By Steve Kolowich. Under pressure from privacy advocates, Google announced on Wednesday that it had permanently removed all ads from its Apps for Education, including its email service, so the company can no longer harvest students’ information for advertising purposes. Google had previously given college administrators the option of allowing the company to scan student Gmail accounts for key words and to deliver targeted advertisements to those students. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Blackboard, the company that produces a leading learning-management platform, has announced a partnership with Discovery Education Higher Ed, an arm of Discovery Communications, the Discovery Channel’s parent. The two companies aim to engage students and faculty members through the use of digital media. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. The open-source textbook publisher OpenStax College, based at Rice University, has cut a distribution deal with a subsidiary of the National Association of College Stores that will lower prices on print versions of OpenStax textbooks. OpenStax, a two-year-old nonprofit venture, offers open-source textbooks that are free online and that cost from $30 to $54 in print versions. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Last year Coursera announced partnerships with international organizations to expand the number of its massive open online courses available in foreign languages. Now the for-profit MOOC provider is going a step further by establishing a Global Translator Community in which individuals will volunteer to help translate lectures. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Students in massive open online courses are apt to take a passive approach to learning, avoiding collaboration with others, seeking only passing grades, and therefore not retaining new knowledge, a new study has found. Researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University surveyed about 400 students who were taking the Harvard Medical School’s “Fundamentals of Clinical Trials,” a MOOC intended for health professionals and offered through the U.S.-based platform edX. More...
By Megan O'Neil. Starting in the fall, undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will each receive $100 in Bitcoin—seed money meant to jump-start a campus digital-currency economy that can be engaged with and studied by students and faculty members alike. The project is being spearheaded by Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore studying computer science and electrical engineering, and Dan Elitzer, an M.B.A. student and the founder of the MIT Bitcoin Club. Together they have raised $500,000 from MIT alumni and members of the Bitcoin community. More...
By Megan O'Neil. The National Labor Relations Board is reviewing a federal law that permits private employers to bar workers from using company email accounts for union activities. Any change could have significant implications for adjunct faculty members and others in terms of their right to use private colleges’ electronic communications systems for actions like discussing the terms and conditions of employment and whether they want to unionize, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, based at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. More...
By Jonah Newman. Our post last week on minority enrollment and diversity at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor sparked a lively debate in the comments section about demographic data and diversity. More...
By Goldie Blumenstyk. Last month Pennsylvania State University held an auction to sell dozens of engineering patents to the highest bidder, setting off speculation on whether the move would produce a financial windfall for the university. It also stirred consternation among some in the world of academic research, who feared the auction might create easy pickings for businesses known as “patent-assertion entities.” Such entities, also known as patent trolls or nonpracticing entities, scoop up rights to patents and then use them to assert infringement claims to unsuspecting companies, which often pay to settle rather than incur the cost of litigation. Read more...
It’s fair to criticize Western Washington University President Bruce Shepard for suggesting his school has too many white students in comparison with people of color. It was an unfortunate way to frame the importance of a diverse student body to the higher education mission.
Shepard gave the regrettable impression that he thinks universities should decrease the number of white students they enroll. We’re confident he meant that colleges — and the nation as a whole — benefit when more students of all races earn university degrees. Read more...
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