Students want hybrid programs that blend online and face-to-face experiences. But colleges don’t seem to be providing enough of them to meet the demand.
That’s one message that emerges from the results of a national survey of more than 20,000 current and prospective adult students that were just released by Eduventures, a consulting firm.
The finding is notable because blended education has been hot lately. In 2009, the U.S. Education Department released a report praising it. And this year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is pouring millions into supporting it.
But the Eduventures survey found a gap between supply and demand: 19 percent of respondents said they were enrolled in blended programs, while 33 percent of prospective students listed that format as their preference.
The report on the survey, which is not available free online, questions whether some students are being “forced” into studying entirely online because of a lack of hybrid programs.
A case brought against the University of Louisville by a nursing student dismissed for her blog postings about a patient giving birth will return to district court.
The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday reversed a decision in favor of Nina Yoder, who was expelled in February 2009 for MySpace posts that the university said violated its honor code and confidentiality agreement.
In the earlier case, tried by the U.S. District Court in Louisville, the student argued that the dismissal violated her constitutional rights to free speech and due process and sought reinstatement and damages.
The district court decision, written by Judge Charles R. Simpson III, found in her favor, and reinstated her at Louisville, but did not take up her concerns about constitutional violations. Rather, the ruling looked at the matter as a question of “contract interpretation,” and found that the student had not violated the university’s honor code or confidentiality agreement and, as such, had…
Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA junior whose brief video rant against Asian students drew a firestorm of criticism, including a video response from UCLA’s chancellor, has decided to withdraw from the university, the Los Angeles Times reports. Ms. Wallace, who has apologized repeatedly for the video, said she was leaving because she had received death threats. In a statement posted by The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper, she reiterated her remorse for having made the video but said her mistake had led to “the harassment of my family, the publishing of my personal information, death threats, and being ostracized from an entire community.” Her decision followed UCLA’s announcement on Friday that she would not be disciplined for the video, which, while offensive, did not violate a code of student conduct.
Last Friday, a student at the University of California at Los Angeles posted an angry, finals-week rant on YouTube that quickly incited outrage from viewers who took her comments about Asian students in the library to be racist. By Monday, the university issued a response—which it made sure was posted to YouTube as well.
“If it’s a response to something that was seen by people in a new-media format, it’s important that the response be made in a new-media format,” says Phil Hampton, a campus spokesman.
In the video, Gene D. Block, the university’s chancellor, called it a “sad day at UCLA.” In a written message e-mailed to the campus community and released on the school’s Web site and Facebook pages, he said that he was “appalled by the thoughtless and hurtful comments” in the original video, created by Alexandra Wallace, a third-year student. In the video, she criticized the behavior of Asian students in the library and at one point mimicked a student talking in a foreign…
!– p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Georgia} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Georgia; min-height: 19.0px} –A Princeton University student whose Web site revealed the breadth of student information publicly available on Princeton servers has drawn criticism from the university and support from some students who say privacy safeguards should be tightened.
The student, Dan Li, said he discovered last summer that anyone sending a request to the university’s LDAP server could determine some students’ student ID numbers, vacation away messages and dates, personal e-mail addresses, dorm addresses, and other information. Much of the data is not searchable using the student directory on Princeton’s Web site.
Mr. Li said he objected to the university’s making that information accessible to the public. Last week, he created a Web site, Do Not Forward @ Princeton, that allowed people to search for some of the additional information if they knew a…
Dale Stephens, a 19-year-old entrepreneur, wants to bring the idea of home-schooling to the college level, with an unusual new Web service he calls UnCollege.
Mr. Stephens is now a freshman at Hendrix College, but not for long. He feels he can learn more outside the traditional college system than as a formal student, and he is leaning toward dropping out at the end of the term and taking his education into his own hands. His new online service is designed to help others do the same.
So far UnCollege is more a concept than a reality, and Mr. Stephens admits that he hasn’t worked out many of the details (the site went up just a few days ago as a kind of trial balloon). But he is tapping into growing frustrations about the high costs of college and the value of a college degree, and the site seems as much a means to spark discussion as a serious educational institution.
Essentially, UnCollege plans to serve as a social group for self-learners to trade tips on how to learn enough…
An iPhone app designed by a team of students for a contest at the University of Missouri at Columbia has helped lead the institution to rewrite its intellectual-property policies.
Members of the student competition, hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, had been informed that the university might assert a partial or complete claim to the products that the students were creating. That led some students to drop out, said Anthony Brown, then an undergraduate in the department of journalism.
Mr. Brown and his team, made up of fellow students Zhenhua Ma, Dan Wang, and Peng Zhuang, decided to stay in, despite their concerns. When they won the competition with an app called NearBuy, the students decided to contact the university to assert their ownership and to ask the university to waive any intent to assert ownership.
They argued that student inventions, even if fostered to some degree by faculty mentors, stood apart from the work done by…
Dale Stephens, a 19-year-old entrepreneur, wants to bring the idea of home-schooling to the college level, with an unusual new Web service he calls