10.5 Million PreK-12 Students Will Attend Classes Online by 2014

The Journal

"More than 2 million preK-12 students take some form of schooling online right now--whether attending a virtual school for all their classes or just taking one or more courses via the Internet. But while the vast majority of students will continue to take all of their courses in physical classrooms over the next five years, the number of students taking courses online will jump to more than 10 million by 2014, according to data released recently by research firm Ambient Insight."

College for $99 a Month

This is the best article I’ve read in 6 months … it’s about a disruptive higher education model, the remaining “shields” around public higher education, and the cross-subsidy losses that come with increased efficiency.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php?page=all

“The cost of storing and communicating information over the Internet had fallen to almost nothing. Electronic course content in standard introductory classes had become a low-cost commodity. The only expensive thing left in higher education was the labor, the price of hiring a smart, knowledgeable person to help students when only a person would do. And the unique Smarthinking call- center model made that much cheaper, too. By putting these things together, Smith could offer introductory college courses à la carte, at a price that seemed to be missing a digit or two, or three: $99 per month, by subscription. Economics tells us that prices fall to marginal cost in the long run.”

“Which means the day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people.”

What should we be doing now … so we, public community and technical colleges, can be more prepared than were the music industry (for iTunes) and the newspapers (for Craigslist)?

Google Announces New Translator Gadget for Websites

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_announces_new_translator_gadget_for_website.php

Google is now giving webmasters the ability to prompt users for automatic translations of their pages. With the new website translator gadget, site owners can paste a short snippet of code into their websites and instantly increase their reach to up to 51 languages.