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.

Colleges and universities will be among anchor institutions in an ultra high-speed nationwide internet network after President Obama announced July 2 more than $760 million in grants designed to expand broadband web access.

Six months after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pumped $3.6 million into a national certification program for teachers of remedial college courses, a new initiative will dole out grants to education-technology projects aimed at improving college readiness, especially among low-income students.

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.

Times are tough at the University of California, the New York Times reports. The state’s budget crisis has led to cuts, layoffs and higher student fees.

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.