Educational innovation gets boost under new programs

A movement is under way to make it easier for entrepreneurs to navigate the lucrative and sometimes-tricky education market and introduce new technology and products into classrooms.

A movement is under way to make it easier for entrepreneurs to navigate the lucrative and sometimes-tricky education market and introduce new technology and products into classrooms.

Technology funding in higher education will remain flat or decrease for the “foreseeable future,” according to an annual education technology report released June 10, as campus IT officials said funding was their top concern over the past year.

The U.S. House of Representatives gave its assent on May 28 to $84 billion in federal funding to help keep the country competitive in the fields of scientific and technological innovation.

Paying bills online is nothing new for 20-somethings, but the University of North Carolina’s elimination of traditional snail mail in sending out tuition bills means students will have to grant bill-pay account access to their financial handlers: mom and dad.

A Wisconsin university expects to save up to $10,000 a year by making a small change in computer users’ habits: Changing the fonts in the documents they print.

Colleges’ unending campaign to attract more students and alumni donations has higher-education officials looking to two technologies that consume a growing chunk of people’s free time: social media and video games.

In last-minute maneuvering designed to get the measure to pass, lawmakers eliminated $20 billion in proposed education funding from the student aid overhaul enacted by Congress last week: $12 billion for community colleges to boost graduation rates, partly through the development of open online courses, and $8 billion for an early-childhood education program.

Community college decision makers were encouraged by the Federal Communication Commission’s inclusion in its National Broadband Plan of robust high-speed internet networks on two-year campuses, which soon could be a central location for locals who don’t have broadband internet at home.

Colleges, universities, and their surrounding communities have a financial interest in making sure all of their students get counted in the census, so public-relations campaigns that encourage students to fill out census forms are popping up all over the country.

Over the past decade and a half, the internet has made it easier for families to learn about, find, and apply for college scholarships, government grants, and other types of student financial aid. This transformation of the financial aid industry continues even today with a simplified federal aid form and a new XML data standard that will make applying for scholarships easier than ever.