AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

The Texas Education Agency has announced the selection of Boston-based education technology provider ConnectEDU as their partner in the development and deployment of the Online College and Career Preparation Resource Site. During the 82nd session of the Texas Legislature, lawmakers appropriated funds for the creation of a statewide online college and career readiness portal to provide online college preparation assistance to students, parents, and high school counselors. After an extensive and competitive open bidding process, the Texas Education Agency selected ConnectEDU to build, maintain and promote the portal to nearly 2.5 million middle and high school students throughout Texas.

The Online College and Career Preparation Resource Site, operating as Texas College & Career, will launch on August 29, 2012 and target an increase in the rate of K12 students transitioning to postsecondary education. The college and career planning tools will be available to students and families statewide at no cost and include unique resources designed especially for students who are more at-risk (such as foster care youth and English language learners). ConnectEDU has partnered with San Antonio-based Edvance Research to ensure the Sites alignment with research-based best practices and to grow awareness of the Sites availability through market engagement and training.

In 2010, ConnectEDU was selected by the Agency to develop and manage the states Online College Preparation Assistance Pilot Program. The Pilot targeted increased completion of essential college and career planning tasks throughout the lowest performing high schools. Armed with the Pilot Programs interactive tools and resources, these schools introduced college and career planning best practices to students and families in order to engage them in critical and early planning activities and increase their preparedness for postsecondary success. Texas College & Career will expand the reach of these critical exploration, planning, and portfolio development tools by making them available to all students and families and are available in both English and Spanish.

Were excited to again partner with ConnectEDU in Texas and are pleased to help bring this needed and comprehensive tool for both college and career planning to Texas students and their families, stated Donald Barfield, President of Edvance Research.

About ConnectEDU, Inc., http://www.connectedu.com

ConnectEDU is a technology company, founded and grounded in education, committed to transitioning 21st Century Learners on their pathways from school to college to career, helping them realize their potential, achieve a secure financial future, and ultimately connect to life's possibilities. ConnectEDU was created in 2002, by Craig Powell, an entrepreneur with a passion for ensuring that all students have access to the expertise needed to maximize their educational potential. Today, ConnectEDU is the world's largest education network, with nearly 20 million registered learners, over 4,000 educational institutions, and 130,000 employers.

About Edvance Research, http://www.edvanceresearch.com

Founded in 2005, Edvance Research, Inc. is a mission-driven, women and minority owned business, nationally recognized for innovative and trusted expertise in education. A proven leader, specializing in collaborative research and development, evaluation, project management, assessment, large scale initiatives, marketing, training and building capacity to use research, Edvance is committed to providing exceptional value to clients through outstanding quality and best practices. Edvance Research is headquartered in San Antonio with offices in Austin, Texas.

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New Texas College and Career Resource Site Contract Awarded by Texas Education Agency

EdX will begin offering free online education courses in September.

When Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced in May the formation of edX, a $60 million joint venture by the two institutions to provide free online university-level courses, the platform joined a list of services already offering massive open online courses (MOOCs).

MOOCs have garnered much attention over the past year with the launches of for-profit online education providers Coursera and Udacity, which both offer a series of courses from top ranked universities at no cost to the user. Coursera, which offers more than 100 courses through 16 institutions, announced in early August that it had reached 1 million registered users. Udacity, which has focused most of its courses in the computer sciences, has revealed that it has more than 700,000 registered users.

[Explore free online education options.]

Although more than 120 universities worldwide have expressed interest in collaborating with the service, edX will begin offering courses from three universities in fall 2012; the University of CaliforniaBerkeley being the third.

"EdX will actively explore the addition of other institutions from around the world to the edX platform, and we look forward to adding more 'X Universities' as capacity increases," according to the edX FAQ page.

The not-for-profit service has announced seven course offerings thus far for its fall launch, ranging from computer science to chemistry to public health. Students who are familiar with online education courses will be accustomed to some of the features available through edX, such as self-paced learning, online discussion groups, and collaborative learning.

[Find out what is the most popular field of study in online education.]

But edX differs from most online services in that the platform will ultimately be available as open source software, meaning that other universities and institutions will be able to host the service themselves and changes to the platform can be made by the community of users.

"Because it is open source," notes the FAQ page, "the platform will be continuously improved by a worldwide community of collaborators, with new features added as needs arise."

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EdX Announces Free Online Courses for Fall Launch

School district is offering Great Lakes Online Education program

by Dan Sanderson-Staff Writer

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 10:12 AM EDT

Home-schooled and parochial school students will be able to take advanced placement courses and students that don't do well in a traditional classroom setting will be able to take classes through a new online program offered by the Crawford AuSable School District.

The Crawford AuSable School District is rolling out a new online program called Great Lakes Online Education (GLOE).

Changes in federal and state education laws allow students to gain credit toward graduation by taking online courses.

One popular online education program claims it is non-profit and is a free virtual school. The program, however, collects state funding for the student, gained from the fourth Friday student count in September, but does not continue to mentor the students, said Brian Banda, the director for GLOE.

Often, students return to public schools, but the school district are not getting reimbursed for costs incurred.

"They're dropping the ball on these students once they receive the funding and that's our concern," Banda said. "We want to be able to provide that education for everyone."

Banda stressed that school officials want to keep students enrolled in the schools since the district has received high state and national recognition.

Excerpt from:
School district is offering Great Lakes Online Education program

TORONTO, Aug. 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --A top online continuing education provider, eCornell delivers online professional and executive development programs to over 50,000 students worldwide in more than 200 countries. By partnering with Destiny Solutions, eCornell will transition from its homegrown enterprise system onto Destiny One, allowing the company to focus on the implementation of a strategic expansion plan, including curriculum development and corporate engagement.

"eCornell's unique approach to eLearning requires sophisticated software to administer students and manage programs throughout the customer lifecycle," said Rob Kingyens, Chief Technology Officer of eCornell. "By shifting away from our homegrown system and onto the Destiny One platform, we are able to focus our technology efforts on new product development and solutions that enhance the learning experience and engagement with our global customer base."

eCornell eLearning combines the most effective elements of a world-class, Ivy League classroom with the flexibility of an online learning environment. eCornell courses -- self-paced and 100 percent online -- are "instructor-facilitated" and "cohort centric" helping guide participants in each course through challenging, real-world exercises with practical on-the-job application. Destiny One will allow staff to manage the scheduling and capacity of courses while providing students with rich, contextual portals and the tools to track their progress to certificate completion.

Destiny One will also support and streamline eCornell's direct and online sales to both retail and corporate customers, which occur locally and through a network of international resellers. Furthermore, the solution will fully integrate with the organization's financial, customer relationship, and learning management systems.

"eCornell is an award-winning leader in online professional certificates in a wide variety of business disciplines," said Shaul Kuper, President and CEO of Destiny Solutions. "Destiny One will enable eCornell to reimagine its market potential and provide organizational agility to further accelerate growth and streamline operations."

For more information on Destiny One, please visit: http://www.destinysolutions.com/product/destinyone-overview

About Destiny Solutions

Destiny Solutions is the leading innovator of lifelong learning business solutions. Since 2001, Destiny Solutions has delivered breakthrough technology designed exclusively to meet the divergent needs of non-traditional higher education. Our flagship product, Destiny One, is the only business solution that offers integrated constituent, enrollment and administrative management on a single software platform so educators can grow revenue, enhance student experience and success, and improve operational efficiency.

For more information, please visit: http://www.destinysolutions.com.

About eCornell

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eCornell Partners With Destiny Solutions to Further Accelerate Growth and Streamline Operations

KALISPELL, Mont. -

FWP officials in Northwest Montana are reminding folks that online registration is now required for many towns holding hunter education courses. FWP officials say online registration helps streamline the process, allowing students to register on their own time.

The process also allows people to pick up a manual and other pre-course materials at an FWP office without attending an orientation session. FWP staff say folks without access to a computer can stop by a library or an FWP office to sign up.

Some classes required online registration last year, and this year online registration is required for virtually all the local classes in Northwest Montana, including courses in Kalispell, Bigfork and Polson.

Folks looking to find more info on registration and classes can visit http://fwp.mt.gov. Everyone born after January 1, 1985 is required to take a course before obtaining a hunting license.

Copyright 2012 by KECI, KCFW, KTVM. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Online registration kicks off for hunter education courses

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5 Tech Tools Making Classrooms Better

Five years ago, Ken Eklund turned online to tackle the issues raised by the future peak oil crisis with the alternate reality game World Without Oil. Now, Eklund has partnered up with Andi McDaniel and turned his attention on education with Ed Zed Omega, a game hoping to reimagine the educational system by following the stories of six fictional teens who choose to drop out of school.

By Brandie Minchew, originally posted at ARGNet

Theres this expression, zed omega. It means so over. When you go zed omega, you are done. -Ed Zed Omega Revealed

When it comes to public or private education, everyone has an experience, everyone has a story, and everyone has an opinion. The internet is rife with pointed discussions about the problems in education, and full of suggestions on how to solve them. While education issues vary broadly from state to state and nation to nation, they share at least one commonality: solutions tend to be easy to propose but difficult to implement. Education reform is an ongoing conversation amongst government officials, educators, and the public, and conversations between these groups are often politically charged and riddled with miscommunication and misunderstandings.

Andi McDaniel and Ken Eklund have brought something new to the conversation about education with their freshly-launched project, Ed Zed Omega. The project focuses on a set of voices that often gets lost in the cacophony that pervades the education discussion: the voices of those most directly affected by our education systems, the people currently subject to the state of being educated. Ed Zed Omega features the stories of six fictional teens who have decided that they are done with education, and that theyre not going back. Their guidance counselor, Mary Johnson, has convinced them to use the time they would have spent in school to complete one more assignment, exploring solutions to the problems they perceive in education.Ed Zed Omega launched on August 15, 2012 and will run through November 15, 2012 to follow their journey.

Several people and organizations are involved in the creation of Ed Zed Omega. The Association of Independents in Radio (AIR) put out a call to producers working on innovative storytelling through their Localoreinitiative. Ken Eklund and Andi McDaniel were matched up through Localore to create a proposal for one of ten projects to be featured by AIR/Localore. The project is funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPC) and presented by Twin Cities Public Television (TPT).

Eklund is no stranger to interactive narratives and serious games. In 2007, he created World Without Oil, the award-winning alternate reality game that jump-started a conversation about a near-future crisis where oil was in short supply. McDaniel is an interactive media producer for TPT, and her work in photography, print, radio and video span a wide range of topics and themes. When the pair first got together to start discussing their proposal, they didnt know that the focus would be education. However, TPT had historically done programming for kids and parents, as well as several documentaries on education. The subject of the high school dropout rate came up 1.2 million kids dropping out of school every year for myriad reasons and Eklund and McDaniel recognized the narrative power of teens who have disengaged with the education system. They envisioned the Zed Omegas, teens who feel let down by education and who want to try something different. They call it dropping out loud.

Ed Zed Omega focuses on the specific stories of six teens. Edwina, Nicole, Xavier, Lizabeth, Clare and Jeremy each have a different reason for wanting to drop out of high school and go their own way. They call themselves the Zed Omegas totally done with high school and reluctant to re-enter the education system as the summer draws to a close. Their guidance counselor, Mary Johnson, identified them as at risk teens and, rather than trying to convince them they are wrong to drop out, she is trying to re-engage them with a self-directed study on education. She is aided by homeschooled teen Nora Rose Melendy, along with Alan Greye and Zephyr Yilmaz who keep the Ed Zed Omega website up and running. August 15 is the day they dont return from their summer vacations, and when their exploration of education begins.

The Ed Zed Omega audience can interact with these teens and their support system through a wide variety of social media while following along with their progress in addressing the problems of education and as they deal with the consequences of dropping out of school. The audience is invited to influence and become part of the Ed Zed Omega story through sharing their thoughts, opinions, and experiences with the Zed Omegas. The games website makes it easy to follow the story using a Tumblr format with snapshots of character activity across the social media landscape.

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Reinventing Education for the Disaffected with Ed Zed Omega

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21 August 2012This study focuses on attitudes and practices related to all aspects of online education including views on the quality of learning outcomes, issues of institutional support, and institutional rewards. Even as online enrollments have grown exponentially, attitudes about online learning have remained conflicted.The study is based on the results of two related, but separate, surveys. The first is a nationally representative sample of higher education faculty members who are teaching at least one course during the current academic year. The second focused on academic administrators in particular those responsible for academic technology at their institutions.

Online learning has experienced consistent growth in the 10 years that the Babson Survey Research Group has been tracking and producing annual reports on the enterprise. The number of students enrolling in one or more online course has increased at rates far in excess of the growth of overall higher education enrollments. The proportion of students taking at least one online course has increased from fewer than 1 in 10 in 2002 to nearly one-third by 2010, with the number of online students growing from 1.6 million to over 6.1 million over the same period an 18.3 percent compound annual growth rate.

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Faculty and online education, 2012

TCS Communications workers prepare a conduit for connection on West 20th Avenue in Lakewood last week. In many far-flung and urban districts, the digital divide centers on sufficient data-streaming capacity to allow students to take the kinds of classes that many small schools can't offer in a bricks-and-mortar classroom. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post)

On Colorado's education landscape, the "digital divide" looks something like this: While one classroom streams online coursework to students, others log off the Internet so a school's meager bandwidth can handle the load.

The gap between the technological haves and have-nots, once defined by access to the computer hardware that drives high-tech learning, now centers on an information superhighway that too often recedes to the digital equivalent of rutted rural back roads.

As a result, classes ranging from Advanced Placement to world languages to credit-recovery courses may not be available in areas with lagging local Internet connections denying many students the same instructional options as their better-connected counterparts.

"If a kid on the plains has good broadband access, he can mitigate those differences with online courses," said John Watson, founder of the Durango-based Evergreen Education Group and co-author of a study for the Colorado Department of Education. "When you don't, it's difficult or impossible."

And as the state moves toward online assessment, such as some high-stakes testing slated for 2014, questions remain about whether the technological infrastructure will be able to handle it.

"Without an adequate pipeline, information may not reach teachers or students in a timely manner," said Dan Domagala, chief information officer for the Colorado Department of Education. "I think access is no longer the issue. It has shifted toward speed and bandwidth and usage and cost."

Those costs present a potentially daunting challenge.

A key 15-year-old federal program called E-Rate, which discounts Internet access for most Colorado school districts, finds itself fast approaching a financial crisis. That could cause more budget headaches for districts already scrambling to provide basic services.

Colorado has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to narrow the digital divide. But those efforts struggle to keep pace with classroom innovation.

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Education's digital divide more about bandwidth than computer hardware

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire -08/20/12)- Although many have no doubts that the education industry will survive, many experts believe that the way the world implements higher education is changing. According to a recent CBS News report, elite universities have responded to these concerns by expanding their curriculum to the Internet. Although online education has been previously doubted as a legitimate way to earn a degree, the creation of free online courses by Harvard, MIT and Stanford has given the practice more credibility. In addition, these programs that are still in their infancy will most likely lay the foundation for how many people approach college in the future. As a private school that prepares students for strong collegiate experiences, York Prep has responded to the rising trend by observing the widespread impact of online education growth.

According to CBS, many international students have responded favorably to the online curricula offered by these noted institutions. Residing in India, Ashwith Rego, a 24-year-old engineering student, explains his education experience, "I never imagined that I would be taught by professors from MIT, let alone for free." While the article pinpoints ways that these programs are beneficial for low-income students or those with busy schedules, York Prep Headmaster Ronald Stewart believes that these programs should also be looked at as a way to enhance every citizen's education.

Stewart explains, "I have listened on my home computer to the complete online lecture series by Michael Sandel of Harvard on Justice, and it was intellectually stimulating and enjoyable. This is the potential of online courses; to provide people from all walks of life the opportunity to hear superb lectures by the best professors in the country. Whether the courses are rigorous enough to deserve college credit or if they can prevent cheating seems secondary to the fact that all of us can enjoy and learn from the best."

However, the education industry is currently in a transition period in which professionals are determining whether online education programs will replace the traditional university altogether or simply expand that experience. While the future remains unseen, the article explains how the shift has benefited universities, "The proliferation of so-called massive open online courses, or MOOCs, has the potential to transform higher education at a time when colleges and universities are grappling with shrinking budgets, rising costs and protests over soaring tuition and student debt."

Having realized the diverse potential York Prep students have in higher education, Ronald Stewart responds to these observations by noting that online education does not necessarily have to be an alternative to the way people learn. He concludes, "Online education can be immensely successful without being considered necessarily as an alternative to a regular college experience. However, for those who do not have the resources of money or time to have that personal college experience, then online courses are a better option than anything else that is currently available."

ABOUT:

York Prep, a private school, was founded by Ronald and Jayme Stewart. Located in New York City's Upper West Side, York Prep offers educational resources to students in grades six through 12. Currently, York Prep has 340 enrolled students, to whom it provides individualized curriculum and course offerings. To learn more, visit yorkprep.org.

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York Prep Reacts to New Online Course Offerings by Elite Universities