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Yesterday President Obama formally announced his proposed innvestment in community colleges as tool to revitalize the American workforce and economy. Among the key initiatives:

Community college challenge grants, to help underfunded colleges that are dealing with limited capacity and to build partnerships with schools and businesses.

• The Access and Completion Fund, to provide performance-based scholarships and give colleges the tools to design more programs around work schedules.
• Modernization of community-college facilities, with $2.5 billion to help renovate facilities and keep up with maintenance costs. The renovations will create jobs, Obama said.
• Open online courses, to create options online as a tool that some think can be more effective than classroom instruction alone.
• 5 million additional community-college graduates by 2020

Read more at CNN.

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This blog has had several posts sharing some of the ongoing national conversation about the future business model for higher education. Until this decade, content has been higher education's strategic advantage. No more. Increasingly, not only is content freely available but the design and delivery of the content in form of lessons and assessments through Open Courseware and Learning Objects repositories. Want socially constructed learning? Try interest groups through Linked-In, Facebook and other community platforms.

Now the US Government is planning to own and make freely available courses that are part of a "National Skills College." Draft langauge for the program calls for $50 million to develop and house courses plus "the plan would provide $9 billion over 10 years to help community colleges develop and improve programs related to preparing students for good jobs, and a $10 billion loan fund (at low or no interest) for community college facilities (Inside Higher Education)."

According to the draft materials from the administration, the program would support the development of 20-25 "high quality" courses a year, with a mix of high school and community college courses. Initial preference would go to "career oriented" courses. The courses would be owned by the government and would be free for anyone to take. Courses would be selected competitively, through peer review, for support. And the courses would be "modular" or "object based" such that they would be "interoperable" and could be offered with a variety of technology platforms.

The ...

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A meta analysis of published reseach on online learning shows "that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction," according to the US Department of Education. The agency looked at over 1,000 studies and whittled them down to 51 that exhibited the appropriate combination of research design and investigations that contrasted an online to a face-to-face condition, measured student learning outcomes, and provided adequate information to calculate an effect size.

The report is sure to stir up, rather than settle debate. First of all, the fact that only 51 studies out of 1,000 met the research criteria shows how much more needs to be done to understand and measure learning in the online context. The report also found that media and quizzing, two tools advocated by online learning advocates, do not appear to improve learning in the studies considered. Regarding media, the study concludes

The fact that the majority of studies found no significant difference across media types is
consistent with the theoretical position that the medium is simply a carrier of content and is
unlikely to affect learning per se (p. 40)

What ...

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Tough economic times are great for doomsayers and higher education is having its fair share. (This this recent and that recent Learning Curve posts.) Our own Chancellor and Governor are joining the chorus. Speaking at Jobs for the Future, an event sponsored by the Lumina Foundation, ChancellorFingerhut said,

"I want to grab our leaders by the lapels and say, 'Don't you see what's going on around here?'.... The fact is that the ability of future generations of this state to sustain our commitment to a vibrant system of higher education is very much at risk."

Southern New Hampshire University President Paul LeBlanc had the best lines:

"It's appalling how little genuine innovation has gone on in higher education... [it] took us 25 years to get the overhead projector from the bowling alley to the classroom"

He described faculty at his institution as "a thousand points of No."

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Rahm Emanuel, talking to party leadersehip, alluded to significant federal investment in Community Colleges for workforce development. The President’s goal to help 5 million more students through the community college system in the next 10 years than is currently projected. There are now 11.5 million students in the country’s two-year institutions, and some experts predict that this figure will nearly double in the coming decade. Accompanying the money is an anticipated overhaul of legislation related to workforce development policies and programs:

“In the past, our job training system in vocational ed has basically been a program per problem,” Emanuel said. “We’ve not had a comprehensive view. What I mean by program is that if you were a veteran, you had a program. If you were a displaced worker because of competition, we had a program. But, we really need to not just have a program per problem but a comprehensive view of job training, what it is supposed to accomplish, and then set up a program based on that.”

Be ready for highly focused, outcome specific training. Expect much of it to be at least partly delivered by online learning. See the whole video after the jump.