Here are some industry articles that caught our eye recently.
The End of College? “In the long run, the case for higher education as a public good will be stronger if higher education organizations make the best possible use of public dollars, in a way that’s strongly aligned with the average citizen’s intense desire to provide an affordable, high quality learning experience for his or her children. Information technology will undoubtedly be an important part of achieving that goal.”
Growing Your Own. “But the basic impulse still strikes me as right. Struggling areas need entrepreneurs of all kinds. The problem is that entrepreneurship is usually taught only in the context of business majors. It needs to spread farther. I should clarify: I’m using entrepreneurialism in the broadest sense of ‘starting or creating something.’ It doesn’t have to apply to a for-profit company; it could easily apply to a non-profit, a political organization, or an NGO. That’s not the crucial part. The important question is: How do you create something where before there was nothing? “
Kodak and Higher Ed. “We are starting to see early indications that the power of one of the key pieces of the bundle, the system of awarding credentials, is beginning to erode. If I’m hiring a computer programmer or a web designer I may be fine, in fact I might actually prefer, indications of demonstrated and validated mastery rather than the general signal of a diploma. A series of badges or verified certificates may be better indications to an employer of future job success than the traditional sheepskin. The future of employee acceptance of alternative credentials for hiring and promotion will be one of those gradually, then all-at-once, stories. Or maybe one of those frog in the boiling water stories. We will not notice the shift until it is maybe too late to jump. What other parts of the higher ed bundle, beyond credentialing, is also at risk of fraying?”
Honing a Spectrum of Learner Access. “The most obvious factor that learners Spectrum-wide see as valuable is academic quality. That almost goes without saying, but it needs to be kept at the top of the list even though it is what we assume from all our institutions. Beyond that, though, I would say there are three things: responsiveness, credibility and context. These factors are very interactive. In many cases, learners expect our programs to be responsive to their unique needs. They also expect us to bring them to credible outcomes that decision-makers in their professional lives will perceive as valuable. Finally, they expect their learning opportunities to be in context to the needs they face on a daily basis. From a structural side, it’s why we suggest right up front in the Spectrum of Access that learning opportunities should be modular, interactive and learner-driven.”
Understanding and Meeting Needs Central to Creating Value for Online Students. “For those of us who are serving fully online students, we may also be surprised by another factor, students considering fully online degrees have different expectations than traditional applicants to on-the-ground programs. In our experience at RutgersOnline, we have found that our leads and serious inquirers for online degrees, especially graduate degrees, have already made the determination to study online. They understand the risks and rewards. Now they are shopping price, support, utility of the degree, and related issues. They are comparing schools and the list is usually short. Their evaluation is now about identifying the school on their short list delivering the most value for the cost, with all costs, including opportunity costs, considered. Once they make a decision, they want to begin immediately, or as close to that decision point as possible.”
Calling the Question: Collaboration as Systemic Change. “What lessons do we draw then from efforts to organize collectively among colleges and universities across the country? The first is that efforts to increase efficiencies and create economies of scale must emerge from a clear, definitive statement within an institution’s strategic plan. The consortial approach must grow organically, past the test of what is reasonable and achievable, involve the faculty and support the core academic program. Whatever steps are taken must be defined by metrics that both measure success in tangible ways and inform future decisions.”
In 3 Reports, Senate Republicans Hint at Higher-Ed Agenda. “Senate Republicans, gearing up for the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, gave strong hints about their priorities in a trio of white papers released Monday. The papers, which examine accreditation, consumer information, and risk-sharing, are meant as conversation-starters and stop short of endorsing any particular policy proposals. Still, they show that lawmakers are considering significant changes in the ways colleges are evaluated and held accountable for student outcomes.”
2 Proposals for Accreditation, 2 Shared Goals: Limits and Flexibility. “Although the language in each document varies, several of the suggested actions are the same, including breaking down the geographic boundaries of the six regional accrediting agencies, allowing an expedited review for institutions that meet certain standards, and stripping away the long list of accreditation requirements that do not directly relate to educational quality but that are mandated by federal law and regulation.”
Online or In-Person? One College Lets Students Switch Back and Forth. “Peirce, a college in Philadelphia that caters specifically to adult learners, plans to allow its students to switch back and forth between attending class in person or online, based on which is more convenient for them on a given week. The flexible delivery model will be offered in certain programs this fall and it will be extended to the college’s entire curriculum by September of 2016. The initiative is part of the college’s 2015-2018 strategic plan.”
Alexander’s Higher Ed Act Agenda. “One issue that emerges clearly in the set of proposals is holding colleges more accountable for their students’ success, including their levels of debt and ability to repay it. The outline backs the concept of risk sharing or “skin in the game” proposals for colleges when it comes to federal student loans. Under those proposals, an institution may be forced to repay some amount of their former students’ defaulted debt or otherwise be held responsible for a share of the federal loans they give out. In addition, the paper floats the idea of making colleges annually pay into an insurance fund based on risk factors such as the rate at which their students withdraw or drop out.”
The Two Cultures, 2.0. “Perhaps if we asked our programmers to learn a little more about history, literature and the arts — perhaps especially if we learned to teach these things in a way that had meaning and appeal across the gap between our two cultures — then our software and our devices might serve more people more effectively, because they would be designed with a deeper understanding of the cultural context in which they are to be used. The university might reach out to the start-up culture emanating from Silicon Valley as a potentially powerful ally. To do that effectively, university culture needs to acknowledge that there are important lessons to be learned beyond the walls. Academics need to understand that people like to code because code can be beautiful, and people like start-ups because they can be creative and smart.”
Researchers Rethink Community College With Clearer Student Pathways. “So researchers looked closely at nine strategies to improve student success, such as accelerating developmental education or online learning, and assessed their effectiveness. Rather than incremental pockets of improvements in a narrow area, the authors suggest colleges try many things together to make fundamental changes. Among their recommendations: provide clearer curricular pathways for areas of study, get faculty more actively engaged in supporting the overall success of students, and set up early-intervention systems to keep students on track. Community college representatives should also visit high schools to explain their offerings (including dual enrollment), convey their academic expectations, and help develop transition curriculum so seniors can spend their last year of high school making sure they are ready to meet college standards, said Jaggars.”
Efficacy: The True Measure of Success in Education. “At Pearson, we are on a journey to better measure our success in these areas, across all of our lines of business. We define efficacy as “a measurable impact on learner’s lives,” and we evaluate our products based on the learner outcomes they deliver in addition to their financial results. By focusing on efficacy, we’re transforming ourselves from a company that used to create mainly inputs (e.g., textbooks, tests) to one that is focused on outcomes.”
How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks? “While I am entirely sympathetic to the need and desire to lower textbook and course material prices for students, no one is served well by misleading information, and this information is misleading. Let’s look at the actual sources of data and what that data tells us, focusing on the aggregate measures of changes in average textbook pricing in the US and average student expenditures on textbooks. What the data tells us is that the answer is that students spend on average $600 per year on textbooks, not $1,200.”
A Global Online Course Gets Locally Grounded. “Though only two physical meetings had been conveyed, evidence is strong that these not only were crucial for consolidating content, clarifying doubts, and clearing misunderstandings, yet also for adherence: Knowing about upcoming seminars motivated participants to finalize the online units in time. Finally, the live-presence – via web-connection – of HarvardX Senior Fellow, Catalina Laserna, and course lead, April Opoliner, in parts of the seminars also improved students’ motivation and adherence.”
Bring Your Own Device. “I’m wondering if it’s time to move from the room full of desktops to bring-your-own-device, at least for general-purpose paper writing. (Again, dedicated labs for high-end uses, like video editing, are a separate issue.) Assuming we could get the wifi backbone to a consistent level of performance, and we could come up with a reasonably elegant way to address printing, it strikes me as a far more student-friendly and institution-friendly way to go. Students could use their cheap laptops (or equivalent) both to consume OER materials and to write and research papers. Since they’d have their own devices, they’d have access to them whenever and wherever they need access; they wouldn’t have to camp outside a computer lab waiting for an open seat. They could take writing breaks to gain fresh perspective before returning to a draft that doesn’t quite work. Cost is an issue, but it’s much less of one than it used to be.”
What’s the Matter with Ebooks? “The tea leaves, even now, are hard to read, but I’ve come to believe that part of this cloudiness is because there’s much more dark reading going on than the stats are showing. Like dark matter, dark reading is the consumption of (e)books that somehow isn’t captured by current forms of measurement. For instance, usually when you hear about the plateauing of ebook sales, you are actually hearing about the sales of ebooks from major publishers in relation to the sales of print books from those same publishers. That’s a crucial qualification. But sales of ebooks from these publishers is just a fraction of overall e-reading.”
Community College to Bachelor’s. “Nearly half of all students graduating with a four-year degree in the 2013-14 school year had some experience within a two-year institution. That detail is a part of a new report released Wednesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which found 46 percent of all students who completed a 4-year degree had been enrolled at a 2-year institution at some point in the past 10 years.”
Techno Fantasies. “In this political economy, the experts on education are rarely experts in education, and that is just the way an increasing number of powerful people seem to like it. Book like these and the speeches and essays accompanying them eat up the landscape of popular discourse. With the microphone, these voices have the gravitas of maleness and whiteness and wealth. They are so loud they must be expert. They look like, walk like and talk like leaders. And the story that they tell is quite comforting for many who look at the rising cost of college and the fragile economy and hope that their children will be able to follow the right path toward a more secure future. As such the University of Everywhere is a consumer fantasy of the future of higher education, a fantasy that purports to be about freedom for learners, about more personalized learning, but that is traced through the history, at least in Carey’s book, of programmed instruction. Machines will teach. Artificial intelligence will replace teachers and tutors.”
What Work Looks Like. “Creative work doesn’t look like other sorts of work. It’s less linear. Externally — and sometimes internally — the line between work and non-work can be hard to see. Most of us know that in other contexts. Sometimes problem-solving conversations have to veer off into seemingly unrelated topics, even silly ones, before solutions coalesce. Sometimes great ideas come to you in the shower, or the gym, or while mowing the lawn. Most good teachers know that a little bit of humor can help the serious part of the lesson get through and stick. And we know now that the human connection that helps students succeed is based on rapport, and rapport doesn’t usually happen instantly. Those seemingly-irrelevant conversations about other things lay the groundwork without which the more serious conversations either wouldn’t happen or wouldn’t work.”
Dear Kevin: 5 Challenges to “The End of College.” “Where my thinking and the arguments in The End of College most diverge is in making sense of the real impact of MOOCs. You seem more enamored with the potential of MOOCs to address fundamental issues of costs, access and quality than anyone that I know who works on these things. None of us are holding our breath for the emergence of the University of Everywhere. In fact, we think that education needs to become more personalized, and more labor intensive, if it is going make real improvements at every level. All the evidence that I have seen says that authentic learning does not scale, and that what is most important is a skilled educator working closely with the learner as a mentor and guide. What I have witnessed as being the real impact of MOOCs, and certainly what we mostly talk about at the edX meetings, is how we can leverage our MOOC experiments to improve residential teaching. MOOCs are one of the reasons why we are living through a residential course quality renaissance.”
Why Free Is Not the Future of Digital Content in Education. “In doing so, technology helps solves a big problem that has always confronted teachers: students learn at different paces. Advanced students can get bored and struggling students can give up. Now, as a teacher, I can put content in front of each learner that is personalized to his or her needs. It’s something teachers have been doing through the ages, but technology brings it to the next level of adaptivity. You get the picture. In this case, technology is making educational content better. It is increasing its value. It is now able to solve a long-existing challenge. It is enabling content to do things that it could not do before. And the stakes could not be higher.”
Little Progress on Incentive Comp. “The Federal Student Aid office has not revised its procedures and policies to enable appropriate enforcement of the incentive compensation ban. The office has continued to be generally guided by a 2002 memorandum that restricted the department to using fines to enforce the incentive compensation ban, rather than more aggressive penalties such as limiting an institution’s participation in federal student aid programs.”
Professors Should Define Student Success. “Many of the professionals teaching in today’s college classrooms understand the need for change. They’re used to adapting to ever-changing technologies, as well as evolving knowledge. And they want to measure students’ preparedness in a way that gives them the professional freedom to own the changes and do what they know, as committed professionals, works best for students. As a tool, the D.Q.P. encourages this kind of faculty-driven change. Rather than a set of mandates, the D.Q.P. is a framework that invites them to be change agents. It allows faculty to assess students in ways that are truly beneficial to student growth. Faculty members don’t care about teaching to the assessment; they want to use what they glean from assessments to help improve student learning.”
Dropouts, Grads, and Terrible Counting. “At a really basic level, this is about definitions. A student who does a year at a cc and then transfers for the bachelor’s shows up in our stats as a dropout, even if she successfully completes the bachelor’s in four years. I don’t see a rational purpose behind counting that student as a dropout, but them’s the rules. That student would show up in the 46 percent of bachelor’s grads with cc experience, but would show up in our numbers as a dropout. There’s the disconnect.”
Criticism vs. Attack. “I see no space for conversation, for the finding of common ground, or for listening to views that may differ from their own. It is great to disagree with Carey’s arguments – I disagree with many of them. What I think is unfortunate is to close off the space for dialogue. In the case of the The End of College this closing off of the conversation is particularly troublesome, as Carey is engaging in an important critique of our existing higher education system. What I found strange in the Watters and Goldrick-Rab review was no recognition of Carey’s focus on the structural flaws and inconsistencies that characterize much of U.S. higher education.”
Postscript on Student Textbook Expenditures: More details on data sources. “In other words, this is an intercept survey conducted with live interviews on campus, targeting full-time undergraduates. This includes the categories of sharing materials, choosing not to acquire, rental, purchase new and purchase used. In comparison to NACS, Student Monitor tracks more schools (100 vs. 20) but fewer students (1,200 vs. 12,000). Despite the differences in methodology, Student Monitor and NACS report spending that is fairly consistent (both on the order of $600 per year per student).”
Stop Saying “High Quality.” “It’s very easy to demonstrate that ‘the degree to which it supports learning’ is the only characteristic of an educational resource that matters. If an educational resource is written by experts, copyedited by professionals, reviewed by peers, laid out by graphic designers, contains beautiful imagery, and is provided in multiple formats, but fails to support learning, is it appropriate for us to call it “high quality”? No. No, no, no. A thousand times no. Despite this fact, which is intuitively obvious, when people say ‘high quality’ they actually mean all these things (author credentials, review by faculty, copyediting, etc.) except effectiveness. In the world of textbooks and other educational materials, high quality’ describes the authoring and editorial process, and is literally unrelated to whether or not the educational resource supports learning.”