Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Report: Four in 10 colleges to offer MOOCs by 2016

Seventeen percent of colleges currently offer MOOCs.

A few high-profile rejections have done nothing to doom the future of massive open online courses (MOOCs), according to a worldwide report. Providing access to MOOCs, in fact, is considered a necessary shift in the ever-changing higher education landscape.

Amherst College offered a firm denial to MOOC provider EdX in April. Duke faculty, a few weeks later, voted down plans for the university to offer MOOC-like courses. Philosophy faculty members at San Jose State University, where MOOCs have thrived, said in an open letter that adopting MOOCs was tantamount to watering down students’ college education.

The willingness to use MOOCs as a means of expanding higher education and lowering student costs is hardly shared by most colleges and universities worldwide, according to a report from Enterasys, a networking company that works with higher education.…Read More

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Chancellor leaving troubled Wisconsin for the presidency of Amherst College

Carolyn A. Martin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a flagship public research university with 42,000 students, is resigning to become president of Amherst College, a prestigious liberal arts college with 1,750 students, reports the New York Times. For most of this year, Dr. Martin, 60, and her campus have occupied center stage in the nation’s politically charged battles over higher education…

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New site offers college essays, sans plagiarism

There is one counselor for every 500 students in U.S. public schools.

Being the first in his family to graduate from high school, Paris Wallace said he sympathizes with teenagers who find themselves alone in the circuitous college application process, and he hopes a new online service called the Essay Exchange can help those students get an acceptance letter this spring.

The Essay Exchange, launched last August, has a repository of about 700 essays written by current students and college graduates who shared their successful written works for $2 apiece.

For between $2 and $5, a prospective student can scroll through the essays and get a feel for the structure and subject matter that helped get another student into a college or university.…Read More

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