By Lawrence Biemiller. Coursera, a pioneer of massive open online courses, said on Monday night that a new partnership with a Chinese Internet company would allow Coursera to offer courses to millions of the company’s customers across China. The Chinese company, NetEase, provides Internet connections and online games, and claims to operate China’s largest e-mail service. Read more...
By Hannah Winston. The course-management company Desire2Learn unveiled a MOOC-enabled version of its online-learning platform on Tuesday, joining two competitors, Blackboard and Instructure, in entering the market for massive open online courses. Read more...
By Steve Kolowich. As technology companies have increasingly eyed higher education as ripe for “disruption,” faculty leaders have been wary of entrepreneurs’ gaining a toehold on campuses. The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a coalition of faculty advocacy groups, has articulated many of those concerns in a report released on Wednesday. The report warns administrators and politicians not to take the private companies at face value when it comes to their promises of increasing access to higher education. Read more...
By Steve Kolowich. The famously cloistered Harvard Business School will soon offer online courses, although it has not quite decided how. The business school, known as HBS, is currently developing online courses that it will market under the banner HBX. The news, first reported by Bloomberg, comes as a number of prestigious business schools, notably Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, have begun offering MOOCs on business and finance. Read more...
By Paul Basken. Perhaps months from now, when the dust settles and academics really look back at it, they’ll find some hard lessons in the elaborate Science magazine exposé this week by the journalist John Bohannon.
After more than a year of work, in which Mr. Bohannon, who has a Ph.D. in biology, crafted a fraudulent cancer-research article and painstakingly tracked the responses to it from more than 300 journals, he gave his industry the embarrassing news that 157 of them had agreed to publish it. More...
By Michael J. Garanzini. The process to reauthorize the Higher Education Act is in full swing, and both the White House and Congress appear to have admirable goals. Everyone agrees that students and parents should have more information about the institutions they are considering, that college needs to be more affordable, and that degree completion has real value in the marketplace. There's little to argue about thus far. The devil, however, is in the details.
Underlying those stated goals is the public perception that college is unaffordable for America's middle class. Annual tuition hikes often exceed inflation by two and even three times. At the same time, salaries of some college presidents appear to be out of line, at least with the public's view of what the job entails. And information about things such as completion and default rates are hard to obtain. More...
By Karin Fischer. The United States is projected to be the largest and fastest-growing destination for foreign students over the next decade, according to a report released on Tuesday by the British Council's Education Intelligence global-research service.
But American universities' heavy reliance on students from China and India could make them vulnerable if an economic slowdown in those and other emerging countries put a college degree—particularly a costly foreign diploma—out of the reach of many families. India and China are predicted to account for fully two-thirds of the growth in international students at American institutions from 2011 to 2024, the research shows. More...
By Jennifer Howard. Christopher B. Loring, the director of the libraries at Smith College, has a problem with his Strategic Air Command bunker—it's almost full.
The bunker, long since retired from military service, now operates as a high-density book-storage facility for Smith and the rest of the Five College Consortium (Amherst, Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst). It can hold about 570,000 volumes and now contains about 540,000. In about five years Smith will run out of places to house all its books, according to Mr. Loring. More...
By Katherine Mangan. Community colleges have generally cast a wary eye toward massive open online courses, or MOOCs. But a relatively new model, which "flips" homework and classwork by incorporating outsourced lectures, could help struggling students and make colleges more efficient, Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told a packed gathering of community-college leaders here on Wednesday. Mr. Gates urged them to provide resources to instructors who wanted to experiment with flipped classrooms and other techniques for integrating technology into their teaching. More...
By Goldie Blumenstyk. Altius Education, which is facing a Justice Department investigation into the now-shuttered Ivy Bridge College that it helped to run at Tiffin University, this week sold its name and most of its assets to Datamark, a well-known enrollment-marketing company.
Assets related to Ivy Bridge were not part of the deal. "We're buying the trade name, we're not buying the company," said Oakleigh Thorne, Datamark's chairman of the board, in an interview on Thursday. "Ivy Bridge is the old Altius's problem." More...
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