In 2008, only 10 percent of colleges checked applicants’ Facebook pages; now, one in four do.

College applicants shouldn’t shut down their various social media accounts, experts said, but they should heavily edit their online comments, photos, and videos, as thousands of applications were marred last year by scandalous Facebook and Twitter activity.

It’s no secret that college and university admissions officers run semi-frequent social media checks of prospective students, but the practice has turned increasingly dismal for students who failed, in one way or another, to exercise Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube caution.

Admissions officers who responded to a national survey this fall said the percentage of applications that had been negatively affected by social media searches had nearly tripled, from 12 percent in 2010 to 35 percent in 2011.

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More than half of community college students require a remedial class.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is awarding upwards of $100,000 to developers who propose apps and online tools that help high school students prepare for college, fund their schooling, and complete the sometimes circuitous application process.

The College Knowledge Challenge started Sept. 27 at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., where 100 developers gathered for a “hack-a-thon”–an effort to create useful technologies aimed at better preparing incoming college students as the need for remedial classes continues to rise across the U.S.

Anyone can submit a proposal to the Gates Foundation through the organization’s website. Winners of the $2.5 million grant competition will be announced in January, according to the foundation.

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More than 600 school districts have iPad programs.

At Georgia College, educational technology could spawn more educational technology.

A group of graduate students at the Milledgeville, Ga.-based campus have used Apple’s iBookstore to publish a video- and image-laden eTextbook filled with information and advice for educators hoping to better incorporate technology in their classroom lessons.

The eBook, “Using Technology in Education,” is a student-created textbook available for the iPad and available for free in the iBookstore, which was introduced in January.

Nine graduate students in Associate Professor Chris Greer’s Advanced Technology for Teachers course researched, filmed, and photographed the text and images used in the ed-tech textbook, covering myriad topics from social media use in education and document cameras to advances in assistive technology and eReaders.

Greer said his class’s eTextbook is a good example of how technology can make education more efficient and affordable without sacrificing quality.

“This movement toward electronic textbooks and tablet computers could revolutionize K-12 and higher education,” he said. “Digital textbooks are inexpensive and can be updated more quickly and easily. Our textbook strives to look at technology and education together.”

Greer said making textbooks available for iPads will have quite an impact in K-12 and higher education as more educators adopt the devices for classroom use. More than 600 school districts have an iPad program, he said.

“It’s a cool, well-designed eBook,” said Greer, associate professor of instructional technology in the John H. Lounsbury College of Education, who added that Apple deemed his students’ work exemplary. “After we submitted it, no revisions were needed. The textbook passed Apple’s screening process, which speaks to the quality of the students’ work.”

Twelve percent of college students who answered a recent survey said they owned an iPad, the Apple product that has launched a tablet computing revolution.

Glen Allen High School, Henrico County’s newest school building, opened in September 2010.

(Editor’s note: This article marks the debut of a new section in eSchool News, called Building Excellence, that will provide news and information to help school and district leaders as they plan, design, construct, and equip leading-edge facilities.)

Before a ribbon is sliced by comically oversized scissors, before a brick is laid or an architect is chosen, before voters approve funding for a sparkling new school building, there is only a plan.

The doors to a new school are thrown open by students, parents, and teachers many years after economic and population growth call for more classrooms in a city, town, or county. Researchers and planners use a district’s public relations apparatus to start talks with residents, myriad public forums are held, committees are formed, reports are issued, school boundaries are rearranged, architectural firms are interviewed, and finally, sometimes after five years, construction begins.

Two or three years after the first piece of sod is laid, the school opens.

Even in the nation’s slumping economy, while local and state government budgets are cut to the bone, U.S. schools and colleges are expected to spend $74 billion on renovation and construction in 2012 and $85 billion in 2013, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau projections.

Spending on school construction and renovation has dipped since the economic downturn that began in 2008, and there is some concern among superintendents that school construction funds for projects over the next decade will come with—at the very least—nominal tax increases that must be approved by a majority of voters.

That’s why officials are determined to keep the public involved and to avoid the kind of top-down approach that could alienate neighbors, parents, school board members, and state legislators.

School division officials, local planners, and other decision makers from Henrico County Public Schools, a district of 48,000 students in 71 schools north of Richmond, Va., recently guided eSchool News editors through the construction of Glen Allen High School, the county’s newest school building, which opened in September 2010.

In the process, they shared the lessons they have learned from completing many such construction projects—and the secrets of their success.

“It was really an incredibly complex and participatory process on behalf of a lot of people before it ever even got to the school board,” Henrico County Superintendent Patrick Russo said of the long process to plan and fund Glen Allen High School, now home to 1,100 students and 80 staff members. “People would be surprised by what goes into it.”

Two universities gave millions to Coursera this week.

A dozen of the country’s top universities will make courses available for free on the open online class site Coursera by the beginning of 2013. The announcement was made on that same day that investors — including two campuses — invested millions in the web-based learning site.

By January, Coursera officials expect the site to offer 100 free courses in the arts, computer sciences, health, mathematics, history, literature, and other disciplines. All courses will be free for any individual with a computer and internet connection to enroll.

Coursera was founded in the fall of 2011 by Stanford Computer Science Professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, and in April 2012 announced that Princeton, University of Michigan, Stanford and Penn were entering into agreement with Coursera to bring course content online for free.

Coursera has seen more than 680,000 students from 190 countries and more than 1.6 million course enrollments across its 43 courses.

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More than 680,000 students have taken a Coursera class.

The University of Virginia will make four of its courses available for free online in 2013 after the campus’s governing board last month cited a lack of web-based courses in its controversial ouster of President Teresa Sullivan.

But advocates for online education said the university’s partnership with for-profit internet learning site Coursersa—which announced partnerships with 12 universities July 17—should be seen as a tepid embrace of nontraditional courses, not as a momentous shift toward a new learning model.

UVa. will post courses in physics, history, and philosophy to Coursera, part of the massive open online course (MOOC) movement that includes other free educational websites like edX, Udacity, and the Khan Academy.

The courses will be available to anyone with an internet connection. UVa. students will not earn credits upon completion of each Coursera class, whereas students at the University of Washington soon will be able to take Coursera classes for credit.

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Seven in 10 students said using lecture capture helped improve their final course grades.

The proliferation of online courses and the flipped learning model has created demand in higher education for lecture capture systems, and officials at technology giant Dell said July 9 they might be able to meet that need.

Dell will bundle lecture capture hardware and software into its server infrastructure for colleges and universities after partnering with popular lecture-recording company Echo360.

Along with the usual batch of networking equipment, servers, and storage, colleges will now have access to Echo360’s lecture capture system, which is used on more than 500 campuses worldwide.

Officials from the two companies said bundling the lecture capture equipment with Dell’s education technology services would help campus IT officials get lecture recordings up and running faster, and with less fuss.

Students can watch Echo360 lectures live or after class, and professors can use built-in “activity heat maps” to track student viewing trends and which class topics are creating the most discussion among students.

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Ed-tech innovators received investment capital 127 times in 2011.

Big-money investors poured more money into educational technology companies in 2011 than during the heady dot-com days of the late-1990s, according to a national market analysis that credits investor knowledge, in part, for the funding boom.

After a slump in investment capital during the mid and late 2000s, companies focusing on classroom technologies—including social media-centric solutions—are benefiting from a never-before-seen influx of funding from private investors and investment firms.

In a report released this week, “Fall of the Wall: Capital Flows to Education Innovation,” GSV Advisors, which assists education entrepreneurs and tracks investments in educational companies and products, documented a steady rise in investment that peaked last year.

Educational technology innovators received investment capital 127 times in 2011, according to GSV, well above the 106 education companies that were funded in 1999, when investors rushed to technology startups during the dot-com boom that created an economic bubble that popped in 2000.

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Six in 10 students said in a recent survey that they forgo buying required books because textbooks are too pricey.

Reining in exorbitant textbook costs is no longer a campus-by-campus venture: A unified approach, powered by EDUCAUSE and the Internet2 consortium’s NET+ cloud-based collaborative purchasing program, could make low-cost electronic textbooks available now, ed-tech leaders hope.

Colleges experimenting with digital textbooks can take months—sometimes years—to negotiate with publishers before their school’s modest eBook program is introduced to students now paying upwards of $1,100 a year for books.

This fall, campus technology leaders will closely track the results of an expansive eTextbook pilot program ranging across 28 campuses, creating what many in higher education believe could be a model for quickly bringing low-cost textbook options to students who, in some cases, have stopped buying required texts because they cannot afford the books.

The participating schools will receive deep discounts on textbook orders, because the colleges will ensure that every student uses the textbook’s free electronic version. Guaranteed participation in the digital textbook effort makes this program different from myriad others tried on campuses across the country.

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Most MBA@UNC class sections have a dozen students.

The ever-present temptations of Facebook, Twitter, eMail, instant messaging, text messages, and online shopping are no match for face-to-face-to-face-to-face interaction.

The cure for the perpetual web-based distractions of class time in the online classroom might be webcams that put every face of every student on screen for everyone to see. Accountability might be the key to holding students’ attention.

Officials from the University of North Carolina’s online MBA program, known as MBA@UNC, said an online learning platform designed and operated by a Maryland-based company called 2tor has created a web-based classroom more engaged than any they have seen.

In 2tor’s online classroom, streaming video brings students—usually in small class sections—to each other in boxes posted across the computer screen. The instructor also appears in a box, speaking to each student face to face.

“Around here, we like to call it Hollywood Squares,” said Doug Shackelford, associate dean of UNC’s business school, referring to the old TV show featuring celebrities lined up in a cross section of windows. “The way we’re doing things, it’s much more intense than what happens in the traditional classroom. There’s no back row. Everyone sits in the front row.”

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