Here are some industry articles that caught our eye recently.
Vendors as Traditional Revolutionaries. “All of which brings me back to a single point: If you want better educational technology, then work to make sure that your colleagues in your campus community are asking for the things that you think would make educational technology better. If 40% rather than 4% of assignments created by your colleagues were on the open web, then learning platforms like LMSs would look and work differently. I guarantee it. Likewise, as long as most educators tend to use the technology to reproduce existing classroom practices, LMSs will look the same. I guarantee that too. And that’s not a vendor thing. That’s a software development thing.”
Forward Planning on Technology. “Technology can address some of the financial and organizational challenges facing public flagship universities, according to a new report, but those challenges have to be solved with input from the entire institution — not just a ‘coalition of the willing.’ … The Ithaka report, funded by the Lumina Foundation, suggests collaboration as one possible remedy — first among administrators and faculty at individual institutions, then possibly between the network’s member universities. But collaboration can only take place if administrations carefully plan, clearly communicate and create incentives for faculty members to use technology in the classroom.”
A business model view of changing times in higher education. “Until recently, creation and teaching of courses and programs were rightfully relegated to the Process part of the business model. In order to get courses created and taught, one needed a specific Resource: faculty members. One might say that courses were a scarce commodity, created on demand. Over the past few years, however, that situation has changed dramatically: We now live in a course-rich world: Textbook companies such as McGraw-Hill and Pearson have become major online course producers, and even degree-program producers. The internet is filled with free open source courses (e.g. The Open Courseware Consortium); the explosion of MOOCs with their high-brand providers adds a dramatic level of free or almost free courseware; and organizations such as the Khan Academy and the Saylor Foundation produce courses as part of a larger goal of almost free college education. This enormous new availability of off-the-shelf courses, many of very high quality, actually signals the creation of a new Resource for higher education. Courses no longer must be created and taught using the traditional Resource/Process combination.”
Notes from NEASC, Part Two. “Prior Learning Assessment is one form of looking outward. It’s the practice of granting academic credits for demonstrated knowledge or competency picked up in other places. (One speaker helpfully differentiated PLA from competency-based degrees by noting that the former assumes that the student shows up with knowledge, whereas the latter measures knowledge gained during enrollment. It’s imperfect, but it’s a decent start.) It’s becoming increasingly popular as a way to help adult students move more quickly through degree programs and get on with their careers. As the number of high school graduates drops — especially in New England — the needs of adult learners are likely to carry more weight. But PLA carries baggage. Be too easy with it, and you start to become a diploma mill. Be too strict with it, and you might as well just not bother. And it’s an awkward fit, at best, with financial aid.”
25 Institutions Sign Up for Project to Ease Path to Degree. “As part of the pilot program, announced in September, students can complete courses from a designated list of about 100 and then earn credit from the participating institutions, which include community colleges, four-year institutions, and for-profit colleges. The institutions will provide data to the council about students’ progress, and more colleges will be recruited to participate in 2015.”
7 Online Learning Myths that University Administrators Believe. “Myth 2: Online learning is cheaper than face-to-face learning and an easy money maker. Reality check. Traditional universities spend more time, money and training to prepare faculty for online teaching while continuing to maintain physical campuses. They also have to build a strong support structure to help distance learning students. The only way to make money from online programs is to spend years working on them, scale to tens of thousands of students and actively reduce capital costs, Hill said.”
Lessons from Serial. “Higher education stands accused in the court of public opinion of a great many crimes. It’s self-referential and out of touch; it’s too expensive; it’s consumed with climbing walls and football; it’s racist and exclusionary; it’s politically correct and not exclusionary enough; pick your poison. The astute reader will notice that some of the charges contradict each other, which, in fact, they do. Some of them are also entirely inapplicable to much of the sector, but we all suffer guilt by association. That isn’t supposed to happen, but it does.”
A Note to Walter Isaacson on “The Innovators.” “A second area that I wish to commend you in The Innovators is your attempt to understand the conditions in which innovation emerges. Throughout your story you continually stress the collaborative nature of the teams responsible for each advance in hardware and software. A history of technology innovation as seen through the lens of relationships is more complex, but also more satisfying. The Innovators is an important read not only for those of us interested in the history of computers, software and the web. Your book should also count as essential reading for anyone wishing to develop an organizational culture conducive to innovation, experimentation, and risk taking.”
Blackboard’s SVP of Product Development Gary Lang Resigns. “Gary Lang, Blackboard’s senior vice president in charge of product development and cloud operations, has announced his resignation and plans to join Amazon. Gary took the job with Blackboard in June 2013 and, along with CEO Jay Bhatt and SVP of Product Management Mark Strassman, formed the core management team that had worked together previously at AutoDesk. Gary led the reorganization effort to bring all product development under one organization, a core component of Blackboard’s recent strategy.”
The Future College Bookstore: Leave The Books, Take The Panini. “Call them next generation campus stores and call the traditional campus bookstore the next venue slated for a certain remake (following in the footsteps of recreation centers and dining halls) as colleges and universities vie to offer students an enhanced college experience and an alternative campus hub while simultaneously dealing with the reality that printed course materials are shrinking as a percentage of store sales.”
Talent Near and Far. “On the interwebs, this sort of thing is called “crowdsourcing.” It’s the attempt to make practical use of the saying that all of us are smarter than any of us. (Fans of early twentieth-century American political thought — and aren’t we all, really? — will recognize the echoes of John Dewey’s notion of “organized intelligence,” from The Public and Its Problems.) Getting more eyes on a shared concern can help in two ways. It increases the chances of solving the problem at hand, and it helps both develop and bring to light hidden pockets of talent. They aren’t always all in the first places you might look.”
5 Things We Know About College Students in 2014. “2. Print is not dead to them. Today’s college students, much like most professionals, feel comfortable in front of a screen. A majority said they preferred a digital format when reading, studying, taking notes, and doing problem sets. That preference for digital was most emphatic when it came to doing research, with 92 percent of students saying they preferred working on a screen. That said, a substantial portion of students said they preferred to do those course-related activities with paper and ink—about 40 percent, depending on the activity.”
From YouTube to e-books: novel ways to reach students. “Lectures are still vital to “inspire and stimulate” students, but as that “teaching tool is lost” as soon as the session ends, Dr Pickering replicates the material in podcasts, screencasts and other packages using YouTube, e-books and iTunes U. By doing so, students from all over the world can also benefit from the material. Additionally, he said, research he has undertaken shows that such resources are of particular help to weaker students.”
Scaling EdTech: A Fireside Chat. “We are starting to see what Don calls the “pull model” of education being driven by technology: people are taking more ownership of their personal evolution through targeted learning. As opposed to a K12 student essentially being forced to sit through a class and accumulating seat time toward a degree, more people are actively putting their own time and money toward their personal betterment through educational programs with direct payback and actionable outcomes.”
Helix Education puts their competency-based LMS up for sale. “Something must have changed in their perception of the market to cause this change in direction. My guess is that they are getting pushback from schools who insist on keeping their institutional LMS, even with the new CBE programs. Helix states they have worked with “top three LMS solutions”, but as seen in the demo (read the first post for more details), capabilities such as embedding learning outcomes throughout a course and providing a flexible time frame work well outside the core design assumptions of a traditional LMS. I have yet to see an elegant design for CBE with a traditional LMS. I’m open to being convinced otherwise, but count me as skeptical.”
Sustaining SARA. “SARA aims to simplify how college and universities become authorized to offer distance education to students in other states. Today, individual institutions have to apply to operate in every state from which they intend to enroll students — a time-consuming and expensive process that involves navigating and keeping up with each state’s changing regulations. Hill likened that system to having to get 50 different driver’s licenses to be able to drive in every state. SARA, similar to how driver’s licenses actually work, has to do with reciprocity. Once a state joins SARA, institutions there can apply for blanket approval to offer distance education to students in the other member states or continue to handle state authorization on their own.”
Why State Policies Fall Short on College Completion. “The group said states and colleges must work together to help large percentages of low-income and nontraditional students get to graduation. Recommendations from the report include redesigning developmental education, using research-based student support services, creating ‘structured pathways’ for students and the strategic use of data.”
Big Unanswered End-Of-Year Questions. “… though I think we librarians need to do more to defend what really matters. Privacy matters. Equal access to knowledge matters. Genuine learning isn’t going to happen thanks to learning analytics, algorithms, and forcing underpaid writing instructors to teach more sections of writing without extra pay or support. Algorithms don’t do nearly as good a job of teaching writing as actual caring human beings – nor will spending money on data mining schemes that will supposedly improve student success do much good if we aren’t willing to help students new to college have human company as they learn the hard business of writing for college and beyond. If this is penny wise, we are trillions of pounds foolish.”
Ratings Plan Arrives, Details Scant. “The most straightforward set of measures looks at the rate at which colleges enroll low-income and first-generation students — and the extent to which institutions are affordable. Those measures include the percentage of students who receive Pell Grants, the financial need of students based on the federal aid formula, the students’ family income levels, and the number of first-generation college students on a campus. In addition, the department is considering the average net price of an institution, which is the actual amount that families end up paying after they receive aid.”
The Walking Dead in Higher Ed. “For the past 20-plus years, the primary source of evidence for a positive impact of instruction has come from tools like course evaluation surveys. Institutional research personnel have diligently combined, crunched and correlated this data with other mostly indirect measures such as retention, enrollment and grade point averages. Attempts are made to produce triangulation with samplings of alumni and employer opinions about the success of first-time hires. All of this is called ‘institutional assessment,’ but this doesn’t produce statistical evidence from direct measurement that empirically demonstrates that the university is directly responsible for the students’ skill sets based on instruction at the institution.”
America as 100 College Students. “America’s postsecondary student population is more diverse than ever. Many students attend school while working part- or even full-time. Some are raising children while in school. And, in many cases, they’re financially independent. There’s no one-size-fits-all path to (or through) college – and we need to plan our education policies accordingly.”
Khan Academy founder has two big ideas for overhauling higher education in the sciences. “To that end, Khan said that he is working on a universal credentialing system that could compare a graduate of ‘Stanford or Harvard’ by their raw abilities. Presumably, this credential would have to be some type of evaluation that would test and measure the abilities of all students, thereby making the granting institution irrelevant. Last year, Sebastian Thrun, the CEO of online education provider Udacity, and California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom announced a tech industry credentialing system, the Open Education Alliance, with Khan Academy as partner. Since then, Udacity has developed its own credential for the tech industry, the nanodegree. Similarly, Coursera, another online education provider, started awarding a ‘signature track’ certificate to the graduates of some its tech courses.”
Skills-Based Education Can Help Solve The Inequality Puzzle. “Wyman cites evidence from Ohio State University showing that at-risk youth benefit the most from vocational education because it does a better job than traditional schooling in keeping them engaged and preventing dropout and incarceration. He argues that technical training should not be viewed as a ceiling but a solid floor for students—a set of ‘stackable skills to build upon, regardless of future career path. As the Harvard report cited above states: ‘[T]he “college for all” rhetoric that has been so much a part of the current education reform movement needs to be significantly broadened to become a “post high-school credential for all.”’”