BUFFALO, NY--(Marketwire -05/24/12)- Bryant & Stratton College Online, a premier provider of online Associate's degree programs, will host a free Virtual Open House on Monday, June 4, from 6:00-8:00pm EDT. Admissions representatives will be available to chat live and answer questions from prospective students about the online degree programs at Bryant & Stratton College Online. Representatives will also give an overview of the overall online college experience from application deadlines, the enrollment process and courses, to career services, opportunities and support available to students. Currently Bryant & Stratton College offers five online Bachelor's degree programs and eleven online Associate's degree programs including online health management degrees, business management degrees and others in the fields of business, criminal justice, financial services, healthcare, human resources and information technology.

Additionally, prospective students will have the opportunity to connect directly with financial aid representatives about financial aid options and scholarships available at Bryant & Stratton College Online. Military personnel and military spouses who are considering an online degree program will be able to speak with Ed Dennis, Military Relations Manager at Bryant & Stratton College Online, about their specific needs and concerns.

Prospective students interested in attending the Virtual Open House are invited to complete a free registration at http://online.bryantstratton.edu/openhouse/.

"Some students see the benefit of online education but are still unsure about how it will work once they enroll, the Virtual Open House gives them a chance to get there questions answered. It is an easy and convenient way for interested students to explore the degree programs we offer and meet with admissions representatives before applying," said Scott Traylor, Associate Campus Director for Online Education at Bryant & Stratton College. "An online program can be an option for those who need to balance a job or family responsibilities with earning their degree or for those simply looking for a flexible course schedule. The Virtual Open House allows prospective students to gather information so they can decide if online education is a good fit."

For more information about Bryant & Stratton College and its online degree programs, visit bryantstratton.edu/Online-Learning.aspx.

About Bryant & Stratton College OnlineBryant & Stratton College is a private career college delivering outcomes based education and training through a flexible, contemporary curriculum in a personalized environment. The College is regionally accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which is an institutional accrediting agency recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, and has locations in New York, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, as well as an Online Education division, and a Professional Skill Center. For over 155 years, Bryant & Stratton College has been providing real world education leading to bachelor's and associate's degrees and professional certificates. Bryant & Stratton College Online offers five online bachelor's degree programs, eleven online associate's degree programs and eleven online certificate programs in a variety of fields including business, criminal justice, financial services, healthcare, human resources and information technology. Some online programs are not yet available in all states. For more information about our graduation rates, the median debt of graduates and other important information, please visit http://www.bryantstratton.edu/disclosures. General information about Bryant & Stratton College and its online degrees can also be found at http://online.bryantstratton.edu.

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Bryant & Stratton College Online Hosts Virtual Open House June 4 for Prospective Students

SYLVANIA TOWNSHIP, OH (Toledo News Now) A bill allowing students to take part of driver's education online is awaiting governor Kasich's signature.

However, some driver's education training schools are not happy with the possible changes. The owner of Mid-America Driver Training in Bowling Green, Donna Foster, today says this decision is bad for business and safety.

"These are life-long, life saving skills that we're teaching these kids, it's not like a math class online or an English class online, life saving skills are being taught here," said Foster.

Each year, Foster teaches about 600 students. Currently, students in driver's education in Ohio must take 24 hours of in-class instruction, along with 8 hours of on-the-road training. Foster says once House Bill 487 gets Governor Kasich's signature it will take kids out of classrooms like hers, and put them in front of computers.

"What's going to happen ultimately is driver's ed is going to get very expensive, there's a possibility that I'm going to have to reduce my staff significantly. If the situation continues, there is a possibility that I may have to shut my doors after being in business for 14 years," Foster explained.

Foster says she is so passionate about steering her students into safe driving habits that she argued her case on the senate floor:

"I said would you be comfortable with your child taking an online driver education course not knowing if they are actually taking it because, their friend could sit beside them and take it. Anyone else can take it. There's no accountability on who is actually inputting info into the system."

The possibility that students aren't doing their own work is something that has Foster and other teachers and drivers concerned that's why she is urging others to contact Governor Kasich to put a stop to what she says is a horrible mistake as soon as possible.

Copyright 2012 Toledo News Now. All rights reserved.

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Online driver's education waiting for governor's approval

Students can explore new online education programs that offer free courses from prestigious universities.

In the past, students who aspired to attend a top-ranked university would need a high GPA, strong test scores, and the resources to fund an education.

Now, with video streaming tools, videoconferencing programs, and the ability to share and edit documents online, anyone with an Internet connection can gain access to college- and graduate-level education.

In recent years, universities have used the Web to post lectures online for users to watch at no cost. In 2006, Salman Khan created Khan Academy, a nonprofit education organization that posts YouTube "micro-lectures" on topics ranging from mathematics to art history.

[See how colleges have utilized YouTube.]

But still the public clamored for more organized online programs, notes Eren Bali, CEO and cofounder of Udemy, an online education provider.

"We realized that people are looking for structured content even though there are heaps of content available [online]," he says. "You need some guidance and a community."

For students interested in free online education programs, here are three that offer structured courses.

1. Coursera: Professors at Stanford University offered a series of free computer science courses online in fall 2011. Hundreds of thousands of students enrolled, far exceeding traditional enrollments, notes Andrew Ng, a cofounder of Coursera and a professor at Stanford who taught a machine learning course during the experiment.

"I normally teach a 400-student class," says Ng, who instructed more than 100,000 students through the online course. "To reach a comparable size audience, I'd have to teach my normal class for 250 years."

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Options Abound for Free Online Education Programs

Illustration by Keith Shore

By Mark C. Taylor 2012-05-21T23:00:24Z

In the coming decade, emerging technologies will thoroughly transform higher education. Although distance learning and computer-assisted education have been around since the 1960s, financial pressures are forcing institutions to develop aggressive online programs.

When education goes online, how professors teach, what students learn and how institutions are structured will change significantly.

Some changes are well under way. In 2009, about 29 percent of college students took at least one course online; by 2014, that number is projected to increase to 50 percent. Much of this growth has been driven by for-profit schools, but in the past couple of years, traditional colleges and universities have designed their own programs in an effort to increase tuition income without expanding the physical plant. It remains to be seen whether this financial bet will pay off.

The most promising initiatives involve cooperation between and among schools. Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University recently announced a $60 million initiative to create edX, described as a transformational partnership in online education that will enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners. Through video and immediate feedback, students will be able to take online versions of MIT and Harvard courses that include exams, papers and even laboratories.

Two Stanford University computer scientists secured $16 million in venture capital to create a new company named Coursera, which will distribute online interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences and engineering. They were inspired by the wildly popular Khan Academy, which offers more than 3,100 micro-lectures on a broad range of subjects, and by the extraordinary success of a class taught by their Stanford colleague Sebastian Thrun that attracted 160,000 students from 190 countries. The new venture will include Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. Thrun himself cofounded the online university Udacity.

Many people within and beyond the academy are skeptical about distance learning and online education. The resistance of faculty members has been the greatest obstacle to the development of effective Web-based learning. While it is true that seminars and small discussion classes cant be taught online, they can be taught effectively using teleconferencing. Two of the most successful courses I have taught were teleseminars with the University of Helsinki in 1992 -- with incoming and outgoing images of the class and myself projected onto a small television screen -- and the University of Melbourne in 1996.

However effective face-to-face classes might be, the reality is that this traditional model is simply unaffordable for most students. In addition, more and more students are working and dont have time for place-based education. Only 15 percent to 18 percent of students in post-secondary education fit the profile of 18- to 22-year-olds residing on campus. For the 85 percent so-called nontraditional students, it is necessary to develop effective alternatives.

The move from the real to the virtual classroom involves fundamental changes. Education is shifting from a mass- production model to one based on what business calls mass customization. This transformation raises rarely asked questions: Why is college duration four years? Why is every course the same length? Why does graduation depend on the completion of a specified number of courses or credits?

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College Crackup and the Online Future

FOSTER CITY, Calif., May 21, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- QuinStreet, Inc. (Nasdaq:QNST - News), a leader in vertical marketing and media online, has opened operations in Sao Paulo, Brazil to serve education clients. This move recognizes the size and importance of the Brazilian education market, as well as rapidly growing consumer demand for higher education information online.

QuinStreet brings over twelve years of experience and leadership in online marketing and media for education to Brazil, and is committed to developing the Internet as an effective, vital channel for prospective students and education marketers. QuinStreet provides Brazilian education clients with a superior online qualified inquiry generation service across a portfolio of high-quality media properties. QuinStreet's Brazilian-owned and operated media portfolio includes MundoVestibular.com.br, GuiadaCarreira.com.br and PasseiWeb.com, and the company partners with a growing network of publishers. In addition, QuinStreet staff handle pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, email marketing and social media marketing for local clients.

"QuinStreet now operates a leading education media portfolio in Brazil," says Pedro Yue, Director of Brazilian operations for QuinStreet. "We help our clients by developing online marketing channels that yield results, and we are able to measure and optimize them over time -- which has been the biggest value-add for most clients."

QuinStreet websites currently reach between 3 and 5 million Brazilian readers monthly. These media properties engage potential students by providing detailed information about campus and distance degree programs, application processes, entrance exams, and career paths.

"Brazil's post-secondary education is going through a unique period of growth and quality improvement, driven by an escalation in student demand and industry consolidation," says Ryon Braga, president of Hoper Educacao. "With increasingly professional management and competitiveness, Brazilian universities have discovered that performance marketing's efficiency is far superior to that of traditional advertising strategies used in student acquisition."

Brazil is an exciting market for QuinStreet. There is unprecedented demand for consumer information about higher education, with the opportunity for continued strong growth. Education is a $15 billion industry in Brazil with approximately $500 million spent annually on marketing. The country has more than 2,000 private colleges and schools. Internet penetration in Brazil is estimated to be 40 percent of the population, roughly half the U.S. rate. Moreover, Brazil has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and a population of nearly 200 million people.

"The education market in Brazil shares many of the same characteristics as the U.S. market of ten years ago," says Doug Valenti, QuinStreet's CEO. "There is clear potential for significant growth over the long term. We are excited to be working with clients at this early stage to dramatically expand their marketing reach."

"When performance marketing occupies a featured spot in Brazilian universities' strategies, QuinStreet will certainly lead this movement, bringing its U.S. experience with effective processes and tools and generating better cost/benefit results relative to local players," says Braga. "In a short time, QuinStreet may become the brand of reference and a synonym for high-performance marketing in the Brazilian education industry."

QuinStreet is currently serving a broad base of schools in Brazil, including the two largest institutions: Anhanguera, with 445,000 students, and Kroton, with over 320,000 students. QuinStreet will continue to focus on expanding its client base and building its media presence in Brazil.

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QuinStreet Expands Education Operations to Serve Brazilian Market

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGynWO-oseE

18-05-2012 02:15

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Online Learning at Martin College - Video

PALO ALTO, Calif. Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school.

"I normally teach 400 students," Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. "To reach that many students before," he said, "I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years."

Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. The costs of getting a college degree have been rising faster than those of health care, so the need to provide low-cost, quality higher education is more acute than ever. At the same time, in a knowledge economy, getting a higher-education degree is more vital than ever. And thanks to the spread of high-speed wireless technology, high-speed Internet, smartphones, Facebook, the cloud and tablet computers, the world has gone from connected to hyperconnected in just seven years. Finally, a generation that has grown up on these technologies is increasingly comfortable learning and interacting with professors through online platforms.

The combination of all these factors gave birth to Coursera.org, which launched on April 18, with the backing of Silicon Valley venture funds, as my colleague John Markoff first reported.

Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years. And schools like MIT and Stanford have been offering lectures for free online. Coursera is the next step: Building an interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a system of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding certificates of completion of a course for under $100. (Sounds like a good deal. Tuition at the real-life Stanford is more than $40,000 a year.) Coursera is starting with 40 courses online from computing to the humanities offered by professors from Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania.

"The universities produce and own the content, and we are the platform that hosts and streams it," explained Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer-science professor who founded Coursera with Ng after seeing tens of thousands of students following their free Stanford lectures online. "We will also be working with employers to connect students only with their consent with job opportunities that are appropriate to their newly acquired skills. So, for instance, a biomedical company looking for someone with programming and computational biology skills might ask us for students who did well in our courses on cloud computing and genomics. It is great for employers and employees and it enables someone with a less traditional education to get the credentials to open up these opportunities."

MIT, Harvard and private companies, like Udacity, are creating similar platforms. In five years this will be a huge industry.

While the lectures are in English, students have been forming study groups in their own countries to help one another. The biggest enrollments are from the United States, Britain, Russia, India and Brazil. "One Iranian student emailed to say he found a way to download the class videos and was burning them onto CDs and circulating them," Ng said last Thursday. "We just broke a million enrollments."

To make learning easier, Coursera chops up its lectures into short segments and offers online quizzes, which can be auto-graded, to cover each new idea. It operates on the honor system but is building tools to reduce cheating.

In each course, students post questions in an online forum for all to see and then vote questions and answers up and down. "So the most helpful questions bubble to the top and the bad ones get voted down," Ng said. "With 100,000 students, you can log every single question. It is a huge data mine." Also, if a student has a question about that day's lecture and it's morning in Cairo but 3 a.m. at Stanford, no problem. "There is always someone up somewhere to answer your question" after you post it, he said. The median response time is 22 minutes.

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Brace for online revolution in higher education

As school music programs dwindle under severe budget cuts, a generation of kids is growing up without music education. If they can't afford private lessons, students can always head to YouTube to learn how to play the piano, but the quality of the instruction is hit-or-miss. Now The Juilliard School, the nations most prestigious college for the performing arts, hopes to change all that by offering its world-class music courses through Connections Education, an online education provider.

The content for the classes, called Juilliard eLearning, will be developed by the schools staff and alumni. The first classeswhich will be offered this fall to K-12 students as well as adults interested in building their musical skillswill align with national music standards.

Juilliard has yet to announce details about specific classesor how much theyll costbut administrators say students will be able to learn how to sing, read music, and play an instrument through virtual music demonstrations, instructional videos, and animation from Juilliards faculty and Connections Educations teachers. Eventually, the program will also offer classes in music theory and music history.

Perhaps virtual classes can't replace the presence of full-time music teachers in every K-12 school, but if Juilliard eLearning proves to be a high qualityand reasonably pricedoption, students may yet receive the music education they deserve.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user cwwycoff1

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Juilliard Brings Online Music Education to the Masses

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF1T0jKU7Ck

15-05-2012 05:23 Michigan State University's commitment to global engagement has led to the establishment of a strong and dynamic presence in the United Arab Emirates. Under the direction of MSU's International Studies & Programs office in East Lansing, Michigan, USA, and operating as a partner of Dubai International Academic City, MSU in Dubai is focusing on master's degree programs, custom and open enrollment executive education programs, research and consultancy, and Study Abroad opportunities.

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MSU Program In Public Health: Master in Public Health Dubai Short Video Intro - Video

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipQBY7F4YY

15-05-2012 13:12 Rice commencement speaker Salman Khan's address to the graduates focused on contributions of a different kind: He urged the students to do everything they can to "increase the net happiness in the world." Khan is the founder of the Khan Academy, a free online education platform and not-for-profit organization that has made waves in the field of education. In 2004, Khan's online tutorials for a young cousin gained a wider audience, and five years later he turned his collection of free educational videos into the online Khan Academy. Today, his more than 3200 online tutorials attract 6 million viewers every month, and Time magazine recently named him one of the world's 100 most influential people. For more:

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Salman Khan at Rice University's 2012 commencement - Video