Digital Learning in ‘Inside Higher Ed’ This Week

Several issues important to readers of "Inside Digital Learning" received coverage in Inside Higher Ed in the last week. Among them:

• Career Education Corporation, a publicly traded for-profit college company that has shrunk significantly from its 2010 peak enrollment of more than 100,000 and 100 campuses, has announced the purchase of Trident University International, a fully online for-profit institution with about 4,000 students. Career Education is paying between $35 million and $44 million for Trident, which was purchased by its current owner, Summit Partners, from the Touro University System for $190 million in 2007. Career Education says it plans to merge Trident with its American InterContinental University institution; American InterContinental and Colorado Technical University are Career Ed's two remaining institutions.
• The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia accepted a staff recommendation Tuesday to move forward with administrative processes that could lead to the revocation of Virginia International University’s certificate to operate. An audit done by the agency uncovered concerns about academic quality in VIU’s online programs, including concerns about “rampant plagiarism” by students; online classes that are “patently deficient” in terms of quality and content; and the admission of “large numbers” of students with inadequate English proficiency.
• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is exploring how to more openly share its publications, data, software and educational materials with the public. MIT’s Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access, which began work 18 months ago, published a series of recommendations for the institution to strengthen its open-access policies on March 18. These include broadening the existing MIT Faculty Open Access Policy to cover student publications.