Exploring Issues in Educational Technology in Virginia's Community Colleges
March 15, 2016 will be my last day at the System Office of the Virginia Community College System. I am leaving my position as Director of Teaching and Learning Technologies to begin the next stage of my career as the Director of Programs and Policy at Achieving the Dream (ATD). In my new role I will be overseeing ATD’s new OER Degree Initiative, an effort to fund the […]
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Last year, Richmond, Virginia was the host city for the 2015 UCI Road World Championships, a weeklong, international bicycle race second in importance only to the better-known Tour de France. It was a great event, with thousands of visitors from all over the globe crowding along the course route to watch the world’s top cyclists zip by. A few months […]
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Happy Open Education Week! There’s a lot happening this week in the world of open education and open educational resources, and it’s happening all over the world, from institutions across North America as well as Europe, Asia, and the global south. You can check out all of the exciting events scheduled for Open Education week on the website: http://www.openeducationweek.org/. I do want […]
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If your college is currently a member of the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements (NC-SARA), the dates for reporting your Spring 2016 enrollment data are May 9-20, 2016. This means you GCC, JSRCC, LFCC, NRCC, NVCC, TCC, and WCC. “Wait? What data reporting?” you ask. One of the requirements of all institutional members of NC-SARA is to share out-of-state distance […]
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You might have missed the announcement from Blackboard a few weeks ago, which was overshadowed by Blackboard’s other announcement. Two new Software as a Service (SaaS) LMS offerings are finally available, six months after they were promised. The new offerings–Blackboard SaaS Plus and SaaS Advantage–join the already available Saas Standard, released at Blackboard World last July. Here is a description of these new […]
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The 2016 Horizon Report for Higher Education was officially released during the annual meeting of the Educause Learning Institute (ELI), which wrapped up yesterday in San Antonio, TX. If you aren’t familiar with it, the annual Horizon Report for Higher Education, now in its 13th edition, is an ongoing collaborative research project between the New Media Consortium and ELI designed to “identify […]
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College textbooks cost too much. If you’ve watched the news or read a newspaper in the past few years, you are aware of this. If you are the parent of a college student, or a college student yourself, you, and your wallet, know this firsthand. The soaring cost of college textbooks is well-documented. Since 2006, the prices of college textbooks have increased […]
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When discussing higher education, there is often a focus on the more serious, systemic problems facing institutions–rising costs, poor outcomes, a stultified academic culture, dwindling public resources–all important topics that need to be addressed–and less attention on the often minute, personal exchanges that make higher education so essential and so powerful: the life-changing impact on thousands of learners fostered by talented and dedicated faculty members. We […]
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OER advocates scored a major victory on Monday with the U.S. Department of Labor’s (USDOL) announcement that it has adopted a department-wide Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license requirement for all intellectual property developed with funds under a competitive Federal award process. Requiring a CC BY license on DOL-funded resources has a number of advantages: The DOL increases the impact, reach and scalability of […]
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During the month of February, Respondus®, maker of the VCCS-licensed products Respondus Lockdown Browser (LDB), Respondus 4.0, and StudyMate, is offering a series of webinar trainings to help instructors effectively use Respondus applications with online tests. The webinar sessions are each 45-minutes long and focus on creating online assessments and deterring cheating during online exams. The schedule is below. Instructor Training for LockDown […]
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