Here are some of the articles that caught our eye recently.
A Manifesto for Active Learning. “Even though information transfer and learning cannot be confused or conflated, I now believe that information transfer does have its place in active learning. … I consider lectures as a component of achieving my first goal: teaching my students how to learn. If I can spark their intellectual curiosity about a subject and teach them how to actively pursue knowledge about that subject—and that’s all I’ve done in a semester’s time—then I consider myself a successful teacher.”
No Aid, No Problem. “UniversityNow’s Patten University may be the first institution to successfully renew its regional accreditation while also voluntarily dropping out of federal financial aid programs. That move is one of several that make the Bay Area startup novel, or at least a new twist on emerging models in higher education. UniversityNow operates New Charter University and Patten, a former religious college in Oakland the company bought last year. The two sister institutions both offer competency-based degrees that are self-paced and online, but feature a relatively heavy dose of faculty support. … But UniversityNow has deviated from WGU’s successful playbook in several ways – most notably with its for-profit status and by forgoing federal aid eligibility. The aid decision is a big part of how the company manages to keep its tuition levels down.”
Students Talking About Technology: ECAR 2013. “And finally, the report also says that students prefer that faculty themselves provide instruction in how to use technology, rather than rely on the help desk or online-only documentation, which suggests that for the foreseeable future, faculty who incorporate technology in interesting or significant ways will need to continue to budget class time to cover how to use the tech.“
Copyright as a Business Model for MOOCs. “In the U.S., the TEACH Act provides an umbrella of protection and access beyond fair use for accredited classrooms and learning institutions, allowing the use and presentation of copyrighted materials by non-profit educational institutions under specific conditions. Although the TEACH Act was amended to take distance learning into account back in 2002, it does not provide MOOCs with the ability to use copyrighted materials without being properly licensed. Is this a competitive limitation of the open MOOC format?”
QuickWire: Rutgers Graduate Faculty Opposes Pearson eCollege Deal. “Deepa Kumar, an associate professor of journalism and media studies, told the newspaper that faculty members thought Pearson’s contract with the university would give the company too much money as well as too much say over the curriculum—particularly because the contract would let Pearson delete course materials it decided were inappropriate. The measure approved in the faculty vote also said that the university should include the faculty union in any future negotiations with Pearson.”
Disrupting College from the Margins: Innovations in Lifelong Learning. “By working from the margins, innovators have the ability to move more nimbly and implement their ideas. UniversityNow for instance keeps its tuition prices low enough that it does not need to rely on Title IV money and the quagmire of regulations that go along with it. Innovators will need to function outside of the auspices of accreditation and worry less about gaining ACE recommendations and regional accreditation and instead focus more on how they can get employers to appreciate and validate learning experiences that do not necessarily translate into credit hours. “
Investing in digital teaching and learning resources: Ten recommendations for policymakers. “2. Pursue complementarity before full substitution A ‘big bang’ approach to replacing printed textbooks with digital materials at large scale may be ill-advised. Traditional printed textbooks will continue to be useful tools, and be cost-effective, for many years to come. When investing in digital teaching and learning materials, first look to see how printed and digital materials may complement each other, and concentrate initial investments in digital content in ways that take advantage of affordances or functionalities not offered by traditional printed textbooks.”
Going Global. “Laureate Education is big. Like 800,000 students attending 78 institutions in 30 countries big. Yet the privately held for-profit university system has largely remained out of the public eye. That may be changing, however, as the company appears ready for its coming out party after 14 years of quiet growth. Laureate has spent heavily to solidify its head start on other globally minded American education providers. In addition to its rapid growth abroad, the company has courted publicity by investing in the much-hyped Coursera, a massive open online course provider. And Laureate recently made news when the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank subsidiary, invested $150 million in the company — its largest-ever investment in education. The company has also kicked up controversy over its affiliation with the struggling Thunderbird School of Global Management, a freestanding, nonprofit business school based in Arizona.”
Military Tuition On Hold. “The U.S. military’s decision to stop paying financial aid for active-duty service members during the shutdown is jeopardizing their academic progress and forcing some to withdraw from classes, according to officials at colleges with large military populations. Since October 1, branches of the armed forces have not processed existing applications for tuition assistance or authorized new requests. Military educational programs were not included in the law passed just before the shutdown that protects military pay from the shutdown. The Army said in a notice on its site that the tuition assistance program remains halted even though it ordered most civilian employees back to work over the weekend.
Faculty Pushback on Online Deal. “The clash between Rutgers’ administration and some of its faculty members resembles similar debates at other institutions. Last September, the administration signed a contract with eCollege, a Pearson division, to develop and manage online degree programs with the goal of enrolling more than 22,000 additional students by 2019. The New Brunswick campus currently enrolls about 41,500 students. Faculty members, concerned about academic freedom and intellectual property rights, on Wednesday passed a procedural roadblock that automatically withholds approval from any new program to be managed under the agreement with Pearson.”
Digital Badges in the Classroom. “Though digital badges usually are associated with MOOC-style courses and distance learning, this achievement-based approach can be integrated into more traditional course formats as well. Using a badge system to recognize student work is a kind of gamification in which learning becomes more concrete and visibly measurable. Early research on this emerging topic acknowledges that badges embed an additional incentive into learning and possess the ability to increase learner motivation and sharpen self-regulatory learning skills. Digital badging is not intended to replace traditional learning formats, nor supplant all other forms of assessment.”
The Sting. “This is why I always cringe when I hear instructors tell first year students “use peer reviewed sources” as if that single criterion is enough to sort the good from the bad (and as if non-experts will make good choices among the thousands of articles they’ll turn up in a search, hardly any of which will be comprehensible). I cringe when I hear librarians say “internet sources can’t be trusted, which is why you want to use library sources” – as if libraries and their licensed databases aren’t full of rubbish in need of vetting. This is why I encourage students to go beyond checklists when they evaluate sources. It’s not how information is dressed or the company it keeps, it’s what it has to say that matters, and how it arrived at its conclusions, and whether the work was carried out ethically and with an open mind.”