The big news this week was the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Education (ED) finding that Western Governors University (WGU) should be considered a correspondence provider instead of a distance education provider, and the school should return more than $700 million in Title IV federal funding programs. More...

Josh Kim wrote a post yesterday at Inside Higher Ed questioning some claims about the LMS market size. More...

Great discussions at #WCET17 conference help clarify how UF Online sheds hubris and continues to transform into growing and healthy online program. More...

In 2011 the University of California laid out plans for a new payroll system called UCPath (for Payroll, Academic Personnel, Timekeeping, and Human Resources). The goal of the $170 million project was to save a reported $100 million per year eventually and to replace a 30-year-old Payroll Personnel System (PPS) that runs separately for each of the 11 UC locations with Oracle’s PeopleSoft payroll and HR systems. More...

Two months ago I wrote a post about Governor Brown's directive for a fully-online community college in California. More...

In our recent coverage of BbWorld and D2L Fusion, Michael and I came away impressed. Both companies are improving and doing so in ways showing them listening to customers, empathizing, and developing product enhancements with more engaging user experiences. More...

We've written similar headlines after past BbWorlds only to be disappointed, so it's prudent to be cautious. We also need to be clear on what "turning around" does and does not mean. That said, this time feels different. More...

Not too long ago, Phil sent me a link to an article in The Atlantic about how an obsession with maximizing clicks through analytics "broke" The New Republic.
By the way, I know where you probably think I'm going with this already, and it's a reasonable direction to take, but it's not the one I'm going to take. More...

D2L the company and Brightspace the company's LMS are undergoing something of a revival in the past year. It's not as if they have dropped in terms of market share - in fact the have a history of strong client retention, losing few customers - but the early 2010's did not lead to rapid customer growth as they had expected after raising two rounds of a combined $165 million in 2012 and 2014. If you read that second post you'll find that I stated that their growth claims "defied logic" at the time. More...