By Megan O'Neil. Blackboard Inc., whose learning-management system is used by more than two-fifths of nonprofit colleges in the United States, said on Wednesday that it would acquire the student-centric web platform MyEdu.
Jay Bhatt, Blackboard’s chief executive, declined to disclose the purchase price. He described the acquisition as “small” compared with others that Blackboard has made in the past several years, but “extremely strategic.” Read more...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. U.S. News & World Report has released its 2014 rankings of Best Online Programs. Nearly 1,000 programs answered questionnaires from U.S. News last summer for this year’s rankings. In 2012 only 860 questionnaires were submitted. Only all-online, degree-granting programs in popular areas, such as nursing, technology, and business, were evaluated. Read more...
By Steve Kolowich. We know that online education went mainstream years ago. Academic leaders believe it will become even more prevalent in the coming years. But how many American students are taking at least one online course right now?
The answer, according to the latest figures from the Babson Survey Research Group, is about 7.1 million. Read more...
By Eric Kelderman. As Congress begins debating the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, proposals to change how public colleges get their federal money are starting to pop up. On Wednesday, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities released a report recommending a new federal block grant to the states for higher education. The goal of the proposed program is to give states some incentive to preserve and even raise the amount they spend on colleges, which has been in decline, and also to strengthen the federal commitment to affordable higher education. More...
By Kelly Field. The more than 100 "commitments" that colleges, nonprofit groups, and foundations will make at a White House higher-education summit on Thursday will help hundreds of thousands of low-income students obtain a college degree, a top adviser to President Obama said on Wednesday. Read more...By Audrey Williams June. A new crowdsourcing project provides an eye-opening glimpse into the hefty amounts of debt some graduate students take on to pay for their education and how hopeless many of them feel about their prospects for repaying it. By Steve Kolowich. Academic leaders increasingly think that massive open online courses are not sustainable for the institutions that offer them and will "cause confusion about higher-education degrees," according to the results of an annual survey.The Babson Survey Research Group has charted the growth of online education annually for more than a decade with support from the Sloan Consortium and other partners. The latest survey, conducted last year, asked chief academic officers at 2,831 colleges and universities about online education. Read more...
By Jonathan Thon. It’s a new year, and with it come renewed efforts to improve the status of academic funding in Canada. While our reader feedback has been phenomenal this last year, our government’s has been less so. Back in June 2013 I wrote a series of open letters on the status of science funding in Canada which I addressed to the Honourable Thomas Mulcair (Leader of the New Democratic Party), the Honourable Daniel Paillé (Chef du Bloc Québécois), the Honourable Elizabeth May (Leader of the Green Party of Canada) and the Honourable Justin Trudeau (Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada), culminating in an open letter I posted on this site to the Right Honourable Stephen Harper. More...
By Bryn Williams-Jones, Jean-Christophe Bélisle Pipon, Elise Smith and Renaud Boulanger. As the executive editors of an open-access journal called BioéthiqueOnline (launched in 2012), we enthusiastically support the initiatives of the federal (e.g., CIHR) and provincial (e.g., Quebec) funding agencies to encourage open-access publication of academic research findings. We subscribe to the view that research funded by Canadian taxpayers should be made publicly available with the briefest delay, and not locked up in pay-to-access journals with high subscription fees. We think that advocating in favour of accessibility of research findings is about ensuring the free flow of ideas and knowledge among the scientific community, being publicly accountable and making the best out of limited resources. But, we also think that bona fide OA publishing needs a little bit of financial support from these same agencies. More...
By Rosanna Tamburri. Move by NSERC, SSHRC would align them with CIHR and funding councils in other countries.
Canada has moved a step closer towards making publicly funded academic research freely available to everyone, not just to those who have access to pricey journal subscriptions. Two of the major federal funding agencies, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, said they are considering adopting a mandatory open-access policy for peer-reviewed journal articles that result from research they fund. More...
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