e-Literate

Open SUNY: A Game Changer in the Making

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Phil Hill

Update 4/25 and bumped due to changes: Thanks to Greg Ketcham and Robert Knipe, I have replaced the 2009 interim proposal document with the updated advisory team report. This changes the intro blurb, description of 9 inter-dependent components, and list of contributions below.

I have been surprised at how little interest the Open SUNY announcement last week generated in educational media and blog discussions. Perhaps the MOOC portion of the story, which was prominent in several headlines, caused people to assume this was just another school trying to jump on the bandwagon. What is significant, however, is that one of the largest statewide systems in the country is making a multi-pronged approach to reduce time-to-graduation and therefore lower student costs.

In brief, Open SUNY is part of the system’s agenda to expand access to public higher education by leveraging existing programs or experiments already in place at member campuses or at the system level, and it has strong ties to Open Educational Resources (OER) concepts. The concept for the strategic plan originated in 2009, eventually leading to the report Getting Down to Business: Interim Report of the Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team released in December 2012 [updated].

The Advisory Team recommends “Open SUNY” be officially adopted as the name of SUNY’s new online learning initiative. The term Open SUNY represents an opening up of the educational opportunities that SUNY can provide through the enhancement of existing—and development of new—online education resources, courses and degree programs.

Open SUNY has the clear potential to establish SUNY as the preeminent and most extensive online learning environment in the nation by providing affordable, high quality, convenient, innovative, and flexible online education opportunities for the citizens of the State of New York and beyond. As a collaborative online educational network, the Open SUNY Online Consortium (SUNY campuses and SUNY system offices) will draw on the Power of SUNY to connect students with faculty and peers from across the state and throughout the world, and link them to the best in research-based online teaching and learning environments, practices, and resources. Dedicated to providing access to open and online learning opportunities, Open SUNY will connect learner and community needs and will allow the State University of New York to bring this concept to scale like no other college, university, or system in the United States.

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Posted in Digital Democracy, Higher Education, Notable Posts, Openness | Tagged Empire State College, MOOC, Open SUNY, PLA, SUNY | 4 Comments

Amendments of California SB520 Bill for Online Courses

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Phil Hill

Last week California SB520 – the bill aiming to create a pool of online availability of 50 high-demand lower-division courses for which the public systems would have to award credit – was amended based on ongoing discussions and negotiations. The fact that the bill has been amended is not surprising, as this is the intent of the legislative process.

Michael and I have covered the basics of SB520, original text, and some analysis in recent posts. The specific amendments can be viewed at the official CA legislature site.

The themes of the amendments are to:

shift the approval of the pool of online courses from the California Open Access Resources Council (COERC) to the administration and faculty senates of the three systems (University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges);
tie the administration of the program to the California Virtual Campus;
restrict each course to matriculated California public higher education and qualifying K-12 students;
tie the provisions of the bill to funding in the Annual Budget Act; and
remove any tie to American Council on Education recommendations.

Amended Bill Language

Below are some of the key changes to the bill, with markups (red strikethrough text for deletions, blue for additions).

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Posted in Digital Democracy, Higher Education, Notable Posts, Openness | Tagged California, Darrell Steinberg, Online Education, SB520 | 3 Comments

Summary from WCET on State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Phil Hill

For any online program in the US that enroll students from more than one state, the issue of the Department of Education’s State Authorization proposed regulations is a major issue. WCET has played a leading role in raising awareness on the issue as well as pushing for a solution. From their summary page (read the whole page for a summary of the timeline, pushback, state regulations, etc):

On October 29, 2010, the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) released new “program integrity” regulations. One of the regulations focused on the need for institutions offering distance or correspondence education to acquire authorization from any state in which it “operates.” This authorization is required to maintain eligibility for students of that state to receive federal financial aid. Institutions have until July 1, 2014, to have obtained the appropriate approvals. Meanwhile, institutions are required to demonstrate a ‘good faith’ effort to comply in each state in which it serves students. While the regulation has been ‘vacated’ by court order, we believe it will be reinstated.

To give an idea of the issues, consider that Missouri charges institutions $5,000 – $25,000 fees to register in the state, and there is a burdensome process. While not all states are as expensive as Missouri, the costs and overhead add up quickly, and there are conflicting and inconsistent requirements from state to state. According to a survey from UPCEA, WCET and Sloan-C, one third of online programs have not applied to any states outside their home, despite the serving a median of 37 states. Furthermore State Authorization rules would stifle online education programs and is already causing many programs to reject students in certain states.

Despite losing in court (the ruling was vacated), the Department of Education still plans on pushing forward and planning to revive State Authorization.

The most promising approach to dealing with this situation is the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA).

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Posted in Higher Education, Notable Posts | Tagged DOE, Online Education, Reciprocity, SARA, State Authorization, WCET | Leave a comment

Tear Down This Wall(ed Garden): Canvas App Center to Offer End User Control Over Apps

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Phil Hill

Instructure took another step this past week to establish Canvas as a true learning platform, moving beyond the traditional bounds of an LMS. The company announced the upcoming release of the Canvas App Center, scheduled for availability at the same time as their annual users confer in June, which will allow end-user (read faculty and students) integration of third-party apps.

I wrote about the trend of the market moving towards learning platforms last year.

In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market.

What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS). [emphasis added]

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Posted in Guest Bloggers, Higher Education, LMOS, Notable Posts, Openness | 11 Comments

The Need For Learning Engineers (and Learning Engineering)

Posted on by Bill Jerome

Editor’s Note: I am pleased to announce that Bill has agreed to continue contributing blog posts from time to time. Therefore, he is now officially a “Featured Blogger” rather than a “Guest Blogger.”

Last week, I had the privilege of speaking at a workshop on online graduate education. At that workshop, Carnegie Mellon University Provost and Executive Vice President Dr. Mark Kamlet used the words “Learning Engineering” in his keynote which I built upon in my talk. In my previous post I referenced the need of semantic data and algorithms to support learning engineers to create and iteratively improve courses and courseware (among other things). I felt it was worth taking a little time to describe just what I believe that means.

For over 10 years, the Open Learning Initiative has been bringing together teams to develop online course materials. Carnegie Mellon is an ideal place to cultivate this work due to its multi-disciplinary programs and culture aside from its expertise in the related fields. During that time we’ve built a team of experts that are critical to the building of learning environments informed by research and capable of recording data for iterative improvement as well as creating dynamic reports for stakeholders.

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