Here are some industry articles that caught our eye recently.
5 Things Colleges Can Expect From Congress in 2015. “Funding will remain tight. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the new majority leader, has promised a return to “regular order” on appropriations, so spending bills are passed on time and another government shutdown is not risked. But budgets will remain tight, especially once the latest round of across-the-board spending cuts, known as the sequester, is applied. In that context, the most colleges will be able to hope for are modest increases for research and student aid; most programs will have to fight just to keep level funding.”
Federal Agency Find Plenty of Fault With Oversight of Higher Education. “Three days before Christmas, the Government Accountability Office put big lumps of coal in the stockings of accreditors and the U.S. Department of Education. The federal office released a report criticizing accrediting agencies’ efforts to oversee academic quality at colleges, and faulting the Education Department for not increasing its own scrutiny of colleges that are under accreditors’ sanctions. Colleges must be accredited by a federally recognized accreditor in order to receive federal student aid. The office focused on the finding that student outcomes have little to do with whether or not a college has been penalized.”
More Metrics, More Problems: Breaking Down Obama’s College-Ratings Plan. “Here’s one of the most hotly contested ingredients that could feed into the ratings: How many students earn degrees or certificates within three years (for community colleges) or six (for baccalaureate institutions)? Federal graduation rates count only first-time, full-time students, leaving out the part-time and transfer students who make up well over half the enrollments at many colleges. A more comprehensive measure is in the works, but it won’t be ready until 2017. Many educators worry that a focus on this measure will encourage colleges to turn away students who are likely to struggle, thereby hurting low-income and minority students disproportionately.”
Fall 2013 IPEDS Data: Top 30 largest online enrollments per institution. “First Impression. With the exception of Grand Canyon University overall and Argosy University for DE, the for-profit sector took a beating with significant drops in both total enrollment and DE enrollment.”
Academics First, Then Athletics. “If, at the end of four years, a student’s primary self-worth and identification is as a pitcher, a rebounder, or a swimmer, then both the institution and the athletics department have failed. Such an outcome calls into question the responsibility of each of them to provide transformative experiences that foster learning and personal maturation. Anything less questions the commitment that a coach and an athletics department have to the institution’s academic priorities.”
Online, Size Doesn’t Matter. “The study finds that increases in online class size have no impact on student grades, student persistence in the course or the likelihood of students enrolling in future courses. The study focuses on courses that are not the size of large lectures or massive open online courses, but courses that are typical of those offered at many colleges and universities (in person and online). And the authors — a research team from Stanford University — write that their findings could suggest ways for colleges to save money, by enlarging online sections and cutting the number of instructors employed.”
Time, Money and Teacher Prep. “Proponents of the regulation say that the focus on outcomes at teacher preparation programs will help improve the quality of teaching in high-need school districts where federal TEACH Grant recipients must commit to working after graduation. The proposed rule, after several years of delay, is now moving ahead in a rulemaking process, with public comments due by Feb. 2. The Education Department has said it plans to finalize the regulation by September. In the meantime, though, many critics of the administration’s proposal are now seizing on a chance to call attention to how costly it would be for colleges and states to fill out the paperwork associated with the rule.”
The Most Important Higher Ed Story of 2015. “Larger enrollment courses are being re-thought as opportunities to invite students into the knowledge creation process. Advances in learning theory have taught us that we don’t retain what we don’t manipulate, create, and explain. Advances in digital learning platforms have enabled us, with significant investments in instructional design and course planning, to bring more active and collaborative methods to classes that were traditionally based on lectures and high-stakes assessments. Any course that does not move a significant portion of the content to beyond the time and space where instructors and students gather will feel anachronistic in an age of blended learning. Any course that does not take advantage of adaptive platforms for frequent low-stakes assessment will be forgoing opportunities for authentic learning.”
In STEM Courses, a Gender Gap in Online Class Discussions. “Company officials argued that the differences in behavior by gender represent a ‘gap in confidence’ between women and men enrolled in the courses. It’s a phenomenon that has long interested the company’s founder, Pooja Sankar, who says she felt isolated as one of only a few women studying computer science at a university in India and was too shy to collaborate with male classmates.”
Three Central Themes for 2015: critical pedagogy, lean libraries, & creative disruption. “Creative disruption has been with me since the beginning. I’ve always sought new ways to provide reference and other library services. We can disrupt ourselves (our policies, procedures, workflows, and mindsets) but I’m actually more interested in the big picture. How technologies and other aspects will disrupt publishing, teaching, and higher education in general. Developing our vocabulary and fluency with change literacy and related concepts will prepare us for whatever the future reveals… and also position librarians to help their communities evolve as well.”
Toward a Shared Vision of Shared Governance. “Simplistic as it may sound, we believe that shared governance should be viewed not so much in terms of who owns what, but as embracing a commitment to a genuine sharing of perspectives—to the avoidance of constituency-based thinking (to the extent that this can be achieved in a world of real human beings!). What is most needed on the part of all parties, including both faculty members and administrators, is not just a willingness to reject ‘we’ versus ‘they’ thinking, but an eagerness to embrace good ideas generated by others. Such mutual openness to good ideas from all sources should be accompanied by recognition that nimble decision making is required. Nimbleness implies a need for a well-understood locus of authority, with administrators expected to listen carefully to those with ideas and expertise to contribute, but then to have the confidence and courage to decide.”
Fall 2013 IPEDS Data: New Profile of US Higher Ed Online Education. “It will be very interesting to see the Babson Survey Research Group data that is typically released in January. While Babson relies on voluntary survey data, as opposed to mandatory federal data reporting for IPEDS, their report should have better longitudinal validity. If this IPEDS data holds up, then I would expect the biggest story for this year’s Babson report to be the first year of no significant growth in online education since the survey started 15 years ago.”
Outsourced Trial Period. “Like most colleges, online institutions are under pressure to improve their graduation rates. Some are getting more selective about which students they admit, turning away those who appear less likely to complete. But rather than just shutting its virtual doors to applicants, Western Governors University has begun referring underprepared students to StraighterLine, an unaccredited online course provider that does not offer degrees.”
Class(es) Prerogative. “It’s harder to be interdisciplinary at this level. A residential four-year college can break format and offer strange and wonderful things, secure in the knowledge that its own credits will count towards graduation. A two-year transfer college really can’t. And that’s a loss. I’d argue that students at this level deserve just as much innovation and academic ambition as students at tonier places. Yes, innovation can — and does — occur in classes with more traditional names and numbers. But it’s harder to get really ambitious and experimental when you have to tie yourself to a checklist at another college’s admissions office.”
The Value Problem in Digital Badging. “Evaluators need a better, faster way to value digital badges. Until this value problem is solved, the potential for digital badging in higher education will be limited. To address the value problem, we recently started a project called Open Badge Exchange designed to provide a public, distributed, and shared badge transaction ledger. When badges are successfully exchanged for other badges or digital credentials, a transaction record is written to the shared ledger. Anyone can look up successful transactions for a given badge in the shared ledger, drastically reducing the evaluation time required for digital badges that have previously been exchanged.”
The Future is Learning, But What About Schooling? “I am, in short, moving away from my earlier conviction that schooling is learning enacted for public purposes through public institutions, and moving toward a broader vision for learning as a social activity upon which society depends for its future development. I am increasingly aware that the weight of politics and public policy upon the institutions of schooling is making schools less and less likely to be the privileged place where learning occurs in the future. The future of learning in society is virtually unlimited, at least for the foreseeable future. Learning is the conversion of information into knowledge; information, in the digital age has become a vast sea of ones and zeros; information becomes knowledge by passing through some medium that transforms the ones and zeros into a conceptually organized form.
Higher Education: The Problem with Priorities. “There are at least three ways to offset inertia in which creating quality with intellectual capital cannot be compared to widget making. The first is to support a mature, nurturing environment in which the duties, responsibilities and protocol are clear. In effect, it may be wise to fight process with better process. The second is to have senior managers who have real authority and a common sense of direction. It presumes, obviously, that the senior managers support the common vision and are not themselves part of the inertia. … There must be institutional support — beginning with the Board — for senior managers who are change agents or these managers risk flame out or being themselves co-opted by the culture they were hired to nurture, change and strengthen. And finally, it also assumes that the Board behaves responsibly, creating a climate of accountability and transparency, supporting a best practice environment without violating the process designed to create it.”
When a Flipped-Classroom Pioneer Hands Off His Video Lectures, This Is What Happens. “The chair of the School of Accountancy at BYU, Jeff Wilks, agrees that flipping a classroom with someone else’s materials isn’t for everyone: ‘It takes a certain kind of professor to be in front of this big of a class and not be bugged by the fact that a lot of the teaching is going on outside the class by someone who isn’t you.’ Ms. Larson, the classroom professor at BYU, says her changed role has taken some getting used to, and requires her to maintain a deep familiarity with Video Norm. ‘It is a bit tricky, because you have to watch Norm’s stuff and you have to bridge it’ in classroom demonstrations.”
A Guide to the Flipped Classroom. “’Flipping’ has become a buzzword. Maybe a colleague down the hall is trying it, or you’re thinking about it yourself. Or maybe you’re still not exactly sure what it is. We’ve compiled a booklet, downloadable below, designed to serve as a quick primer on this growing—and sometimes controversial—teaching approach. It contains several recent articles and essays from The Chronicle, along with a list of links for further reading. Downloading is simple: Just fill out this form, and the booklet is all yours.”
Administrators, Authority, and Accountability. “While they do counsel administrators to be less dismissive of faculty input, and while they urge faculty members and administrators to deal with one another with less cynicism, Bowen and Tobin would have been much more provocative if they had noted that administrators need to recognize that they often don’t get it. Administrators need to seek and use the expertise and insight of faculty members not because of shared-governance considerations but because doing so reduces their likelihood of error, as well as the penalty for such errors. The same, of course, goes for faculty members. In fact, done right, shared governance accomplishes what Bowen and Tobin appear to desire: It helps faculty members work across departmental lines and even across campus boundaries.”
No Discernible Growth in US Higher Ed Online Learning. “Think of the implications here if online education has stopped growing in US higher education. Many of the assumptions underlying institutional strategic plans and ed tech vendor market data is based on continued growth in online learning. It is possible that there will be market changes leading back to year-over-year growth, but for now the assumptions might be wrong. Rather than focusing just on this year, the more relevant questions are based on the future, particularly if you look at the longer-term trends. Have we hit a plateau in terms of the natural level of online enrollment? Will the trend continue to the point of online enrollments actually dropping below the overall enrollment? Will online enrollments bottom out and start to rise again once we get the newer generation of tools and pedagogical approaches such as personalized learning or competency-based education beyond pilot programs? … One issue to track is the general shift from for-profit enrollment to not-for-profit enrollment, even if the overall rates of online courses has remained relatively stable within each sector. There are approximately 80,000 fewer students taking at least one online course at for-profit institutions while there are approximately 157,000 more students in the same category at public and private not-for-profit sectors.”
Farm Teams. “But the basic idea makes sense. When selective institutions — especially public ones — are physically close to community colleges, sending “near-miss” applicants to the community college to prove themselves and get up to speed offers a smart answer for everyone involved. The elite public institution gets to manage the difficult trick of maintaining both standards and openness to the public at the same time. The near-miss student gets a chance to prove herself, and at lower cost. And the community college gets a pipeline of strong students with something to prove.“
Academic Journals: The Most Profitable Obsolete Technology in History. “Gershman lays out his vision for the future of academic publishing and says that a very different sort of publishing system would be that everybody could post papers to a pre-print server similar to the currently existing arXiv.org. After posting research, then the creator selects to submit it to a journal, which is essentially sending them the links to your paper on the pre-print server. The journal editorial board do the same editorial process that exists now–if your paper is accepted to their journal they can put their imprimatur on your paper saying it was accepted to this journal–but there is no actual journal–it is just a stamp of approval. What Gershman’s concept does is remove most of the costs from the equation. The cost for running this pre-print server would be a shared cost for all universities and funding agencies and could clearly infuse millions upwards of billions back into the broad higher education system should an overarching system be implemented and respected. Bohannon is not convinced the prior is an easy sell.”
Redefining Full-Time Adjunct Work. “How universities translate the work of adjunct faculty members into work-hour equivalencies for purposes of the health care law has also been a challenge. Last year, the Internal Revenue Service issued guidance to colleges about how to make those calculations. Meanwhile, unions representing adjunct professors on Wednesday blasted the new efforts to change the 30-hour rule.”
Elusive Data on Education and Workforce. “After eight years of work and $640 million in federal spending, state data systems that seek to link education and the workforce remain riddled with holes. That was the conclusion of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report released in November. The GAO looked at two federal grant programs to support states’ development of “longitudinal” data systems that try to follow students as they move from early education to K-12, college and employment.”
Schrödinger’s Library. “he latest draft of the new Framework for Information Literacy articulates just how ambitious librarians are about the kind of learning that academic librarians want to promote. Librarians think teaching students how to think about information is a major learning outcome and supporting that learning is the mission of the library. Faculty think that kind of learning is their job. The difference is probably one of emphasis. Librarians have a broad view that being able to use and create knowledge generally is an important outcome of education; faculty tend to be more focused on engaging in disciplinary knowledge as a means of giving students deep subject knowledge and experience that can provide students with transferrable skills and habits.”
3 Lessons from Amazon’s Fire Phone Fiasco. “If Amazon could buy spectrum, or buy an existing wireless provider, they could up-end the mobile market simply through offering fair pricing and better customer service. Our lesson is that good ideas are easy, execution is what is hard. We know that higher education needs to be more flexible, more affordable, and more learner-centric. These are easy goals to set and hard goals to execute on.”
Course Development and MOOCs (Part 1): The Emergence of a Role. “Generally, course developers described similar roles and responsibilities across different institutions and organizations within the edX consortia. Such uniformity is important, as it opens the opportunity for formal professional development and training for course developers that includes both instructional design, and faculty curricular development methods, with the intention of further sharing and developing course development best practices. While MOOCs have challenges, that roles are becoming more standardized suggests maturity in the field.”
Higher Ed: Meet the Chief Digital Officer. “At the core of all that disruption is the need for a digital strategy in higher education. In fact, some institutions have started establishing chief digital officer (CDO) positions to create a structure and accountability on campus around both online learning and the university’s overall digital presence. It’s a trend that has taken an even greater hold in the corporate sector: According to a 2013 McKinsey survey of C-level executives across a range of industries, regions and company sizes, 30 percent reported a CDO on their companies’ leadership teams.”
Higher-Ed Groups Seek a More-Complete Picture of Post-College Outcomes. “The groups’ framework divides student outcomes into four overlapping categories: public and private, and economic and ‘human capital.’ Public, ‘human capital’ outcomes of college could include activities such as giving to charity, volunteering, and voting. Personal, ‘human capital’ outcomes could include career satisfaction and advancement. Some metrics, like employment and reliance on social services, are considered as both personal and public economic outcomes.”
Measuring Substance. “Keller and others spoke here at an event to unveil the project. A key goal, they said, was to encourage policy makers to use appropriate measures of post-college success, rather than just available or simple ones. Although the participants did not single out politicians’ initiatives – such as the Obama administration’s pending rating system, and recent legislative proposals — the associations’ project clearly seems designed both as a counterpoint and as an attempt to expand on those efforts.”
Two Years of Free Community College. “The proposal, dubbed America’s College Promise, would be a matching grant program. The federal government would pay for 75 percent of the ‘average cost of community college.’ That means covering tuition and fees upfront, White House officials said, rather than the total price of attendance. Participating states would be required to cover the remaining tuition balance.”
Dutch Open Access Fight. “Gerard Meijer, president of Radboud University and one of the lead negotiators for the Dutch universities, said that in addition to preserving access to their subscription journals, the universities wanted publishers to permit all future articles whose corresponding author has a Dutch affiliation to be published on an open access basis for no extra charge. He said universities were also unwilling to tolerate any more above-inflation price rises. A deal that meets the universities’ requirements was recently made with Springer, the world’s second-largest science journal publisher. Professor Meijer said this showed that the transition to a fully open access business model could be made by traditional publishers.”
An Intimate Education. “We are in a period of exceptional innovation in the way education takes place. We must test and develop ever-new forms of virtual courses to convey skills while containing costs. But while doing so, we cannot forget the value of an education that is personal and beholden. This July, over 40 individuals, both teachers and students, learned about freedom, citizenship, and the purpose of knowledge by reading significant books and talking to one another around a battered old wooden table. The results were wondrous.”
First Thoughts on Taking Tennessee National. ”Part of what makes the Tennessee Promise smart is that it’s endowed. It has its own dedicated funding stream, which makes it likely to survive changes in the political winds. Unless I missed it, the federal plan doesn’t have that. It’s just a budget line, cuttable like any other. I’d like to believe that higher education would be held sacrosanct the next time the winds shift, but then, I’d like to believe a lot of things. Based on the last several decades, it seems unlikely.”
Airlines, Cable, and the Unbundled University. “An unbundled university would probably be as frustrating for students (and faculty) as the unbundled airline is for passengers. Part of the magic of higher ed (at least traditional residential higher education institutions that predominantly serve an 18 to 22 year old market – which I know is a minority of all higher ed students) is the bundled experience. Freshman and sophomores all live in the same dorms. (Buying a super luxury option – beyond maybe a single – is not usually an option). Everyone can workout at the gym. Hang out in the student center. Take advantage of the resources in the learning center. Attend the same performances and guest lectures. Make an appointment with a counselor. The thought of every non-curricular / extra-curricular activity being subject to a fee is somewhat appalling. A class (a cohort) will no longer have a common set of experiences. Income, rather than energy or talent or creativity, will be the determinant of academic quality of life.”
The Changes You Face Now Are Different From the Changes in the Past. “With technical challenges, situations arise where current knowledge, expertise and resources are enough to deal effectively. A technical problem is not necessarily trivial or simple but its solution lies within the organization’s current repertoire of resources (such as updated technology, takeaways from past experience, or decisions to invest more money or people). With adaptive challenges, there are fewer clear answers. Adaptive challenges cannot be solved with current knowledge and expertise, but require experimentation, risk taking, creativity and the ability to use “failures” as learning opportunities. The problem is that we too often treat adaptive challenges as technical ones.”
Who Has a Stake in Obama’s Free Community-College Plan? “News of President Obama’s initiative met with skepticism among some private-college presidents, who wonder why community colleges are being singled out as a gateway to higher education. Small, less-selective private colleges have long struggled against a stereotype that they are expensive and mainly serve affluent students. In fact, they enroll significant numbers of low-income, first-generation, and at-risk students, and they graduate those students at much higher rates than do community colleges. And just like two-year colleges, small four-year colleges have long dealt in preprofessional programs, too.”
What Students Pay at Community Colleges Now—and How Obama’s Proposal Might Change That. “Tuition is just a fraction the full cost of attending college. Students must also find a way to pay for books, supplies, and transportation, as well as food and housing. In fact, for the average community-college student, tuition and fees account for less than a quarter of the total cost of attendance. Food and housing charges for community-college students average $7,705, according to the College Board. Of course, most community-college students don’t live on a campus; they commute. So that figure is based on the living expenses colleges determine commuter students face.”