Here are some industry articles that caught our eye recently.
Students’ Long Paths to Completion Carry Major Financial Consequences. “Even if they could afford to tackle 15 hours per semester, that could be overwhelming for students with weak academic backgrounds, including many low-income and minority students, or for older adults who haven’t been in a classroom in decades, some educators worry. That’s especially true if prerequisite remediation is cut, they say. In addition to offering remediation alongside, instead of before, most college-level classes, Complete College America has been promoting a plan it calls Guided Pathways to Success, or GPS. With that approach, every major is organized into a prescribed pathway of sequenced courses that will allow students to graduate in two or four years.”
4+1 Interview: Linda Nilson. “These are the major problems that specs grading intends to reduce: the lack of rigor in college courses, the disconnect between grades and learning outcomes, student confusion over faculty expectations, students’ low motivation to work and to excel, faculty-student grading conflicts, student and faculty stress, students’ sense of not being responsible for their grades, their tendency to ignore faculty feedback, and faculty’s grading burden, which has been growing for years.”
The Middle. “Which means that the publics can actually turn a dilemma into an opportunity. If they allow themselves to be commoditized — to “sell” only interchangeable general education credits — then I foresee an ugly race to the bottom. But with more middle and even upper middle class students feeling compelled by economics to look more closely at public options, there’s a real opportunity for publics to start to fill the holes left by struggling privates. Gaining more traction with the middle and upper middle classes can bring with it not only more resources, as important as those are, but more political strength.”
“Like a Real College.” “Innovators who want to get around some of the logistical or conceptual barriers to fuller participation in higher education need to keep in mind that while the new students may appreciate the access, they still want it to be access to a valid and recognizable thing. That may not entail a homecoming weekend, but it may well entail graduation ceremonies, human contact with faculty and staff, and the chance to connect socially with other students. They want signifiers that suggest to other people — employers, yes, but also family and friends — that they’ve achieved something real and recognizable.”
How I Give Big Talks. “The 20 minute talk is clearly modeled after a TED talk. I’ll use slides, but they will be image based slides. Tons of hours will have gone into finding and preparing the images. These talks are designed to leave two or three big ideas with the participants. There will be lots of interaction with the audience in these 20 minutes, but it will be mostly me who is speaking. The interaction may consist of call and response – or raised hands – but again in the first 20 minutes I’m working hard to get the big ideas across. I’m using that 20 minutes to make an argument. To convince the audience of some point. … This 20 minute talk is almost never about imparting information, data, or facts. A talk is the wrong time to give lots of new information. It is important to use evidence and data, but only to support the narrative. In the 20 minute talk I hope to take the room on an idea journey.”
In a Move Toward Open Access, ‘Nature’ Allows Widespread Article Sharing. “’Nature,’ one of the world’s most-cited scientific publications, took a step toward open access on Tuesday by granting its subscribers and journalists wide authority to let outside readers view its articles at no cost. Under the new policy, subscribers to 49 journals published by the Nature Publishing Group and collected on Nature’s website can create and share links to full-text versions of all of that content. About 100 media outlets also can include free links in news reports that reference articles in the group’s journals. The change is a financial risk for ‘Nature,’ which recognizes that it may lose money from both subscribers and nonsubscribers who buy access to a single article, Steven C. Inchcoombe, chief executive officer of the Nature Publishing Group, said in an interview outlining the decision.”
Digital Natives Like a Good Lecture, Too. “I don’t think ‘today’s students’ are much different from how I was at 19, or from previous generations of students. In the past 1,000 years of higher education, we have found what works best in teaching: small classes and one-on-one interactions between student and professor. That is why Oxford and Cambridge still have one-on-one tutorials, and I don’t see those classrooms being flipped anytime soon. They already are flipped, in the sense that the student has to prepare an essay every week before the class but also has to attend lectures which are very much in the traditional model.”
Pearson, Efficacy, and Research. “And it turns out that the more our participants knew about learning outcomes research, the more they were interested in talking about how little we know about the topic. For example, even though we have had course design frameworks for a long time now, we don’t know a whole lot about which course design features will increase the likelihood of achieving particular types of learning outcomes. Also, while we know that helping students develop a sense of community in their first year at school increases the likelihood that they will stay on in school and complete their degrees, we know very little about which sorts of intra-course activities are most likely to help students develop that sense of connectedness in ways that will measurably increase their odds of completion. And to the degree that research on topics like these exist, it’s scattered throughout various disciplinary silos. There is very little in the way of a pool of common knowledge.”
A Flexible Future. “Some of the country’s most rigorous research universities have a new obsession: flexibility. As the institutions contemplate a more modular future, experiments with blended learning may provide an early glimpse at their plans. Through strategic visions and partnerships, institutions such as Duke and Harvard Universities and the Georgia and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology are laying the groundwork for curriculums that will be delivered through a combination of face-to-face instruction, blended courses and distance education. A common goal is to offer students ‘flexibility’ — a word several administrators used to summarize their institutions’ aspirations.”
What Monsters Lurk In Your LMS? Audrey Watters on Education Technology. “The problem isn’t that science gives us monsters, it’s that we have pretended like it is truth and divorced from responsibility, from love, from politics, from care. The problem isn’t that science gives us monsters, it’s that it does not, despite its insistence, give us ‘the answer.’ And that is problem with ed-tech’s monsters. That is the problem with teaching machines. In order to automate education, must we see knowledge in a certain way, as certain: atomistic, programmable, deliverable, hierarchical, fixed, measurable, non- negotiable? In order to automate that knowledge, what happens to care?”
Mind the Gap: A Response to Ben Wildavsky. “Wildavsky doesn’t take a long historical view, though he certainly could. Over the past several decades, most states have shifted cost from subsidies to students. Pell grant spending has increased, student loans have ballooned, and students working thirty or more hours a week for pay outside of class has gone from aberrant to normal. We’ve gone from very low tuition — CUNY was free until the mid-1970’s — to considerably higher tuition and higher aid over the course of decades. Has that resulted in greater economic growth? Is the economy growing faster in 2014 than it was in, say, 1968? (Hint: no.) Has it resulted in greater economic equality, as all of that high aid should have led us to expect? (Hint: no.)“
Books or Articles on Academic Change? “The most common answer for what needs to change in higher ed seems to be our rising costs. Everyone that I know in any leadership role in higher education is thinking about prices, costs, and value. Beyond issues of student debt and rising higher ed costs, what are the areas that we need to focus most of our energy on change? Is it student learning? Are we talking about the skills traditionally prized at liberal arts institutions, such as leadership and analysis and critical thinking skills? Or are we talking about specific competencies that are closely aligned with employer and job market demands? What are the other specific areas that our colleges and universities need to focus their change efforts?”
A Gamified Approach to Teaching and Learning. “What is striking about Carnes’s approach is that he is as interested in promoting students’ affective development, interpersonal skills, moral reasoning, and psychological maturation as he is in cultivating cognitive growth. To be sure, he views role playing games as a way to familiarize students with essential issues in ethics, philosophy, political theory, and theology, and to expand their mental universes, by exposing them to historically significant texts, individuals, and events. But his underlying goal is to cultivate those qualities of character and habits of mind that higher education too often eschews. The games encourage students to acquire empathy by imagining other selves, to forge a sense of community with teammates and other classmates, and to promote an imaginative understanding of the past.”
Reflections from Arizona: The Future of Higher Education. “Professional development for faculty and advisors. Driven by the integration of technology, all three institutions we visited support and encourage routine engagement of their faculty and advisors with learning science and with best practices in instruction, coaching, and mentoring. This has a remarkable effect on the organizational culture, keeping it oriented to and wholly animated by student success.”
This Will Revolutionize Education. “Many technologies have promised to revolutionize education, but so far none has. With that in mind, what could revolutionize education?” (A YouTube video.)
Is Kuali Guilty of “Open Washing”? “But the story of what’s going with Kuali, the open source ERP system for higher education, is interesting and relevant for a couple of reasons. First, while we hear a lot of concern from folks about the costs of textbooks and LMSs, those expenses pale in comparison to what colleges and universities pay in SIS licensing and support costs. A decent sized university can easily pay a million dollars or more for their SIS, and a big system like UC or CUNY can pay tens or even hundreds of millions. One of the selling points of Kuali has been to lower costs, thus freeing up a lot of that money to meet other needs that are more closely related to the core university mission. So what happens in the SIS space has a potentially huge budgetary impact on teaching and learning.”
State of the Commons. “Millions of creators around the world use CC licenses to give others permission to use their work in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to. Those millions of users are the proof that Creative Commons works. But measuring the size of the commons has always been a challenge. There’s no sign-up to use a CC license, and no central repository or catalog of CC-licensed works. … With this report, we’re taking a big step toward better measuring the size of the commons.”
The Curriculum of the Future: How Digital Content is Changing Education. “This Center for Digital Education (CDE) Special Report takes a deep dive into digital curriculum, looking closely at the benefits and potential pitfalls involved in the shift. From innovative content delivery methods to the latest in open educational resources and other trends on the horizon, this report highlights case studies and best practices from education institutions that have already made the transition to digitally delivered learning.”
Blowing Off Class? We Know. “Still, there’s a big difference between having the data and having the experience to use it effectively. The University of Maryland University College, an adult-focused institution that is part of the University of Maryland system, has learned that lesson. In early 2013, it put ‘attendance triggers’ into its academic monitoring system, but disabled them for the many military students it enrolls after realizing that missed classes were inevitable for active-duty personnel but not necessarily predictive of academic trouble. The alerts were just annoying.”
What’s Next for E-Textbooks? “Still, the technology is out there to move the e-textbook beyond the ‘digital with extras’ model. As David Anderson, executive director of higher education at the Association of American Publishers, described, learning platforms from his members incorporate text content, adaptive learning materials, quizzes, tests and games. Artificial intelligence can determine where a student is strong and weak, and ‘drill the student until the student performs better,’ he noted. The data generated through those mechanisms is sent back to the professor, ‘who can monitor it as the class is going along and adjust his or her instructional priorities.’ Those same platforms, he said, allow the faculty member to choose individual chapters from a textbook and add his or her own ‘extraneous materials in as part of the coursework.’”
Big Districts Pressure Publishers on Digital-Content Delivery. “A shift toward shared interoperability standards for K-12 digital content would help school districts avoid being either locked into the product ecosystem of an individual vendor or left to navigate a thicket of proprietary content-delivery systems that often don’t mesh well with one another. It could also transform how schools purchase and consume digital content. The standards could allow districts to procure small “chunks” of content (individual chapters, lessons or videos, for example) from multiple vendors, perhaps through licensing agreements, rather than rely on big buys of yearlong or grade-span textbook series from a single publisher.”
Two-Year Majors. “Forcing students to pick something — knowing full well that they have the option of changing it later — can nudge them towards acknowledging some sort of substantive interest. I’m thinking here that it may be akin to party identification and voting rates: people who register as Democrats or Republicans tend to vote at higher rates than people who declare themselves independents. Much of that is probably a reflection of previous underlying interest, but some of it may be self-reinforcing. It may not be a coincidence that voting rates have declined along with party identification. Asking the students to declare the academic equivalent of a party may induce a greater sense of academic belonging. They’ll know who their peers are.”
Reactions to the Inaugural Leading Academic Change Summit. “What has occurred in the last few years has been the collision of new pressures (public disinvestment, rising costs), new models (blended learning, flipped classrooms, and open online education at scale), and a growing excitement around learning science (learning analytics and advances in cognitive science and learning theory). This collision has opened up space for a new group of non-traditional and non-faculty academics to engage in more robust and productive collaborations with faculty and campus leadership. We are seeing a growth of learning and learning research related positions in teaching and leaning centers, academic computing departments, digital learning units, and institutional research units. Every institution is struggling with how to shift organizational structures, reporting lines, resources and personnel closer to teaching, learning and student success.”
MOOC Research Learning Curves. “At HarvardX we’re increasingly interested in how MOOC data can guide us towards better teaching. In fact, we aim to learn from research on every MOOC that we build to continuously improve our teaching on campus and online. But to understand what helps students learn and what doesn’t, to get a handle on cause and effect, we have to shift from observational studies to building experimentation into the very DNA of our courses. This necessitates increasing collaboration between the faculty, professional learning researchers, and instructional designers. For course teams and professors with littleexperience in educational research, the task seems daunting: Where do I even begin?”
Good Cop, Bad Cop From White House. “And it also, in part, more vividly illustrated what seems to be an ongoing tension of the Obama administration’s higher agenda: how to promote the value and importance of colleges while also seeking to hold institutions more accountable, especially for their tuition prices. The contrast in tone between separate speeches on Thursday by President Obama and Vice President Biden underscored the balancing act for an administration that has sought to both cheerlead successes and innovations in higher education and clamp down on rising tuition prices — approaches that tend to draw opposite reactions from college leaders.”
Yeah, We’re Really Screwing This Up. “I believe that students do their best and most meaningful work when they have the maximum freedom to explore their own interests. Sometimes that freedom is going to result in them choosing to not do the drafts for my assignments. Sometimes their reasons are sensible (an important exam in another class), while other times they’re silly, (insert non-essential activity here), but in either case, students are going to learn something about choice and consequences from their decision, which is maybe one of the most important things a college education can deliver.”
A Giant Journal Club Talks About Collaboration. “Spending some time together when still drafting research assignments and the syllabus and having more than one encounter with a liaison librarian during the course of the semester makes a significant difference. There wasn’t a statistically significant difference between being fairly involved and being totally embedded, which is a relief when you think about how to scale things up.”