Serendipity35

NextGenU.org describes itself as "the world's first portal where anyone, anywhere in the world can access university and graduate-level courses for interest or for credit through recognized accredited institutions and organizations. The credit (or interest) is the important word in this new site.

At this point, they concentrate the courses, certificates, residencies primarily in the health sciences.

They work in collaboration with experts and professional organizations for quality assurance and endorsement, and use cutting-edge educational innovations, including computer-based learning resources, local and web-based peer-to-peer interaction, and mentoring experiences.

NextGenU.org is your portal to the world’s first free, accredited, higher education. Starting with a focus in the health sciences, NextGenU.org partners with leading universities, professional societies, and government organizations like the U.S. CDC, Grand Challenges Canada, and the World Health Organization. NextGenU.org’s accredited partners give learners credit for this training (or institutions can adopt them and use them with their students), all for the first time ever for free (and without advertisements). All our courses are competency-based, and include a global peer community of practice, and local skills-oriented mentorships. Founded in 2001, we launched our first full course (Emergency Medicine) in March 2012, and have students registered in over 80 countries: initial data show that NextGenU’s training performs comparably to traditional American medical schooling. Please come learn more about us or have a look at our available courses.

Part of the appeal of being a university that offers MOOCs through providers like Coursera is that it puts you in very nice academic company since the courses are offered by many of the elite world institutions. Recently, Coursera added ten new state university systems with multiple colleges to their network.

As pointed out on moocnewsandreviews.com, in partnering with so many institutions, Coursera sidesteps a contractual obligation to primarily offer courses from members of the Association of American Universities (AAU) or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America.

Coursera will be branding a new section of its offerings website for these state universities. Some of those state universities might see this as creating a second tier of offerings which put their schools in a less prominent, perhaps second class, light.

Inside Higher Ed reported that SUNY's associate provost, Carey Hatch, "...said SUNY, which has two AAU institutions (Stony Brook University and University at Buffalo), was not quite thrilled with the segregation. 'We’re not totally happy about it, but we understand the perspective of where Coursera partners started from,' he said. 'We hope through the course of time where they end will be something different.'  The University of Colorado system is glad it can offer more MOOCs from all its campuses on Coursera. Its Boulder campus is an AAU institution and existing Coursera partner, but its three other campuses are not." 

The State University of New York (SUNY) has 64 campuses, which makes it one of the largest systems in the world. They are already making an effort to enroll 100,000 new students over the next several years as part of their own Open SUNY initiative.

When I was the Manager of Instructional Technology at NJIT, I asked my staff to emphasize the "instructional" prt of our name. We were IT, but not the information technology folks who had very different concerns. My department was housed under an umbrella with media services. Before I arrived, instructional technology was the smallest group and the campus community often saw all of us as one big tech group. I wanted the emphasis to be on how to instruct using technology rather than how to jam technology into instruction. We joked so often about having solutions to problems that didn't exist that the IT people were sometimes the first to say it before introducing a new technology to us.

Of course, we were not anti-tech or anti-IT at all. We led the emerging technology group and sought out new instructional technologies all the time. I was introduced to EDUCAUSE in 2001 and I admit that at first I saw it as a very information technology organization without enough concern for instruction for my purposes. They still are closer to that IT side, but over the years I have seen the two IT groups - information and instructional - move closer to the center of that Venn diagram.

Every year, EDUCAUSE puts out a top issues report and I always viewed it as one way to think about what we might address in the new academic year come September.

Here are their Top Ten IT Issues for 2013:

Leveraging the wireless and device explosion on campus
Improving student outcomes through an approach that leverages technology
Developing an institution-wide cloud strategy to help the institution select the right sourcing and solution strategies
Developing a staffing and organizational model to accommodate the changing IT environment and facilitate openness and agility
Facilitating a better understanding of information security and finding appropriate balance between infrastructure openness and security
Funding information technology strategically
Determining the role of online learning and developing a sustainable strategy for that role
Supporting the trends toward IT consumerization and bring-your-own device
Transforming the institution's business with information technology
Using analytics to support critical institutional outcomes

You can read more about each in the latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review or online, but I was actually more interested to see a section on "New Strategic Priorities."  Noting that "The boundaries between academia and the rest of the world have never been more porous," they chose four priorities in particular. 

1) Contain and reduce costs. The bleak economic outlook and reduced funding sources are making it imperative to reduce or at the very least contain the growth of costs. Efficiencies are sought, and business best practices are often viewed as the best path to achieving efficiencies.

This first one interests me (from the instructional side of the house) the least, although I know it may be the number one concern on a campus.

But I am interested in the three other priorities, all of which would be on my list of things we need to be addressing in the new academic year.

2) Achieve demonstrable improvements in student outcomes. The practice of measuring, improving, and reporting student outcomes is moving from highly desirable to imperative. The window of opportunity for colleges and universities to shape how they define, measure, and improve student outcomes—rather than react to external requirements—is shrinking.

3) Keep pace with innovations in e-learning, and use e-learning as a competitive advantage.3 Whether driven by the explosive interest in open educational resources (OERs), most notably Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or by explorations in using technology to develop and implement new academic credentialing models like badging and competencies, presidents, chancellors, and provosts are eager to use technology to help inform and transform postsecondary education.

4) Meet students' and faculty members' expectations of contemporary consumer technologies and communications. Students and faculty not only expect that they will be able to use their smartphones, tablets, and consumer-based apps in their academic work but also expect that their institutions' services will work as elegantly and effectively as commercial services.

The article offers that higher education institutions have been building systems for years that gather, process, and report institutional data, but that is is usually siloed into finance, human resources, facilities, research activities, and student performance. Even with all these siloes, the university itself probably is another larger silo (towring, and made of ivory?) that doesn't connect with other universities data, systems, processes, or services.

And that is a shame, because so many of our strategic priorities have become the same that we need the instructional side and the information side to work together, and to work with other institutions.

At the recent OCW Consortium meeting in Bali, Indonesia, awards were given in two categories of open courses – text-based and multimedia.

Text based courses include written materials for the course, including lecture notes, assessments, syllabi, calendars and readings.

Multimedia courses also include video, audio or other type of multimedia presentation of materials.

These courses are produced in a variety of languages and developed by institutions committed to increasing access to high quality higher education for everyone.

America certainly does not dominate the winners.

2013 Course winners – text based courses:

·       An American Constitutional History Course for Non American Students, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
·       Delft Design Guide, Delft University of Technology
·       Atomic Physics, African Virtual University
·       Fisiología Humana, Universidad de Cantabria
·       Conocimientos Básicos de Matemáticas para Primeros Cursos Universitarios, Universidad de Zaragoza

2013 Course winners – multimedia courses:

·       Thermal and Statistical Physics, National Tsing Hua University Opencourseware
·       Productos de apoyo y tecnologías de la información y las telecomunicaciones, UNED: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
·       Basic Arithmetic, Scottsdale Community College
·       Developmental Math, The NROC Project
·       Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I, Delft University of Technology