Faculty and students at Bridgewater College in Virginia complained increasingly in recent years about the unavailability of textbooks at the campus bookstore. To control inventory, the store stocked only a percentage of materials required if everyone purchased what was expected. Campus business officers also noted a rapid decline in textbook revenue and related commissions, as […]
Starbucks made headlines last spring as more than just a campus hot spot when it announced a free college tuition plan for its employees. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and health insurance company Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield have now followed suit, and Starbucks has expanded its program. While each corporation is partnering with a specific […]
Heather DeBlanc says there’s been a lot of buzz lately at conferences among attorneys and insurance consultants about the Affordable Care Act. Specifically, DeBlanc, an attorney at Liebert Cassidy Whitmore in Los Angeles, says there have been rumors the IRS is increasing the audits it performs at higher education institutions to ensure schools aren’t misclassifying […]
Who watches online videos today? Maybe a better question is, who doesn’t? According to surveys from the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of adults watch videos while 75 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds do it on their smartphone. Video is an engaging, emotional and effective way to communicate and influence. So it was just a […]
Online learning, specifically MOOCs, has inspired many doomsday forecasts regarding the fate of traditional higher education—which, of course, has yet to collapse. But the predicted death of MOOCs—due to erratic completion rates, lack of formal student support and concerns about the financial returns for institutions—hasn’t come true either. In an effort to add quantifiable worth […]
It’s an uncomfortable truth for colleges and universities—cheating happens. And by many accounts, it happens a lot. Although cheating isn’t new, technology facilitates it and student culture more readily accepts it. Students may believe outstanding scholastic performance—achieved by whatever means necessary—paves the difficult-to-navigate path to success. Added into this mix is the popularity of online […]
Attending class as a robot There’s a new attendance option for online students of Michigan State University’s educational psychology and educational technology doctoral program: They can come to class via robot. Instead of sitting in on a stagnant videoconference, the robots allow students to scan the room remotely and feel physically engaged. The robots, from […]
More than two-thirds of the matches picked up by content-tracking service Turnitin are matches to other students’ work. Turnitin checks work for originality by helping identify primary-source and outside content use within that work. While not all the matches are instances of plagiarism, the statistic certainly reflects the degree to which students are sharing information […]
The University of Michigan’s very decentralized campus means it has multiple IT departments, numerous technologies and plenty of cloud applications. “We basically use everything you can think of when it comes to the cloud,” says Don Welch, chief information security officer. “Colleges here have their own relationships with providers, and their own strategies with information […]
Online degrees are poised to shake up the academy, says Kevin Carey, director of educational policy at the New America Foundation. That they haven’t yet is not the fault of technology as much as it is the perceived value of a traditional college diploma. That document tells little more than the applicant attended classes at […]
