Kelsey, like many towns scattered throughout Middle America, is a quaint affair of some 53,000 souls. The only difference between Kelsey and the thousands of towns just like it that dot the American landscape is that Kelsey isn’t real: it’s a virtual sandbox created for the purpose of generating interactive case studies for University of Phoenix students.

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In a new book based on polls conducted by his international polling firm, John Zogby argues that online education will see widespread acceptance in the coming decades. He explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education that online learning is suffering from “cultural lag,” where “those who define the standard [i.e. employers] haven’t caught on yet.”

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today that David Parry, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, will be allowing anyone to participate in weekly online discussions in his graduate-level class. In an earlier post, we argued that open access to course materials without professorial interaction and the presence of an academic framework the material is not particularly valuable. Prof. Parry recognized that making lecture materials available online was not enough, and decided he would supplement posted course materials with a weekly video-chat.

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In a July 30 post on the company blog, Google announced over one million users worldwide are using its online education suite of email, calendar, and docs. As we mentioned before, it is unlikely that Microsoft will be able to match this level of market penetration any time soon, although the battle is far from being won by Google. The real challenge lies in how Google will monetize this user base unaccustomed to commercial services. Nevertheless, this is an important milestone for learning technologies, especially due to the global reach of these services. We expect to see these online platforms continue to experience robust growth, especially as universities in the developing world begin to uncover their potential. With the market growing at such a rapid pace, it is primed for the entrance of a new major player. Will Microsoft or another company occupy this new space? Or will Google simply consolidate its dominance?

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After a month of down time, embattled textbook tracker Textbook Torrents is now back online, although still without access to its domain name. The site, which can be reached via its IP address 85.17.226.223, received widespread press coverage at the beginning of July, which brought legal pressure in the form of take-down requests served on its host and domain registrar. The resulting fiasco was typical of the murky legal waters surrounding linking to copyrighted content but not hosting the content itself: the site was booted by its host and, most unusually, locked out of its domain. After scrambling to move to a new hosting service, Textbook Torrents is now back up with heightened privacy measures in place. Most significantly, it no longer records users’ IP addresses to protect user privacy should their server logs be compromised.

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The University of Phoenix and American Intercontinental University top veteran college enrollment lists, according to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article appearing yesterday. As the first batch of post 9/11 veterans begins re-assimilating to civilian life, many are taking advantage of the Montgomery GI Bill to acquire degrees. The bill provides a stipend that covers the cost of most community colleges and online schools but falls short of most public university tuition levels.

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The July 30 edition of Education Weekly reveals a troubling Obama campaign memo that maligns publicly-funded online learning solutions. The memo reflects an unsophisticated perspective on online education, referring to most online schools as “for-profit” organizations that would squander taxpayer money.

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As internet giants Google and Microsoft jockey for dominance in the realm of web-based services, institutions of higher learning have benefited from this competition in the form of free services. Google so far leads Microsoft by a wide margin: roughly 2000 institutions worldwide have outsourced some aspect of their web services (generally email) to Google since 2006. This September, Google will be touring the country in an environmentally-friendly bus as part of the aptly-named “App to School” tour. The tour aims to promote Google’s portfolio of web-based applications as well as solicit feedback from student end-users.

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  Knol screenshot, courtesy of Wikipedia

Google’s recently-acquired reference site, Knol, entered into public beta on 23 July. The site is similar to Wikipedia in that it relies entirely on user-submitted content, but the similarities end there. Instead of encouraging collaboration between users, Knol emphasizes individual authorship, and encourages users to verify that their username is their legal name via credit card or phone. As such, each entry is controlled by a single person, although other users may suggest edits. Knol aims to incentivize contribution by paying authors a share of the ad revenue generated by their content.

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A list featuring the names of over 9,000 degree mill “graduates” was released today by the Spokane, WA Spokesman-Review. The list, which the Justice Department refused to release, was apparently leaked to the paper. Upon researching the names on the list, the paper found several shocking clients: a CIA contractor and an employee of the National Security Agency (both with top-secret clearance), an employee of a nuclear power plant, a NASA engineer, two US Marshals, a senior White House staffer, Army officers, and numerous police officers and municipal employees. The eight people who set up and ran the degree mill have been indicted and convicted of federal offenses, and ringleader (and high-school drop out) Dixie Ellen Randock faces three years in prison.

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