campus. The University of Kansas has had a faculty-approved open-access mandate in place since 2009. What it hasn’t had is a group of like-minded institutions to share ideas with about how to support such policies. Today Kansas and 21 other universities and colleges announced that they’re joining forces to form the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, or Coapi. The new group will “collaborate and share implementation strategies, and advocate on a national level,” it said in a statement. The group’s members so far include Arizona State, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Oregon State, Stanford, and Trinity universities as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oberlin College. “The goal is to provide more practical advice and ideas for refining and expanding policies on our individual campuses but also to leverage those policies into action,” said Lorraine Haricombe, the dean of libraries at Kansas.
Ms. Return to Top. ProfHacker. How much would you be willing to pay on a monthly basis for all-you-can-read access to a scholarly database like JSTOR or Project MUSE? I ask for a couple of different reasons. For one thing, the New York Times recently began charging for online access beyond a certain number of free articles, and they’ve created a fee structure that makes no sense to me. If you use their smartphone app you pay one price, but if you use their tablet app you pay more, and if you want “unlimited digital access” you pay even more. That’s not all. Online access is free if you pay for the print edition (no matter whether you get all seven days of the week, Monday-through-Friday only, weekends only, or Sundays only — each of which has a different price).
Such a complicated set of rules! If the NYT asked me to pay $10 a month for online access I’d do it in a heartbeat. For another thing, the cost of database library subscriptions keeps going up and up, which puts a crimp in already squeezed library budgets. Wired Campus. (This story was updated on July 21, 2011) Amazon has rolled out an e-textbook-rentals program, which could bring more attention to the emerging model of treating textbooks like online subscriptions. Students can now download temporary copies of textbooks on Amazon’s Web site for reading on a Kindle e-book reader or on a computer, tablet, or smartphone running free Kindle software.
The system lets customers specify rental periods lasting anywhere from a month to a year. Amazon argues that the digital rentals can save students up to 80 percent compared with traditional print textbooks. For example, one textbook, Intermediate Accounting, which retails at $197 in print and $109 as an e-book, would cost $57 to rent from Amazon for three months. Students have the option to purchase the e-book during or after a rental period, and can extend rental period in daily increments. “Textbooks by nature are a disposable product,” said Sarah L. Ms. Return to Top. Community-College Students Perform Worse Online Than Face to Face - Community Colleges. By Ryan Brown Community-college students enrolled in online courses fail and drop out more often than those whose coursework is classroom-based, according to a new study released by the Community College Research Center at the Teachers College at Columbia University. The study, which followed the enrollment history of 51,000 community-college students in Washington State between 2004 and 2009, found an eight-percentage-point gap in completion rates between traditional and online courses.
Although students who enrolled in online courses tended to have stronger academic preparation and come from higher income brackets than the community-college population on the whole, researchers found that students who took online classes early in their college careers were more likely to drop out than those who took only face-to-face courses. Among students who took any courses online, those with the most Web-based credits were the least likely to graduate or transfer to a four-year institution. Ms. How Will Colleges Innovate as the Market Is Disrupted? - The Editor's Notebook. The End of the Textbook as We Know It - Technology. By Jeffrey R. Young You've heard it before: Digital technologies blew up the music industry's moneymaking model, and the textbook business is next.
For years observers have predicted a coming wave of e-textbooks. But so far it just hasn't happened. One explanation for the delay is that while music fans were eager to try a new, more portable form of entertainment, students tend to be more conservative when choosing required materials for their studies. For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change. That's exactly what some companies and college leaders are now proposing. To understand what a radical shift that would be, think about the current textbook model. Here's the new plan: Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).
Why electronic copies? Moving the Tollbooth Then last year an official at Indiana, Bradley C. Mr. Blind Florida State U. Students Sue Over E-Learning Systems - Wired Campus. Two blind students at Florida State University have sued the institution and its Board of Trustees for discrimination, arguing that a mathematics course at the university relied on e-learning systems that were not accessible to the disabled. The students, Christopher S. Toth and Jamie A. Principato, say they were unable to access software used for homework and tests in their fall of 2009 math class. They say the course also relied on “clickers”—small remote-control units that allow students to answer multiple-choice questions during lectures—which were not accessible to them.
They argue in their legal complaint, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Tallahassee, that the university is required under the Americans With Disabilities Act to make such classroom materials accessible or provide viable alternatives. The online software used at Florida State, called eGrade, is incompatible with screen readers, which allows blind users to translate text to speech, the students say.
Daniel F. Publishers Grapple With Thorny Issues of Protecting Property and Going Digital - Publishing. By Jennifer Howard Baltimore Collaborate and share—but protect your copyrights. That was the sometimes conflicting message heard at the Association of American University Presses' annual meeting, which ended here on Sunday. Many of the sessions and conversations took a digital turn, too, as attendees compared notes on how to acquire, produce, and market scholarly e-books and journals. More than 700 scholarly-publishing professionals registered for the meeting, making it one of the association's largest ever.
The official theme was "The Next Wave: Toward a Culture of Collaboration. " One panelist at the session, Michael Levine-Clark, collections librarian at the University of Denver, gave the audience a long list of features the e-book aggregations will have to include to satisfy libraries. At a session on "List Building for the Digital Age," several editors talked about learning to incorporate what one called "e-thinking" into book acquisitions much earlier than they used to. The Rise of Teaching Machines - The Digital Campus. By Josh Fischman At Arizona State University, a high-tech teaching tool with roots in the pre-Internet 1950s has created a bit of a buzz. "I think it's going to be quite good," says Philip Regier, dean of ASU Online.
"Looking forward to it," says Arthur Blakemore, senior vice provost of the university. "I'm excited," says Irene Bloom, a senior lecturer in mathematics at the downtown campus. All are anticipating this summer's debut of Knewton, a new computerized-learning program that features immediate feedback and adaptation to students' learning curves. The concept can be traced back a half-century or so to a "teaching machine" invented by the psychologist B.F. Skinner, then a professor at Harvard University. IN THE RIGHT COLUMN: More on The Digital CampusBROWSE THE FULL ISSUE: News, Commentary, and DataBUY A COPY: Digital and Print Editions at the Chronicle Store Fifty years later, that basic idea has evolved into a hot concept in education: adaptive learning.
And the software adapts. House Panel Votes to Repeal 'Credit Hour' and 'State Authorization' Rules - Government. By Armando Montaño Washington The U.S. House of Representatives education committee approved a bill Wednesday that would repeal a pair of controversial Education Department rules set to take effect July 1. The bill (HR 2117), authored by Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, would block rules that would set a federal definition of a credit hour and expand state oversight of colleges. The rule defining a credit hour is intended to curb credit inflation that could result in the overawarding of student aid. The second rule, on state authorization, requires colleges that enroll students through online or distance-learning programs to seek any necessary state approval for such programs or risk losing federal aid.
Several Democrats offered amendments on Wednesday to limit the scope of the bill, but none were adopted by the committee. "When you put hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars on the street, you have to have some minimal protection," said Mr. Education Department Clarifies E-Reader Accessibility Rules - Wired Campus. The U.S. Department of Education today released a new guide to laws and rules colleges must follow to ensure e-reading devices and other emerging technologies are accessible to all students. It focuses on students with vision problems, a group whose access issues have triggered official complaints against colleges.
The document, in the form of “Frequently Asked Questions,” was published in response to the department’s “Dear Colleague” letter to college presidents on the subject last June. If colleges use e-readers, or other emerging technologies, blind students “must be afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students,” according to the department.
The department doesn’t discourage the use of emerging technologies but indicates that colleges should assess whether a new technology is accessible, or could be modified to be accessible, before using it. An audio book might not do the trick, though. Students Say Tablets Will Transform College, Though Most Don't Own Tablets - Wired Campus. More than two-thirds of a large group of college students say that tablet computers will change the way students learn, according to survey results released today. The Pearson Foundation sponsored the survey of 1,214 college students, as well as 200 high-school seniors who are heading to college, and found overwhelming interest in the devices.
Most of the students were not speaking from experience: Only 7 percent of the college students and 4 percent of the high school seniors owned one. Still, 69 percent of the college students said that tablets will transform higher education, and 48 percent said tablets will replace textbooks—at least as we currently understand textbooks—within the next five years. The survey was conducted for the foundation this March by Harris Interactive, which weighted the sample so it was representative of the American college population in terms of income, ethnicity, geography, and other factors. Return to Top. How to Join the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (and Why You Want To)
QuickWire: Top 10 Trends in Academic Libraries - Wired Campus.