eCornell

Online Providers of Specialty Curricula Vie for Academic Credit

Since the online-education boom, the notion that students could cobble together a curriculum that includes courses designed and delivered by a variety of different institutions — including for-profit ones — has gained traction in some circles.

Much of the talk about this imminent unbundling has come from colleges that predict that students might want to transfer credits from other colleges that might have different missions. But the competition may also come from entities that do not even offer degrees.

Consider Statistics.com, a company that teaches a swath of online statistics courses to mostly adult learners. In eight years, Statistics.com has grown its menu from a half-dozen professional-development classes to more than 80 courses designed and administered by top statisticians, many of them professors at leading universities. It enrolls about 2,500 students per year. And although the company caters primarily to the professional-development crowd, Statistics.com says it is now looking to grow its introductory offerings in a way that could compete with “any university, whether online or brick-and-mortar, that is going after the nontraditional student market,” according to Peter Bruce, its founder and president.

"Organizations that provide the 'best' online education in a given subject area will come to dominate others," he says. In other words, as technology allows students to pick and choose courses from different institutions, the education providers that thrive will be those that concentrate their resources in particular fields.

Skeptics who object to counting credits from courses taken through commercial providers toward degrees at a traditional institution usually do so based on concerns about quality and rigor. But Michelle Everson, a lecturer at the University of Minnesota who also serves as a consultant and an instructor for Statistics.com, says there is, pound for pound, no difference in rigor between Statistics.com’s introductory courses and the ones Minnesota offers as part of its curriculum. She teaches both.

Burck Smith, the founder and CEO of StraighterLine, says that, while the precepts of higher education are difficult to change, he believes the confluence of several economic factors — particularly rising tuition and the unwillingness of many students to take on exorbitant debt, especially as they see their degree-holding peers struggling to land jobs — may force institutions to consider turning to outside specialists if they want to continue offering certain courses.

And if they don’t, Smith says, students will likely turn to the outside specialists themselves.

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iPads on Campus

Seton Hill University, a Roman Catholic institution in Pennsylvania, announced this week that it would be giving Apple’s new computing tablet to each of its 2,000-odd full-time students when they arrive on campus in the fall. George Fox University, a Christian institution in Oregon, will expand its annual laptop giveaway to first-year students to offer students a choice between a Macbook and an iPad. The year after that, there will be no more choice: Everybody will get iPads.

The e-learning giant Blackboard, meanwhile, today is announcing that it is launching an app for the iPad that will allow students to access their courses from the new device.

But the arrival of the long-awaited device has also prompted questions. On Educause’s CIO listserv last week, higher-ed technologists wondered aloud about the costs and benefits of the efforts of some campuses try to seed their student bodies with the gadget du jour.

Greg Smith, the CIO at George Fox, responded, saying that universities should not worry about justifying iPad giveaways with precise cost-versus-value analyses. The shifts that are happening in higher-ed technology — particularly from bound textbooks and research materials to electronic versions — are “bigger than the iPad,” said Smith. Universities know this change is coming, he said, so they should do what they can to enable it. “The iPad appears to be the perfect device for information at your fingertips which places it in the role to ignite the change,” Smith said.

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U.S. Dept. of Education Releases National Education Technology Plan

The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Technology Education has released an 80-page draft of a five-year National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), which presents a model of 21st-century learning powered by technology, with goals and recommendations in five important areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. Titled "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," the report advocates empowering students to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several dimensions.

“A core set of standards-based concepts and competencies form the basis of what all students should learn, but beyond that students and educators have options for engaging in learning: large groups, small groups, and work tailored to individual goals, needs, and interests,” the report says. “To prepare students to learn throughout their lives and in settings far beyond classrooms, we must change what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, and where and when they learn and change our perception of who needs to learn. We must bring 21st century technology into learning in meaningful ways to engage, motivate, and inspire learners of all ages to achieve.”

The draft technology plan highlights Virginia's Fairfax County Public Schools, which has built an online one-stop shop to connect teaching resources, assessments, and system-wide data. Teachers use a Web-based system called the Electronic Curriculum Resource Assessment Tool to create and access lesson plans, worksheets, assessment tools, and other resources tied to district-approved standards. Students take assessments online or on paper, and the results help link teachers to resources that will help address specific students' needs.

“It brings joy to my heart that learning is the first goal,” says J. Ana Donaldson, the recently elected president of the Association of Educational Communication and Technology, about the plan. “Learners are engaged inside and outside the school environment.”

'Harnessing America's Wasted Talent'

In his new book, Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass), Peter Smith argues that the country needs to reach deeper into its population than it historically has to produce a sufficient number of educated and skilled workers, and that the thousands of current colleges cannot do that job. Following are excerpts of an interview conducted via email by Insider Higher Ed.

Q. Define the "personal learning" that you think is undervalued/under-recognized by the current higher education system.

A. Students are rarely asked, in depth, what they want from their college education and are almost never engaged in an ongoing conversation about it with someone who can affect their higher education experience. Until institutions personally connect the learner with the curriculum and the college experience, the learner is vulnerable. And the 'at risk' learner is always more vulnerable.

Additionally, the older one becomes the more experience one has to compare with what they are being taught. So, to fail to integrate someone’s experience into the curriculum both trivializes and frustrates them. That’s why starting with the assessment of prior learning is such an educationally important thing to do.

Q. What are the developments (you call them "game changers") that make you believe the time is right to create an alternate path to a postsecondary education for these students?

A. You see evidence every day. When AARP solicits proposals for a learning platform for its members, the balance has shifted. When the Peer-to-Peer University moves into its second “term,” the balance has shifted. When StraighterLine is recognized for its courseware alone, the balance has shifted. When the global OpencourseWare Consortium gets three million hits a month, the balance has shifted.

In the book, I devoted a chapter to the “End of Scarcity” and its impact on higher education. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this trend. Colleges are built and organized around scarcity – the expertise of faculty is in short supply, classrooms and labs are limited because they are expensive, and the authority to offer a course of study is limited. Additionally, reputation is built around who you exclude as much as it is who you include and who succeeds. In fact, the whole concept of meritocracy is built on the notion of scarcity because there is not enough room “at the top” for everyone.

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New Study: Online Education up 17% to 4.6 Million

The 2009 Sloan Survey of Online Learning reveals that enrollment rose by nearly 17 percent from a year earlier. The survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities nationwide finds approximately 4.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2008, the most recent term for which figures are available. 

. . .

"Online education continues to establish itself as demand remains strong and new applications materialize, such as contingency planning for campus emergencies," said Frank Mayadas, special advisor, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "We believe demand will fuel sustained growth especially within public universities and community colleges, raising the need to share research, optimal methods for faculty training, and other best practices to new levels of importance." The survey is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The complete survey report, “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009” is available on the Sloan Consortium Web site.

Princeton Review Partners with Penn Foster, Aims to Create Largest Online College Ever

A month after completing its first foray into online higher education by acquiring the distance education provider Penn Foster, the Princeton Review has set its next goal: to help create the largest online college ever. And it thinks it can do it in five years.

The company announced yesterday that it is entering into a joint venture with the National Labor College -- an accredited institution that offers blended-learning programs to 200 students, most of whom are adults -- to establish what would be called the College for Working Families. The college would offer courses tailored to the needs of union members and their families, beginning this fall.

. . . The new institution would start off awarding associate degrees, with aspirations to running bachelor's and master's programs down the line. Tuition would be similar to that at most community colleges.

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Blackboard Drops Suit Against Desire2Learn

Blackboard, known for its tenacity in the e-learning market, announced on December 15 that it is backing off from its long patent feud with the Canadian company Desire2Learn.

The dispute dates back to 2006, when Blackboard sued Desire2Learn in a Texas district court for 38 counts of patent infringement, seeking millions in damages. The court only upheld three counts, and both companies appealed the parts of the decision they had lost to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which in 2008 dismissed all of Blackboard’s claims against Desire2Learn. But by then the industry giant had filed additional patent-infringement lawsuits against its smaller competitor, which were pending--until December 15, when the rivals announced the détente.

. . .

Many advocates of open source learning management systems strongly backed Desire2Learn in the dispute, and feared that a Blackboard victory might open the way for the company to attack their products and give the giant in the market too much control over it. While Blackboard officials repeatedly said that their actions against Desire2Learn didn't suggest any course of action against anyone else, the dispute led to much public bashing of the company.

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Another in Growing List of Studies Suggesting Online Teaching Improves Classroom Teaching

Most professors agree that more work goes into designing an online course than a face-to-face one. But if those professors are interested in improving their teaching skills, it might be worth the extra effort.

So say researchers at Purdue University at Calumet, who believe that learning how to do distance education properly can make professors better at designing and administering their classroom-based courses.

“Most of the professors who teach at the university level have had no experience with pedagogy or instruction in general,” says Janet Buckenmeyer, chair of the instructional technology master’s program at Calumet. “They’re content experts, not teaching experts.”

Since most professors have spent their lives holding forth from the front of a lecture hall, many have not had to engineer their lesson plans with the sort of rigor required of a well-designed online course, Buckenmeyer says.

When teaching online, she says, “You have to pay more attention to the navigation of the course, the clarity of the course, the objectives of the course, the reason why you’re assigning activities and assessments, [and make] certain everything is perfectly clear to the students. In a face-to-face situation, you can get by with just coming in and not having prepared and winging a class session. You can’t do that online.”

. . . In order to teach well online, she says, professors need guidance.

That was the thesis behind the creation of Calumet’s Distance Education Mentoring Project. The project takes faculty who are looking to adapt their classroom courses to the online environment and teams them up with Web-savvy colleagues. Those mentors advise the novices on best practices for online course design and oversee them through the first semester of the online version of the course.

. . .

Casimir Barczyk, a veteran professor at the Calumet school of management, is an alumnus of the Distance Education Mentoring Project.

. . .

What he learned was how to engineer assignments and assessments toward explicit educational objectives. If Barczyk needs students to learn how to think analytically about hiring rubrics, for example, he would not use simple true or false question to evaluate their progress.

After learning the value of objectives-oriented course design in his online courses, he applied the same principles to the classroom courses he had taught for decades. Student performance improved in both, he says.

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The Ever-Expanding U. of Phoenix

In the world of for-profit higher education, and higher education in general, the University of Phoenix has historically been viewed as the 800-pound gorilla.

As of Tuesday, it may be more like a 1,000-pound gorilla. As Phoenix's parent company, the Apollo Group, reported its fourth quarter and annual earnings Tuesday, it announced that the university's enrollment of degree-seeking students grew to 443,000 as of August 2009, up 22 percent from 362,000 in August 2008. The biggest growth in Phoenix's enrollments, by far, came among students seeking associate degrees, which rose by 37 percent, to 201,200 from 146,500 in 2008.

About two-thirds of the university's new students as of August are female, 27.7 percent are African-American, and about half are 30 or over.

The university attributed the sizable increases to a range of factors, including increased efforts in retaining students, expanded marketing, and the "current economic downturn, as working learners seek to advance their education to improve their job security or reemployment prospects." Many community colleges and several of Phoenix's major peers in for-profit career education, including Kaplan Higher Education (21.9 percent) and Corinthian Colleges, Inc. (24.4 percent), have reported sharp upturns in student enrollments this fall.

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A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. ... Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. ...

This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

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