The solution to the upcoming fall of higher education is openness of content and sell the services beyond the content. Lower the cost by sharing. Will be interesting to see whether higher education would actually go in this direction. Instead what I have seen is colleges trying to figure out how much of a premium…
Found the Educational Technology Trends 2010 quite interesting. Especially the part which predicts yet again (still?) the death of the LMS. Both learning and learning content are moving away from traditional centripetal models, in which everything happens at set locations and is controlled at the institutional/publisher level (top-down), and moving toward centrifugal models that are…
We started in a conversation about an interesting grant seeking to help students from low-income families through OpenCourseWare and providing them better information. An Open Source LMS != open coureseware. OSLMS is running students through online classes. OCW is providing the content so anyone can download and use it. The better information section sounded to…
A former coworker, Cat Finnegan, worked on retention of online students. Recent articles about online students having higher drop out rates than face-to-face caught my eye. Especially the rationales. The recent articles all are about the work done at KSU (whose online class system we host, well one of them: Blackboard) which will be published…
Here is an interesting Governor Pawlenty interview from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Towards the end the governor says something like: Can’t I just pull [course lectures] down on my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it, from wherever I feel like it? And instead of paying thousands of dollars, can…
This piqued my interest because well… I work for public higher education running an online class system. There are twin subtle pressures to both compete and remain aloof depending on people’s assumptions about money and quality. I personally just hope we do whatever is necessary to provide the highest quality service for students. This was…
My favorite quotes: “[Blackboard is] a one-stop shop where students can come and get absolutely any access to me, any access to the teaching assistants.” — Philip Wirtz “[Open source] classroom management systems [like Sakai and Moodle] are becoming increasingly popular because they allow schools to adapt the software to meet their needs.” “Even though…
In ten years (by 2020), the goal of the Obama administration is to have 60% of the American population hold at least a 2-year post-secondary degree and graduate college-ready high school students. I’m hoping the first, stated as “We will raise the proportion of college graduates from where it now stands [39%] so that 60% of…