“Saylor’s free, complete and intuitively-structured courses built with the self-directed student in mind are a natural fit for iTunes U which combines lectures, iBooks, educational apps and reference tools for a fully integrated experience,” said Alana Harrington, Director of the Saylor Foundation.

Beginning early this morning, 18 of our free, self-paced and automated college-level courses became available on our very own iTunes U site. These courses, hailing from our 12 disciplines, consist of nearly 1,000 readings and 300 video lectures – and we’re only adding more! We hope that by making our educational materials available on this amazing educational platform, we will be able to extend our reach and to continue to get our courses into the hands of knowledge-hungry individuals.

“We’re excited to launch the Saylor Foundation on iTunes U and increase free access to education around the globe,” said Harrington.

You can find the full press release here – and be sure to head over to itunes.com/saylor to see our official iTunes U site.

The return on investment from American colleges is dropping—a combination of insane cost inflation and a crummy job market.   To be fair, many colleges are giving kids what they want—beautiful campuses, restaurants, and spas—and parents, lenders, and alumni keep shelling out the cash.  But disruptive alternatives—like free—will pop the bubble for third tier institutions.  Declining subsidies will convert your favorite state U into a selective private institution (e.g., University of Colorado is basically private). And your kid won’t get in because the U decided to boost enrollment of full-tuition international students.

A group of about thirty higher education leaders, philanthropist, entrepreneurs, policy makers and advocates met in DC yesterday to discuss strategies for boosting college completion and ROI.

They started with a provocative question: now that most of the world’s knowledge is available as free and open content, does college still matter?  There was general agreement that most employers still value a degree, so credits still matter—especially for low income and first generation students.

Competency-based systems, like Western Governor’s University, obviously makes sense and despite the fact that WGU is growing by 30% annually the idea just hasn’t caught on.  That’s because institutions have had little incentive to grant credit for people that show up with skills or can more quickly through the system.

But that is going to change.  The rise of open content—Khan Academy, Saylor.org, Edx, Academic Earth—is building a giant reservoir of demand for competency-based college credits.  There are game-based iPad apps (e.g., Cut The Rope and Water) that do a better job of teaching engineering than the classes I took 30 years ago.

The days are numbered for the regional accreditation system that maintains the oligopoly with no regard for academic ROI.  The guardians of inputs will eventually succumb to market-driven outcome measures.  The state that figures this out will instantly be an international leader in competency-based education and will probably have visitors from all over the world in search of credits for what they know and can do.

Acceleration options will also become more important.  Here’s the chat we should have with every American eighth grader:

• Congratulation, in two years you will be earning college credit.  You need to choose between brand name and fast lane—expensive selective colleges and rapid pathways to a degree.
• If you want a shot at a selective college you should plan on four years in high school with lots of AP or IB and boatloads of activities.  If you don’t get in to your favorite selective, you’ll have at least a year of college credit that a second tier college will accept.
• The alternative is graduation from high school in three years with a year of community college credit and transferring to a school that gives you full credit allowing you to graduate from college in two or three years—a 3+3 pathway.

For adult learners ‘stackable certificates’ (i.e., 2+2 programs) allow access to entry level jobs while additional credits are accumulated.

Improved market signaling helps college know what to offer and helps students get into degree programs likely to yield employment.  At the macro level this requires surveying emerging job clusters.  At the micro level, it means paying attention to course taking patterns at bleeding-edge providers like GeneralAssembly (seriously, look at the courses offered this week—you won’t find any of these at your local community college).

Improved signaling requires much better data systems.  For starters, states need Florida-like abilities to track a kid from high school to college to the labor market. States need to be able to track high school aspirations, college enrollment, college persistence and transfers, graduation, and at least initial employment.  States should know how much debt a student accumulated and whether they are paying it back.

Outcomes measures will grow in importance with the rush to market-based certification systems.  Without achievement standards and measures of academic growth there will be a lot of crappy credits granted (not that most current credits are worth the debt incurred).

Automated essay scoring, recently demonstrated to be highly accurate and already used to certify doctors, can be part of the solution to providing lots of standards-based feedback to college freshman and sophomores.  When combines with measures like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), we can begin to track the value-added contribution of college coursework.

The administration has been beating on for-profit online colleges, but when we start to measure academic progress it will be clear that they stack up pretty well compared to your local state U.

Yes, we should strive to be number one in college completion rates again.  But let’s make sure the massive public subsidy is producing an ROI.  Let’s help families make informed decisions before they incur educational debt they won’t be able to repay.

And, for our second announcement, this partnership, and the rising costs of a college education, is prompting the formation of a working group between the Saylor Foundation, StraighterLine, and two universities located in northern Virginia - George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College. We’re still working out the details of the working group, however the objective is create clear articulation plans among the participating groups so students who have the discipline for independent or accelerated study would have frictionless transfer, leading to a low cost college degree. Here’s a link to the official announcement.

We’re enthusiastic about the opportunities that these developments will create for Saylor.org students. Please keep a close eye on our website and blog in the coming months for updates on both announcements.

The image “Newspapers B&W”  came from Flickr user NS Newsflash and is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY license.

Description: The Saylor Foundation is pleased to announce the second installment of its course design workshop series: Articulating and Aligning Learning Outcomes.  In this workshop, you will hear from Ellen Bremen, Emily Wood, Andy Williams, and Stephanie Delaney, expert instructional designers from the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, as they share best practices and guidelines for articulating strong and testable learning outcomes and then aligning them with course content.

Time: 1:00 p.m. EST

Date: June 27, 2012

We’ll update this post as soon as we have a registration link. In the meantime, be sure to mark your calendars!

This Saturday’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy will unveil a months-long collaborative effort — the Data Journalism Handbook, a free, CC BY-SA licensed book to help journalists find and use data for better news reporting.

Data Journalism Handbook – Cover Mockup / jwyg / CC BY-SA

A joint initiative of the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation, the collaborative book effort was kicked off at the 2011 Mozilla Festival: Media, Freedom and the Web — which gathered reporters, data journalism practitioners, advocates, and journalism and related organizations from around the globe. Over three days, participants researched, wrote, and edited chapters of the handbook. Contributors include the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, the Chicago Tribune, Deutsche Welle, the Guardian, the Financial Times, La Nacion, The New York Times, ProPublica, The Washington Post, and many others — including Creative Commons. Creative Commons contributed to various pieces of the “Getting Data” section, including “Using and Sharing Data: the Black Letter, Fine Print, and Reality.” You can preview the outline here.

From the announcement,

Now more than ever, journalists need to know how to work with data. From covering public spending to elections, the Wikileaks cables to the financial crisis – journalists need to know where to find and request key datasets, how to make sense of them, and how to present them to the public.

Jonathan Gray, lead editor for the handbook, says: “The book gives us an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at how data is used by journalists around the world – from big news organisations to citizen reporters. We hope it will serve to inform and inspire a new generation of data journalists to use the information around us to communicate complex and important issues to the public.

You can sign up to get the handbook when it goes live at http://www.datajournalismhandbook.org. The entire handbook will be available for free under CC BY-SA, with an alternative printed version and e-book to be published by O’Reilly Media.

On Tuesday, Alana Harrington, Director of the Saylor Foundation, presented Saylor’s content aggregation process and the benefits that our procedure and resulting courses have for the open education community and beyond. These benefits include courses that address the needs of educators and students; the addition of new openly licensed materials; and spotlighting new content providers.  Click here to see Alana’s presentation slides and video.

Want to learn more about the happenings in Cambridge? Several attendees have already blogged about their experience. Click here for a New York Times article on Cambridge 2012, here for a list of blog posts the cover the event and here for a collection of photos taken throughout the conference. And, if you’re on Twitter, check out the hashtag #cam12 for a run-through of attendees thoughts and major takeaways from each presentation.

Next week, Alana and I will travel to Berlin to present at the re:publica conference. Stay tuned to the Saylor Journals for a recap of that event!

The image “Wordcloud generated from #cam12 tweets” used in this post came from Flickr user m.hawksey and is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY license.

“MIT OpenCourseWare has released a new cross-disciplinary course list presenting the core academic materials—including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams—from 66 MIT entrepreneurship courses. The courses are organized into lists that cover core and supplemental entrepreneurship concepts and are also presented in topical lists including finance, law, leadership, marketing, and strategy. In addition, the resource includes videos on entrepreneurship subjects and links to entrepreneurship-related sites from across the MIT community.

‘We’re very excited to see this resource published on the OCW site,’ said Bill Aulet, Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. ‘This site highlights some very valuable entrepreneurship educational material from MIT and will be a practical resource for entrepreneurs worldwide.’

The launch of the entrepreneurship cross-disciplinary list represents the first phase of MIT OpenCourseWare’s efforts to organize and publish MIT’s entrepreneurship curriculum, and the OCW staff will be adding additional course materials and supplemental content in the future, as well as updating some of the content currently included.

The entrepreneurship cross-disciplinary course list is the latest in MIT OpenCourseWare’s series of cross-disciplinary list addressing topics including energy, the environment and transportation. These lists highlight how MIT addresses today’s complex challenges across the many traditional disciplines and departments that structure the Institute. The entrepreneurship course listing includes materials from the Sloan School of Management, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the Media Arts and Sciences program, and the Experiential Studies Program.”

So if you’ve ever thought of starting your own business – or if you simply want to think more like an entrepreneur – consider combining these resources with our Business Administration discipline. You might just find yourself ready to start your dream company in no time!

Please tell our readers a bit about yourself. 

Since 2004, I have been fortunate to live and work as a professor, consultant, and researcher in the “Last Frontier” of Alaska. This is 5636 miles from my past life and warmer comfort-zone in South Georgia. While I have not yet appeared in any of the numerous Alaska “Reality Shows” that have bombarded the airwaves these past few years, I have been fascinated with developing creative strategies for facilitating meaningful learning with emerging technologies. This would include virtual and augmented reality, m-Learning and e-Learning, as well as, assistive and mainstream tools. Witnessing firsthand the intersection of “Native Ways of Knowing” and what has been called “21^St Century Learning” is an interesting juxtaposition of styles and gifts.

I completed my doctoral studies in 2004 at the University of Georgia where my focus was in the fields of Adult Education, Instructional Technology, and Research Methods. My work examines the systemic issues of isolation and identity, urban affluence versus rural disparity, and effectively using information and communication technologies that promote inclusion, collaboration, and communication. However, it is the pedagogical strategies for facilitation with these cognitive tools that intrigues me most.

What are you working on for Saylor.org?

So far, I have worked in a limited capacity on course design and development and occasionally an advisory role. I eagerly await my next assignment!

What has working for Saylor.org taught you?

It is refreshing to be associated with dedicated individuals who are passionate about addressing the systemic barriers in our world and who want to make a tangible difference in the lives of others through the open access to quality educational materials. I often say that “we”, as a society, can only advance as quickly and effectively as we can share our ideas. I have found this vision and commitment true for Saylor.

What are you looking forward to for the open education movement?

Several things. First, I would like to see even more individuals and educational institutions make their courses, e-books, and other digital learning objects openly available. This allows learners the access to overcome the dispositional emotions such as fear of failure and to make well-informed decisions with an empowered locus of control that fosters creativity and imagination. How many people do you know that are unhappy about their job and current knowledge base? Most, if not all, have not fulfilled their dreams and aspirations, and arguably, this is based many times, but not always, on decisions that were not informed.

Currently, we are witnessing an educational diaspora of ideas as the definition of “access” continues to evolve and gain even greater impetus. Learners are experiencing firsthand the unquestionable importance of lifelong learning and the appreciation raising the consciousness through the open education movement.

Secondly, I envision courses becoming increasingly interactive and the hybridization of asynchronous and synchronous, blended e-learning becomes more pervasive. E-Learning does not take place in a vacuum and the technology exists to expand our conceptualization to include robust synchronous and asynchronous “teachable moments”, whereby, real-time feedback, collaboration, and construction of knowledge lead to positive and tangible outcomes.

And finally, as learners become more accustomed to this interactive engagement, the overall inherent quality of the learning is enhanced (e.g. Personal Learning Environments or PLEs). It has been my experience that the Open Educational Movement (OER) is, has been, and will continue to be, a vital means to address inequalities and promote positive and lasting change.

What advice would you give to educators looking to participate in open education?

Do more than merely “look” or scan the website. If you genuinely value altruism over egoism and truly want to my a significant, non-esoteric, but rather, an exoteric contribution to a movement that directly impacts humanity today and tomorrow, then you should seriously consider participation. If, on the other hand, you are satisfied with the status quo and daily reproduction of a rigidly classist society accompanied by marginalization and disenfranchisement…well…there are planes departing for North Korea on a daily basis. But beware, just perhaps, very soon, North Korea may likely experience an “Arab Spring”.

Want to meet more of our professors? Stay tuned to the Saylor Journals for future professor profiles!

Over the next couple of months, we will be making a focused effort to finalize and complete all 241 courses that we set out to create three years ago. While we have professors contracted to build many of these courses, there are a handful of courses where we’re still in search of that perfect professor to help us out. These courses are:

BUS404: Risk Management
CHEM203: Bioinorganic Chemistry
MA201: Mathematical Logic and Theory of Computation
MA233: Elementary Number Theory
MA242: Real Analysis
MA304: Topics in Applied Mathematics
ME203: Engineering Materials & Materials Processing
ME302: Mechatronics
POLSC303: Feminist Politics
POLSC433: State and Local Government

We would like to call on your assistance in helping us find professors to build these courses. If you know of a professor who has experience teaching any of these courses – and who might be interested in helping us out – please let us know! We will offer you a $250 referral bounty if you refer a professor that we approve to design any one of the ten courses listed above. (Please note: We will issue the referral bounty once that professor completes the course.) Questions? Know someone that might be interested? Send our recruiting team an email and let us know!

The image “Pandora @ MIT” used in this post came from Flickr user pinelife and is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. 

For those of you who are unfamiliar with UoPeople, it’s certainly worth checking out.  A tuition-free online global university, UoPeople was founded in 2009 by educational entrepreneur Shai Reshef and is designed to provide access to college studies for qualified individuals, despite financial, geographic or societal constraints.

UoPeople Founder and President Shai Reshef hailed the partnership, saying, “UoPeople is the first university built on the foundations of Open Educational Resources (OER), using only OER for all teaching and reading materials. By harnessing technology and promoting OER, UoPeople and the Saylor Foundation will provide quality education to those that would be unable to study otherwise.”

We at the Saylor Foundation are quite fond of the course creation process that we’ve polished over the past couple of years – and we found that, through this partnership, it added a great benefit in terms of getting high quality education into the hands of those who need it most.

“We were thrilled to partner with UoPeople and create an adapted Business Law course to offer to UoPeople bachelor’s students,” said Jennifer Shoop, our own Content Development Manager. “We hope that, through this partnership, we are able to provide education for more knowledge-thirsty students across the globe.”

We’re excited to have UoPeople offer our adapted course to its bachelor’s degree students and look forward to the students’ responses!

Read the full press release here.