California Virtual Campus

Seventy-five students started their pharmacy studies at Creighton University the past two weeks, but they’ll rarely set foot on campus again. They are enrolled in the university’s online pharmacy doctorate program, the only one in the country. Over the next three years, they will take classes and study largely by using the laptop computers each received during a two-week orientation and training period on campus. They will spend a fourth year in clinical training where they live. The program exists mainly for older students who want to make a career change to pharmacy and need the flexibility of an online program because of their families and careers.

By Rick Ruggles

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Computerworld – Barnes & Noble today released free Nook e-reader software for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, along with updates to Nook software for the iPad that provide content rating capability and more.

The bookseller also sells a Nook e-reader device, but it has always focused on making its collection of 1 million e-books available on other readers and computer platforms, a strategy that not all of its competitors have followed. The company said today that it plans to continue to add support more platforms and devices in the future, but it didn’t provide further details.

By Matt Hamblen

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Many students dread public speaking and say they only sign up because the class is required. But in Sam Blank’s classroom, they find it isn’t so terrifying.
“I’m a pretty well-liked person, considering the fact I teach a course that creates fear in people,” jokes Blank, 62, a communications professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York.

Blank is among millions of educators who are praised, glorified — and sometimes verbally torn to shreds — on websites where students go to rate their professors. Luckily, he got a stellar rating: the No. 1 community college professor on the website RateMyProfessors.com.

By USA Today

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College Web pages remain “widely inaccessible” to people with disabilities, despite some improvements in recent years, according to a recent study.

The study found that more colleges are deploying basic accessibility features, like adding alternative text to images so a blind student can understand them with read-aloud software.

By Marc Parry

Read The Chronicle of Higher Education

USA Today reports a side of educational technology that’s well known to specialist researchers but doesn’t often reach the mass media. Electronic readers and textbooks, while an interesting concept and potentially lucrative for publishers, so far aren’t meeting student needs:

By The Atlantic

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Oklahoma State University professor Bill Handy has big plans for the Apple iPad this fall. If the text messages he has received since the school announced he would test the tablet-style e-reader in some courses are any indication, students are eager to get their hands on the devices, too.

Handy, who teaches in the School of Media and Strategic Communications, is quick to stress that his intent is not to celebrate the new technology so much as to evaluate its effectiveness in the classroom.

By Mary Beth Marklein

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LAS VEGAS — Think you’re going to ace freshman year? Want to put money on that?

A website called Ultrinsic is taking wagers on grades from students at 36 colleges nationwide starting this month.

Just as Las Vegas sports books set odds on football games, Ultrinsic will pay you top dollar for A’s, a little less for the more likely outcome of a B average or better, and so on. You can also wager you’ll fail a class by buying what Ultrinsic calls “grade insurance.”

By Oskar Garcia

Read Huffington Post

Google’s core Internet search technology famously grew out of a grad school project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to index the world’s books, and the modern Google Books Project actually touts itself as the part of Google that carries on the founders’ original vision. So, when GBS, which has thrown high-powered computers, brilliant engineers, and millions of dollars at digitizing the world’s books, claims to have come up with a reasonable count of the number of books in the world, who are we to disagree?

By Jon Stokes

Read Ars Technica

Around 300 people crowded around the display tables set up in Wallenberg Hall last Friday, all of them eager to try out the latest gadgets from Stanford students in the Learning, Design & Technology (LDT) program. But although the image calls to mind children in a toy store, most of the people at LDT EXPO 2010 were in fact adults, looking at what might be the future of education.

LDT, a master’s program, is a graduate program in the School of Education that focuses on innovating education using state-of-the-art technology and entrepreneurship. Students coming from all fields may enter the program to take classes on business, technology and education, in order to combine the different fields to create a new way to learn.

By Aaron Broder

Read The Stanford Daily

Historically, cartoons are not a significant driver of communications and marketing strategy in higher education.

But one cartoon — by Randall Munroe, whose popular Web comic is known as xkcd — has resonated so strongly in higher ed circles that it has some marketing officials taking a hard look at what experts still believe to be their strongest marketing asset: the institutional website’s home page.

The cartoon shows a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles — one labeled “Things On The Front Page Of a University Website,” and the other labeled “Things People Go To The Site Looking For.”

By Steve Kolowich

Read Inside Higher Ed