By Tamar Lewin

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.

Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.

Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.

To address both problems and keep students on track to graduation, universities are beginning to experiment with adding the new “massive open online courses,” created to deliver elite college instruction to anyone with an Internet connection, to their offerings.

While the courses, known as MOOCs, have enrolled millions of students around the world, most who enroll never start a single assignment, and very few complete the courses. So to reach students who are not ready for college-level work, or struggling with introductory courses, universities are beginning to add extra supports to the online materials, in hopes of improving success rates.

Here at San Jose State, for example, two pilot programs weave material from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to earn credit for them.

“We’re in Silicon Valley, we breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it makes sense that we are the first university to try this,” said Mohammad Qayoumi, the university’s president. “In academia, people are scared to fail, but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of failure. And if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll figure out what went wrong and do better.”

In one pilot program, the university is working with Udacity, a company co-founded by a Stanford professor, to see whether round-the-clock online mentors, hired and trained by the company, can help more students make their way through three fully online basic math courses.

The tiny for-credit pilot courses, open to both San Jose State students and local high school and community college students, began in January, so it is too early to draw any conclusions. But early signs are promising, so this summer, Udacity and San Jose State are expanding those classes to 1,000 students, and adding new courses in psychology and computer programming, with tuition of only $150 a course.

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.’s online materials with live classroom sessions might help more students succeed. Dr. Agarwal, the president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer the blended class last fall.

The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.

“We’re engineers, and we check our results, but if this semester is similar, we will not have the traditional version next year,” said Khosrow Ghadiri, who teaches the blended class. “It would be educational malpractice.”

It is hard to say, though, how much the improved results come from the edX online materials, and how much from the shift to classroom sessions focusing on small group projects, rather than lectures.

Finding better ways to move students through the start of college is crucial, said Josh Jarrett, a higher education officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in the past year has given grants to develop massive open online courses for basic and remedial courses.

“For us, 2012 was all about trying to tilt some of the MOOC attention toward the more novice learner, the low-income and first-generation students,” he said. “And 2013 is about blending MOOCs into college courses where there is additional support, and students can get credit. While some low-income young adults can benefit from what I call the free-range MOOCs, the research suggests that most are going to need more scaffolding, more support.”

Until now, there has been little data on how well the massive online courses work, and for which kinds of students. Blended courses provide valuable research data because outcomes can easily be compared with those from a traditional class. “The results in the San Jose circuits course are probably the most interesting data point in the whole MOOC movement,” Mr. Jarrett said.

Said Dr. Junn, “We want to bring all the hyperbole around MOOCs down to reality, and really see at a granular level that’s never before been available, how well they work for underserved students.”

Online courses are undeniably chipping at the traditional boundaries of higher education. Until now, most of the millions of students who register for them could not earn credit for their work. But that is changing, and not just at San Jose State. The three leading providers, Udacity, EdX and Coursera, are all offering proctored exams, and in some cases, certification for transfer credit through the American Council on Education.

Last month, in a controversial proposal, the president pro tem of the California Senate announced the introduction of legislation allowing students in the state’s public colleges and universities who cannot get a seat in oversubscribed lower-level classes to earn credit for faculty-approved online versions, including those from private vendors like edX and Udacity.

And on Wednesday, San Jose State announced that next fall, it will pay a licensing fee to offer three to five more blended edX courses, probably including Harvard’s “Ancient Greek Heroes” and Berkeley’s”Artificial Intelligence.” And over the summer, it will train 11 other California State campuses to use the blended M.I.T. circuits course.

Dr. Qayoumi favors the blended model for upper-level courses, but fully online courses like Udacity’s for lower-level classes, which could be expanded to serve many more students at low cost. Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash-strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction.

“There may still be face-to-face classes, but they would not be in lecture halls,” he said. “And they will have not only course material developed by the instructor, but MOOC materials and labs, and content from public broadcasting or corporate sources. But just as faculty currently decide what textbook to use, they will still have the autonomy to choose what materials to include.”

While San Jose State professors decided what material should be covered in the three Udacity math courses, it was Udacity employees who determined the course look and flow — and, in most cases, appeared on camera.

“We gave them lecture notes and a textbook, and they ‘Udacified’ things, and wrote the script, which we edited,” said Susan McClory, San Jose State’s developmental math coordinator. “We made sure they used our way of finding a common denominator.”

The online mentors work in shifts at Udacity’s offices in nearby Mountain View, Calif., waiting at their laptops for the “bing” that signals a question, and answering immediately.

“We get to hear the ‘aha’ moments, and these all-caps messages ‘THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU,’ ” said Rachel Meltzer, a former clinical research manager at Stanford and mentor who is starting medical school next fall.

The mentors answer about 30 questions a day, like how to type the infinity symbol or add unlike fractions — or, occasionally, whether Ms. Meltzer is interested in a date. The questions appear in a chat box on-screen, but tutoring can move to a whiteboard, or even a live conversation. When many students share confusion, mentors provide feedback to the instructors.

The San Jose State professors were surprised at the speed with which the project came together.

“The first word was in November, and it started in January,” said Ronald Rogers, one of the statistics professors. “Academics usually form a committee for months before anything happens.”

But Udacity’s approach was appealing.

“What attracted us to Udacity was the pedagogy, that they break things into very small segments, then ask students to figure things out, before you’ve told them the answer,” said Dr. Rogers, who spends an hour a day reading comments on the discussion forum for students in the worldwide version of the class.

Results from the pilot for-credit version with the online mentors will not be clear until after the final exams, which will be proctored by webcam.

But one good sign is that, in the pilot statistics course, every student, including a group of high school students from an Oakland charter school, completed the first, unproctored exam.

“We’re approaching this as an empirical question,” Dr. Rogers said. “If the results are good, then we’ll scale it up, which would be very good, given how much unmet demand we have at California public colleges.”

Any wholesale online expansion raises the specter of professors being laid off, turned into glorified teaching assistants or relegated to second-tier status, with only academic stars giving the lectures. Indeed, the faculty unions at all three California higher education systems oppose the legislation requiring credit for MOOCs for students shut out of on-campus classes. The state, they say, should restore state financing for public universities, rather than turning to unaccredited private vendors.

But with so many students lacking access, others say, new alternatives are necessary.

“I’m involved in this not to destroy brick-and-mortar universities, but to increase access for more students,” Dr. Rogers said.

And if short videos and embedded quizzes with instant feedback can improve student outcomes, why should professors go on writing and delivering their own lectures?

“Our ego always runs ahead of us, making us think we can do it better than anyone else in the world,” Dr. Ghadiri said. “But why should we invent the wheel 10,000 times? This is M.I.T., No. 1 school in the nation — why would we not want to use their material?”

There are, he said, two ways of thinking about what the MOOC revolution portends: “One is me, me, me — me comes first. The other is, we are not in this business for ourselves, we are here to educate students.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 30, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the institution from which Rachel Meltzer, a mentor for the online provider Coursera, graduated. It was Washington University in St. Louis, not Stanford (where Ms. Meltzer worked a clinical research manager).

Dr. Mohammad Qayoumi

At April 22’s budget forum, President Qayoumi began with good news about exactly how Proposition 30 impacts SJSU. View the event video and slides here.

There is no word yet on tuition increases for students and pay increases for faculty and staff, matters addressed by the system overall rather than each campus.

We’ll know more after the “May Revise,” an update of the budget proposal released in January. The legislature expects to pass the budget package in June. The new fiscal year begins July 1.

Auxiliaries

But the hundreds of students who packed the front rows of Morris Dailey Auditorium focused on the planned merger of four of SJSU’s five auxiliaries.

Students demanded a greater voice in the process, which would combine the Student Union, Spartan Shops, the Tower Foundation and the Research Foundation.

Qayoumi explained the merger is still very much in the planning process, with the goal of gaining efficiencies through unifying common functions such as financial services, IT and HR.

A taskforce of business managers for each auxiliary has issued a report that the president will share with each organization’s board of directors.

Qayoumi assured the students that fees collected for Student Union, Aquatics Center and Fitness Center renovations will be used for no other purpose.

Online Initiatives

The question and answer session then turned to other topics, including funding for SJSU’s online initiatives.

Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Ellen Junn explained students pay for the Udacity courses through the College of International and Extended Studies.

San Jose State has paid nothing for edX materials blended into campus-based courses. But as the collaboration expands, SJSU will pay a licensing fee.

To cover the cost, the provost has applied for a grant to be funded through $10 million Governor Brown set aside for CSU online efforts.

The Idea Makers: Ten Tech Innovators 2013

What are the biggest ideas in education technology this year, and who’s driving them? For the second year in a row, The Chronicle has identified a group of key innovators who are rebooting the academy, and we’ve profiled 10 of them on the pages that follow. This is not an endorsement of their projects: In some cases, the subjects of the profiles disagree with one another on how best to change higher education. But all of the people you’ll meet here think technology could break established molds and help students learn more effectively, researchers make discoveries more easily, and colleges operate more efficiently. Earlier this year we invited readers and higher-education leaders to submit their nominations for this project, and we received more than 125 entries. Ultimately, the selections were made by a group of Chronicle editors and reporters, with a goal of considering innovators in various sectors.

By Jeffrey R. Young

Mohammad H. Qayoumi thinks public universities should take a lesson from Wal-Mart—a view that might sound strange coming from a university president.

But Mr. Qayoumi, who leads San Jose State University, is referring to the retail giant’s ability to continually expand both its brick-and-mortar stores and its online services. “It has the biggest stores all over the country, but it is also really active in e-commerce,” he says. “It’s not an either/or, it’s an issue of how we can really bring a blend of the two together.”

Mr. Qayoumi is trying a similar blending on his campus. He is experimenting with using massive open online courses, or MOOCs, both to bring down the cost of delivering classes on his campus and to let high-school students and others get a head start on college—on the cheap.

For his first goal of cutting costs, the university teamed up with edX, the nonprofit MOOC provider started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to offer a “circuits and electronics” course in which students watched free lectures made by MIT professors as homework and attended class discussions with instructors at San Jose State.

The experiment violated a basic premise of college teaching—that every professor should create and deliver his or her own lectures.

“How different is the basic algebra course taught in Boston, or California, or wherever?” asks Mr. Qayoumi.

To help provide a cheaper online-only option, the university forged a partnership with Udacity, a for-profit MOOC provider. In a pilot project, the company worked with professors at the university to create three introductory mathematics classes. The courses are free online, but students who want credit from San Jose State can take them for just $150, far less than the $450 to $750 that students would typically pay for a credit-bearing course.

Both moves are part of Mr. Qayoumi’s plan to “reinvent” public universities. He has laid out that vision in a series of reports that call for public colleges to use technology to produce more graduates while spending less money. In one, he suggests that some high-school students might take a year’s worth of courses as MOOCs before even coming to a college campus.

Some professors question the president’s notion that colleges should look to industry for inspiration. “It almost treats students like they’re industrial products, like ‘How many widgets can we get through those programs?’” said David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media at the University of Texas at Dallas, in an interview this year after San Jose State announced its project with Udacity.

Mr. Qayoumi, though, sees the move to online learning as a way to actually improve the quality of education. In large lecture classes, he says, people romanticize the classroom experience and overstate the effectiveness of the chalk-and-talk format. When professors give monologues to a room of 120 students, few actually interact with the sage on the stage.

So far, data are proving him right. In his experiment with the edX circuits class, 91 percent of the students who watched the lecture videos from MIT passed, while only 55 percent and 59 percent passed in the two traditional sections offered as control groups.

The president compares higher education today to the railroad industry in the 1940s and 50s: Companies that stubbornly clung to the view that they were in the railroad business failed, while those that diversified, considering their mission as transportation in whatever form, thrived.

“How can we really help our students be successful?” he asks. “How can we be this cradle of creativity and an intellectual center of new ideas and new knowledge?”

“We are a learning enterprise,” he says. And he’s willing to abandon the old rails of traditional instruction.

Mr. Qayoumi, 60, grew up in Afghanistan and trained as an engineer at the American University of Beirut. He did his doctoral thesis at the University of Cincinnati on how to rethink electrical systems to make them more efficient.

He worked in industry for several years—as an engineer in the Middle East—which he credits for giving him his business-minded approach to college leadership.

In the mid-80s he became associate vice president for administration at San Jose State, and held administrative positions at two other California institutions before becoming president of California State University-East Bay, in 2006. He took over the top job at San Jose State two years ago.

He has also played a role in the rebuilding of his homeland, serving as senior adviser to the minister of finance of Afghanistan, from 2002 to 2005, and as a board member of the Central Bank of Afghanistan, from 2003 to 2006.

His reports and his experiments with MOOCs have recently brought him into the national spotlight. He has presented his ideas to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Gov. Jerry Brown of California has taken an interest in his projects.

Mr. Qayoumi often talks as if he’s running a start-up technology company rather than a state university. “We would like to move as fast as we can,” he says of his plans. “We want to fail fast, learn from it, and move on.”

What would he say to someone who worries that too much fast failing could undo his esteemed university?

“I don’t see them as radical,” he says of his projects. “It’s not that we’re changing the entire university.”

But he does feel a sense of urgency for his reforms. “Isn’t it about time that something should change?” he asks. “From the day that chalk and a blackboard were invented, how much change has really been made? We need to move far faster than what we have been comfortable” with up to now, he says.

“It’s not the tyranny of OR. It’s the genius of AND,” Newsom said, comparing conventional classes with the “flipped” approach developed by SJSU and edX.

The SJSU-edX collaboration began in fall 2012, when Ghadiri assigned the MITx 6.002x Circuits and Electronics online materials as homework for his EE98 Introduction to Circuits Analysis course.

“When I’m studying for a midterm and there’s one thing I don’t quite understand, I can’t go back to that lecture in a traditional class, but with this class, I can go back and play it again,” Compton said, explaining how she benefits from viewing MITx lecture sequences online.

Classtime was devoted to discussion and group work. Early indicators have been remarkably positive. View the news conference video.

During SJSU’s fall 2012 EE98 Introduction to Circuits Analysis course, SJSU Lecturer Khosrow Ghadiri used the MITx 6.002x Circuits and Electronics materials on the edX platform. (Christina Olivas photo)

SJSU will open a Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning. The expanded collaboration follows a successful pilot that increased pass rates.

Contacts:
Pat Lopes Harris, SJSU media relations, 408-656-6999
Dan O’Connell, edX media relations, 617-480-6585

SAN JOSE, CALIF. – Thousands more California State University students will benefit from a major expansion to the collaboration between San Jose State University and edX, the not-for-profit online learning enterprise founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). SJSU and edX detailed this announcement at a news conference April 10. View the video.

An online engineering course in circuits and electronics — created by MIT as an MITx course for the edX platform and offered to San Jose State students for the first time last fall — will be made available to as many as 11 other CSU campuses. The expansion will benefit thousands of students from nearly half of Cal State’s 23 campuses.

San Jose State will concurrently establish a Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning to train faculty members from other campuses interested in offering the engineering course and other blended online courses in the future.

“San Jose State University is thrilled to have the opportunity to grow its groundbreaking collaboration with edX,” President Mohammad Qayoumi said. “As the public university serving Silicon Valley, San Jose State is the perfect place for a center for excellence in online education. We look forward to helping other California State University campuses make available to thousands of students the innovative, blended approach to learning developed by SJSU and edX.”

Once trained at San Jose State, faculty members from other CSU campuses will be equipped to incorporate the MITx 6.002x Circuits and Electronics course offered on the edX platform into their own blended classroom settings. This means students from participating CSU campuses will have access to the rigorous curricular materials — readings, video and interactive exercises — wherever they study, and then meet in class for in-depth discussions and group work facilitated by local professors.

The agreement also sets the stage for the SJSU-edX collaboration to expand well beyond engineering to the sciences, humanities, business and social sciences. SJSU will pilot additional courses from several edX universities including Harvard, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.

Building on Success

During SJSU’s fall 2012 EE98 Introduction to Circuits Analysis course, SJSU Lecturer Khosrow Ghadiri used the MITx 6.002x Circuits and Electronics materials on the edX platform. His class, comprised of 87 students, viewed the MITx video lectures and completed MITx problem sets outside of class. During class, Ghadiri facilitated 15 minutes of questions and answers, and then devoted the remainder of the class to peer and team instruction and problem solving using materials developed by SJSU faculty members. Early indicators have been remarkably positive. Although the numbers of students were small and classes differed on many factors, the pass rate in the blended class was 91 percent, and the pass rates in the conventional classes were as low as 55 percent.

This spring, SJSU is repeating the experiment with a second section of the same size, refining an approach that could one day be applied not just to engineering, but to students in all STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.

“One of the founding principles of edX is to use the power of technology and online learning to improve on-campus education and to innovate in higher education,” said Anant Agarwal, president of edX. “Our collaboration with San Jose State University is a strong example of how well-designed blended learning can engage students and substantially improve learning outcomes. We’re excited to expand our model throughout the California State University system and continue to broaden access to a world-class education.”

New Center for Excellence

At the core of these innovations are faculty members trying new ways to infuse technology into teaching and learning. To support faculty members as they embark on this trailblazing work, SJSU will establish a Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning.

The center will open this summer with a focus on the MITx circuits and electronics course. Initially, the center will serve faculty members at the 11 participating CSU campuses. Over time, the center could grow to serve all of the nearly 22,000 faculty members and more than 426,000 students of the CSU system.

Under the leadership of SJSU Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Ellen Junn, the center could also expand to serve other public and private colleges and universities worldwide.

Unbounded Teaching and Learning

The expansion of SJSU’s collaboration with edX is part of a campaign led by President Qayoumi, who argues that educational institutions urgently need new approaches to teaching and assessing learning that are personalized, collaborative, engaging and relate to real-world, 21st-century problems. Join the conversation at Unbounded: Teaching and learning without limits.

“San Jose State’s online initiatives are about far more than a single subject, technique or campus,” Qayoumi said. “Our work is about trying many new approaches, identifying what works and pushing forward a national conversation on effective ways to infuse the opportunities offered by technology into the way we teach and learn.”

About San Jose State University

San Jose State — Silicon Valley’s largest institution of higher learning with 30,500 students and 3,850 employees — is part of the California State University system. SJSU’s 154-acre downtown campus anchors the nation’s 10th largest city.

About edX

EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on transforming online and on-campus learning through groundbreaking methodologies, game-like experiences and cutting-edge research. EdX provides inspirational and transformative knowledge to students of all ages, social status, and income who form worldwide communities of learners. EdX uses its open source technology to transcend physical and social borders. We’re focused on people, not profit. EdX is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the USA.

Dr. Mohammad Qayoumi

Media contact:
Pat Lopes Harris, pat.harris@sjsu.edu, 408-656-6999

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano today announced the appointment of Mohammad H. Qayoumi, president of San Jose State University, to the Homeland Security Academic Advisory Council (HSAAC). The HSAAC, comprised of prominent university presidents and academic leaders, is charged with advising the secretary and senior leadership at the department on several key issues.

“Dr. Qayoumi’s extensive experience and expertise will make him a valuable asset to the council,” said Secretary Napolitano. “I look forward to working with him on these critical issues.”

In this noteworthy role, Qayoumi will provide advice and recommendations on issues related to student and recent graduate recruitment; international students; academic research and faculty exchange; campus resilience; and homeland security academic programs. Qayoumi will also serve as chair of the HSAAC’s new subcommittee on cybersecurity, which will advise on the department’s cybersecurity recruitment and workforce education efforts.

“The mission of the Homeland Security Academic Advisory Council reflects San Jose State’s role as the leading public university powering Silicon Valley,” Qayoumi said. “Among our priorities are attracting the brightest minds to our campus, where we provide academic and pre-professional opportunities to the tech industry workforce of the future.”

Qayoumi is spearheading plans for one of the nation’s first university-based cybersecurity center, which will take a cross-disciplinary approach to workforce development. By fall 2013, San Jose State will hire a cluster of tenure-track faculty members to focus on this endeavor. SJSU will host the U.S. Cyber Challenge Western Regional Summer Cyber Camp for the second consecutive year.

About Qayoumi

Qayoumi holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the American University of Beirut and four degrees from the University of Cincinnati: a master’s in nuclear engineering, a master’s in electrical and computer engineering, an MBA and a doctorate in electrical engineering.

He has more than 32 years of engineering and administrative experience in several universities.  He served as president of California State University East Bay from 2006 to 2011. He came to Cal State East Bay from California State University Northridge, where he served as vice president for administration and finance and chief financial officer from 2000 to 2006, and was also a tenured professor of engineering management.

Qayoumi has served his native country in various financial capacities. He was the senior advisor to the minister of finance of Afghanistan from 2002 to 2005 and served on the board of directors for the Central Bank of Afghanistan from 2003 to 2006.

San Jose State University — Silicon Valley’s largest institution of higher learning with 30,000 students and 3,850 employees — is part of the California State University system. SJSU’s 154-acre downtown campus anchors the nation’s 10th largest city.

Participants of the day camp will learn key skills required to score well in the April 2013 Cyber Quests Qualification Competition (Robert Bain photo).

Contacts for reporters:
Rudy Pamintuan, USCC Media Relations, 312-961-4710
Pat Lopes Harris, SJSU Media Relations, 408-656-6999

The U.S. Cyber Challenge has announced the date and details of the 2013 Cyber Quests Preparatory Day Camp. The day camp will take place on Saturday, April 6 at San Jose State University beginning at 9 a.m. and concluding at 5 p.m. To learn more information and register for the 2013 Cyber Quests Preparatory Day Camp, visit www.sjsu.edu/cybersecurity.

“As the largest public university serving Silicon Valley, San Jose State must take the lead in providing students with opportunities to become immersed in cyber security, a top international issue,” said SJSU President Mohammad Qayoumi. “San Jose State is pleased to collaborate with the U.S. Cyber Challenge to develop programs attracting the brightest minds to one of the most critical emerging fields of our time.”

Participants of the day camp will learn key skills required to score well in the April 2013 Cyber Quests Qualification Competition. Presentations may include introductions to Wireshark and web application and database security, securing network services, network discovery methods and a host of other topics. Sponsors of the 2013 Cyber Quests Preparatory Day Camp include Visa and the Bay Area Council.

“We are very proud to host our first Cyber Quests Preparatory Day Camp,” stated Karen S. Evans, National Director of U.S. Cyber Challenge. “We believe that equipping students with the knowledge and skills to do well in the Cyber Quests online competition will lead to more students being invited to our Summer Cyber Camps and ultimately exponential growth in the capacity of our professional workforce in cyber security.”

Participants are required to be 18 years or older. There are no specific credentials or skills required to attend the day camp, although camp content will be quite technical and will require some background in computer science. Admission is free, but spots are limited. Therefore, it is suggested to register as soon as possible before the camp is filled to capacity.

Cyber Quests is an online cybersecurity competition operated by Cyber Aces. Top scorers earn an invitation to the U.S. Cyber Challenge Western Regional Summer Cyber Camp to be held at SJSU in August 2013. The Cyber Quests competition will open on April 16 and end on April 30. Registration begins on March 29. To register, visit USCC.CyberQuests.org.

About San Jose State University

San Jose State – Silicon Valley’s largest institution of higher learning with 30,500 students and 3,850 employees – is part of the California State University system. SJSU’s 154-acre downtown campus anchors the nation’s 10th largest city.

About U.S. Cyber Challenge

The mission of the U.S. Cyber Challenge (USCC) is to significantly reduce the shortage in the cyber workforce by serving as the premier program to identify, attract, recruit and place the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. USCC’s goal is to find 10,000 of America’s best and brightest to fill the ranks of cybersecurity professionals where their skills can be of the greatest value to the nation.

About the National Board of Information Security Examiners

The mission of the National Board of Information Security Examiners (NBISE) is to increase the security of information networks, computing systems, and industrial and military technology by improving the potential and performance of the cyber security workforce.

About CyberAces

The mission of CyberAces is to identify, enable and encourage young Americans with high aptitude for technical achievement in information security to discover their talents, develop their passion, and determine where their talent can be nurtured so they can make a major contribution to the physical and economic security of the US and its enterprises.The CyberAces foundation achieves its mission by offering challenging and realistic cybersecurity competitions, training camps and educational initiatives through which high school, college students and young professionals develop the practical skills needed to excel as cybersecurity practitioners and to become highly valued citizen-technologists.

The online education program San Jose State University announced Tuesday, with the help of Gov. Jerry Brown, is small — just three classes of 100 students each. But it is a big step toward a new future for higher education that Brown introduced in last week’s budget proposal.

California’s three-legged system of higher education — community colleges, the California State University and University of California systems — has been a primary driver of the Golden State’s economic engine. But it has been slow to adapt to new realities. Costs are rising unsustainably; tuition has nearly doubled at CSU and UC since 2007. Just 16 percent of CSU students finish a degree within four years. And there is a troubling mismatch between the number of graduates in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields and the number of jobs in those fields that companies will need to fill.

Part of the problem is declining state support. The UC and CSU budgets were cut $1.6 billion, inflation adjusted, in the past decade. Although Brown wants to restore some of that, taxpayer funding will not return to its former levels.

A major transformation is needed to lower costs for students and taxpayers and to increase the number of students getting degrees, especially in STEM fields. Brown included $37 million in this budget for Internet learning initiatives, along with hundreds of millions more to restore some cuts. But he is also demanding that the systems reduce costs, improve access to courses students need for degrees and improve graduation rates.

The SJSU pilot the governor praised Tuesday has elements of all of that. The partnership with Udacity, a Palo Alto online education company, is for three classes: entry-level math, elementary statistics and college algebra. The courses are required, but too many students have trouble passing. That makes them good choices for this experiment with an interactive curriculum and a low cost — $150, not much more than a community college course.

SJSU President Mohammad Qayoumi is a leading advocate for sweeping reforms. He co-wrote a paper last fall recommending that dozens of introductory courses — things like Economics 101 — be redesigned and offered online. The classes would have a common numbering system, and all three college systems would use them.

This would benefit students, taxpayers and businesses. It would make transferring from community college seamless. It would help keep students in school in the crucial first years by making the curriculum more interactive, which has been proven to engage students. And Qayoumi estimates it could reduce the overall cost of higher education by 16 percent.

This won’t happen quickly. But the SJSU pilot, along with Brown’s enthusiasm, could begin the transformation.

Click here to view the ABC7 story.

Posted by ABC 7 Jan. 15, 2013.

By Associated Press (ABC7 News contributed to this report.)

SAN FRANCISCO — San Jose State University and a Silicon Valley company on Tuesday announced a partnership to offer affordable online classes for credit, an initiative backed by Gov. Jerry Brown to help California colleges reduce costs and expand student access.

The pilot program, co-developed by San Jose State and Palo Alto-based Udacity Inc., will begin offering three entry-level courses for $150 each starting later this month. The California State University campus charges about $620 for similar classroom-based courses.

The online effort began this past summer when the governor called Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun and asked him to help develop digital courses for California colleges. Thrun is a researcher at Stanford University and Google Inc. who launched Udacity to provide so-called massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

Brown said Tuesday the goal is to allow students to “graduate quicker so they don’t carry this big load of debt on their backs for the next 25 years,” noting that only 16 percent of Cal State students graduate in four years.

The initiative, called “San Jose State University Plus,” is different from other online education programs because it will offer introductory courses for credit, charge low fees and welcome students who don’t attend the school, officials said.

The pilot program will enroll about 100 students in each class, with half from outside San Jose State. It will target high school students, waitlisted community college students, members of the armed forces and veterans.

The first classes offered will be pre-algebra, algebra and elementary statistics – three-unit “gateway courses” with high failure rates that are required for most Cal State degree programs.

“These are the courses that are high demand. Everybody needs them to move to the next part of their curriculum sequence,” said Timothy White, the new chancellor of the 23-campus CSU system.

San Jose State faculty will be the instructors of record for the classes and will evaluate students. No textbooks are required, and students will have access to mentors through chat rooms, a helpline and other means.

“I’ll be communicating with those students via chat and tutoring them. Udasity is also going to be offering online tutoring,” said Sandra DeSousa, a SJSU algebra professor.

“I want to democratize education. I want to level the playing field for everybody,” Thrun told ABC7 News.

“After all, we are here in San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, the cradle of creatively and the epicenter of innovation,” said San Jose State president Mohammad Qayoumi.

San Jose student Alan Cochrane told ABC7 News he likes the idea. He said, “I feel like it may be cheaper. For me personally, I like on line courses because it helps me focus more.”

Brown said, “It’s an experiment and we’re going to learn together. That’s why I think we will succeed.”

Thrun admits the pilot project is a work in progress. He told ABC7 News, “Wait two or three years into it. I hope it’s going to be much, much better.”

In his 2013-2014 budget, Brown has proposed giving California’s public colleges and universities more money. But in return, the Democratic governor wants them to hold down costs, stop raising tuition and embrace online learning.

Brown is scheduled to attend the University of California Board of Regents meeting on Wednesday, when university officials plan to discuss plans to expand online learning at the 10-campus system. Leaders of the online education providers Coursera, edX and Udacity are expected to speak at the gathering.

U.C. has spent $4 million to market the idea, but only one person who wasn’t already a U.C. student, has signed up for any of the 14 courses.

ABC7 News contributed to this report.

Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. spoke at the event about the long-term potential for San Jose State Plus before SJSU President Mohammad Qayoumi and Udacity Inc. CEO and Co-Founder Sebastian Thrun signed the official agreement.

In his first public appearance at SJSU, recently appointed California State University Chancellor Timothy P. White provided a systemwide perspective on the announcement and online education. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen attended to lend his support.

SJSU community members joined the media and officials to participate in a rigorous question and answer session including Brown, Qayoumi, Thrun, White and SJSU Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Ellen Junn.

Read the full news release about today’s announcement. View a recording of the news conference and join the conversation about #SJSUPlus on Twitter.