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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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“A school’s name opens more doors than many others,” Bertrand explains. “Not only did college open doors, but the school’s name did. So if you have Yale on your resume, it felt like an automatic yes, you’ll get a certain job. So I felt like Ivy Leagues would help me out more than certain colleges would.”

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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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President Obama has doubled Pell Grant funding since 2008.

When voters go to the polls to choose the nation’s next president in November, they’ll be making a choice that has important implications for schooling in the next four years.

We’ve asked a pair of political scientists to analyze the education philosophies of the two major party candidates, and what these will mean for both students and educators—and here’s what they had to say. (Click on the headlines to read the full articles.)

Romney calls for smaller federal role in education

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has offered a program of education policy goals that calls for a smaller federal role in both K-12 and higher education, modifying but not eliminating No Child Left Behind, more school choice, and using the private sector as a provider of support and educational services for students. These policy proposals will not dramatically overhaul the U.S. education system, but they are politically smart and attainable and could lead to small but still important improvements in education…

Education is a public good, not a commodity

This fall you will most likely not hear the differences on education between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney framed in these terms: as a public good versus a commodity. Yet, in the broadest strokes, this is what is at stake in the presidential election of 2012—two very different visions of education, and two very different ways to solve the problems that the American system of education faces. One based on a principle of universality, the other based on market forces…

Tell us what you think

Who do you plan to vote for in November, and why? What are the issues that matter most to you, and what do you think about each candidate’s position on these issues?

Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

See also:

Obama: Ryan’s economic plan costly to schools

Obama renews call for aid to halt teacher layoffs

Expert: Federal school reform plan is wrong

Romney: American kids get ‘third-world’ education

Fact check: Romney off on Obama’s love for unions

Romney tells Philly teachers that class size doesn’t matter

Mitt Romney’s plan to federalize education reform

Both state and federal legislators have been considering a wave of bills concerning online privacy in schools and the workplace.

Should a university be able to edit a student’s Facebook profile or check his private tweets? Absolutely not, said the Delaware state legislature, as it recently passed the first state law to forbid schools from requiring students to divulge personal social media login information.

Signed into law by Gov. Jack Markell on July 20, HB309 bans both public and private higher-education institutions from committing a range of student privacy violations.

Delaware colleges and universities cannot require or request that students turn over login information, nor can they ask students to log on to their personal social networking sites in the presence of a school representative.

The law also bars schools from tracking students’ personal online activities or requesting that the student add a school representative on a social networking site. A school could not demand, for example, that a student approve a teacher as a Facebook friend.

Originally written to include primary and secondary schools as well, the final version of the law limits its scope only to post-secondary institutions.

Legislators reconsidered the K-12 portion of the bill after hearing concerns that schools working with younger children would deal more frequently with cyber bullying problems, said Damian DeStefano, legislative aide to the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Rep. Darryl Scott.

In the wake of several high-profile cyber bullying cases, schools have been under increasing pressure to monitor instances of students bullying each other via social media.

“We wouldn’t want to handcuff a school in its ability to investigate cases of bullying,” he said.

Another factor that complicates student privacy laws in the K-12 space: the rise of “bring your own device” (BYOD) programs designed to get technology in the hands of more students.

When students are bringing their personal devices into the classroom for instruction, and teachers need to monitor those devices, “to what degree does that make everything on the student’s device available for school review?” said Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, in a phone call with eSchool News.

“Should a student be able to password-protect access to their device? Should the school be able to demand the access password on those devices? Tricky issues,” Willard wrote in a subsequent eMail message.

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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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