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Washington State is creating a new online institution through a partnership with Western Governors University. Gov. Chris Gregoire signed a bill (HB 1822) on Friday establishing WGU Washington, which had been touted as a way to expand access to education without spending state money. The arrangement is similar to an earlier deal struck between the State of Indiana and the nonprofit online university.

There appears to be one key difference, though. Indiana students can use state financial aid toward WGU Indiana programs. The news release announcing WGU Washington mentions the availability of only federal, not state, financial aid. Previously, Washington legislators had amended the measure to ensure that students at Western Governors would not receive state financial aid unless a policy to grant such aid was approved by the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board. The worry was that WGU would drain resources from other colleges.

Wired Campus

Using satellite imagery and social-media reports, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, John Carroll University, Harvard, and elsewhere have created maps of disruption, damage, and refugee movements. Now The Chronicle’s Marc Parry reports that the Internet-based information is being funneled to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“For map creators, the hope is that those tools will help relief workers on the ground,”  Mr. Parry writes. “But academics building the platforms also have other audiences in mind: scholars who will study the crises, students eager for practical experience, and average citizens interested in getting breaking news stories in new ways.”

Wired Campus

The list of joint nonprofit ventures angling to sell university-press electronic books to libraries just got shorter. Two of the leading contenders, Project MUSE Editions and the University Press E-Book Consortium, or UPEC, announced today that they will join forces “to collect, host, and market scholarly e-book collections to the library marketplace.”

The five presses involved in planning UPEC—the University of Nebraska Press, New York University Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, Rutgers University Press, and Temple University Press—had put out a request for proposals for potential partners, and Project MUSE was the winner.

The resulting partnership, called the University Press Content Consortium, or UPCC, will make its debut in January 2012, says the announcement, with preselling to take place this fall. The consortium will market collections of new and backlist scholarly monographs to libraries, with what it calls “minimal DRM,” or digital-rights management. It will…

Wired Campus

A bunch of University Presidents (is that the right collective noun for a group of University Presidents? A herd? A coven? A flock?) gathered recently to talk about the University of the Future.  I found Georgia Tech’s president’s comments pretty interesting.  I’m not sure that the 25 year view really works for a strategic plan — how can we know what’s going to be valuable in 25 years, and if we don’t know, how can that inform our strategies today?  I buy the importance of flexibility (see previous post on sociology and drop-outs), but I think he overstates the importance of technology today.  Yes, students have expectations of even more technology — what’s the cost of not meeting those expectations, and what’s the cost of encouraging a focus on an oral culture (as Alan has pointed out)?  His story in the below about Georgia Tech using social media to continue classes during our ice storm week is unfortunately false– we were told that faculty could not hold classes or other…

Computing Education Blog

Max Hailperin passed on this story to the SIGCSE-Members list.  He added that: “About 40 students will graduate from the program in May. But that will leave about 40 who haven’t. They hope to get those students through within two years. But even if they do, the students may be forced to take upper-level computer science classes from faculty who may not have taught them before.” Interesting that Aviation was going to be cancelled, too, but the local business community worked to save that program. But not CS.

It’s been a bit blue in Minnesota State University’s computer science department.

But it’s not hard to understand why.

“Everyone in the department has either been fired, retired or has resigned,” said Dean Kelley, one of those faculty members. “Two took retirement — one effective last year, one this year — one who was on a leave of absence and has resigned. As for the remaining three, the word they used was ‘retrenched.’”

Computer science as a functioning program at MSU will…

Computing Education Blog