This post includes articles on a study examining the impact of open educational resources on student outcomes, the costliness of online courses over their lifespan, an interview with Senator Ron Wyden, and a new Ivy-League MOOC.
With our "Interesting Policy Reads" blog posts, the EDUCAUSE Policy Office highlights recent articles on federal policy issues and developments that are directly relevant to members or provide insights on higher education policy in general.
- Free Digital Textbooks vs. Purchased Commercial Textbooks, Inside Higher Ed, July 16, 2018. (A new study conducted at the University of Georgia has found that college students provided with free course materials—such as open educational resources—perform better than those who are given a commercial textbook.)
- Keeping Online Courses Fresh: Valuable, but Costly, Inside Higher Ed, July 18, 2018. (While some believe that online courses cost less to carry out than in-person classes, they often require maintenance over the course's lifespan that can outpace the initial launch cost.)
- Who Lives in Education Deserts? Chronicle of Higher Education, July 17, 2018. (Recent analyses show that approximately 11.2 million adults live more than a 60-minute drive from a public college.)
- NIST to Withdraw 11 Outdated Cybersecurity Publications, Security Week, July 18, 2018. (The US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that it will withdraw 11 Special Publications on cybersecurity.)
- Sen. Ron Wyden on Breaking Up Facebook, Net Neutrality, and the Law That Built the Internet, The Verge, July 24, 2018. (Senator Ron Wyden, author of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, offers insight into the future of internet and data privacy policy.)
- Ivy League Degree for the Nontraditional Student, Inside Higher Ed, July 25, 2018. (Coursera, a MOOC provider, is offering a new master's degree in computer and information technology with the University of Pennsylvania for the price of $26,300, roughly one-third the cost of the on-campus program's $75,000 price.)
- DeVos to Announce New Push for Deregulation, Innovation, Inside Higher Ed, July 27, 2018. (The Department of Education announced that it intends to establish a negotiated rulemaking session touching on a wide variety of topics, including areas related to state authorization of distance education and faculty interaction requirements.)
- Hey, Alexa, Should We Bring Virtual Assistants to Campus? These Colleges Gave Them a Shot, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2, 2018. (Some research universities are providing students with Echo Dots to supplement student experience by answering campus-specific questions, relaying individual students' data such as grades, and allowing professors to push supplemental audio after a lecture for topic reinforcement.)
Kathryn Branson is an associate with Ulman Public Policy.
© 2018 Kathryn Branson. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.