Here are some of the industry articles that caught our eye recently.
Coursera Hires Former Yale President as Its Chief Executive. “Landing Mr. Levin could be a coup for Coursera, as the company looks to strengthen its reputation at home while navigating the knotty politics of international higher education. Coursera, which rose to prominence as a provider of massive open online courses, has been trying to expand in China. This past fall the MOOC provider announced a deal with NetEase, a Chinese Internet company, to build a Chinese-language portal for its courses, and it has been working with local universities and organizations in several countries to improve its offerings to non-English-speaking learners. The company’s international efforts have been complicated by politics.”
New Syllabus Archive Opens the ‘Curricular Black Box.’ “So what might scholars learn from studying syllabi? Earlier work by Mr. Cohen gives a sense of the potential. In a 2005 article in The Journal of American History, he analyzed nearly 800 syllabi to study the place of textbooks in American-history survey courses. Discussing such courses in the same journal, a group of professors had earlier stressed the importance of additional readings and suggested that textbooks played a secondary role in their classes. Mr. Cohen’s data showed that those remarks ‘may not be representative of how the survey is taught’ at most American colleges, which remained heavily dependent on textbooks and conventional teaching methods.”
Report Estimates Half of Vets on GI Bill Graduate. “The report released Monday estimated that 51.7 percent of student veterans earned a degree or certificate for some kind of higher education. That’s slightly lower than the graduation rate for traditional students, who generally enroll out of high school, but higher than for veterans’ non-traditional peers — those students who also tend to be older and have families and jobs.”
Lessons Learned. “When asked why the university system needs to launch a fully online degree-granting institution, supporters of the idea tend to point to one number: 49. That’s where Arkansas ranks in the country in educational attainment, defined as the percentage of adults with bachelor’s degrees. The Lumina Foundation also estimates that in 2010, 358,000 Arkansans had started college not but did not finish. In response to the dismal ranking, Governor Mike Beebe in 2011 called on the state to double the number of Arkansans with a bachelor’s degree by 2025. The board responded in November 2012, passing a resolution that pledged to expand the number of online offerings in the state.”
What’s Your Learning Philosophy? “Haave makes a distinction between learning styles and a learning philosophy. Although some experts are now questioning whether learning styles exist (in the manner we’ve come to know them), the preference for a particular approach to learning is thought to be innate. A learning philosophy is something that reflects what a learner has discovered and come to believe about learning. It answers, not the ‘how’ questions (of style) or the ‘what’ questions (of content), but the ‘why’ questions. Why are you learning? What role does learning play in your professional and personal life?“
Fight on State Authorization. “In order to participate in federal student aid programs, all institutions must be authorized by their state regulators. Under federal rules that take effect this July, colleges are required to follow whatever procedures a state lays out for authorization, though the department has some minimum standards for what that process must look like. States have to have procedures to handle student complaints, for instance. But it gets murkier when online programs are beamed to students across state lines. As well as proposing to reinstate its state approval requirement, the Education Department is attempting to make additional changes to the 2010 version of its regulation.
Just Do It? Every so often, someone from outside of academic affairs will ask me, earnestly, why we don’t “just do” something. It often takes a couple of years to move from embracing a concept — whether it’s seven-week courses, modular courses, or whatever — to actually running it. Why does it take so long? Why don’t we just do it? The popular stereotype has it that academics are mossbacked antiquarians who think change is a four-letter word. But that’s not it, most of the time. (Every college has a few…) That’s why I’m so enamored of this presentation by Nikki Edgecombe and Susan Bickerstaff of the CCRC about the real costs of implementing a new developmental sequence.”
Hillary on Higher Ed. “American institutions seeking to work abroad need to ask what kinds of education ‘will make the biggest difference in a particular country or community,’ Clinton said. And in much of the world, that means resisting the temptation to simply reproduce ‘the extraordinary institutions’ of higher education in the United States. In much of the world, she said, basic education and skills training is what is needed, Clinton said. In other countries, experiencing more rapid economic growth, education in ‘a specific sector,’ such as clean energy, may be the most important contribution.”
College students bypassing degrees on purpose. “The popularity of seeking a higher education with no intention of graduating is a challenge for institutions that are increasingly focused on improving their graduation rates. Still, some institutions are responding by starting up programs for these students and considering creating new kinds of credentials to recognize the combinations of courses they’re taking. … This may help explain why students opt for taking classes instead of earning degrees: They can spend less time and money in school but still see economic returns.”
Predicting Success. “Many colleges are flirting with how to use predictive analytics to boost their graduation rates. But big data is often just a flashy way to spend money on reports aimed at administrators, argue the leaders of Civitas Learning. They say data science works best when converted to practical tools that faculty members, advisers and students themselves can use. And the company, which is a relatively new player in education technology, so far has signed up more than 25 institutions — including statewide systems and national chains of campuses — to give its products a whirl.”
Competency as One Answer. “Enter competency-based education. It was introduced in America towards the end of the 1960s, but it applied only to small niche markets. Back then, cost and access were not the acute problems that they have become. The reason that new models are emerging now is that competency-based education is a well-conceived effort to meet at least some of the challenges facing higher education today. It is not the only effort, but it is promising because if done well, it addresses the issues of cost, quality, scaling and individualized learning all at once.”