Instructors at Princeton University discussed developing a homegrown massive open online course platform during a faculty meeting on Monday, The Daily Princetonian​ reported. The university joined Coursera's consortium in April 2012. By building their own platform, some faculty members argued they would eliminate the question of intellectual property rights. Read more...

The Obama administration on Wednesday unveiled a new web portal aimed at the people who help students and families prepare for college. The site aggregates a range of Education Department resources and promotional material meant to encourage students to attend college and take advantage of federal student aid programs. Guidance counselors and other mentors are able to search a database containing infographics, fact sheets, videos, and other presentation materials relating to the financial aid process. Read more...

Students during the 2011-12 academic year paid, on average, higher immediate out-of-pocket costs to attend public and private colleges than their counterparts in 2007-8, according to a new federal report released Tuesday. The average out-of-pocket net price -- a college’s sticker price minus all forms of financial aid -- increased by $800 at both private not-for-profit and public four-year universities, after adjusting for inflation. At community colleges, the same figure rose by $400. Read more...

The Obama administration is moving ahead with plans to waive certain federal student aid rules for a limited number of colleges that want to experiment with competency-based education and other innovative forms of higher education. Officials are soliciting suggestions on what those experiments should look like, according to a notice set to be published in the Federal Register this week. Read more...

"Online Education: More Than MOOCs" is a collection of news articles and opinion essays -- in print-on-demand format -- about the many forms of online learning that continue to develop outside the white-hot glare of hype surrounding massive open online courses. The articles aim to put recent developments in online education into long-term context, and the essays present the timely thinking of commentators about experts about how distance education is affecting learning and colleges' business models. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. A main takeaway of a new British Council report analyzing trends in Indian student mobility is that there is no one single trend. The growth in India's own higher education system has been rapid at the same time that the sliding value of the rupee has made overseas higher education more expensive. While the U.K. and U.S. are the top two destinations of choice, students are increasingly applying to universities in Canada and Germany, where they perceive education to be cheaper and employment opportunities to be robust. Canada stands out in terms of perceived opportunities for permanent migration, while students see Germany as offering world-class opportunities in the automotive, engineering, and manufacturing industries. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The average debt that borrowers of student loans had at graduation continued to rise last year, climbing to $29,400 for the class of 2012, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS). This year's figure, based on TICAS calculations of federal data collected every four years, is up by more than 25 percent compared with the group's $23,450 estimate for the class of 2008. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Federal regulators next year will begin closer monitoring of companies that process student loan payments for the vast majority of borrowers to make sure they are following the law and not misleading consumers. Under a rule proposed earlier this year and set to be finalized Tuesday by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, federal regulators will have the authority to oversee a much larger swath of student loan servicers. Read more...

By Nancy Shulock and Martha Snyder. A recent research paper published by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education and reported on by Inside Higher Ed criticized states' efforts to fund higher education based in part on outcomes, in addition to enrollment. The authors, David Tandberg and Nicholas Hillman, hoped to provide a "cautionary tale" for those looking to performance funding as a "quick fix."
While we agree that performance-based funding is not the only mechanism for driving change, what we certainly do not need are impulsive conclusions that ignore positive results and financial context. Read more...

By Adam Kotsko. This summer, the faculty of Shimer College held a discussion of Jacques Rancière's book The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. In it, he discusses the educational theory and practice of Joseph Jacotot, who claimed that one could teach a subject one didn't even know in the first place. For Jacotot, teaching isn't a matter of expertise, but of determination. It isn't about transmitting knowledge to the student, but about holding students accountable to the material that they are working on. Read more...