Today, April 25, 2013, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted out of committee a bill to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).  On a voice vote, the Committee approved the ECPA Amendments Act of 2013 (S. 607) co-sponsored by Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).  The bill, which has broad bi-partisan support, would require the government to obtain a warrant from a judge before gaining access to the contents of email or documents stored in the cloud.

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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.

What is Open SUNY?

Open SUNY is a set of 9 interdependent components, as described by the advisory team report [updated]

1. Open SUNY Online Consortium - Comprised of courses from SUNY campuses across the system taught by SUNY faculty, the Open SUNY Online Consortium will collectively offer the most extensive array of online courses and degree programs in the country. This unified approach to online education will provide learners with cost effective options to compete with the rising costs of higher education and enable students taking courses across multiple SUNY institutions to receive financial aid from their home institution.

2. Open SUNY Degree - The term Open SUNY degree refers to functional coordination of policies and practices that “systemness” will allow for, not the actual degree conferrals that are the role of the campuses. The Office of the Provost will seek out campuses to offer new, high needs, online degree programs that will not necessarily require the host campus to develop or provide all the necessary courses to meet credit requirements to confer a degree.

3. Open SUNY Complete - Open SUNY will lead a SUNY-wide project to support degree completion for students who seek to return to college after a significant absence (commonly referred to as ”stopped out”). The Open SUNY Complete program will identify and support former students who wish to return to SUNY to earn and complete a degree. This will occur through use of market analyses and outreach to students who are now considered beyond the normal reach of the originating enrolling college, using a variety of cooperative strategies between SUNY institutions. tate University of New York  Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team Interim Report 4

4. Open SUNY Resources - Open SUNY Resources will build on existing digital repositories, making vast amounts of high quality, credible material available to faculty and learners, while simultaneously staking ground as a world leader in creating new resources by leveraging the vast expertise available across SUNY disciplines.

5. Open SUNY PLA (Prior Learning Assessment) - Increasingly, people acquire and assimilate knowledge both internal and external to the academy. Recognition of the latter, when applied toward college level learning, provides greater access to higher education, decreased time to degree completion, increased retention and completion rates, and significantly lower costs to students. Open SUNY PLA will provide services to campuses that do not wish to establish their own prior learning assessment processes.

6. Open SUNY Workforce - A SUNY-wide strategy for the use of online learning in support of workforce development and adult/continuing education can strengthen SUNY’s role as an economic driver throughout NYS and provide access to SUNY higher education specifically for potential employees, employees and employers statewide (and nationally, who will be attracted to all that SUNY and New York have to offer).

7. Open SUNY International - Open SUNY International will provide a network for learning by linking faculty and students from around the world, demonstrating SUNY’s commitment to international education. In partnership with the Office of Global Affairs, Open SUNY International will provide new opportunities for SUNY students to engage in international and intercultural learning.

8. Open SUNY Research - Open SUNY Research will continue a long tradition of scholarship related to innovation, student access, and learning in open and online environments. Previous support from the Office of the Provost has fostered an active and ongoing research and development agenda with more than 150 conference papers, book chapters, peer-reviewed journal publications, monographs, and presentations directly related to SUNY Learning Network and online education initiatives. Open SUNY Research expands this work and will be supported by a combination of SUNY-wide innovation grants, external funding, formal initiatives, advisory group efforts, and campusbased research activities.

9. Open SUNY Learning Commons - The Open SUNY Learning Commons will be a set of technology applications and online environments to support all Open SUNY services and components. Facilitating communication across campuses, the Learning Commons will bring the user-friendliness of social media applications to the SUNY community. It will leverage advanced open source and commercially available online learning tools, while building communities of practice for students and faculty.

Open SUNY funding comes from a $18.6m funding from NY2020 legislation, and will eventually cost (according to estimates) $3.35m per year in operations.

Announcements

The plan was announced during the SUNY Chancellor’s State of the University address on January 15, 2013. One of the goals of Open SUNY, according to the Chancellor is to expand access to public higher education:

Launch of Open SUNY in 2014, including 10 online bachelor’s degree programs that meet high-need workforce demands, three of which will be piloted in the fall. Open SUNY will leverage online degree offerings at every SUNY campus, making them available to students system-wide using a common set of online tools, including a financial aid consortium so that credits and aid can be received by students across campuses. Chancellor Zimpher said Open SUNY enrollment will reach 100,000 students within three years, making it the largest online education presence of any public institution in the nation.

On March 19, 2013, the Board of Trustees endorsed the plan. One of the motivations for this move was to coordinate campus efforts and gain system-wide synergies, as described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed. One of the key targets for the online expansion will be non-traditional adult learners.

SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher wants to consolidate online course offerings after nearly 20 years of institutional independence.

“I think the problems the country is trying to solve simply cannot be solved one institution at a time,” Zimpher said in a recent interview. [snip]

SUNY began its online efforts in 1994 at Empire State College. Now, there are 150 online degree programs scattered across all its campuses. SUNY’s extensive offerings are, as it has said in documents related to its new effort, “fragmented” – the source of “countless unexplored opportunities for collaboration, economies of scale and innovation.”

Zimpher ultimately wants to enroll 100,000 new online students in the next several years while also adding new degree programs to train New Yorkers for industries with job openings. To reduce costs to students, she is also trying to speed degree completion times in online degrees to three years.

The chancellor said the whole online effort will target adults.

“We have all these adults who have some education but not enough,” she said. “We’re really trying to grow a major enrollment in an underserved population.”

Ry Rivard’s article also highlights potential pushback from the faculty unions.

A spokesman for the union that represents SUNY academics and instructors said the union had not been consulted about the push.

“SUNY hasn’t brought us into the conversation, hasn’t consulted us,” said Don Feldstein, spokesman for United University Professions, which represents about 32,000 SUNY employees.

SUNY spokesman David Doyle said the system had consulted with faculty by appointing some of them to a task force and by talking to faculty through the “appropriate governance channels,” such as the faculty senate.

How Will We Know?

The part of innovation that I don’t see mentioned enough, at least in the proposal and press releases, is a structured method of determining what works and what doesn’t work. The proposal does mention the metrics that should improve if Open SUNY is successful, but these are all at the initiative level, and not at the individual innovation level [updated].

The impact of Open SUNY will be measured by its contributions to:

• Enhancing and supporting academic excellence of faculty and students;
• Reducing the time required for degree completion;
• Reducing the overall cost of obtaining a SUNY degree;
• Meeting workforce and societal needs;
• Increasing SUNY completion rates;
• Increasing the number of online learners;
• Enhancing the profile of SUNY as an innovative leader in teaching and learning;
• Continuing to reduce a collective carbon footprint; and
• Increasing student and faculty international engagement through online interaction.

Some of these are laudable goals (reducing time to degree and overall cost, increase completion rate), but some are ill-defined (improved outcomes) and some are questionable (increased number of online learners as a goal rather than means to a goal, and enhancing the profile).

But a deeper problem is lack of discussion on determining which innovations to diffuse and which innovations to keep from diffusing. Perhaps there are plans for evaluating courses and programs, but there are no details available that I can find.

Focus on Spreading Innovations, not Creating Innovations

SUNY, of course, is not the first place to develop MOOCs, online courses, OER, open courseware or PLAs, so what is important about this announcement? I think the significance lies in SUNY’s scale and SUNY’s approach. SUNY appears to view the Open SUNY program as a method to spread educational innovations throughout one of the largest systems in the country rather than creating a new pilot program or experiment. SUNY has 468,000 students and plans to add 100,000 more. Rather than trying to create a new innovation, the role of the system is to foster innovation and then take the best ideas and make them available to all.

Although it’s not getting enough attention, Open SUNY will have an outsized impact on the future of online education in the US. State-wide initiatives, whether driven by the systems or the state government, are becoming one of the biggest factors in how higher education is changing in the US. I suspect that other states will be watching SUNY and adopting this model in part or in whole.

Pay attention to Open SUNY – it will matter.

Further Reading

Further reading in chronological order:

• SUNY Strategic Plan, “The Power of SUNY”, 2010
• Associated Press, “SUNY seeks to establish a ‘cradle to career’ future for its graduates”, April 13, 2010
• Empire State College, “Open SUNY Final Proposal” from 2012
• CNY Central, “SUNY Chancellor reveals ambitious agenda”, Jan 15, 2013
• USA Today, “State University of New York pushing online classes”, Jan 15, 2013
• Education News, “Open SUNY Will Mark New York’s Push into Online Education”, Jan 22, 2013
• Open SUNY Press Release, “SUNY Board Outlines Implementation of Open SUNY”, March 19, 2013
• Buffalo Business First, “Online courses to be available across SUNY system”, March 20, 2013
• Chronicle of Higher Education, “SUNY Signals Major Push Toward MOOCs and Other New Educational Models”, March 20, 2013
• Online Colleges, “State University of New York Embraces Online Learning with Open SUNY Initiative”, March 22, 2013
• e-Literate, “SUNY and the Expansion of Prior Learning Assessments”, March 26, 2013
• Inside Higher Education, “Economies of Online Scale”, March 27, 2013

Update 4/02: Fixed editing mistake to say “SUNY, of course, is not the first place to develop . . . “

The post Open SUNY: A Game Changer in the Making appeared first on e-Literate.

 

“What we’re talking about is a different satisfactory academic progress model than most of you are used to,” said project leader Van Davis to a large group of faculty from the two Texas campuses implementing the Texas Affordable Baccalaureate. Far from being shocked by his statement, the group appeared eager to dive into the day’s work on that very model.

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by Ellis Booker, Information Week

Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, recognized older students as online learning harbinger. Schools aren’t the only ones grappling with big questions about online learning, flipped classrooms, assessment analytics and open-source alternatives to commercial products. Traditional publishers are making changes, too. Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher, was early to embrace the digital future, according to observers. The company says more than half of its revenues last year came from digital products and service. “We’ve organized internally around three A’s — achievement, access and affordability,” Todd Hitchcock, senior VP of online solutions and business development at Pearson, told InformationWeek in a phone interview.

http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/education-giant-pearson-adapts-to-digita/240153068

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by Yojana Sharma, University World News

Naubahar Sharif has been teaching science, technology and innovation for some years at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He drew on his lectures to develop a massive open online course, or MOOC, on “Science, Technology and Society in China”, and this month it was launched on the Coursera platform – billed as Asia’s first MOOC. Some 17,000 students registered for the three-week course, which began on 4 April. “I was astonished and overwhelmed. This is far more than the 8,000-10,000 students we were expecting,” said Sharif, an associate professor.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20130417153545600

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Yesterday was week 14 for ds106, the last week of classes for my UMW students, and also the last of my semi regular live Google Hangouts pitched as a weekly “show”. Thanks to Brian Lamb, Todd Conaway, and stalwart student Nancy B for showing up.

The whole series is right here!

The viewership on the series is lower than the video for Aunt Bertha’s Toenail Clipping tutorial, but that was not the point. What was the point? Oh yes, since ds106 really has now scheduled classes nor weekly lectures via video, I wanted something that was “live” as an least an opportunity to offer at least some together moment in the class.

Oh, I made it a participation requirement for my students to cohost / be present for at least one show a semester. This provided me a way to ask them about the class and give them a platform to complain (the never did), and have speak for the experience in their own words, interact with open participants from the larger community– but mostly so I at least could know them a bit better, and vice versa.

Unlike spending thousands of dollars to film sterile fixed lecture (cough xMOOC), this was meant to be as conversational as face to face interactions, to be human to each other. It was not scripted.

My shtick was sort of pretending it was a 1960s style talk show- no idea why, but I put a black and white effect on my laptop camera (iGlasses), often wore a tie, and played some cheesy music.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I decided each week to make a 2-3 minute intro reel, always the same orm of intro, music, and exit, but each week I would insert some new clips of old commercials, educational videos, etc. I used three segments from the 1958 Promotion Bypass, a vintage film about management issues, for the dude in the suit behind the desk. My shtick was each week, I would re-write a script I would dub over his lines. This was a matter of counting syllables and re-writing it.

I ended up getting it so I could produce a new video each week in about 2 hours. For what purpose? My own amusement. But they were fun to do

After the hangout was archived by YouTube, I simply used the youtube editor to weld together the intro to the google archive recording.

I filmed these in my spare bedroom/office, using a reflector to bounce fill the window light, an worklight for a spot (super low tech by Andy Rush measures for sure). I’d play the music from my iPad out of some portable speakers.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I also used this as a theme (and produced yet another intro all the way up to 38 views) for my keynote for the TCC World Online Conference.

So this was totally not necessary, but totally became a weekly obsession, and I got a lot out of the regular act of doing this week by week. It was worth it for me to at least have some talking time with the students. I call it flipping the video lecture– right into the trash. Online classes do not need lectures to transmit content. Or at least I think they don’t.

But what do I know? Aunt Bertha is killing me in the stats.

Thanks to people like Todd Conaway, Ben Rimes, Brian Lamb, Brian Short, Zack Dowell, Mikhail Gershovich, Jonathan Worth, Andy Rush, Giulia Forsythe, Jim Groom, Norm Wright, Daniel Zimmerman, Michael Branson-Smith, Bryan Alexander, Martha Burtis, and Haley Campbell for being guests.

And all my students for putting up with the weirdness.

But don’t mind me, ask Aunt Bertha.

by Rebecca Grant, Venture Beat

NovoEd launched today to make access to courses from prestigious educational institutions available to anyone, starting with Stanford. The company started out as Venture Lab, a project run by a Stanford professor and a PhD student to make online learning more social, experiential, and interactive. Many Stanford professors were interested in taking their courses online but said presenting material in that format did not allow for the degree of interactivity they desired. Using a combination of techniques in crowdsourcing, design and analysis of reputation systems, and algorithm design, NovoEd’s platform enables collaboration and peer learning. The classes are built around team-based exercises that require students to exchange ideas, communicate, and evaluate each others’ work. Stanford University will use the platform to offer seven courses to the general public, as well as 10 private courses available only to current Stanford students. Course topics are diverse and include ‘A crash course on creativity,” “Mobile health without borders,” and “Finance.”

http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/15/stanford-for-everybody-professor-launches-startup-make-elite-education-globally-accessible/

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New forms of scholarship, new educational pathways, and new interconnections and dependencies characterize the digitally rich landscape of higher education today. We are living and working in an age in which connections are blends of unique relationships and new social mores, crisscrossing an eclectic panorama of technology solutions and smart devices. In today’s world, planning and delivering IT services for residential and virtual campuses entails creative reexamination of all our premises, from partnerships and collaborations, to business models and processes, to services and service delivery.

This session will define and explore the new, connected landscape we all must gingerly yet strategically navigate. It also will examine how traditional higher education, whether large research or small liberal arts, should be adapting to the opportunities and challenges presented by the ubiquity and pervasiveness of connectivity.

*This presentation is part of an EDUCAUSE Live! Game Changers Spotlight Series focusing on higher education in the connected age.

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Author Rachel Fishman, examines the most common challenges to implementing successful distance-education programs, including cost, quality, and faculty buy-in. Fishman decribes 5 steps to successful online state higher education systems.

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BY AARON LEWIS, Yale Daily News

Yale faculty may have postponed their vote on the grading overhaul to November, but students concerned about grading policies may have something bigger to worry about: artificial intelligence software that could be used to evaluate their essays. EdX — an education nonprofit founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — has just introduced a free online tool that automates the essay grading process. EdX president Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, told The New York Times he believes his software will give professors more free time and allow students to receive helpful instant feedback. The software first analyzes 100 of a professor’s already graded essays, then uses machine-learning techniques to grade future papers on its own.

http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/04/16/robot-essay-graders-a-growing-possibility/

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By Katy Murphy, Oakland Tribune

San Jose State and online education startup Udacity are offering for-credit, online-only courses for $150 this summer, the company announced Monday. Enrollment is capped at 1,000 each for the new introduction to programming and psychology courses and will likely grow for the existing, lower-level math classes. The courses are an extension of a pilot project launched in January at San Jose State with Udacity that has been deemed successful. Going into midterm exams, 85 percent of students (including university and high school students) were still enrolled in the test courses, Udacity reports.

http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_23029108/san-jose-state-and-udacity-expand-online-courses

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By Trent M Kays, Minnesota Daily

Automated feedback is nothing new. However, EdX is taking it to an entirely new level. Writing is not an automated activity. Sure, a computer can compile and construct sentences, but a computer can never write. It can never move people to action via discourse, and it can never really construct meaning. The human in the writing process is paramount. Humans drive the writing process. Therefore, in the same way computers cannot write, they also cannot be left to judge others’ writing. Even now, students are marching into SAT and GRE testing facilities to take standardized tests and write to prompts. After they finish writing, their essay is sent off to be graded by a computer. To be fair, according to the Educational Testing Service, one human also grades test answers. Still, how does it make you feel knowing that a computer is deciding whether you’ll go to college? That’s basically what is happening.

http://www.mndaily.com/opinion/columns/2013/04/14/massive-computerized-professor

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Faced with increasing needs for bandwidth, Oregon State University partnered with NoaNet Oregon (Northwest Open-Access Network Oregon) to construct an OSU-owned fiber link which provides unlimited bandwidth. This unique public/private partnership is based on a revenue-sharing model. OSU paid for the up-front build-out costs and expects enough revenue to offset that investment as well as provide additional investment monies. SESSION Events and Sessions 0

The higher education community continues to make significant progress toward addressing the problems of distance education state authorization through the development of a state authorization reciprocity proposal. The Commission on the Regulation of Postsecondary Distance Education, a joint effort of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) and the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO), recently released its final report, Advancing Access through Regulatory Reform: Findings, Principles, and Recommendations for the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA).

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by GREGORY FERENSTEIN, Tech Crunch

The largest university system in America is aggressively expanding its experimental foray into Massive Online Open Learning (MOOCs), based on an unusually promising pilot course. The California State University system will offer a special “flipped” version of an electrical engineering course at 11 more universities, where students watch online lectures from Harvard and MIT at home, while class time is devoted to hands-on problem solving. A San Jose State University pilot found that the flipped class increased pass rates a whopping 46%, which university President Mohammad Qayoumi believes is enough to move full-steam ahead.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/california-universities-aggressively-expand-online-courses-finds-failure-rates-drop/

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by TIM DODD, Australian Financial Review

A University of NSW spin-off company, Smart Sparrow, will this week launch a new e-learning product which goes a step beyond the popular massive open online courses, or MOOCs. “A MOOC is a way to give a massive audience a similar experience, similar to a lecture,” said Smart Sparrow chief executive Dror Ben-Naim. “Smart Sparrow is a bit more like the private tutor. It’s like personalised learning at scale.” While MOOCs offer online learning in a linear fashion – usually with short videos each followed by a multiple choice quiz to ensure the student has understood the concept before moving on – Smart Sparrow’s technical platform offers adaptive e-learning. This means students are free to explore for themselves and learn by doing. They may play with chemicals in a virtual chemistry lab, test different engineering structures or learn about a physical concept with an interactive moving diagram. The platform also gives instructors and course designers the opportunity to target learning for individual students and give students more creative tasks.

http://www.afr.com/p/national/education/taking_the_next_step_beyond_moocs_YOp1faaL3PDE6ziDzTt97O

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by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOM

Online learning site Udemy is launching a corporate training option that enables companies to create private online learning sites for their employees. Ambitious individuals who want to bulk up on new skills can turn to online learning site Udemy for lessons on everything from web development and programming to accounting and entrepreneurship. And it might not be long before their employers start picking up the tab.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/12/udemy-adds-revenue-stream-with-private-online-learning-sites-for-companies/

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