Here are some industry articles that caught our eye recently.
An Aging America: Higher Education’s New Frontier. “At a time when traditional “retirement” increasingly marks the beginning of a new phase of work (whether by choice, necessity, or some combination of the two), millions will need help if they are to make a successful transition. Looking toward another two, three, or even four decades of healthy active life, many people are eager to gain new skills and the credentials that will help them move into a new work-life chapter. Like students of traditional college age, they also will need help navigating what is fast being recognized as one of life’s major transitions, akin to adolescence in its significance. Here we have the makings of a win-win scenario. Colleges need students, and a growing underserved population needs supportive educational pathways into a new life chapter, precisely what colleges have historically provided. So why the deafening silence?”
Guest Post: Post-Charleston Interview on the future of the Library with Stanley Wilder, Dean of Libraries at Louisiana State University. “Each year at the Charleston Conference, I have the good fortune to meet at least one new person who broadens my perspective on the role we all play in developing, curating, sharing and protecting knowledge as a part of the library world. In this column, I focus on people, companies and institutions that I feel are doing unexpected things that are instructive as to where we are heading. Over an excellent dinner, Stanley Wilder and I discussed the future of the library with a particular emphasis on the provisioning of learning content and the symbiosis of content and services in a digital environment. I hold the view that the provisioning of digital content and services need not be managed or administered by multiple departments in the university, particularly if it concerns learning content and learning management systems, and that the library as a ‘digital nerve center’ ought to be the home. In the following interview with Stanley, this theme is explored, among others, and I challenge the reader to discern the degree to which Stanley and I concur about the role of the library.”
The Innovation Agenda. “This is not to say that there is no use for technology. The Online Learning Initiative, a project studying statistics pedagogy at Carnegie Mellon, shows that some online segments work better than large lecture sessions. But, if you read their reports, it’s clear that the experiment essentially offers a flipped classroom, and in fact students probably gain more faculty contact than in the lecture model. It’s more like a return to a tutorial model. Who knew students do better with professors? What the rush for innovation is really about, as Christopher Newfield, a leading critic of higher education, has pointedout, is not a better theory of change but a theory of governance.”
Educating Minds Online. “In a chapter on the thorny problem of student motivation, Miller offers a host of small suggestions to help faculty members personalize an online learning environment, engage students in discussion boards and other course activities, and minimize two common problems in online courses: student procrastination and distraction. ‘In general,’ she writes, ‘structure is the enemy of procrastination.’ And so she advocates an ‘early and often’ assessment philosophy, one that involves students from the first class session and then throughout the course.”
Best of a Bad Situation? “Ted Mitchell, the under secretary of education, has praised ECMC’s promise to slash tuition by 20 percent for most new students. And in an interview last week, he said the deal would help many students who are close to earning their credentials. The guarantee agency is trying to buy campuses and online programs that enroll 11,000 students who are within five months of completion, according to the department, and 8,600 who are within three months.”
Quiet Players, Deep Pockets. “Back in 2011, the department said it would encourage guarantors to propose new services that build on their experience backing loans. While details were fuzzy at the time, the department’s ideas included providing default prevention and financial literacy services to colleges and borrowers. The major players in the industry have been moving this way. Kantrowitz said several guarantee agencies have used their expertise and data-collection chops to transition to working on college completion and financial counseling.”
The Ecosystem Problem. “The catastrophic and growing disconnect between graduate institutions and the larger academic job market is a function of the incentives to which graduate institutions are responding. Given an ongoing and well-publicized (at least within the industry) employment problem, why do graduate programs keep growing? The short answer: although the larger system doesn’t need more new grads, each individual research university needs a constant, and preferably growing, supply of graduate students. The incentives at the institutional level are the opposite of the needs at the system level. New graduates pay the price for the disconnect.”
Higher Ed by the Numbers. “We have about 21 million students enrolled in US higher education. Of those, 15 million go to a public institution and 6 million are at private schools. Amongst private schools, about twice as many students go to non-profits (4 million) as for-profits (2 million). About 13 million of the 21 million students are full-time students.”
Placing the Actor. “ECMC is buying 56 campuses and paying very little for each. It’s saying it will run them as nonprofits, and will show good faith by starting with a 20 percent tuition cut. It’s promising to bring in a top-flight educational management team, despite never having run even a single campus of a college before. And it’s saying, probably correctly, that it won’t be a guarantor of any of the loans on its own campuses, because the Feds will. I can see why the Feds are eager to sell. They have no desire to run a chain of colleges, and full refunds and payouts to everyone would be terribly expensive … But ECMC’s interest is harder to explain. It has the means to do the deal, certainly, and it has the opportunity, but I’m stuck on the motive. Why is it doing this?”
How to change behavior in your disrupted organization. “Of course, new information changes behaviour. If people are sitting in a crowded theater and someone shouts “Fire!” their behaviour will change instantly. If someone tells you where you can get gasoline 10 cents cheaper, you will change your behaviour the next time you need a fill-up. If you hear about a great job opening in another city, you may apply for it. So what? I decided to come at it from a different angle. I asked myself, ‘Can I think of anyone whose behaviour I’d like to change?’”
Clash in the Stacks. “That idea is at least gaining some popularity among other library directors who see the future of the profession as serving not necessarily as gatekeepers, but as coaches and consultants to teach others to sort through the information and use it effectively.”
Saltatory. “Some may see the growth of the master’s degree as an insidious form credential creep. Economists seem to love to talk about the cab driver and the barista with a master’s degree. My take is that a normative master’s degree will be a very good thing for our economy and our society. A general upswing in educational attainment has always been the surest path to greater economic productivity. On an individual level, earning a master’s degree results in significantly higher earnings in every profession. Would the expected degree that every college-goer receives moving from a bachelor’s to a master’s represent a saltatory change in higher education?”
Rethinking Retention. “Today, roughly four in ten college freshman fail to graduate after six years. Why do too many students fail to graduate and why do many who do take six years or even more? Although many blame this on under-preparation, a lack of focus and motivation, shifting student demographics, or various distractions, whether extracurricular or social, these do not appear to be the dominant factors. The top problems are financial, institutional, curricular, and socio-cultural. Let’s look briefly at each of these impediments.”
The Rise of Digital Poster Sessions: creating new learning interactions in the library. “We’ve also seen the rise of digital poster sessions. The room has eight large monitors on the walls and two additional mobile monitors that can be utilized. We can clear out tables and chairs to create an open room where students move around the screens and talk about projects. Think of a poster session but with 70-inch monitors instead of tack boards. While most of these sessions have been static (jpg or ppt) some have included video or interactive web content. … What I like about the digital poster session format is that not only do students conduct research and articulate a problem or solution, but they openly present on it as well. This has led to new instructional opportunities related visual literacy and related content. Students have to give careful thought to how they express their ideas.”
The Battle for Open and MOOC Completion Rates. “Yesterday I wrote a post on the 20 Million Minds blog about Martin Weller’s new bookThe Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. Exploring different aspects of open in higher education – open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship – Weller shows how far the concept of openness has come, to the point where “openness is now such a part of everyday life that it seems unworthy of comment”. If you’re interested in OER, open courses, open journals, or open research in higher education – get the book (it’s free and available in a variety of formats).”
An Academic Library Story. “ I have this theory that as goes the academic library, so will go the academic institution. If your institution is producing a commodity then you will be in for a future of only struggle. If your institution is instead about mission, and people are the center of this mission, then you will be okay. Naive? Perhaps. At my institution, the heart of the academic experience runs through our academic libraries. The libraries are where you find the students. They are studying in groups or alone. The libraries are where the students go to find librarians to help them with their classes and projects. The libraries are where the faculty go to consult with librarians on course readings, class assignments, and class projects. Our libraries house and host our academic computing units and our instructional designers. Our teaching and learning center (what we call our Center for the Advancement of Learning) is housed in the most beautiful wing of our central library. Our library spaces have evolved to accommodate more collaborative work and more informal learning. More of our student services have migrated to our libraries. Our librarians are constantly accessible to our students and faculty.”
Students as Producers, Students as Partners. “In stark contrast, the student as partner and producer model builds on a recognition that young people today have no particular desire to be passive or deferential. It seeks to engage students in their own learning, not simply through active learning strategies, but through authentic experience in professional practice, and by creating educational materials that can be useful to others. It demands that students be engaged in all aspects of a course or program, from blueprinting to instructional design.”
Textbook Publishers’ Changing Product Strategies. “The three principal beneficiaries of the higher education publishing industry’s consolidation, Pearson, Cengage Learning, and McGraw-Hill Education, command an estimated 80% share of the U.S. higher education textbook market. Even with the advantages lent by such enormous market shares, the largest higher education publishers find themselves in an increasingly difficult situation. As noted in a previous blog post, competition from online used book and rental competitors, increased price resistance, and a painfully slow transition to digital product models present fundamental challenges to traditional publishing strategies. In response, higher education publishers are striving to develop innovative, online products—but that effort requires substantial investment. Digital transition costs are increasing just when unit sales are declining. What impact will this ongoing profit squeeze have on publishers’ product strategies?”
National Advisory Panel on Accreditation Considers Major Reforms. ”More than two years later, that same panel is discussing amending those recommendations with a set of far-reaching proposals that would change both the accreditation process and the role of the panel itself. Among the recommendations being considered are eliminating the regional boundaries that define the nation’s six major accrediting bodies and granting more authority to the panel to oversee accreditors and to develop policy.”
Room to Experiment. “Ball State University is using active learning, multimedia-enabled classrooms and swivel chairs to put a new spin on its faculty development efforts. The university earlier this decade renovated its Teachers College building, creating two classrooms it calls Interactive Learning Spaces. The rooms are part of a larger faculty development program intended to promote active learning techniques and cut down on lecturing. As the program has expanded, the university is researching whether teaching at-risk students — those withdrawing from or earning a D or F in a basic math course — in the classrooms could improve academic outcomes and, eventually, graduation rates.”
Academic IT and “The New Leadership Challenge.” “When I read articles as good as Michael’s I think about how organizational change is an entire academic discipline. The literature that I’m most interested in now is all about higher ed leadership. All those years studying the demographic transition were enjoyable, but would it have been better to have been reading the Harvard Business Review rather than Demography? Knowing what I know now about the course of my academic career, would it have been better to get a terminal degree in higher education leadership as opposed to one in sociology? Are academic leaders who have academic training in organizational leadership and change better positioned to lead organizational change?”
Community College Programs Can Lead To Big Payoffs – In The Right Fields. “Analyzing seven years of post-graduation data from more than 20,000 students who attended Washington state’s 34 community and technical colleges, researchers from Columbia University and the Career Ladders Project in Oakland, Calif., found that programs that take more than a year to complete lead to better employment odds and higher wages — sometimes even more so than a bachelor’s degree.”