Online Education

NEW YORK -- One way to get an edge in this job market is to earn an advanced degree. Just don't assume that doing it online will be easy. Online master's programs are often cheaper and more convenient than traditional ones, but they also present challenges. "You're home alone and have to motivate yourself. It's not the same as sitting in a classroom, where you have a social support group," said Michael Lambert, executive director of the Distance Education and Training Council, an accrediting agency based in...

Online course providers have typically target students, but Udemy is going after an underserved group: professionals. The Scottsdale, Arizona-based company launched "Udemy for Organizations" today to help companies train their employees. The available courses include soft skills, like people management and public speaking, as well as training in common programs, like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Excel. A small business might decide to buy twenty licenses for the marketing team to refresh their...

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn are co-founders of Innosight Institute , a nonprofit think tank focused on education and innovation, and co-authors of the award-winning book, " Disrupting Class . " This year's math classes for many students in the Los Altos School District in California look radically different from those in the past. Powered in part by the Khan Academy —a non-profit that offers free educational resources such as online lessons and online assessments—the school district is...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been touted by some as the breakthrough that will transform education. Top universities such as MIT, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley are scrambling to make their lectures available online. Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) described one such program — a trial effort between online course platform Udacity and San Jose State University — as being "about our society, our future and how we can all improve our skills, how we can exercise our...

The leadership crisis that rent the University of Virginia last month arose partly out of fear that other elite schools were moving into the vanguard of a coming digital revolution, and that U-Va. stood to be left behind. That argument, advanced by the leader of the university governing board, turned out to be based on a faulty premise. Almost no one on campus knew at the time the breadth of the collective investment that U-Va. was already making in online education. On Tuesday, the investment will yield a major payoff.

Every year as broadband reaches more people, online education keeps growing and growing. So far, though, most online education focusses on vocational courses, test preparation, or supplemental tutoring. One startup trying to bring entire degree programs online is 2tor , which just closed a $20 million Series B funding at a rumored valuation of around $100 million. Highland Capital Partners led the round, with previous investors Redpoint, Novak Biddle, and City Light Capital...

LYNCHBURG, Va. — The small Baptist college that television preacher Jerry Falwell founded here in 1971 has capitalized on the online education boom to become an evangelical mega-university with global reach. In the almost six years since Falwell's death, Liberty University has doubled its student head count — twice. Total enrollment now exceeds 74,000, with nearly 62,000 working toward degrees online in fields such as psychology, business, education, criminal justice and, of course,...

The job cuts continue at Rockville-based Human Genome Sciences as the biotechnology company folds its employees and operations into those of the British drugmaker that bought the firm this summer. The latest round of cuts targets 97 employees who were notified of the decision last week. The firm also warned that additional reductions would be announced in November and during the next calendar year. The eliminated positions come from both the science and business sides of the...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been touted by some as the breakthrough that will transform education. Top universities such as MIT, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley are scrambling to make their lectures available online. Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) described one such program — a trial effort between online course platform Udacity and San Jose State University — as being "about our society, our future and how we can all improve our skills, how we can...

K12 Inc., the Herndon-based company that is the country's largest provider of full-time online education, lags behind charter schools and traditional public schools on a broad array of academic measures, according to a new study . Students enrolled at K12, which provides public virtual education in 29 states and the District of Columbia, lag behind their counterparts on federal and state measures of math and reading proficiency, according to...

A sea change is under way at the nation's old guard of academic institutions as more degree programs work their way online, fundamentally altering not just the way colleges teach students, but how they make money while doing so. The movement gained steam last year when private companies such as Coursera and Udacity began to offer online courses to the masses, taught by instructors at elite colleges such as Stanford, Harvard and the University of...

It's hard to think of a higher education leader who faces more challenges than Timothy P. White. The new chancellor of the California State University system, who started in December, oversees 23 campuses in the nation's most populous state, with 44,000 faculty and staff and 427,000 students. The range of student backgrounds and needs is staggering, and the cutbacks in recent years in state funding have been immense. Yet White was upbeat this week in a visit to Washington that coincided with a gathering of...

LYNCHBURG, Va. — The small Baptist college that television preacher Jerry Falwell founded here in 1971 has capitalized on the online education boom to become an evangelical mega-university with global reach. In the almost six years since Falwell's death, Liberty University has doubled its student head count — twice. Total enrollment now exceeds 74,000, with nearly 62,000 working toward degrees online in fields such as psychology, business, education, criminal justice and, of course,...

If you haven't paid much attention to lynda.com before, you're going to want to keep your eye on it now.  The online learning company, which has helped more than two million people learn software, business and creative skills through video courses, on Tuesday announced that it has raised $103 million in its first (yes, first) outside financing round. That's a lot of money for any company to raise — but especially for one that has been around for the past 17 years and profitable for the...

Providers of free online college courses are experimenting with academic security measures that will enable students who successfully complete the courses to obtain credentials, for a small fee, that convey some of the cachet of a premier university. The credentials, or certificates, won't translate into course credit toward a degree — at least not at big-name schools — because questions persist about how much those schools are willing to grant students who don't pay tuition, as well as...

A senior U.S. Senate Democrat this week ended an inquiry into operations of the University of Maryland University College, a fast-growing provider of public online education that came under scrutiny after the abrupt resignation of its president this year. A top aide to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, sent UMUC a letter indicating that questions about the university's enrollment and workplace practices had been answered.

Imagine you're a high school biology teacher searching for the most vivid way to explain electrical activity in the brain. How about inserting metal wires into a cockroach's severed leg and making that leg dance to music? Starting Monday, that eye-popping lesson, performed in a six-minute video by neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage, is available free online. TED, a nonprofit organization that produces a popular annual conference on ideas, is launching TED-Ed, an online collectio n of lessons it...

A senior U.S. Senate Democrat this week ended an inquiry into operations of the University of Maryland University College, a fast-growing provider of public online education that came under scrutiny after the abrupt resignation of its president this year. A top aide to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, sent UMUC a letter indicating that questions about the university's enrollment and workplace practices had been answered.

Elite universities have learned this year that offering free online courses will draw a huge global audience. Now educators want to know whether those courses are worthy of academic credit and how they might be used to help more people pursue college degrees. The American Council on Education, which represents university presidents, said Tuesday it is teaming with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the free online education provider Coursera on an initiative to seek answers to those questions.

Regarding the Nov. 4 Sunday Arts article " Corcoran's board slow to create a new vision ": One has to credit the Corcoran trustees (many of whom have been influential in the local arts scene) for their dedicated service and substantial monetary contributions to the gallery and school over the years. However, the aim of creating a new vision has to be accompanied by the entertaining of new ideas that transcend the obvious alternatives. I was struck by the commonalities of current voting board members: no member under...