Helix Uses Storytelling, Adaptive Technology To Personalize Learning

Campus Technology - April 25, 2012

Altius Education has launched a developer preview of Helix, an online learning environment designed to personalize higher education.

The new tool "combines the powers of storytelling, big data, cognitive science, and current technologies to fundamentally change the way students experience online learning," according to information released by the company.

The storytelling aspect of the platform is designed to add relevance to courses and improve engagement and retention by creating a narrative framework for students based on their interests and educational goals.

At the beginning of a course, students are asked to choose a story that applies to them. To use an example from the Altius Web site, students taking an introductory photography course are asked if they are interested in sports, wedding, or safari photography. It then provides information about why the course is important to their aspirations and what topics within the course they should pay special attention to. Read the full article>

Transitioning More Community College Students to 4-Year Institutions

Whiteboard Advisors - April 22, 2012

In case you missed it, Altius Education announced the launch of an online learning environment called Helix at the ASU Ed Innovation Summit last week. For those who play attention to online learning and innovation among community colleges, Helix is worth checking out. The team at Altius knows an awful lot about the drivers of community college success. Founder Paul Freedman’s brainchild, Ivy Bridge College is driving completion rates –last time we checked—significantly higher than that of traditional two-year institutions.

According to the release, Helix uses data and relevant stories to create personalized education. But Helix is not your father’s LMS: Altius has created a set of tools and solutions tailored to the unique needs of first generation college goers and other student groups that often struggle with 2-year completion – and all too rarely transition into 4 year institutions. (According to the Center for American Progress, only about half of students who enroll in community colleges intending to obtain a two-year degree or transfer to a four-year program successfully do so within six years.) The Helix launch has already garnered media attention – check out Forbes and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read the full article>

Ryan Busch Interviews Paul Freedman of Altius Education About the Release of Helix at the ASU Education Innovation Summit

Today's Campus - April 24, 2012

Paul Freedman and I spent a few minutes together at the recent ASU Education Innovation Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Sky Song complex. Paul's company, Altius Education just released a new idea in higher education called Helix--and he's looking for feedback. You should visit www.MeetHelix.com for more information. I hope you also enjoy my performance at the start of the video as I try to remember the name of the conference! Enjoy! Watch the video>

Education Innovation Heats Up in the Desert

Forbes - April 19, 2012

The ASU Skysong Education Innovation Summit has become the can’t-miss education innovation event of the year in just the three years since it was founded—and this year came as close to living up to the hype as anything could (full disclosure: I am a member of the advisory board).

Held at Arizona State University’s Skysong campus from April 16 to April 18, roughly 800 people—from educators to entrepreneurs to investors, thought leaders, and policymakers—crowded this year’s education’s “Davos in the Desert” conference.

As usual, there was a great mix of thoughtful panels and keynotes about how to use innovation to drive educational improvements for all students—not just in the U.S. but in the world—as well as a number of education companies showcasing their wares for investors (with disruptive start-up PresenceLearning winning this year’s pitch contest). Read the full article>

The Flying Car of Higher Education

Huffington Post - February, 19, 2012

Remember when you were a kid and you used to think about the future and what it would look like? I thought for sure that we would have flying cars by now, or that we'd all be living on the moon. When 2001 came around, I have to admit part of me was a little disappointed that it was the new millennium and technology hadn't advanced enough to give us things like robot butlers, flying cars, and houses on the moon. (You know, pretty much how things were on "The Jetsons.")

When I think about higher education today, I feel the same way. I can't believe we're not all driving flying cars yet.

Now some of you well-versed in current scientific events may bring up the fact that there actually is a flying car. (A company called Terrafugia Inc. just completed its first test flight at the beginning of this month.) But Terrafugia's car is also expected to cost $279,000 once it's finished, so a few Silicon Valley tycoons may be able to buy one but I don't think we'll be seeing flying highways any time soon. Read the full article>

At Altius’ Online College, Students Will Learn Through Stories

Xconomy - April 19, 2012

Altius Education, the San Francisco startup that launched the two-year online junior college called Ivy Bridge, now hopes to blossom into a full-fledged, four-year institution called Altius University. And to prepare the way, it’s rolling out a new software platform designed to improve education through “the power of stories.”

Paul Freedman, Altius’ founder and CEO, revealed the new platform yesterday at Arizona State University’s Education Innovation Summit in Scottsdale, AZ. It’s called Helix, and is intended not only to replace the open-source Moodle learning environment currently offered to Ivy Bridge students, but to serve as the backbone for the new university, which is currently being evaluated for accreditation by regulators.

Freedman gave Xconomy an early look at the Helix platform last week. He says Moodle and other learning management systems used by online education companies “are all based on 1999 technology and don’t allow for the level of personalization that you see everywhere else on the Web today.” With Helix—which is currently in beta testing and will be used for actual Ivy Bridge classes starting this August—Altius has set out to build a system that will engage students better by structuring lessons around the real-world scenarios in which knowledge is used. Read the full article>

Altius Education Announces Helix Platform

GettingSmart - April 18, 2012

Paul Friedman, CEO of Altius Education, debuted Helix, a next gen higher learning platform, at the ASU Education Innovation Summit (#eisummit) today.

Altius has been extending access to quality higher education as a transfer institution for several years but Paul was frustrated by the quality of online learning. Looking at trends Paul could see that by 2014 a majority of U.S. college students will take at least part of the education online—that’s 22 million, double what it was last year.

Altius was using Moodle but found it socially isolating, rigid, and detached. When Paul looks at the randomness of what is taught, how it’s taught, and the learning environment, he decided he wanted to “control the stack” to offer a great education. Read the full article>

The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile

TechCrunch - February, 19, 2012

We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!) and raw computing power is taken for granted.

What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. Many of these new startups will be the usual poor clones or feature add-ons to Facebook and Twitter, or poor attempts at doing one feature or another better than Zynga, or applying LinkedIn to a small vertical.

A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires). But that does leave the question: What else new has the potential (nothing is certain!) to be truly disruptive or establish a new category in the domain of consumer Internet/mobile/services (which to me are fast becoming interchangeable)? Read the full article>

Venture Fund for Traditional Colleges

InsideHigherEd - January 17, 2012

The space between nonprofit and for-profit higher education gets a little more crowded today.

University Ventures Fund, a $100 million investment partnership founded by a quartet of veterans of the for-profit and nonprofit education sectors, is the latest entrant in a market that aims to use private capital to expand the reach and impact of traditional colleges and universities.

The fund, whose two biggest investors are the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG and the University of Texas Investment Management Company, is focused on stimulating "innovation from within the academy," rather than competing with it from the outside, David Figuli, a lawyer and partner in University Ventures, said in an interview Monday.

The projects will include helping institutions expand the scale of their academic programs, re-engineer how they deliver instruction, and better measure student outcomes; the first two investments, also announced today, will be creating a curriculum through Brandman University aimed at improving the educational outcomes of Hispanic students, and a company that helps universities in Britain and elsewhere in Europe deliver their courses online. Read the full article>

Online Enterprises Gain Foothold as Path to a College Degree

The New York Times- August 25, 2011

Harvard and Ohio State are not going to disappear any time soon. But a host of new online enterprises are making earning a college degree cheaper, faster and flexible enough to take work experience into account. As Wikipedia upended the encyclopedia industry and iTunes changed the music business, these businesses have the potential to change higher education.

Ryan Yoder, 35, a computer programmer who had completed 72 credits at the University of South Florida years ago, signed up with an outfit called Straighterline, paid $216 to take two courses in accounting and one in business communication, and a month later transferred the credits to Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey, which awarded him a bachelor’s degree in June.

Alan Long, 34, a paramedic and fire captain, used another new institution, Learning Counts, to create a portfolio that included his certifications and a narrative spelling out what he had learned on the job. He paid $750 to Learning Counts and came out with seven credits at Ottawa University in Kansas, where he would have had to spend $2,800 to earn them in a traditional classroom. Read the full article>

Altius Education’s Ivy Bridge Disrupts Community College Through Technology

Xconomy - March 3, 2011

I have a theory about what makes the best entrepreneurs so good: each one is driven by a conviction that he’s discovered some deep flaw in the world. This problem sticks in his craw as if it were a personal affront, and he simply can’t rest until he’s done something to fix it.

The problem that offends Paul Freedman is this: About 75 percent of the 3.4 million students enrolled in community colleges in the United States say they intend to transfer eventually to a four-year university—but only 20 percent ever do.

That is a horrendous reality, if you think about it. It means that nearly a million people every year are dropping out of the higher-education system. For one reason or another, they’re giving up on their dreams of obtaining a four-year degree and all of the economic benefits known to go with it. Read the full article>

A New Model Community College

InsideHigherEd - January 4, 2011

When for-profit companies team up with traditional colleges to offer instruction, many academics object. The Princeton Review inked a deal to offer a nursing program for a Massachusetts community college last year, and faculty unions scoffed that the high price students must pay for the program violated the traditional community college mission of open access and public accountability. Critics said the same about Kaplan's failed deal to take on California students locked out of financially strapped community colleges.

In contrast, there has been relatively little controversy over a different kind of partnership between a company and a private college: a joint effort of Tiffin University, a small private institution in northwest Ohio, and Altius Education, a for-profit company based in San Francisco.

In 2008, Tiffin and Altius opened Ivy Bridge College, an online community college that offers a general studies associate degree program targeted at traditional-age students who wish to transfer to four-year institutions. Though tuition for an academic year of full-time study is $9,450, which is considerably more than a typical community college would cost, financial aid is available. Tiffin handles the academics — its accreditation extends to Ivy Bridge — and Altius handles the enrollment management. Read the full article>

Investor Groups May Be Nonprofit Colleges' Next Saviors

The Chronicle of Higher Education - February 2, 2010

Nonprofit colleges in financial trouble have options other than merging, shutting down, or, as was the case for institutions like the College of Santa Fe and Daniel Webster, Kendall, and Waldorf Colleges, selling themselves to for-profit higher-education companies.

With so many private investors now looking to get a piece of the higher-education action—and especially, to get in on the boom in distance education— institutions, whether ailing or not, have growing opportunities to form joint ventures with private investors.

The joint ventures allow them to preserve their academic essence while also generating new revenue.

"Folks have figured out there's a lot of money to be made," said Michael B. Goldstein, a lawyer who worked on one such arrangement recently involving the newly formed College for Working Families, a joint venture backed by the National Labor College and Penn Foster Education Group. Read the full article>