Here are some of the articles that caught our eye recently.
Demographic Data Let Colleges Peer Into the Future. “College officials not already following such trends would do well to pay attention. Demographic change has become a crucial focus of enrollment management over the past decade, but with intense pressure to fill each year’s class, longer-term planning can lapse. And despite more data analysts in the field, much number crunching, experts say, is still clumsy. Campus leaders are often unaware of the coming reality, even as they rely on students for revenue.”
Bracing for Demographic Shifts, Colleges Face Tough Trade-Offs. “That’s not to say colleges are ignoring demographic change. Many, in fact, are responding in various ways, albeit incrementally. Just as demographic shifts don’t happen overnight, strategies for recruiting the next wave of students take time to develop. An East Coast college can’t just parachute into California and collect applicants for next fall’s class. As J. Leon Washington explains, student recruitment is becoming an increasingly complex mix of local, national, and global outreach. How a college pursues one group of students may affect how it can serve another.”
Colleges Measure Learning in More Ways, but Seldom Share Results. “The most popular method of assessment, used by 85 percent of respondents, is student surveys, like the National Survey of Student Engagement, or Nessie, which Mr. Kuh pioneered, as well as the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey, and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s surveys of freshmen and seniors. Next in popularity, at 69 percent, were rubrics, which define levels of student performance on assignments. The survey revealed that portfolios of students’ work have become much more common as an assessment method. Only 8 percent of institutions used them four years ago, but 41 percent do so now.”
MOOCs: Been There, Done That. “The final MOOC retreat is to have computers teach, the magister ex machine miracle. That approach has some proven merit for introductory quantitative courses with clear right and wrong answers. But that level is only an introduction. The human redoubt is in judgment: After the mechanical basics, the quantitative disciplines require meta-knowledge about the proper application and limits of algorithms, meta-knowledge that produces not true or false answers but only better cases to be made. Ask a real scientist: The flow of inquiry, doubt, and resolution inherent in the enterprise of thought has not yet been reduced to a set of finite rules.”
Coursera Will Offer Certificates for Sequences of MOOCs. “The new program, called Specializations, will include certificates in data science, mobile-app development, and cybersecurity. Each sequence will comprise three to nine MOOCs, plus a capstone project in which students will be asked to apply their skills, by building an app, coding a secure web page, or producing a 5,000-word essay.”
Knowing What Students Know and Can Do: The Current State of Student Learning Outcomes Assessment in U.S. Colleges and Universities. “The findings from this survey point to five areas that require immediate attention by institutional leaders, faculty and staff members, assessment professionals, and governing boards. 1. More faculty involvement is essential. If there is one matter on which almost everyone agrees—administrators, rank-and-file faculty members, and assessment scholars—it is that faculty involvement in assessment and improvement is essential to both improve teaching and learning and to enhance institutional effectiveness. While faculty routinely ‘assess’ their students’ learning through papers, test, other tasks, the nature of student work is not always closely aligned with stated course, program or institutional outcomes. Teaching and learning centers can make an important contribution to the assessment agenda by offering workshops and consultations that help faculty design classroom-based assignments that both address the respective faculty member’s interest in determining whether his or her students are learning what is intended as well as provide evidence about student learning that can be used to represent institutional effectiveness. Another promising faculty development approach is to situate assessment as a curricular review function, either in the context of the disciplines or the general education program.”
Completion Rates Aren’t the Best Way to Judge MOOCs, Researchers Say. “Completion rates make sense as a metric for assessing conventional college courses, said Andrew Dean Ho, an associate professor in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and director of the university’s MOOC research. In a conventional course, the goals are generally consistent and well understood: Students want to complete the course and, eventually, earn a credential. The instructors want the same thing. A MOOC is more of a blank canvas, said Mr. Ho. Some students who register for MOOCs have no intention of completing, and some instructors do not emphasize completion as a priority. Success and failure take many forms.”
Liberal Arts Grads Win Long-Term. “While making the case that liberal arts graduates are perfectly payable and employable, the report also drives home the fact that there’s one area where humanities and social sciences majors have everyone beat: meeting employers’ desires and expectations. Employers consistently say they want to hire people who have a broad knowledge base and can work together to solve problems, debate, communicate and think critically, the report notes – all skills that liberal arts programs aggressively, and perhaps uniquely, strive to teach.”
Public-University Group Offers Alternative to Obama’s College-Rating Plan. “Instead, the association suggests, the federal government should judge colleges based on a trio of risk-adjusted outcome measures: retention and graduation rates; employment and continuing-education rates; and loan-repayment and default rates.”
Enough With the ‘Lifelong Learning’ Already. “I don’t mean to sound (too) churlish. I recognize that people who preach the faith about lifelong learning have good intentions. But what they are asking for is so imprecise. Lifelong learners of what? Unless we answer that question, the phrase means nothing. It belongs in the junk pile of shopworn academic platitudes. So let’s attempt to answer that question. I’ll start. It should go without saying that I want my students to become more knowledgeable about literature, more effective in interpreting the written word, and more competent writers and speakers. Those are my primary goals. But if I had to articulate secondary, big-picture objectives, I would say that I want my students to become curious, open-minded, empathetic citizens.”
Pressure on the Provosts: 2014 Survey of Chief Academic Officers. “Only 5 percent strongly agree and another 18 percent agree that the economic downturn is ‘effectively over’ at their institutions. In contrast, 21 percent strongly disagree and another 37 percent disagree. Public institutions were likelier to see the downturn continuing while privates were more likely to see recovery, though only 26 percent of private nonprofit institutions agreed that the recession was over for their colleges and universities. If budget pressures continue, so too do others. Provosts see continued demands on accountability and academic rigor, interest in MOOCs (of which they are skeptical) and competency-based education (about which they are more enthusiastic). They are decidedly unenthusiastic about President Obama’s proposed ratings system.”
General Education’s Remake. “The work by the three committees will overlap. But they will focus on different areas. The design/leadership group will consist of about 25 officials from institutions that are already devising outcomes-based, portable general education pathways. The focus of the equity research working group will be studying what works best for underserved students. And, finally, the digital resources study group will evaluate online learning strategies that help students have multiple options for meeting degree expectations.”