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Felice Nudelman, executive director of education for the New York Times Company, says the publisher has developed its own digital-learning platform and is beginning to collaborate with colleges. “We did a course with Ball State University, and it just took off,” she said at the 2011 Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas. Students get a long-term collaborative experience, she says, involving faculty members and reporters from the New York Times newsroom.

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“An e-book is not an engaging experience, merely replicating a textbook,” say William D. Rieders, executive vice president for new media at the publishing company Cengage Learning. At the 2011 Higher Ed Tech Summit, he said this major publisher sees little future in e-books, despite the proliferation of Kindles and other e-book readers, and tablets like the iPad. The biggest areas for Cengage, he says, are software programs like homework solutions and assessment tools. Print textbooks are still healthy, but they function now as a reference for professors and students, while these other materials are taking center stage in the learning experience.

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Online courses, particularly those at for-profit colleges, have been pilloried for their high dropout rates. The American Public University system does better, says Frank McCluskey, its executive vice president and provost. Nearly 80 percent of freshmen return as sophomores, he says, and technology plays a key role. At the 2011 Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas, he explained how the university manages this in a system that has 80,000 students. “The digital classroom has brought a lot of digital footprints, a lot of data,” Mr. McCluskey says. “If we see a classroom in which there’s no discussion boards, no activity, we can very early on alert the professor that it’s not a good idea.”

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just announced 47 finalists for its Next Generation Learning Challenges grants, and many of the colleges to make the cut have focused on using data about student performance to enhance teaching. “Once you get down to that learning moment, that’s when you are probably going to see the true power of data,” says Mark David Milliron, deputy director for higher education at the Gates Foundation. From the 2011 Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas, Mr. Milliron explains why he believes that “at the instructional level, that’s when you really can begin to use those data to innovate.”

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From the 2011 Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas, this Wired Campus podcast explores new Obama administration plans for enhancing educational technology. Karen Cator, director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, talks about a new National Center for Advanced Research and Information in Digital Technologies that will finance research on teaching and learning. She also discusses ways her office can help connect higher education professionals with one another to share best practices for using technology, something that is not happening now.

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Josh Gottheimer of the Federal Communications Commission, where he is senior counselor to the chairman, talks at the Higher Ed Tech Summit about how the FCC is opening up new “dark fiber” Internet connections to schools and colleges. He says this will allow more students to use the Web for learning, at a lower cost for everyone.

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