Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border Training and Education

Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Warning
No higher education program that substitutes “life experience” or “job experience” for academic credit in the real world is respected in academe. This does not mean that experience is not educational. It merely means that it is impossible or impractical to determine knowledge attainment unless more formalized processes of courses and examinations are administered for academic credit. Hence, a degree from any school that replaces some courses with "experience" is not worth much more than the paper it is printed on. Graduates from such a school should be evaluated on the basis of their life experiences. They should not be evaluated on the basis of that school's course credits. Paying for such credits is a waste of money in my viewpoint.

**Overview of The Future of Higher Education**
Introductory Quotations
Long-Term Future of Education and Education Technologies (including grid computing, Blogging, Podcasting, and video games
Motivations for Distance Education
2004 Update on the Quality and Extent of Distance Education in the United States
Models for Distributed/Distance Education
Classroom and Building Design --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Design
Comparative Advantages of Colleges and Universities
Corporations and Universities Sign Partnership Pacts
Corporations Sign Pacts With Professors Affiliated With Prestige Universities
Universities Partner With Each Other
Degree and Certificate Programs Online
Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, and Other Sharing Universities
Technology Aids for the Handicapped and Learning Challenged
University of California's XLab
A Crystal Ball Look Into the Future (including Concept Knowledge)
Babson College's experiments with "Tailor-Made Degrees"
A Cloudy Crystal Ball
Distance Education Magazines and Journals http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm#Resources
The term "electroThenic portfolio," or "ePortfolio," is on everyone's lips. What does this mean? http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ElectronicPortfolio
Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students? Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

Overview of The Future of Higher Education

Introductory Quotations

Long-Term Future of Education and Education Technologies
(including grid computing, Blogging, Podcasting, and video games

Motivations for Distance Education

2004 Update on the Quality and Extent of Distance Education in the United States

Models for Distributed/Distance Education

Classroom and Building Design --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Design

Comparative Advantages of Colleges and Universities

Corporations and Universities Sign Partnership Pacts

Corporations Sign Pacts With Professors Affiliated With Prestige Universities

Universities Partner With Each Other

Degree and Certificate Programs Online

Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from Around the World:
OKI, MIT, Rice, and Other Sharing Universities

Technology Aids for the Handicapped and Learning Challenged

University of California's XLab

A Crystal Ball Look Into the Future (including Concept Knowledge)

Babson College's experiments with "Tailor-Made Degrees"

A Cloudy Crystal Ball

Distance Education Magazines and Journals http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm#Resources

The term "electroThenic portfolio," or "ePortfolio," is on everyone's lips. What does this mean?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ElectronicPortfolio

Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students?
Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

From Hapless to Helped
"autodidacts disadvantaged by distance" (Don't you love love alliteration as a memory aid?) In the quotations below, contrast and compare the impact of the interactive Internet and ebullient email on evolving education from 1858 versus 2001.

The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade -- in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) --- http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

Jensen Added Comment
It wasn't mentioned, but I think Goldie took the ACC 460 course --- Click Here

The Bright Future of Grand Canyon University online
The Apollo Group is the king of for-profit higher education, parent of the University of Phoenix. By comparison, Grand Canyon University, another for-profit college in Phoenix, is David to Apollo’s Goliath. But that’s obviously not quite how Brian Mueller sees it. Mueller, the president of the Apollo Group and the driving force behind the University of Phoenix’s highly successful online division, is betting that Grand Canyon’s future is brighter — or perhaps more profitable — than Apollo’s. The two companies announced this morning that Mueller is giving up his position at Apollo to help lead Grand Canyon into its recently announced initial public offering, which was initially valued at $230 million. Compared to Apollo, which educates hundreds of thousands of students and is 35 years old, Grand Canyon is comparatively a toddler. Since 2004, when it was purchased by a team of investors, it has been transformed from a struggling nonprofit Christian college with fewer than 1,000 into a thriving institution that has about 20,000 students, most of them online. A full report on these striking developments will be available on our Web site Thursday morning.
Inside Higher Ed, June 25, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/25/qt

Fast Growth of Online Programs Relative to "Blended Programs"
Despite the growth of “blended” education — in which instructors mix in-person and online experiences for students — online education appears to be outpacing it in some ways, according to a new study by Eduventures, the Sloan Consortium and Babson College. The report found a faster rate of growth in the percentage of classes offered online than for blended courses. The report found that while 55 percent of colleges offer at least one blended course, 64 percent offer at least one online course.
Inside Higher Ed, March 13, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/13/qt

"How to Be an Online Student and Survive in the Attempt," by Maria José Viñas, Chronicle of Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 11, 2008 --- Click Here

In theory, distance education is supposed to open up an era when all students have a range of options not limited by geography. But a new report from Eduventures finds that most distance students enroll at distance programs run by institutions in their own geographic regions, and that more than a third of these students take online courses offered by an institution within a 50-mile radius.
Inside Higher Ed, March 28, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/28/qt

Education Balance: Even Resident Students Can Benefit for Life With Some Online Courses

Open Sharing Catching on Outside the United States
Britain’s Open University today formally begins its effort to put its course materials and other content online for all the world to use. With its effort, OpenLearn, which is expected to cost $10.6 million and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the university joins Massachusetts Institute of Technology and institutions in several other countries in trying to put tools for learning within the reach of otherwise difficult to reach populations.
Inside Higher Ed, October 25, 2006

Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college in Fall 2005?

More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education . . . ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’
Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed, November 10, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online

A Serious New Commercial Advance for Online Training and Education

"Opening Up Online Learning," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, October 9, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/cartridge

This has not exactly been a season of peace, love and harmony on the higher education technology landscape. A patent fight has broken out among major developers of course management systems. Academic publishers and university officials are warring over open access to federally sponsored research. And textbook makers are taking a pounding for — among other things — the ways in which digital enhancements are running up the prices of their products.

In that context, many may be heartened by the announcement later today at the Educause meeting in Dallas that three dozen academic publishers, providers of learning management software, and others have agreed on a common, open standard that will make it possible to move digital content into and out of widely divergent online education systems without expensive and time consuming reengineering. The agreement by the diverse group of publishers and software companies, who compete intensely with one another, is being heralded as an important breakthrough that could expand the array of digital content available to professors and students and make it easier for colleges to switch among makers of learning systems.

Of course, that’s only if the new standard, known as the “Common Cartridge,” becomes widely adopted, which is always the question with developments deemed to be potential technological advances.

Many observers believe this one has promise, especially because so many of the key players have been involved in it. Working through the IMS Global Learning Consortium, leading publishers like Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill Education and course-management system makers such as Blackboard, ANGEL Learning and open-source Sakai have worked to develop the technical specifications for the common cartridge, and all of them have vowed to begin incorporating the new standard into their products by next spring — except Blackboard, which says it will do so eventually, but has not set a timeline for when.

What exactly is the Common Cartridge? In lay terms, it is a set of specifications and standards, commonly agreed to by an IMS working group, that would allow digitally produced content — supplements to textbooks such as assessments or secondary readings, say, or faculty-produced course add-ons like discussion groups — to “play,” or appear, the same in any course management system, from proprietary ones like Blackboard/WebCT and Desire2Learn to open source systems like Moodle and Sakai.

“It is essentially a common ‘container,’ so you can import it and load it and have it look similar when you get it inside” your local course system, says Ray Henderson, chief products officer at ANGEL, who helped conceive of the idea when he was president of the digital publishing unit at Pearson.

The Common Cartridge approach is designed to deal with two major issues: (1) the significant cost and time that publishers now must spend (or others, if the costs are passed along) to produce the material they produce for multiple, differing learning management systems, and (2) the inability to move courses produced in one course platform to another, which makes it difficult for professors to move their courses from one college to another and for campuses to consider switching course management providers.

The clearest and surest upside of the new standard, most observers agree, is that it could help lower publishers’ production costs and, in turn, allow them to focus their energies on producing more and better content. David O’Connor, senior vice president for product development at Pearson Education’s core technology group, says his company and other major publishers spend “many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year effectively moving content around” so that ancillary material for textbooks can work in multiple course management systems.

Because Blackboard and Web CT together own in the neighborhood of 75 percent of the course management market, Pearson and other publishers produce virtually all of their materials to work in those proprietary systems. Materials are typically produced on demand for smaller players like ANGEL, Desire2Learn and Sakai, and it is even harder to find usable materials for colleges’ homemade systems. While big publishers such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill have sizable media groups that can, when they choose to, spend what’s necessary to modify digital content for selected textbooks, “small publishers often have to say no,” O’Connor says. As a result, “there are just fewer options for people who aren’t using Blackboard and WebCT, and more hurdles to getting it.”

Supporters hope that adoption of the common cartridge will allow publishers to spend less time and money adapting one textbook’s digital content for multiple course platforms and more time producing more and better content. “This should have the result of broadening choice in content to institutions,” says Catherine Burdt, an analyst at Eduventures, an education research firm. “Colleges would no longer be limited to the content that’s supported by their LMS platform, but could now go out and choose the best content that aligns with what’s happening in their curriculum.”

Less clear is how successful the effort will be at improving the portability of course materials from one learning management system to another. If all the major providers introduce “export capability,” there is significant promise, says Michael Feldstein, who writes the blog e-Literate and is assistant director of the State University of New York Learning Network. “This has the potential to be one of the most important standards to come out in a while, particularly for faculty,” says Feldstein, who notes that his comments here represent his own views, not SUNY’s. “It would become much easier for them to take rich course content and course designs and migrate them from one system to another with far less pain.”

But while easier transferability would obviously benefit the smaller players in the course management market — and ANGEL and Sakai plan to announce today that their systems will soon allow professors to create Common Cartridges for export out of their systems — such a system would only take off if the dominant player in the market, the combined Blackboard/WebCT, eventually does the same. “I’m not sure how excited Blackboard would be about making it easier for faculty to migrate out of their product and into one of their competitors,” says Feldstein.

Chris Vento, senior vice president of technology and product development at Blackboard, was a leading proponent of the IMS Common Cartridge concept when he was a leading official at WebCT before last year’s merger. In an interview, he acknowledged the question lots of others are asking: “What’s in it for Blackboard? Why wouldn’t you just lock up the format and force everybody to use it?” His answer, he says, is that by helping the entire industry, he says, the project cannot help but benefit its biggest player, too.

“This will enable publishers to really do the best job of producing their content, making it richer and better for students and faculty, and more lucrative for publishers from the business perspective,” says Vento. “Anything we can do to enable that content to be built, and more of it and better quality, the more lucrative it is eventually for us.”

Blackboard is fully behind the project, Vento says. Having endorsed the Common Cartridge charter, Blackboard has also committed to incorporating the new standard into its products, and that Blackboard intends to make export of course materials possible out of its platform. “Exactly how that maps to our product roadmap has not been finalized,” he said, “but in the end, we’re all going to have to do this. It’s just a question of when.” There will, he says, “be a lot of pressures to do this.”

That pressure is likely to be intensified because of the public relations pounding Blackboard has taken among many in the academic technology world because of its attempt to patent technology that many people believe is fundamental to e-learning systems. O’Connor of Pearson says he believes Blackboard could benefit from its involvement in the Common Cartridge movement by being seen “as the dominant player, to be someone supporting openness in the community.” He adds: “There is an opportunity for them to mend some of the damage from the patent issue.”

Like virtually all technological advances — or would-be ones — Common Cartridge’s success will ultimately rise and fall, says Burdt of Eduventures, on whether Blackboard and others embrace it. “Everything comes down to adoption,” she says. “The challenge with every standard is the adoption model. Some are out the door too early. Some evolve too early and are eclipsed by substitutes. For others, suppliers decide not to support it for various reasons.”

Those behind the Common Cartridge believe it’s off to a good start with the large number of disparate parties not only involved in creating it, but already committing to incorporate it into their offerings.

Yet even as they launch this standard, some of them are already looking ahead to the next challenge. While the Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, will allow for easier movement of digital course materials into and out of course management systems, it does not ensure that users will be able to do the same thing with third-party e-learning tools (like subject-specific tutoring modules) that are not part of course management systems, or with the next generation of tools that may emerge down the road. For that, the same parties would have to reach a similar agreement on a standard for “tool interoperability,” which is next on the IMS agenda.

“This is only one step,” Pearson’s O’Connor says of the Common Cartridge. But it is, he says, an important one.

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology and distance education are linked at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

The Global Technology Revolution 2020 ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2006/RAND_TR303.pdf

Questions
What are the most significant changes expected in higher education by the Year 2025?
What major universities are now experimenting on the leading edge of such changes?

Answers
Answer 1 --- Cluster and Grid Computing! The first test linked Caltech, Fermilab,
UC San Diego, the University of Florida, and the University of Wisconsin

What's Microsoft been up to in grid/distributed computing? The company's not talking, but we've ferreted out some interesting details about the hush-hush "Bigtop" project. Our sources say it involves loosely coupled machines, and perhaps even a new version of Windows. Read our story for more details on what "Bigtop" could be, and when to expect it.
Jim Lauderback, What's New from Ziff Davis, December 30, 2004

From Syllabus News on September 24, 2002

Stanford Online Press Gets 'Clustering' Software

Stanford's HighWire Press, an online publisher of scientific and medical publications for researchers and institutions, has licensed "clustering" software that will allow it to organize its content into easy-to-navigate clusters for end-users. HighWire licensed the Clustering Engine and Enterprise Publisher from Vivisimo, Inc. to organize search results and publish larger document subsets on its master site. HighWire will offer the products to its own publishing customers for use on their journal websites. "HighWire Press now has 13 million online articles, so researchers need tools to reduce, refine, and tunnel into search results," said John Sack, director of HighWire. The new software, he added, "will help liberate readers from the need to make overly specific queries. Instead, they can recognize interesting topic clusters and drill down from there, in the `I know it when I see it' style."

For more information, visit: http://highwire.stanford.edu .

"What Is Grid Computing, Anyway?" by Tim McDonald, NewsFactor Network July 24, 2002 --- http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18722.html

One good way to gauge a new technology's degree of acceptance is to observe whether it has moved out of the laboratory and onto store shelves -- from science to commerce. According to that measure, grid computing is just coming of age.

Often called the next big thing in global Internet technology, grid computing employs clusters of locally or remotely networked machines to work on specific computational projects.

One well-known example of grid computing -- sometimes called distributed or clustered computing -- is the ongoing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in which thousands of users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space.

From Science to Commerce

Grid computing traditionally has been useful to researchers working on scientific or technical problems -- much like the SETI project -- that require a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.

But while this technology was once exclusively the province of academics in fields like biomedicine and weather forecasting, it has recently been making a strong foray into potentially lucrative e-commerce sectors. Although clustering has been used for several years as a load-balancing technique by server hardware manufacturers, grid computing now seems to be coming of age for other applications as well.

"Grid computing has advanced to the point now that there are products out there like Sun's Grid Engine Enterprise Edition," Aberdeen Group analyst Bill Claybrook told NewsFactor.

Much like a load-balancing server cluster, Sun's Grid Engine software lets organizations create networked grids to share resources on a wider scale and to allocate processing resources according to department priorities.

Grid Computing Components

Essentially, grids are built from clusters of computer servers joined together over a local area network (LAN) or over the Internet.

While several grids that run over the Internet -- like the SETI project -- have been built with proprietary software, there are several development tools that can facilitate the growth and adoption of grid computing.

One of those tools is Globus, a research and development project focused on helping software developers apply the grid concept.

The Globus toolkit, the group's primary offering, is a set of components that can be used to develop grid applications. For each component in the toolkit, Globus provides an API (application programmer interface) for use by software developers.

Power to the People

Research scientists historically have been attracted to grid computing because it uses the power of idle computers to work on difficult computational problems.

Proponents of grid computing say the technology will enable universities and research institutions to share their supercomputers, servers and storage capacity, allowing them to perform massive calculations quickly and relatively cheaply.

In line with those expectations, HP recently announced that a 9.2-teraflop supercomputer soon will be connected to the Department of Energy's Science Grid. When installed, it will be the largest supercomputer attached to a grid anywhere in the world, according to the company.

Sharing Data

Until now, the problem with grid computing has been a lack of common software for developers to work with, largely because grids rely on Internet-based software.

In an effort to spur broader adoption of grids, the National Science Foundation established the US$12.1 million Middleware Initiative last year, and the agency has recently released software and other tools designed to make working on grids easier for scientists and engineers.

"Scientists are now sharing data and instrumentation on an unprecedented scale, and other geographically distributed groups are beginning to work together in ways that were previously impossible," according to the Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support Center.

First Gaming Grid

In a real-world example of grid computing, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Butterfly.net announced in May that they would soon release a computing grid for the video game industry. Butterfly.net spent two years building the grid, which distributes games across a network of server farms using IBM e-business infrastructure technology.

Massively multiplayer games (MMGs) historically have been run on mirrored servers that essentially duplicate copies of the MMG universe to balance user loads.

While this technique is designed to reduce latency for all users -- so that each set of servers behaves responsively to user actions -- the mirroring technique limits the number of players who can participate at one time in the same game universe.

When load balances increase, the typical MMG response has been to add more servers, copy the game universe and spill the extra load into that new copy.

Now, however, Butterfly.net's grid technology provides "cross-server sentinels" that supports the interaction of millions of players in one world, with server boundaries invisible to players. According to the company, the extension of grid computing to the gaming world lets game developers support a limitless number of users in their MMGs.

'Taking Hold of an Industry'

Companies are lining up to jump on the Butterfly bandwagon. This week, for example, software development site CollabNet announced it will work with Butterfly.net to develop an online environment that lets game developers test their games.

"IBM's been extremely busy on a number of fronts in grid, in terms of investing resources and winning new partners and customers," IBM spokesperson Jim Larkin told NewsFactor.

"Butterfly is one of the key examples thus far of how IBM has worked with another company to help develop a computing grid that is in the commercial arena," Larkin said. "It's a clear example of how grid is taking hold of an industry."

"Digipede to Showcase .NET Grid Computing Solutions at Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference," PR Web, June 19, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb400497.htm

"Grids Unleash the Power of Many," by John Gartner, MIT's Technology Review, January 14, 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/wo_gartner011405.asp?trk=nl

Computer scientists in three states -- West Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado -- are each combining their technology resources into separate computer grids that will give researchers, universities, private companies and citizens access to powerful supercomputers.

The project designers say these information aqueducts will encourage business development, accelerate scientific research, and improve the efficiency of government.

"Grid computing will provide 1,000 times more business opportunities than what we see over the Internet today," says Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of grid computing and networking services at MCNC in Research Triangle Park, NC.

MCNC is spearheading North Carolina's statewide grid development that currently includes seven universities including North Carolina State, Duke, and the University of North Carolina.

The North Carolina project -- which has a goal to link 180 institutions -- is encouraging business development through its Start Up Grid Initiative, which allows fledgling companies to plug into the grid for up to nine months free of charge and afterwards at discounted rates, Gentzsch says.

Because raising capital and acquiring technology takes up most of a new company's time, "Startups usually only get to spend 10 percent of their time executing their idea," says Gentzch, who has launched seven companies.

According to a 2003 report by Robert Cohen, a Fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, North Carolina's grid could create 24,000 jobs and boost the state's output by $10.1 billion by 2010 if effectively implemented.

Before statewide grids can become a realit, the software used to share and manage resources needs to be improved to include more standard communication protocols. Gentzsch says the expected release of version 4.0 of the open source Globus Toolkit, which he estimates is used by 90 percent of grid projects, will greatly simplify connecting computers to the grid.

Securing a location's computing resources so that only specified resources are made available for sharing is a significant challenge, Gentzsch says. To protect data files, institutions must "encrypt everything," and configure the grid network so that "the CPU cycles are separated from the disk resources."

Gentzsch estimates that advanced computing resource utilization is just 25 percent, and grid computing could increase the efficiency to 75 percent.

"Back to Basics and the Next Big Thing," by Phillip D. Long, Syllabus, August 2002, pp/ 10-11 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590

Grid Computing: The Next Big Thing

The next big thing to transform the Internet is likely to come from work going on with the grid. The grid is an infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of people, institutions, and resources.

It may be useful to recall that the birth of the Web came from a desire to share research papers among large numbers of particle physicists doing “big science” at CERN, the Swiss research center. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision has changed all our lives. In the world of international science, its impact has been staggering. Recognizing this, the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC), the UK analog of the National Science Foundation, has embarked on a £98 million project called the Core e-Science Programme, managed by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of the UK Research Councils. The e-Science project proposes to connect scientists with expensive remote facilities, teraflop computers, and information resources stored in dedicated databases. Add to these resources higher level services such as workflow, transactions, data mining, and knowledge discovery, and you begin to glimpse what’s envisioned. The grid is the architecture proposed to make this a reality.

What kinds of research are we talking about? Everything from particle physics (what goes around comes around) to basic medical investigation. For example, our understanding of even basic human physiology remains terribly limited. We don’t know how multiple parameters interact over time in fundamental processes like heart rate, blood pressure, and other cardiovascular indicators. Imagine if 100,000 people volunteered to wear real-time monitoring devices so that their daily metabolic functions were recorded and analyzed in real time. The volume of data is enormous but that’s just the beginning. We would want to compare how the data relate to the activities of the people as they went about their daily lives. In the end, predicting the likelihood of an impending physical problem becomes a potential reality. Just like the work underway to provide predictive intervention for the replacement of computing hardware, you can imagine high risk heart patients wearing proactive monitors that page them to head for a cardiac care unit because the data indicate a potential problem in the next 24 hours. Today it may seem like science fiction, but with research using the grid, it’s emerging into possible science fact.

This may seem far a field from the classroom. How far it is remains to be seen of course, but there are people working today on applying the potential of the grid to learning management or virtual learning environments. Better descriptions about teaching processes and the learning objects needed, along with work on metadata for educational objects, are underway. So stay tuned for more about the “next big thing” in future columns.

References

Laurillard, D. The Changing University. 1996.
http://itech1.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper13/paper13.html

Metadata for Education Group
www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj

The full article is at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590

CLUSTER AND GRID COMPUTING REFERENCES --- http://www.ic.uff.br/~vefr/research/clcomp/clustrefs.html

"Time to Hop on the Gridwagon," by Daithí Ó hAnluain, Wired News, July 26, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,54098,00.html

"Grid computing was the reserve of 'big science' five years ago," says Catlett, "But in five years, it will be completely pedestrian. I was working on a Cray Supercomputer in 1985, and my laptop would blow it away now!"

That's for the future. In the meantime, Grids are currently deploying among Fortune 2000 companies to deal with everything from batch analysis of financial data, trend analysis of point-of-sale data, and design, engineering and manufacture automation. Oh, and collaboration as well.

This last may seem a surprising tangent to the pure processing power that grids typically deliver, but collaboration and data analysis are two sides of the same logistical coin. Engineers or scientists are increasingly collaborating on projects and testing their theories across the same grid. They are also dealing with terabytes of data.

It's one of the moves that makes integration with Web services so obvious to grid gurus, like IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of technology strategy.

"Grid computing is really the natural evolution of the Internet. This is really looking at the Internet, with all its promise of universal connectivity and reach, and making it work far better by bringing the qualities of service that people are used to in enterprise computing, and ... (what) we all have gotten used to in utilities like electricity (and the) telephone."

Ultimately, then, the grid could provide computing power on a utility model for consumers or one-off projects or simply as a means to outsource processing.

Nonetheless, big science will still be a major part of the grid's future. A case in point is the TeraGrid, which goes live next spring and is set to steal the No. 2 spot from IBM's ASCI White in the world supercomputer rankings.

"The Earth Simulator is essentially a big computer grid," Catlett says. "A bunch of computers put in a grid to get the power. It's a short step from putting supercomputers in a grid across the room to doing it across the country, or across the world."

When completed, the TeraGrid will include 13.6 teraflops of Linux Cluster computing power distributed at the four TeraGrid sites, capable of managing and storing more than 450 terabytes of data. It will be connected through a network 40 Gbps, which will become a 50 to 80 Gbps network or 16 times faster than today's fastest research network.

It will be used for National Science Foundation-sponsored projects and commercial applications.

So where will it all end? Nowhere in sight, that's for sure.

"We have the genome sequence and now we're working on the protein folding, and it won't be long before the life sciences are looking at whole life systems," Baird says. "The nature of grid computing is going to allow for bigger and bigger science applications. As long as we keep on putting out more power, people will design better applications for it."

There will be one paradigm shift that may be noticed only for what's missing: the end of technology.

"We're entering the post-technology age where users will be able to get on with what they want to do without worrying about making the technology work," IBM's Hawk says.

Service	Currently Offer	Offered a Year Ago
Campus testing center for distance students	73%	69%
Distance ed specific faculty training	96%	92%
Online admissions	84%	77%
Online counseling / advising	51%	43%
Online library services	96%	96%
Online plagiarism evaluation	54%	48%
Online registration	89%	87%
Online student orientation for distance classes	75%	66%
Online textbook sales	72%	66%

	Enrollment, Fall 2002	Enrollment, Fall 2006	Increase	Compound Annual Growth Rate
Doctoral/Research	258,489	566,725	308,236	21.7%
Master’s	335,703	686,337	350,634	19.6%
Baccalaureate	130,677	170,754	40,077	6.9%
Community colleges	806,391	1,904,296	1,097,905	24.0%
Specialized	71,710	160,268	88,558	22.3%

	Public	Private Nonprofit	Private For-Profit
Fall 2002	66.1%	34.0%	34.6%
Fall 2003	65.4%	36.6%	62.1%
Fall 2004	74.7%	43.8%	48.6%
Fall 2005	71.7%	46.9%	54.9%
Fall 2006	74.1%	48.6%	49.5%

	Doctoral/Research	Master’s	Baccalaureate	Associate’s	Specialized
Expecting increase	87.5%	84.0%	75.6%	87.8%	75.3%

ACC 460 Government and Non-Profit Accounting

Rapid Shift in Attitude

"How to Be an Online Student and Survive in the Attempt," by Maria José Viñas, Chronicle of Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 11, 2008 --- Click Here