A couple of announcements this week point to a growing role for massively open online courses in K-12. The Saylor Foundation, the most interesting nonprofit in open education that no one seems to have heard of, launched a program of Common-Core aligned K-12 courses. And Lumen Learning, David Wiley’s startup which I wrote about earlier [...]

Colleges and universities awarded 5.1 percent more degrees in 2011-12, despite a 1.6 percent dip in enrollment, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Community colleges lost 250,000 students, but granted 8 percent more associate degrees. The number of bachelor’s degrees rose by 4.3 percent.

California community colleges could add courses in short summer and winter sessions — if students pay more, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. A bill that passed the Assembly this week would let colleges charge non-resident rates — $200 per unit — for new classes instead of the usual fee of $46 per unit. Students who pay more [...]

With the help of Labor Department grants, community colleges are accelerating job training programs aimed at adults and “stacking” workforce credentials, reports Inside Higher Ed. Working with employers, Massachusetts’ 15 community colleges have accelerated training for jobs in health care, advanced manufacturing, information technology, biotechnology, green energy and financial services. In addition to prior-learning assessment and [...]

A music lesson in Virani’s classroom When Neil Virani walked into his middle school special education classroom at Mulholland Middle School, part of the LA Unified School district, three years ago, he encountered a roomful of students with a range of cognitive, emotional and physical challenges. But the most toxic problem they had to combat [...]

Last month, the state of New York administered English Language Arts and mathematics assessments to students in grades 3-8. For the first time, the assessments were aligned with the Common Core State Standards, a set of standards for what students should know at each grade level in these subjects that 45 states across the country [...]

More Americans than ever have earned bachelor’s degrees, putting them ahead of international rivals, but the gap is narrowing, according to new figures from the U.S. Department of Education. The department’s annual Condition of Education report, which tracks all levels of education, finds that the percentage of American 25- to 29-year-olds with at least bachelor’s [...]

Last month, the state of New York administered English Language Arts and mathematics assessments to students in grades 3-8. For the first time, the assessments were aligned with the Common Core State Standards, a set of standards for what students should know at each grade level in these subjects that 45 states across the country [...]

A music lesson in Virani’s classroom When Neil Virani walked into his middle school special education classroom at Mulholland Middle School, part of the LA Unified School district, three years ago, he encountered a roomful of students with a range of cognitive, emotional and physical challenges. But the most toxic problem they had to combat [...]

Lisa Dieker went around the room asking her middle-school students what they did over the weekend. CJ went to see the movie “Here Comes the Boom” with her boyfriend. Ed played in a basketball game and Kevin posted new dance videos to YouTube. “Did you work on any art projects?” Dieker asked Maria, a girl [...]

Somewhere midway through his sophomore year of college at Florida Atlantic University, Christopher Clevenger started to question his aeronautical engineering major. He liked the coursework, and was doing well at it, but when he thought about his job prospects, the future seemed bleak. “It would be me, a computer screen and a phone,” he said. [...]

ORLANDO―Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida (UCF) had spread out over the room in small groups. One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed [...]