California Virtual Campus

“A national continuing education association and a listings firm launched an online directory of certificate and degree programs offered by regionally accredited colleges and universities. The directory was developed by the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA) and Educational Directories Unlimited, Inc. (EDU), which say 17 million U.S. adults are now pursuing higher education opportunities.

The directory will help prospective students search for programs via degree level, format, subject and, if applicable, zip code. The site will also offer advice for going back to school. UCEA President Roger Whitaker, who is also dean of the College of Professional Studies at George Washington University, said the directory would provide adults seeking to further their education a ‘trusted resource’ to find ‘credible programs that meet their interests.’”

The directory is available at: http://www.uceadirectory.org/

“Campus Technology presents a bold new conference this summer in Boston. Following 12 years of the annual Syllabus conference for education technology professionals, this summer’s program emphasizes the critical impact of cross-departmental teams that drive change on campuses. These teams are comprised of campus visionaries and administrators across technology, academic, and funding areas. Content will be presented in innovative panel discussions and interactive formats that allow you to learn from peers, solve problems you may be facing on campus, and return to your institutions with tools, knowledge, and a blueprint for change. Multiple ‘topics and issues’ dinners and breakfast focus groups are value-added opportunities for you, as is a unique ‘technology insider’ field trip to MIT.”

Conf: July 31-August 3, 2006
Exhibits: August 1-2, 2006
Sheraton Boston Hotel
Boston, MA

For additional information:

http://www.campus-technology.com/conferences/summer2005/

“Alex Plair had figured on going away to Georgia Tech after graduating from Kalamazoo Central High School.

Plair, a senior tackle and linebacker at Central who plans to study construction engineering in college, also had given some thought to trying out for the Yellow Jackets’ highly regarded football team as a walk-on.

But now that there’s The Kalamazoo Promise, a pioneering, new scholarship program for graduates of Kalamazoo Public Schools, the 17-year-old student has decided to instead pursue a free college education much closer to home. He probably will attend Western Michigan University, where he could try out for the college football team in his own hometown.

“I had planned on going to college anyway but it’s going to help my parents out because I have five sisters – four of which are in college now,” said Plair, who wouldn’t even have to pay room and board at Western Michigan. The university is offering it for free for four years to 2006 graduates of the school district as an incentive to go there.

Announced by school district officials on Nov. 10, The Kalamazoo Promise – which already is being commonly referred to by locals as simply “the promise” – is not only altering a lot of students’ college plans but also is poised to make a seismic impact on the community’s economy.

On Saturday, school officials plan to meet with representatives of economic-development organizations, civic groups and local government to discuss the broader implications of the scholarship program and start planning for some possibly big changes. The program is expected to attract more businesses, jobs and commerce to greater Kalamazoo, and raise property values in the district.

To be eligible for the scholarship program, students must live in the district, graduate from one of the high schools and have attended Kalamazoo schools for at least four years at the time of graduation.

The scholarships will cover 100 percent of tuition and mandatory fees for graduates who enrolled in the district in kindergarten. Partial scholarships calculated on a sliding scale will be available to graduates who enrolled between grades 1-9.

The scholarships must be used at Michigan’s public universities or community colleges, which already are competing with each other for graduates of Kalamazoo schools. Western Michigan is offering four years of free room and board to 2006 grads, while Wayne State University says it will give them a 50 percent discount.”

For additional information:

http://www.ccweek.com/NewsPage.asp?nid=12

“TextbookX.com, a peer-to-peer electronic marketplace for buying
and selling used college textbooks, said it will offer UPS
Online Tools to track shipments between buyer and sellers.
The Web-based tools enable students to print labels, compare
prices, and arrange shipments from their personal computers.
Brian Jacobs, president of TextbookX.com parent company Akademos,
said tracking is important because when students buy textbooks
online, they need to know they will get them on time. ‘Many
textbooks are required reading before exams, and a late or
lost book can have a serious impact on a student’s coursework,’
he said.

The UPS services will also give sellers confidence they will
be paid promptly for delivered packages, he added.

Jacobs, a former Cornell University professor, said he
started the business to use the Internet to “democratize”
opportunities for students in higher education. He noted
that according to the Government Accountability Office,
college textbook prices tripled from 1986 to 2004, going
up by more than twice the rate of inflation.”

For Additional Information:

http://textbookx.com/

“Researchers at George Mason University are developing a plug-in for the Firefox browser that will help academics organize sources and properly cite them. The tool is designed to harvest bibliographic information from online sources and organize it for someone doing research on the Web. Assuming the bibliographic elements are formatted in a way the software can recognize, the application will parse title, author, and other information and correlate it with the source. Daniel J. Cohen, assistant professor of history and one of the developers, said it can be thought of as “incredibly smart bookmarking…. You’re not just bookmarking the page, but you’re automatically [capturing]…all that info that scholars want to save.” Unlike commercial products that organize sources, the new application will tie directly into the browser, eliminating the step of manually collecting citation details.

The open source application is expected to be completed next year and will be available for no charge from George Mason’s Web site. Cohen said he believes the application will make unintentional plagiarism less likely than if a researcher were keeping sources organized manually.”

Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 December 2005 (sub. req’d)

http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/12/2005120602t.htm

For a related Blog:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_12_04_fosblogarchive.html

“The availability of high-quality online college courses will
soon rival face-to-face offerings, according to a 2005 survey
of online learning by the Sloan Consortium, a group of schools
embracing online education led by Babson College and the
Franklin Olin College of Engineering. The survey, based on
responses from 1,025 colleges and universities, showed that
nearly two-thirds of schools offering face-to-face undergraduate
or graduate level courses also offer courses at the same level
online.

Other findings of the survey include: a majority (56 percent)
of chief academic officers said online education is critical
to their long-term strategy. And slightly more schools use
core faculty to teach their online courses than their face-to-face
courses.

‘Colleges and universities are starting to understand that online
courses help increase enrollment and improve diversity without the
need for additional classrooms,’ and addresses ‘professors’ [sic] needs
for workplace flexibility, among other issues challenging academia,’
said Sloan Consortium president Frank Mayadas. Meanwhile, the College
Board announced it would now include the Sloan questions in its annual
survey of colleges, effectively tripling the survey’s sample size.”

The 2005 survey is available for download at
http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/survey.asp.

“An assistive tech developer is incorporating MP3 technology
in its solution set for people with print-related disabilities.
Premiere Assistive Technology is offering what it calls a
‘universal learning device’ which allows people to carry a
two-inch MP3 device that can be plugged into a computer’s
USB port to provide access to speech enabled ‘talking’
software.

The product, dubbed ‘The Key to Access,’ is designed to
make computers or laptops accessible to vision or
print-impaired people at a much lower cost than machines
that are specially equipped for people who have difficulty
reading.

Premiere will pre-load a Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine from
Cepstral Inc. onto each Key-to-Access device. Cepstral’s
synthetic TTS voices will then provide an audio interface
for various Premier software applications including Premier’s
Universal Reader Plus, Talking Word Processor, Scan and Read
Pro, Text to Audio, PDF Magic, EText Reader, Ultimate Talking
Dictionary and Talking Calculator.”

For additional information:

http://www.premier-programming.com/home.htm

“A consortium of Texas state educational agencies has
launched a Web site to help Texas high school students
prepare for the SAT and ACT tests. Texas Online
Preparation for College Admission Tests (TOPCAT), which
appears on the existing CollegeForTexans.com website,
features tutorials, practice questions, a vocabulary
builder, and a coaching system that allows teachers to
monitor the progress of their students. The program
features materials that can adapt to each student’s
ability level.

The consortium, a partnership of the Texas Higher
Education Coordinating Board, the Texas Education
Agency, and the Texas Guaranteed Student Loan
Corporation, is working with Xap Corp., an educational
online services firm, to develop the site. In the
coming months, Xap will add Spanish-language ACT and
SAT tutorials to the existing English language content,
it said. ‘Texas high school students deserve the best
online educational tools to successfully prepare them
for college admissions tests,’ said Glenda Barron,
Associate Commissioner for Participation and Success
at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.”

For additional information:

http://testprep.collegefortexans.com/

“Carnegie Mellon University researchers last week demonstrated a
breakthrough in cross lingual communication and speech-to-speech
translation in a video conference with researchers at the University
of Karlsruhe in Germany. Computer science professor Alex
Waibel delivered a domain-independent, speech-to-speech
translation in a lecture that was simultaneously translated from
English to Spanish to German.

Waibel said current systems allow translation of spontaneous
speech in limited situations, such as making hotel reservations or
tourist shopping, but they cannot enable translation of lectures,
television broadcasts, meetings or telephone conversations. The
new technology fills that gap and makes it possible to extend such
systems to other languages and lecture types. The demo also
included an array of small ultra-sound speakers that can deliver a
narrow beam of audio in a foreign language to a particular
individual, while others nearby hear the same speech in the
original language as it’s spoken without disturbance.

Waibel and his colleagues also showed delivery of speech via
heads-up display and text, a PDA-based pocket interpreter, and
simultaneous translation of videos of European Parliamentary
sessions.”

For additionial information:

http://www.cmu.edu/news/index.html

"Need course materials fast? MIT’s OpenCourseWare is piloting a feature that will allow users to download in a .ZIP file all HTML pages and files associated with a particular course. Yes, it’s still free.

‘OpenCourseWare expresses in an immediate and far-reaching way MIT’s goal of advancing education around the world. Through MIT OCW, educators and students everywhere can benefit from the academic activities of our faculty and join a global learning community in which knowledge and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of all.’" – Susan Hockfield, President of MIT

For additional information:

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html