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Audrey Watters, Inside Higher Ed

MIT's Simmons Hall

The flurry of late 2011 news has certainly made making predictions about technology and higher education fun.

The announcement about MITx — MIT’s plans to offer certification (“for a modest fee”) for open courseware — was the year’s final shot across the bow of higher education. Beware, it seemed to indicate: things are changing. No doubt, 2011 was a year of shrinking government funding for education, rising student debt, rising unemployment among college grads (gasp! people questioned the value of a college diploma!) and growing private sector investment in education companies. 2012 will likely bring more of the same.

As such it’s both easy and difficult to make predictions. “There will be more integration of technology into the classroom” is an easy one. “This will be fraught with privacy and security and pedagogical concerns” is another. But in many ways, we’ve had these same sorts of conversations about education technology for years now. Will things be different in 2012? If so, why? (If not, why not?)

I do think we’re at a point where we could see great change in education — at universities as well as at the K-12 level. Those are driven by technology, true, but also myriad other economic factors. The predictions I have to make about higher education for 2012 occur at that intersection: new technologies, new economies, new business models … and the fallout therewith. More…

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By Jennifer Preston, The New York Times

Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The policies come as educators deal with a wide range of new problems. Some teachers have set poor examples by posting lurid comments or photographs involving sex or alcohol on social media sites. Some have had inappropriate contact with students that blur the teacher-student boundary. In extreme cases, teachers and coaches have been jailed on sexual abuse and assault charges after having relationships with students that, law enforcement officials say, began with electronic communication.

But the stricter guidelines are meeting resistance from some teachers because of the increasing importance of technology as a teaching tool and of using social media to engage with students. In Missouri, the state teachers union, citing free speech, persuaded a judge that a new law imposing a statewide ban on electronic communication between teachers and students was unconstitutional. Lawmakers revamped the bill this fall, dropping the ban but directing school boards to develop their own social media policies by March 1.

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Image: Stephen Morton for The New York Times

By Stephanie Saul, The New York Times

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Agora is one of the largest in a portfolio of similar public schools across the country run by K12. Eight other for-profit companies also run online public elementary and high schools, enrolling a large chunk of the more than 200,000 full-time cyberpupils in the United States.

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Image: Lance Murphey for The New York Times

By Daphne Koller, The New York Times

Our education system is in a state of crisis. Among developed countries, the United States is 55th in quality rankings of elementary math and science education, 20th in high school completion rate and 27th in the fraction of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.

As a society, we can and should invest more money in education. But that is only part of the solution. The high costs of high-quality education put it off limits to large parts of the population, both in the United States and abroad, and threaten the school’s place in society as a whole. We need to significantly reduce those costs while at the same time improving quality.

If these goals seem contradictory, let’s consider an example from history. In the 19th century, 60 percent of the American work force was in agriculture, and there were frequent food shortages. Today, agriculture accounts for less than 2 percent of the work force, and there are food surpluses.

The key to this transition was the use of technology—from crop rotation strategies to GPS-guided farm machinery — which greatly increased productivity. By contrast, our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.

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Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC

Today the likes of Google, Microsoft and other leading technology names will lend their support to the case made to the government earlier this year in a report called Next Gen. It argued that the UK could be a global hub for the video games and special effects industries – but only if its education system got its act together.

The statistics on the numbers going to university to study computing make sobering reading. In 2003 around 16,500 students applied to UCAS for places on computer science courses.

By 2007 that had fallen to just 10,600, and although it’s recovered a little to 13,600 last year, that’s at a time in major growth in overall applications, so the percentage of students looking to study the subject has fallen from 5% to 3%. What’s more, computing science’s reputation as a geeky male subject has been reinforced, with the percentage of male applicants rising over the period from 84% to 87%.

But the problem, according to those campaigning for change, begins at school with ICT – a subject seen by its detractors as teaching clerical skills rather than any real understanding of computing.

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