The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things—radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It’s called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained.

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together—free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­—and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they’ve learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. More…

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Las Vegas—At the very start of the Higher Ed Tech Summit here this week, James Applegate threw out a challenge. Mr. Applegate, vice president for program development at the Lumina Foundation, told an overflow crowd that the United States needed 60 percent of its adults to hold high-quality degrees and credentials by the year 2025.

During the rest of the day, technology executives described programs that could improve graduation rates and learning, but won’t be able to do so for several years. They collect many points of data on what professors and students do, but can’t yet say what results in better grades and graduation rates. “We’re beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don’t have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that,” said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker. “These are really early days,” agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard.

There’s lots of technology out there that’s outcome-related. For instance, at the meeting, which is part of the international Consumer Electronics Show, the interactive textbook publisher Kno announced a suite of new features. One of them, a performance gauge callled Kno Me, gives students information about how much time they spend on different sections of a book, the results of quizzes, and the kinds of notes they took. “With thousands of students using these books, we can show them which of these variables are related to students—anonymous, of course—who get A’s, or B’s, or C’s, so students learn what kind of activity leads to the best results,” said Osman Rashid, the company’s chief executive. More…

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Trevor Bailey is director of worldwide education at Adobe Systems, and leads the programs and strategies that make Adobe products easily available to education institutions.

Today, only 57% of students who attend college in the U.S. actually graduate. The country ranks 12th among 36 developed countries. President Obama’s administration has a stated goal for the U.S.: Take the lead in higher education completion rates by 2020. To accomplish this aim, Obama notes the need to foster critical thinking, champion problem solving and employ innovative knowledge to prepare students for college and careers.

Technical literacy and strong learning engagement are two important paths toward boosting college graduation rates and better preparing students for lifelong career success. However, technology is just one vital factor in a cumulative equation. Educators can benefit by rapidly adopting tablet devices and interactive digital publications.

Better Study Habits and Performance With Tablets

Market intelligence firm IDC projects worldwide shipments of more than 70 million tablets in 2012, up from 17 million in 2010. We are witnessing a major transformation in how digital content is distributed and consumed. According to a 2011 Pearson Foundation survey, 86% of college students who own a tablet say the device helps them study more efficiently, and 76% report that tablets help them perform better in their classes. Seventy percent of college students and college-bound high school seniors are interested in owning a tablet device, and 20% expect to purchase a tablet within the next six months. More…

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The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today’s fast-changing job market.

Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of “badges” to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain—intentionally so—to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom.

At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a “Great Listener” badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short educational clips. With enough of those badges, paired with badges earned for passing standardized tests administered on the site, users can earn the distinction of “Master of Algebra” or other “Challenge Patches.” More…

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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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Michael Staton is the founder of Inigral, which develops social software for student recruitment and higher education retention. Inigral recently brought on the first PRI as a venture investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been named one of the top 10 innovative companies in education by Fast Company.

In 2011, entrepreneurs and startup activity sprouted up everywhere. Not coincidentally, the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Austin, Portland and every college town from Abilene to Gainesville is fostering young, eager minds. The millennial generation is proving it can create companies — and thus, jobs — that solve real problems.

Trends like these are quickly impacting how young people relate to and absorb education. These days, higher education is a dynamic and increasingly digital environment — and some are questioning the relevance of the traditional educational institution at all. Here’s a look at some of the big changes in tech and funding that have shaped education in 2011.

1. The UnCollege Movement Begins

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Former CEO of PayPal and venture capitalist Peter Thiel maintains that entrepreneurship is best learned outside of higher education, through real-world experience. He created the 20 under 20 program to demonstrate that the best and the brightest students can find success without college.

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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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CALLING “World of Warcraft” (WoW) a mere video game is seriously underselling it. The virtual world, in which millions of players cooperate to conduct quests, delve into dungeons and slay dragons, is both a commercial and cultural phenomenon.

Released in 2004, the game has now more than 10m active players, each of whom pays a monthly fee ($13-15 in America). Industry analysts estimate that Activision-Blizzard, the game’s publisher, rakes in annual revenues of well over $1 billion from WoW alone. On top of that are sales of “expansion packs” for the game, which come out roughly every two years.

But WoW is not just about playing online. An annual convention in Anaheim, California, called “BlizzCon”, attracts tens of thousands of WoW fans. There are popular sidelines in novelisations, comic books and card games. Occasionally, there is even talk of a film.

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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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FOR the second year in a row, the Monday after Thanksgiving — so-called Cyber Monday, when online retailers offer discounts to lure holiday shoppers — was the biggest online sales day of the year, totaling some $1.25 billion and overwhelming the sales figures racked up by brick-and-mortar stores three days before, on Black Friday, the former perennial record-holder.

Such numbers may seem proof that America is, indeed, online. But they mask an emerging division, one that has worrisome implications for our economy and society. Increasingly, we are a country in which only the urban and suburban well-off have truly high-speed Internet access, while the rest — the poor and the working class — either cannot afford access or use restricted wireless access as their only connection to the Internet. As our jobs, entertainment, politics and even health care move online, millions are at risk of being left behind.

The experience and opportunity gaps between rich and poor are a problem worldwide, both within and between communities and nation states. As the often unreal cyberworld becomes evermore the world in which real events transpire, access to digital information and to participation in educational, economic, and political processes is unfairly distributed. This is startlingly true in the United States where the Internet was originally conceived and created.

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