Here are some industry articles that caught our eye recently.
Stanford Chief Wants Higher Ed to Be ‘Affordable, Accessible, Adaptable.’ “To be effective, online learning must overcome several challenges, he said. It has to help students learn better, and it needs to offer a customized experience. ‘In a live classroom, a good instructor can see what works and what doesn’t,’ Mr. Hennessy said. Online instruction might be able to do that using real-time data and analytics on how students are engaging (or not) with the material. ‘We can get instant feedback,’ he said.”
3 Big Issues We Heard About at SXSWedu. “Student privacy, easier-to-use digital tools for instructors, and efforts to offer alternative credentials were some of the most-talked-about topics this week at the South by Southwest Edu conference, an offshoot of the popular South by Southwest music festival.”
Gates Foundation Fine-Tunes Its Focus in Higher-Education Policy. “The policy areas listed in that document include creating a national approach to collecting and reporting data on student performance, supporting financial models that would improve both access and completion by low-income and other disadvantaged students, replacing ineffective approaches to remedial education, and developing academic programs that would shorten the time to earn a degree.”
Okay So What’s The Big Deal About A Learning Culture? “No point beating around the pedagogical bush. That’s our definition: Real learning is the ability to adopt what you know and know-how to do and adapt it under an everchanging variety of circumstances. Learning is an ongoing process. That’s my definition and I’m sticking to it. So in a learning culture, everyone would be continuously adopting what they learned, creatively using it in as many different ways as possible, and sharing that learning with everyone else. The culture would be all about real learning.”
Not a Tsunami, But… “The ‘unbundling’ of degrees that many are predicting — where students assemble the learning they want, offered in person or online, by one or more institutions to earn credentials — is something that Hennessy predicted was the future of continuing education and professional education. ‘Online technologies will dominate this marketplace,’ he said. And this will include many professionally oriented master’s programs, he said. But he rejected the idea that this would be or should be the future of undergraduate education. An undergraduate degree ‘is a lot more than a group of unrelated courses,’ he said, and its ‘value proposition is different’ from the sum total of credits.”
Public Matters: A Response to Kevin Carey. “At the same time, though, Carey’s treatment elides the larger political economy in which these changes may be happening. The massive buildup of state college and community college systems within about a twenty-year window in the mid-twentieth century was a response to a political and economic imperative to open up pathways to the new middle class. They were public responses to a public need. That’s not true of most of the new forms emerging now. Some are for-profit, albeit of a different stripe than Phoenix or DeVry. Others are foundation-driven, or offshoots of existing elites. That’s not just a difference of bookkeeping; it’s a difference of mission.”
The 4 Properties of Powerful Teachers. “Just what are those traits? Here are some I’ve identified, and you could probably add to this list: Great teachers tend to be good-natured and approachable, as opposed to sour or foreboding; professional without being aloof; funny (even if they’re not stand-up comedians), perhaps because they don’t take themselves or their subject matter too seriously; demanding without being unkind; comfortable in their own skin (without being in love with the sound of their own voices); natural (they make teaching look easy even though we all know it isn’t); and tremendously creative, and always willing to entertain new ideas or try new things, sometimes even on the fly.”
Rutgers and ProctorTrack Fiasco: Impact of listening to regulations but not to students. “If you want to observe the unfolding impact of an institution ignoring the impact of policy decisions on students, watch the situation at Rutgers University. If you want to see the power of a single student saying “enough is enough”, go thank Betsy Chao and sign her petition. The current situation is that students are protesting the Rutgers usage of ProctorTrack software – which costs students $32 in additional fees, accessing their personal webcams, automatically tracks face and knuckle video as well as watching browser activity – in online courses. Students seem to be outraged at the lack of concern over student privacy and additional fees.”
Education Dept. Considers Creating Not 1 but 2 College-Ratings Systems. “The first ratings system would be geared toward consumers and be based on raw outcomes metrics. The second would be geared toward policy makers and researchers, and would rely on metrics adjusted for student and institutional characteristics, the official told attendees at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual policy briefing. Only the second system would be used to measure accountability. The shift appeared designed to answer criticism that the department was trying to do too much with one system.”
The Impact of Free Tuition. “Tennessee’s free community college program is exceeding expectations. Demand remains high and the state’s completion rates for federal aid applications are up, which is putting colleges on notice about a likely influx of students. … Of the initial 58,000 applicants, more than 43,000 attended their first meeting with mentors — an important milestone for student participation. Those 15,000 that have since left the program are consistent with the program’s projections.”
Scaling Student Support. “In the Wild West future of unbundled higher education that has been proposed in various forms by Kevin Carey, Anya Kamenetz, and Jeff Selingo, the targeted student seems to be a solo outlaw, a confident autodidact who hungers for the unbound autonomy of a “DIY” bespoke education. Those of us who have actually taught students and worked on campuses know how this kind of student is lovely to find but exceedingly rare. Most of our students are more like townspeople — good citizens of various backgrounds who have other demands on their time and need a community to support their success. In an era of educational disinvestment, however, that kind of support is extremely expensive and difficult to scale beyond individual institutions. In the spirit of Mr. Carey’s latest book, however, we thought we’d take a turn at reimagining higher education- – beyond unbundling.”
House Republicans Would Slow Spending on Pell Grants to Help Balance Budget. “But consumer advocates, like officials at the Institute for College Access and Success, warn that the cuts, if enacted, will force millions of low- and moderate-income students to borrow more, drop out, or forgo college altogether. In a news release, they pointed out that the program’s costs have actually declined 20 percent since 2010 and are expected to remain level for a decade, after adjusting for inflation.”
GOP Would Freeze Pell. “In recent years, as reconciliation has been used to push through changes to student aid programs, it has at times undercut momentum for reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Some observers of the process have said that as a result, important changes to higher education policy that can’t be achieved through reconciliation (because they don’t have a direct budgetary impact) have been left to linger.”
Blackboard Brain Drain: One third of executive team leaves in past 3 months. “The percentage of leadership changes within a 3 month period rises above the level of ‘natural evolution of business’. Correlation does not imply causation, but neither does it imply a coincidence. … These changes come in the middle of Blackboard making huge bets on a completely new user experience and a move into the cloud. These changes were announced last year, but they have not been completed. This is the most important area to watch – whether Blackboard completes these changes and successfully rolls them out to the market.”
SC colleges would have to help lower textbook costs under new bill. “Colleges also must provide guidance to students on how to save money on textbook purchases and offer assistance to faculty on the availability of less costly formats, including electronic versions of textbooks and portions of a textbook sold separately. Schools also would have to conduct surveys with course evaluations on textbook satisfaction and use.”
Free American History! “Whitman would have been pleased to see the new American history textbook called The American Yawp — and not just for its allusive title. As a sometime school teacher and educational reformer, he wanted ‘free, ample and up-to-date textbooks, preferably by the best historians’ (to quote one discussion of this aspect of the poet’s life). Yawp‘s 30 chapters cover American history from the last ice age through the appearance of the millennial generation. It has plenty about the founders and the origins of the U.S., but avoids a triumphalist tone and includes material on inequality — including economic inequality — throughout. It was prepared through the collaborative efforts of scores of historians. And the creators have published it online, for free.”
Filmed Plays. “As I mentioned in passing yesterday, I think online classes are still in the “filmed play” stage of development. They’re only beginning to develop their own distinctive identity. And online support services mostly aren’t even at that stage yet. I’m wondering what the “movie” stage, as opposed to the ‘filmed play’ stage, might look like. In other words, instead of trying merely to recreate the in-class experience, what options might the online mode uniquely lend itself to using? A movie like ‘Boyhood’ simply couldn’t work as a play; it takes advantage of quirks of its form that no other form would allow. What’s the online class equivalent of ‘Boyhood’? What could an online class achieve that would go beyond mimicking the classroom and become its own distinctive thing?”
What’s Missing in the Vision of Stanford’s Hennessy. ” The bar for introductory course quality is being raised, and being raised quickly, by MOOCs. Residential courses, offered for matriculated (paying) students, must offer significantly greater value than free open online courses. At every institution that visit (and I’ll grant you that my sample is not representative), the introductory large-enrollment course is being rethought, redesigned, and reconfigured. The fast rising quality of traditional residential introductory courses is a story that I think the educational press and pundits has largely missed. We talk all the time about rising higher ed costs, and we should. But we should also be aware of the renaissance in teaching and learning that is occurring across the higher ed ecosystem.”
Faculty Success Means Student Success: Supporting Online Faculty. “Sure, but support for online faculty isn’t just during the course. It starts long before the first class, in the course design process — in how you set up the learning management system for them, and how you train them in tools and give them ongoing support. We support faculty fully in designing courses, rather than just handing them a course shell in the learning management system for them to develop from scratch. We need to start with individual attention to the faculty member, so we assign them an instructional designer — someone who knows the technology and the best practices for online instruction. For faculty, designing an online course is often dramatically different from designing an in-person class; you’re including more multimedia, more video, more games, and more simulations. You’re blending technologies from a publisher, maybe some open education resources, and maybe your own lecture notes or learning activities that you’ll need to adapt to an online environment.”
House Would Cut Student Aid More Than Budget Blueprint Reveals. “On Tuesday, Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives released a spending blueprint that would freeze the maximum Pell Grant for 10 years and roll back some recent expansions of the program. On Wednesday they revealed that their plan would also abolish the in-school interest subsidy on Stafford loans, reverse a recent expansion of income-based repayment, and end public-sector loan forgiveness. Those cuts in the federal student-loan programs don’t appear in a budget document that the House Budget Committee released on Tuesday. But when Rep. Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, asked during a markup session on Wednesday if such changes were assumed in the measure, a committee aide confirmed that they were.”
“A Known Issue.” “Higher education is largely a reputational industry. There’s a real reluctance to put anything that could be construed as bad news out there. Given that colleges rely on friends to stay afloat — alumni, donors, legislators, and community partners, most notably — it’s important for those friends to see the impact of their support. When speaking with the people whose support makes up the gap — or doesn’t — between what colleges cost and what they charge, it’s important to speak the language of success, rather than need.”
The Secret Is the Blend. “Not all blended learning is equal. Although the different definitions of blended would make you think that it is just about putting some of the course activities online (e.g., Picciano, 2006), but I believe the secret is in the blend. Sure, we can develop online lectures and put them online and then have students come to a f2f class for more higher order or experiential learning, but the most successful blended learning is when you blend activities across the mediums. You strategically think about which activities should use which media and then you use these activities to inform each other in the different environments, creating a loop in a sense and then closing that loop as my colleague Alan Aycock used to say. Integration is a key component of really effective blended courses. This is a pedagogical approach that carefully plans the course design to integrate learning, utilizing both mediums providing coherence of the experience and allocating appropriate effort and attention in each medium.”
Back To The Future: Looking at LMS forecasts. “Thanks to Chuck, this has been informative (to me, at least) to go back and review forecasts and see what I got right and what I got wrong. Chuck’s general point on my forecasts seem to be that I am over-emphasizing the emergence of learning platforms at least as a distinct category from enterprise LMS, and that we’re still seeing LMS market although with changed internals (fewer features, more interoperability). I don’t disagree with this point (if I am summarizing accurately). However, if you read the actual forecasts above, I don’t think Chuck and I are too far apart. I may be more optimistic than he is and need to clarify my terminology somewhat, but we’re in the same ball park.”
Texas-Size Math Lab. “Modularized learning is not new, said Hunter Boylan, director of the National Center for Developmental Education. Colleges began offering remedial courses with modular structures and sequencing 50 years ago, he said, using workbooks instead of computers. ‘It’s based on pretty sound theory,’ Boylan said. Austin officials decided to try the emporium method. They paired it with adaptive courseware, which adjusts to individual learners based on their progress and ability to master concepts. The college went with ALEKS, an adaptive software platform from McGraw-Hill Education.”
Instructional Designers by the Numbers. “My sense is that the numbers and pay of Instructional Designers is growing faster than the data that I’ve been able to Google. Every school that I know is trying to build their Instructional Design team. The competition for excellent Instructional Designers seems to be heating up.”
Austin Community College’s ACCelerator: Big bet on emporium approach with no pilots. “The one area that concerns me is the lack of structured time for students away from the workstations. Developmental students in community colleges often have not experienced academic success – knowing how to succeed, learning how to learn, believing in their ability to succeed – and often this non-cognitive aspect of math is as important as the actual coursework. Allen-Johnson described the availability of coaching that goes beyond coursework, but that is different than providing structurefor coaching and self-regulated learning.”