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Students in courses hosted by Coursera, the massive open online course provider, can now access lessons on the go -- as long as they have an iPhone. The MOOC provider launched an official mobile app on Tuesday, allowing iPhone users to browse courses, receive notifications from the courses they are enrolled in, and stream and download lectures. Read more...

Haverford College officials are backing away from a pledge to ensure no students are forced to borrow money to attend the private liberal arts college. College administrators told students this week they are looking to do away with their six-year-old “no loan” pledge to some students – mostly its students from upper middle class households. The new plan still has significant protections for needy families in lower income brackets: Families making less than $60,000 will still not have to take out loans and no family should have to borrow more than $12,000 over four-years, which is far less debt than the average debt-bearing student. (The median family income in the United States is about $51,000). Read more...

By Cyrille Cartier for Times Higher Education. In a town near the Croatian border with Bosnia, Marija Čačić saw many family members and friends lose their jobs as local industries shut down. She came to the University of Zagreb’s philosophy department eager to lay foundations for a better life, far away from those local problems. But all that changed when Čačić joined the student movement and saw the connection between the jobless workers back home and her own struggle for “free education.” Read more...

By Paul Fain. Competency-based education appears to be higher education’s "next big thing." Yet many academics aren’t sure what it is. And that goes double for lawmakers and journalists. A new group is stepping in to try to clear up some of the confusion. The nascent Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN) will include up to 20 institutions that offer competency-based degrees or are well on their way to creating them. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. More than one person told Chris Romer that his vision of creating a national network of high-quality community college programs and selective four-year colleges committed to enrolling their graduates was folly. It's hard enough to get community colleges and elite public and private colleges in a given area to articulate transfer agreements, let alone create something on a national scale, he was told. But the American Honors program that Romer and colleagues unveiled early this year has indeed created such a network, and it is beginning to bear fruit. Read more...

By Michael Stratford and Paul Fain. During a hearing Thursday, several Democratic senators mulled whether the federal government should get more involved in the accrediting process. They might have been less enthusiastic if they saw what was happening at another meeting two blocks away. The federal panel that reviews accreditors, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, held that gathering. Faculty members and students from the City College of San Francisco, who for the past year have essentially waged war against the accrediting agency that is threatening to revoke the accreditation of their college, pleaded their case to the panel. Read more...

By Peter Stokes and Sean Gallagher. A little over 12 months ago, The New York Times famously dubbed 2012 “The Year of the MOOC.” What a difference 365 little days can make. Here at the back end of another calendar year, we wonder if 2013 might come to be thought of as “The Year of the Backlash” within the online higher education community. Even Udacity's founder, Sebastian Thrun, one of the entrepreneurs whose businesses kicked off MOOC mania, seems to be getting into the backlash game. Read more...