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20 avril 2013

The Rights Question - Who owns intellectual property in the brave new world of MOOCs?

http://www.universitybusiness.com/sites/default/files/UB-logo_4.pngBy Kristen Domonell. Disputes over intellectual property (IP) rights have been around as long as faculty members have been producing ideas. Whether it’s a cure for a disease, a textbook, or even a syllabus, ownership and IP rights are dictated by a policy at every college and university in the United States. The consensus at most institutions is that either faculty members own their ideas and license an institution to use them, or, in some cases, an institution owns anything produced with its campus resources and licenses it to faculty. But when distance education took off in the 1990s, faculty and administrators started to think a little more about who owned course work. There was the potential for exposure and profit, but for the most part, the audience was still confined to an institution’s own students. Flash forward to 2013 with massive open online courses, or MOOCs, just a year old, and higher education has a new IP debate on its hands.
“MOOCs are making it different for the first time,” says Sean Brown, vice president of education at Sonic Foundry, a lecture-capture company. “There is a sense, for lack of a better phrase, of a direct market now.” In the past, debate over who owned a syllabus or even an online course was much more limited in scope because there wasn’t a real market for it. Read more...
20 avril 2013

Eight Possible Coursera Monetization Strategies

http://www.universitybusiness.com/sites/default/files/UB-logo_4.pngBy Kristen Domonell. How might a company or institution profit from a MOOC? Here are eight possible strategies, as outlined in Coursera's contract with the University of Michigan.

  1. Certification: Company will provide University-branded certificates that can be purchased by end users; these certificates, which do not carry University credit, will certify achievement by end users of an instructor-specified threshold of performance for a particular course. These certificates might be provided as either (a) a signed pdf document, or (b) a badge posted on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, or other community websites, via a recognized badging system.
  2. Secure assessments: Company may provide a end user, for a fee, the capability to undergo identity-verified testing at a private location or in a certified testing location.
  3. Employee recruiting: With end user consent (via opting into emails of this type), company will allow prospective employers (whether an employer or a recruiter) to execute queries against end user records. These queries might involve student performance in relevant courses (as specified in the query) as well as student-supplied demograpic information (such as education or geographical location). Company will then allow employers to email end users via the platform, to propose employment opportunities. Company will not reveal student contact information to the employer. Students may choose to respond to the email with their contact information at their discretion.
  4. Employee or university screening: Company will provide a prospective employer the capability to assess prospective employees for a given level of expertise in courses provided by company, by having the prospective employee take a set of assessments in a proctored environment at the employee site. A similar model with be offered to universities who want to verity a level of knowledge of incoming end users (e.g., for evaluting course waiver requests).
  5. Human-provided tutoring or manual grading: Company will provide access to (paid) human tutoring, grading, or other forms of human academic support.
  6. Corporate/university enterprise model: Company will provide employers access to an enterprise version of the platform, which will allow employers to (a) use the content for training employees (trainees) using courses provided on the platform, (b) provide employer instructors access to trainee performance records, for the purposes of gauging performance and assisting trainees in learning. Employers might also augment university-provided courses on the platforms with additional content of particular relevance to their own employee pool. Such content will be accessible only to employer's trainees. The same model can be used to provide an enterprise version of the platform to non-university academic institutions (e.g. community colleges) that seek to offer their registered end users higher-quality courses at a lower cost for credit at these non-university institutions.
  7. Sponsorships: Company will allow third party sponsorships of courses, by foundations or companies, using appropriate and non-intrusive visual elements on the course webpage. A sponsor will require the approval by university and instructor, but such approval will not be unreasonably witheld without cause.
  8. Tuition fees: For certain courses, a tuition fee may be charged of students for access to the course content (usually after a short initial viewing period where access is free). This fee will be mututally agreed to by university and company. In the standard procedure, a end user will be allowed to indicate "financial hardship," upon which tuition fees are automatically waived with respect to access to course content. Certification to a end user declaring financial hardship may or may not be provided, as agreed upon by university and company.
20 avril 2013

An Institutional Responsibility: Tracking Retention & Academic Success of Out LGBT Students

http://www2.myacpa.org/images/logos/acpa_bw.jpgBy Shane Windmeyer, Keith Humphrey and Danielle Barker. Calls for increased accountability, specifically around student graduation rates, are everywhere in higher education across the United States. Ensuring that students progress efficiently from orientation to commencement has become the focus, and rightfully the responsibility, of many campus administrators. Increasing student retention and graduation rates is challenging work, unless colleges and universities are willing to raise their admissions standards.
Many institutions that are not able to adjust the academic profile of their entering class have smartly disaggregated their retention data to see where the roadblocks exist that stop students from succeeding. In that process, it has become clear that aspects of student’s identity contribute to their success just as much as their academic preparation or study skills. But, in the process of designing complex retention interventions, institutions determined to achieve success for their students are missing key aspects of student’s identity, particularly identity based on sexual orientation. This oversight potentially makes some of the retention efforts futile.
There is no panacea that all campuses can adopt to resolve this issue. Woodard et al. correctly stated that like politics, all retention issues are local (Woodard et al., 2001). What works on one campus, is not likely to be exactly replicated on another campus. The logic is simple. As much as our campuses are the same, they are really very different from each other. Each campus has its own student body, admission requirements, academic policies, tuition and fee structures, and student services that support the graduation goal. Even institutions located across the street from each other compare like the proverbial apples and oranges. Read more...
20 avril 2013

Pragmatic Advising

HomeBy Martin S. Edwards. My students, especially soon-to-be master’s-degree recipients, frequently ask about whether Ph.D. programs are a good career path. Given the difficulties of this job market, even for students in a professional program who have experience in the field, the prospect of a Ph.D. can seem like a permanent safe harbor. Appearances deceive, though, as a tight academic job market and a deepening reliance on adjuncts make even employment after the Ph.D. a difficult proposition. It’s no surprise, then, that there’s been an increasingly strident pushback to the idea that Ph.D.s are necessary. Numerous examples exist in the humanities, sciences and social sciences. Read more...
20 avril 2013

MUSC, College of Charleston officials discuss potential merger

http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash4/373034_107285652622522_1177053718_q.jpgBy Lauren Sausser. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley held a series of three meetings last week attended by top administrators of both the College of Charleston and the Medical University of South Carolina about potentially merging the two centuries-old institutions.
“The response was overwhelming and extremely positive,” Riley said. “People were very enthusiastic. It’s like the light bulb went off.”
He said Charleston needs a comprehensive research university with undergraduate, graduate and doctorate-level programs to realize its economic potential and compete for new business with other research-rich regions around the country like North Carolina’s Research Triangle and Austin, Texas. A merger of the two schools isn’t a new idea, but has taken on new urgency, he said. “It moved from a nice thing to have to an imperative.” Read more...
20 avril 2013

'Risk' and Reward

HomeBy Trenda Boyum-Breen. The number of career changes an average person makes in their lifetime is on the rise, including for higher education professionals. The decision to leave your current institution for a new one is likely not easy; now imagine crossing over to a new sector. In my first column I mentioned my decision to join other colleagues in higher education who have taken the risk to cross sectors from traditional higher education to for-profit. A reader picked up on me using the term “risk” and asked if I would expand on that. In general when I contemplated a move to a new institution, I reflected on the “fit” between what I brought to the table (both personally and professionally) and what the organization brought to the table (mission, culture, scope of the position, vision, location, reputation, etc.). Read more...
20 avril 2013

ACT Research Points to Continued Gap Between High School Preparation, College Expectations

http://www.act.org/templates/assets/i/logo.pngFindings from the latest ACT National Curriculum Survey®, released today, point to a continued gap between what high schools are teaching and what colleges expect their incoming students to know. ACT’s report, which focuses on the policy implications of the survey results, suggests this gap may indicate a lack of alignment between high school and college curricula that could be contributing to the nation’s college and career readiness problem. The survey results show more than three times as many high school teachers as college instructors believe their students are prepared to succeed in college courses.
“When high school teachers believe their students are well prepared for college-level courses, but colleges disagree, we have a problem,” said Jon Erickson, ACT’s president of education. “If we are to improve the college and career readiness of our nation’s high school graduates, we must make sure that our standards are aligned between high school and college. States have raised expectations by increasing educational standards over the past few years. This report provides an important reminder that we also need to bring school curricula up to the same heightened expectations.”
The vast majority (89 percent) of high school teachers surveyed by ACT reported that their students are either “well” or “very well” prepared for college-level work in their subject area after leaving their courses. In contrast, only around one fourth (26%) of college instructors reported that their incoming students are either “well” or “very well” prepared for first-year credit-bearing courses in their subject area. These percentages are virtually unchanged from those in ACT’s 2009 curriculum survey. Read more...
20 avril 2013

A Better Factory Model

HomeBy Clive Belfield and Davis Jenkins. Economists are often criticized for treating colleges as if they were factories: using models that evaluate college efficiency in creating outputs (student completions) for a given input (cost). In fact, in many ways a college education is like the factory production process: students start at the beginning and then, after a sequence of “inputs” in the form of courses and support services, some graduate successfully at the end. Unfortunately, economic analyses of college efficiency typically do not look at college as a process. Economic models have traditionally tried to understand college efficiency through a simple input-per-output equation. For example, they may look at a graduation rate in 2012 and compare that to the resources available in the college in 2012. Read more...
20 avril 2013

New Survey Indicates Educational Institutions are Increasingly Using Social Media to Reach Donors, Alumni and Students

http://www.case.org/prebuilt/images/logo1_new_372.gifBy Pam Russell. Institutions See Value of Social Media as a Strategic Tool. Schools, colleges and universities worldwide are increasingly using social media in campaigns to raise funds and steward current and potential donors and to connect more often with current students, prospective students, parents, faculty and staff. The fourth annual CASE/Huron Education/mStoner social media survey, conducted in February and March of 2013, asked advancement professionals at education institutions about their use of social media. More than 1,000 respondents provided feedback on the tools they are using, how they use them, challenges they face and what they expect as return on investment. Facebook continues to be the most popular platform with 96 percent of respondents using it versus 82 percent on Twitter, 75 percent on LinkedIn and 71 percent on YouTube. However, the use of platforms other than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube has decreased as compared with results from the 2012 survey—blog and Flickr use have both declined by 13 percent. The decrease in use of other platforms is due to an increased focus on strategy and an intentional approach to the investment of resources in new channels. Read more...
20 avril 2013

The Real Precipice

HomeBy Richard Holmgren. Although massive open online courses have been gathering substantial recent attention, future histories of education will likely only note them as a harbinger of change or transitional step into an educational model that is organized around learning. In most cases, MOOCs operate on a grand scale but use a traditional form in which a faculty member (or two) is responsible for most aspects of course design, delivery, and assessment. The real threat to traditional higher education embraces a more radical vision that removes faculty from the organizational center and uses cognitive science to organize the learning around the learner. Such models exist now. Consider, for example the implications of Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative. Read more...
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