University of Oregon

READINGS

Institutional Cooperation for Personalized Learning by Michael Tanner, Vice President, APLU.
Note: This is a good overview of APLU project goals.

Introductory Webinar with Michael Tanner, Vice President of APLU

10 Universities Team To Offer Cross-Institution Online Courses for Credit
By Dian Schaffhauser
Campus Technology, 11/26/12
Note: Partner institutions are Brandeis, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Rochester, UNC-Chapel Hill (the only public university), Vanderbilt, and Wake Forest. (ARB)

Universities Try MOOCs in Bid to Lure Successful Students to Online Programs
January 23, 2013, 8:58 pm
By Steve Kolowich
Chronicle of Higher Education 

…Academic Partnerships, a company that helps traditional institutions build online programs, believes it has found a way. And it involves awarding academic credit to students who take MOOCs—at no charge.

The company announced on Wednesday that it and a group of its public-university clients were planning to recast certain conventional online courses as MOOCs in the hope that the free courses could serve as a tool for recruiting students into their online degree programs—in particular, students who are likely to succeed.

Academic Partnerships is calling the new program MOOC2Degree.
….clients planning to offer MOOC2Degree courses [include] the University of Arkansas system, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Texas at Arlington College of Nursing, the University of West Florida, and Cleveland State, Florida International, Lamar, and Utah State Universities. (Another client, Arizona State University, says it plans to participate but will charge students who enroll there for credits earned in its MOOCs.) ….snip….

California State U. Will Experiment With Offering Credit for MOOCs
January 15, 2013
By Jeffrey R. Young
Chronicle of Higher Education

State universities in California, looking for creative ways to reduce education costs at a time of budget stress, are turning to MOOCs to offer low-cost options for students.

On Tuesday, San Jose State University announced an unusual pilot project with Udacity, a for-profit provider of the massive open online courses, to jointly create three introductory mathematics classes. The courses will be free online, but students who want credit from San Jose State will be able to take them for just $150, far less than the $450 to $750 that students would typically pay for a credit-bearing course.

If the project continues beyond the pilot, the university will keep 51 percent of any revenue after costs are covered and Udacity will keep 49 percent, said Mohammad Qayoumi, president of the university, in an interview on Monday….snip…

November 13, 2012
American Council on Education May Recommend Some Coursera Offerings for College Credit
By Jeffrey R. Young
Chronicle of Higher Education
Note: this article includes descriptions of other projects funded in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s larger MOOC initiative. (ARB)

The American Council on Education has agreed to review a handful of free online courses offered by elite universities and may recommend that other colleges grant credit for them.

The move could lead to a world in which many students graduate from traditional colleges faster by taking self-guided courses on the side, taught free by professors from Stanford University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and other well-known colleges.

In what leaders describe as a pilot project, the group will consider five to 10 massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, offered through Coursera for possible inclusion in the council’s College Credit Recommendation Service. That service has been around since the 1970s and focuses on certifying training courses, offered outside of traditional colleges, for which students might want college credit. McDonald’s Hamburger University, for example, is among the hundreds of institutions with courses certified through ACE Credit, as the service is known.

Last year, a provider of low-cost online courses called StraighterLine became one of the first online institutions to win inclusion in the recommendation service.

ACE also announced on Tuesday that it will set up a Presidential Innovation Lab that will bring together college leaders to discuss the potential of MOOC’s and new business models for higher education. The lab is supported by an $895,453 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as part of about $3-million in new MOOC-related grants announced Tuesday….snip….

Even if ACE recommends the courses, it is up to individual colleges to decide whether to grant transfer credit for them. So the next question becomes, Will colleges welcome such transfers? ….snip….

Josh Jarrett, deputy director for postsecondary success at the Gates foundation, said that “MOOC’s may be the next generation of AP courses.” Many students already arrive at campuses with credit they earn by passing Advanced Placement tests in high school, and MOOC’s may simply prove another way for students to get a jump on college.

Many of the grants by the Gates foundation concerning MOOC’s are focused on the use of free open courses as a supplement to traditional courses, rather than a replacement for them.

For instance, another Gates-foundation grant announced Tuesday, for $1,440,900, will support researchers from Ithaka S+R, a group that speeds development of information technologies for higher education, to study the effectiveness of MOOC’s used in a “flipped classroom” model. In that model, students at traditional campuses watch lecture videos for homework and use class time for discussion rather than lecture.

In that way, Mr. Jarrett said, MOOC’s may turn out to be a high-tech replacement for a textbook.

“We think in the short term the blended, flip-the-classroom model is going to be the one that’s most effective for first-generation, low-income students, the kind of students that we work for,” he said.

The Gates foundation also announced Tuesday the names of nine institutions that will receive grants to develop remedial and introductory classes. Those institutions include Cuyahoga Community College Foundation, Wake Technical Community College, and Ohio State University.

The foundation also announced a grant of $269,000 to the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities to consider a consortium of colleges that would jointly build MOOC’s and other digital course materials.

UO Reports and Activities
Blandy, Doug. Distance Education at the University of Oregon (presentation, 12 September  2012)
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/apluconsortium/files/2013/02/10.05.12_SVPAA-Presentation-of-Distance-Ed-at-UO-2fiktrj.pdf

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