Within five years, students at the University of California will likely take 10 to 15 percent of their courses over the Internet, UC President Mark Yudof said Wednesday in San Francisco at a marathon discussion of online education with the regents, Gov. Jerry Brown and three rising stars in the world of classroom-free courses. Yudof said he’ll provide incentives for faculty to develop online courses to ease overcrowding in the most popular freshman and sophomore courses. And he said UC is working to overcome technical difficulties preventing students from taking online courses developed on campuses other than their own. Student Regent Jonathan Stein warned that students are concerned that trading the benefits of campus and classroom for computerized education would be a “degradation of the UC experience.” Yudof said that no student will be forced to take classes online, but that the migration is inevitable.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: January 16th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

University of California leaders pledged Wednesday to sharply expand online education over the next few years, possibly aiming to have UC students take about 10% of all their classes online — averaging four courses toward their degree… Yudof promised that the new classes would be of high academic quality and would not cause layoffs. The regents were under pressure from Gov. Jerry Brown to take such steps, and last week Brown’s budget proposed giving UC $10 million next year to help finance new online courses, primarily entry-level general education courses that are now overcrowded… Just a day earlier, Brown announced the start of a pilot partnership between San Jose State and Udacity, a Silicon Valley online education group, to create low-cost online classes in entry-level subjects. Brown also plans to attend next week’s meeting of the Cal State University trustees.

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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 16th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

With funding tight, the state of California has turned to Udacity to provide MOOCs for students enrolled in remedial courses. But what is lost when public education is privatized? … Udacity’s government-endorsed apprehension of a clear public need for private benefit highlights the most troubling aspect of MOOCs: Rhetorically, they assume “information is power,” purporting to tear down the walls to knowledge by making it broadly available, even if in a very particular format. But pragmatically, they admit, if only behind closed doors, that actually power is power, and controlling the networks for services offers a good deal of it at limited investment.

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by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic.

Posted: January 16th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Brown hopes to use state purse strings to force down their expenses, hold the line on tuition and fees, and graduate more students more quickly. He wants more teaching, less research and more online courses to save money and increase offerings. He says more students should be accepted from California’s community colleges… in the UC system, whose independence is enshrined in California’s Constitution. Relationships between governors and the two systems can be rocky. In the state budget he proposed last week, Brown increased money for the two systems by more than $250 million each — less than they requested, but enough to avert tuition hikes in the fall, leaders of both systems have indicated. If they want more in the future, the governor said, they’ll need to do as he asks.

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by Anthony York, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 15th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

MOOCs may have snared most of the headlines, but traditional, credit-based online learning continued to chug along just fine last year, thank you very much. More than 6.7 million, or roughly a third, of all students enrolled in postsecondary education took an online course for credit in fall 2011, according to the 2012 iteration of the Babson Survey Research Group’s annual Survey of Online Learning… massive open online courses that have captured the imagination of the public and turbocharged the discussion about digitally delivered instruction in many quarters — the Babson survey for the first time queried institutional officials about their views about the courses. Given their relative newness, the answers are probably unsurprising: lots of uncertainty about whether to embrace them, and significant skepticism about whether the free open courses (at least as of the time when the survey was conducted) present a “sustainable method for offering online courses.” … More than three-quarters (77.0 percent) of chief academic officers rate the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face courses, up from 57.2 percent when Babson first asked the question in 2003. Fewer than a third (30.2 percent) of CAOs believe that faculty members on their campuses accept the value and legitimacy of online education — lower than the rate in 2004.

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by Doug Lederman , Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: January 13th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget plan appears to provide sufficient funding to avoid tuition increases at the University of California next year, a UC administrator said this afternoon. “When you add everything up, I think our initial reaction is that we can manage without a tuition increase for ’13-14,” Daniel Dooley, senior vice president of external relations at the UC, told The Bee. “We’re pretty excited about what he’s proposed.”

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by David Siders, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: January 11th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget plan announced Thursday morning gives California’s colleges and universities good news for the first time in years. The CSU and UC systems would each receive an additional $125 million in funding for core instructional programs, a 5 percent increase. It was less than they asked for, but far better than their outlook just a few months ago, before the passage of Propositions 30 and 39 in November. Those measures are expected to raise an additional $6 billion annually for the state. The state’s community college systems would receive $197 million more next year — money that will allow colleges to restore thousands of classes, said California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice Harris.

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by Katy Murphy, The San Jose Mercury News.

Posted: January 10th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Offering a brief glimpse of his new spending plan, Gov. Jerry Brown said Tuesday he will propose a “live-within-our-means” budget this week that spends more money on higher education and K-12 schools in the next fiscal year. “We’re proposing increases in education at the higher level and in K through 12,” Brown said… Brown suggested other areas of the state budget wouldn’t be so fortunate, even naming areas such as state-subsidized child care and the court system, both of which have endured significant cuts since the recession. The state’s court administrator said last month that Brown plans to cut the judicial system $200 million in his January budget. “Most people want to spend more money than the state has, and I will tell you 2013 is the year of fiscal discipline and living within our means,” Brown said. “And I’m going to make sure that happens.”

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by Kevin Yamamura, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: January 8th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Legislative Republicans on Monday proposed a seven-year freeze on tuition and fee increases at California’s public universities and community colleges to correspond with the length of tax increases under voter-approved Proposition 30… “It’s important to remind voters about Gov. Brown’s promises that passing Prop. 30 would prevent tuition and fee increases and that Republicans have stepped forward to provide the leadership necessary to guarantee those promises are kept,” said Tom Del Beccaro, chairman of the California Republican Party. The bills will probably end up being symbolic, given that Republicans will have difficulty putting bills through a Legislature with a Democratic supermajority.

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by Patrick McGreevy, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 8th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The governor thrust himself into the debate because he envisions cost savings in online education. UC did too. But its project has lost money so far. After raising just $750,000 from a foundation, UC Online took out a $6.9 million loan from UC. It has spent more than $5 million, with most going to a marketing company. And now that MOOCs are stealing UC Online’s potential clientele, UC may rethink its plans. But changing midstream will be tough. UC Online has to pay back the loan in seven years and expected to sell 7,000 classes to non-UC students for $1,400 or $2,400 apiece, depending on each course’s duration. China was thought to be a lucrative potential source of students, but few expressed interest. The U.S. military also fell through.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: January 8th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.