With an infusion of money from US stimulus spending, groups like The Gates Foundation, and the private sector, the technological landscape in higher education is changing rapidly. In the recent past, classroom tech extended to YouTube videos, bare-bones online courses, or collaborative systems like Moodle; now, the emphasis is all about open courseware and analytics to monitor student behavior.

Major bets that institutions are placing on technology in higher education were unveiled recently through a round of grants funded primarily by The Gates Foundation and led by Educause, a nonprofit association that encourages technology in education.

In the first of two rounds, The Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) awarded $10.6 million to 29 organizations, with the potential for an additional $5.4 million to be doled out later. Close to half of the initial $10.6 million went to open courseware projects that seek to publish adaptable Web-based courses for the public.

The funded initiatives focus on four areas:

Open courseware

“Blended learning,” the mixture of in-class time with online learning

“Deeper learning,” the use of social media and virtual worlds to increase student engagement

“Learner analytics,” analytical software to retain and use student data

Despite the distinctions, many categories overlap; for instance, open courseware often uses blended learning.

Targeted schools range from liberal arts colleges like Bryn Mawr to large systems like the University of Michigan, but the goals are the same: use the software in introductory math and science courses. While Bryn Mawr will use open courseware to increase time for in-depth conversations in the classroom, the University of California will integrate touch-based interactivity, such as a real-time quizzes or real-time question and answer sessions, with asynchronous content, such as recorded lectures.

The focus on using blended learning and open courseware for prerequisites extends to international projects like The Open University and Inquus Corporation’s OpenStudy.

The Open University plans to develop free, open courseware that will aide students in meeting prerequisite math courses. The program, called “Bridge to Success” (B2S), will use high-quality open educational material, like MIT’s Open Courseware, to combine multimedia content with traditional pre-algebra concepts. In past projects, bridging has increased student participation, learning capacity, and confidence.

Inquus’s OpenStudy tackles these problems by bringing social media into introductory classrooms. The program seeks to expand its national peer-to-peer social learning network site with support study groups for courses. By putting assignments, lectures, and other materials into a collaborative space, OpenStudy tries to create trust, communication, and heightened interactivity within a group of students (either an entire class or a break-out group within a class). OpenStudy’s tactics capitalize on virtual collaboration, which has been shown to increases student engagement and academic achievement.

Other funded projects include tracking, retaining, and analyzing student analytics to uncover student patterns. In one instance, Marist College plans to build an open analytics program that will be able to amass student data and target “at risk” students. This data is especially useful for colleges, since, according to the State University of New York, nearly 40 to 70 percent of incoming US college students need remedial education.

The University of Michigan will also use data from over 40,000 students that can identify patterns of behavior to train, advise, and encourage student participation. The lead researcher, Dr. Timothy McKay, said of the grant, "Too few students come to see me when I have office hours. This is what I would tell them if they were sitting in front of me.”

The stress on open courseware and Web-based learning has been slowly calling into question the main approach of higher ed teaching: providing an ongoing, deliberative, face-to-face dialogue with professors. Granted, the courses funded here are introductory, where an engaging interlocutor may not always be prominent, but physical, personal interaction is fundamental to higher education. We're already seeing real shifts away from this model as top-flight school like the University of North Carolina already offers a 100 percent online MBA.

Few students replaced a traditional university education by going to a well-stocked library instead, but the modern combination of recorded lectures and online collaboration might eventually pose a stronger threat to the dominant "go to a campus" model of higher ed.