Here are some industry articles that caught our eye recently.
Education Dept. Proposes Reining In Deals Between Colleges and Banks. “Among other things, the department’s new rules would: Prohibit colleges from requiring students to open a new account to deposit funds. Keep banks that form partnerships with colleges from assessing overdraft fees to students. Require that a new student’s existing bank account be presented as the default option for depositing funds.”
The Teaching Compact. “I, as the professor, am not primarily interested in assessment. I want you to leave each class, and the course over all, curious, critically aware, and eager to find time to read, to look, and to discuss the subject further — equipped to carry on rather than crowned with credits for your grade-point average. … I will not have a detailed and preconceived idea of what you should learn or accomplish in the class, other than intensive, careful, self-critical work, and a bit of basic memorization that will do you no harm.”
Retention in the Trenches. “The good news is that faculty members can take steps on their own that might actually have some impact. Studies show that one of the most important factors affecting students’ persistence and success is the quality of their classroom experience, or what the student-retention expert Sherry Miller Brown calls ‘academic integration.’ That’s especially true for students who are most at risk of falling by the wayside, such as nontraditional students and those in developmental courses. So what can you do, in your own classroom, to help? Be a teacher, not a gatekeeper.”
Common Ground in a Polarizing Country. “And that’s where community colleges are both wonderful and struggling. They’re wonderful in that they’re resolutely egalitarian. They offer second chances to people who need them, and they keep prices low to ensure that everyone who wants to attend, can. Now they’re focusing more on completion, which can have the welcome effect of reducing achievement gaps across racial and economic lines. Community colleges reach across those municipal boundaries, bringing together the students that entire local governments exist to keep apart. Community colleges are struggling in that culturally, they’re swimming upstream. They don’t have the cachet of exclusive universities or the direct connection to property values of K-12 schools. They assume the relevance and desirability of a larger community, in a larger culture that defaults to polarization and isolation. They try to produce a middle class for a country that’s expanding at the extremes and shrinking in the middle. That’s a tall order.”
After the Cameras Leave. “How we react to events like those in Baltimore speaks volumes about our values. We know we must do much better, especially for people who have not had a chance to thrive in our society. Americans — not just in Baltimore but across the country — have an opportunity now to ask difficult questions and take long-term action. Universities have an especially critical role to play as community anchors, educators and researchers. A quote from a 1923 edition of The Daily Princetonian sums up our responsibility as aptly today as it did the day it was penned: ‘We are almost the only section of the population which has the leisure and opportunity to study the controversial questions of the day without bias, and to act accordingly. The power of today is in our hands.’”
Can a Community College Job Be a ‘Steppingstone’? “A final reason why more people don’t move from two-year to four-year colleges, and one that’s often overlooked: Most tenure-track faculty members at community colleges have no desire to ‘move up,’ nor do we regard a position that requires lots more research as necessarily a move up. Perhaps some of us, when first hired by a community college, believe that we’ll stay a few years then start looking around. But then something odd happens: We discover we really like it here. We embrace the teaching focus, enjoy our students, and find ourselves reasonably well compensated.”
For the Sake of Working-Class Students, Give ‘Fisher’ Another Chance. “Instead, a majority of people believe in using alternatives to race when feasible — policies like providing a leg up to economically disadvantaged students, boosting financial aid, increasing transfers from community colleges, ending legacy preferences, and reducing an emphasis on tests in favor of students in the top portion of a state’s high schools.”
When Your Online Course Is Put Up for Adoption. “On the surface, Ms. Ebbeler’s Rome course seems to push the instructor to the margins. Students work through a series of online modules — containing course readings, links, and quizzes — on their own time. Mr. Lundy, the instructor, held review sessions on the campus every week, but they were optional and archived online. Students are required to show up in person only for examinations. But Ms. Ebbeler says the role of the instructor remains crucial. ‘They think it doesn’t matter who they put in charge because the course will teach itself,”’she says. ‘And yet I’ve been clear all along that that’s not the case.’ Rolando Garza, an instructional designer at Texas A&M University at Kingsville, says managing a course handoff can be challenging, but it helps if somebody who was involved in creating of the course works closely with the new instructor.”
U.S. Delays Requirement on Tuition Breaks for Veterans. “The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced last week that it was pushing back the deadline for states to comply with a law that requires public colleges to charge veterans lower in-state tuition rates, regardless of their state of residency.”
Education Dept. Readies Debt-Forgiveness Plan for Ex-Corinthian Students. “Now, with hundreds of former Corinthian students seeking debt relief under the clause, the department is working out a process to handle the claims. In doing so, officials have been mindful of the precedent they are setting, as well as the potential cost to taxpayers. Department officials have said they are leaning toward a case-by-case process, in which students would seek loan discharges as individuals. But critics say an individualized process would force borrowers to jump through too many hoops, discouraging some from seeking relief altogether.”
Why Technology Will Never Fix Education. “Sadly, what we found was that even when technology tested well in experiments, the attempt to scale up its impact was limited by the availability of strong leadership, good teachers, and involved parents — all elements that are unfortunately in short supply in India’s vast but woefully underfunded government school system. In other words, the technology’s value was in direct proportion to the instructor’s capability. Over time, I came to think of this as technology’s Law of Amplification: While technology helps education where it’s already doing well, technology does little for mediocre educational systems; and in dysfunctional schools, it can cause outright harm.”
U.S. Senator’s Bill Would Make Public 4-Year Colleges Free for All. “Bernard Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and long-shot candidate for the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination, introduced a bill on Tuesday that would make attending all four-year public colleges free. The College for All Act, the cost of which would be split between the federal government and the states, has virtually no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress.”
Replacing print where it matters most: Textbooks. “Let’s get this straight first; teachers teach, and the curriculum (whether it’s a textbook, or an online package) is a tool the teacher uses to teach. I make this point first because often when discussing the best form of curriculum, the teacher is left out of the equation. The question is essentially, “Does the student learn better out of a textbook or online?” This confuses education with self-education and imagines a student alone in a room with a notepad and a textbook or alone in a room with a laptop. Fortunately, education properly achieved involves teachers. Among other things, the teacher critically examines the given curriculum, cuts some of the material, replaces it with others and finds supplemental materials to re-emphasize the material he finds most important. This is an essential function of the teacher. In order to ensure that the needs of his specific students are met, each teacher needs to be a mini-curriculum director for his students.”
Has Nothing Changed? “Then there is the biggest challenge of all: From those students who expect an education that differs dramatically from what higher ed has traditionally provided. Many seek an education that is more career-focused or more experiential or more flexible than what higher education has traditionally offered. The most obvious development involves the embrace of flipped classrooms, of online education, and, at a growing number of institutions, open education resources — developments that are reshaping the student experience even at residential campuses.”
Trying Team-Based Inquiry to Teach Research Skills in the Humanities. “This semester, while teaching a 200-level English seminar on tutoring writing, and with some help from my advisor, I took a different approach: instead of setting students up for the conventional research paper, I structured my class around a collaborative research process. I was considering incorporating more flipped elements into my teaching, and wanted the learning activities in my class to better reflect my course outcomes. In particular, I wanted students to experience how our field generates knowledge by doing it themselves—I required students to get their hands dirty by doing primary research, I scaffolded assignments so that each could build up to the final paper, and I had students form teams based on their research interests.”
Bringing Back Pell for Prisoners. “Steurer and many others who work on college programs for incarcerated students cite an influential 2013 study from the RAND Corporation. The research found that inmates who participated in correctional education — including remedial, vocational and postsecondary programs — were 43 percent less likely to return to prison within three years. Participants also were 13 percentage points less likely to commit another crime. The RAND study found that every dollar states spend on prison education saves about five dollars in incarceration costs. That’s because prisoners who get a college education are more likely to land a job and to successfully reenter society after they are released.”
From the Ground Up. “Faculty members at the university are free to use — and are encouraged to experiment with — whatever tools they want in their classrooms. For that tool to be approved as a part of Canopy, it needs to be vetted by five subcommittees (e-learning, IT managers, research and development, core services and shared infrastructure, and information security and compliance) before an IT council takes a final vote. The committees include administrators, faculty members, students and staffers.”
Federal Error Rates Criticized. “Historically, the department has estimated improper payments by taking a representative sample of Pell Grant and loan recipients and looking at discrepancies between their self-reported income data and their federal tax filings. Last year, though, the department decided to take a new approach. It started extrapolating improper payment rates based on the errors it happened to uncover during audits of colleges during the previous year. The department originally planned to weight its results based on the number of colleges it audited. But after running those numbers, according to the report, the department switched its approach. It instead weighted the improper payment rate based on the total amount of dollars covered by the audits.”
The Problem With Longitudinal Data. “This week we got the latest data on our six-year student success rate. It’s supposed to tell us how we’re doing, and in a global sense, it does. But it has a glaring flaw that reduces its usefulness in driving change, and renders it absurd for use in performance funding. It’s at least six years old. In fact, it’s slightly older than that, due to the delay in gathering data. Which means that we just got numbers for the cohort that entered in the Fall of 2007. People who study retention data insist that the lion’s share of attrition happens in the first year. That means that the hot-off-the-presses numbers we’re getting now are mostly reflective of what happened in the Fall of 2007 and the Spring of 2008. That was before the Great Recession, the enrollment spike of 2009-10, its subsequent retreat, and the largest wave of state cuts in memory. It reflects what was, demographically, a different era. And it misses everything we’ve done in the last six years, since someone who dropped out in early 2008 missed the innovations introduced in 2010 or 2012. In other words, as a reflection of what we’re doing now, it really doesn’t help.”
“Low Hanging Fruit” for Respecting Adjuncts. “A recently published study, ‘Supporting the Academic Majority: Policies and Practices Related to Part-Time Faculty’s Job Satisfaction,’ revealed that while the vast majority of adjunct faculty suffer from underemployment, one of the things they most want is ‘respect.’ No one who has been an adjunct or involved with issues of adjunct labor was surprised by the findings. A career as full-time “contingent” as opposed to part-time “adjunct” faculty at four different schools, I know the experience of working with and without respect from the institution and the people within it, and it makes a significant difference.”
This is the Future of College. “Experts say that within the next 10 to 15 years, the college experience will become rapidly unbundled. Lecture halls will disappear, the role of the professor will transform, and technology will help make a college education much more attainable than it is today, and much more valuable. Indeed, a number of institutions may shut down. But those that survive will be innovative and efficient.”
Myths and Misconceptions about Competency-Based Education. “CBE is about skills, not abstract knowledge. CBE is often characterized as nothing more than skills-based training, which is a myopic viewpoint. While it is indeed practical in nature, CBE can (and should) also focus the exploration of ideas, theories, and concepts, provided that what students encounter is also applied in a professional, academic, or personal context. In essence, CBE is not only about skills, but also about the application of skills against the backdrop of deep knowledge. This process is enhanced by complementary notions, such as applied theory, engaged scholarship, or evidence-based learning, which themselves are competency-based in nature.”
Tech Woes at Small Colleges. “And we’re not alone. Last April, Bloomberg Business ran a story about the ‘death spiral’ of small colleges facing declining enrollment, and The Chronicle has published any number of pieces on just how difficult it is for a small institution to remain state-of-the-art with technology. Small colleges face challenges with server storage, wireless access, lack of redundancy in Internet access, and hardware obsolescence. It is also difficult to retain IT staff as the lure of a substantial salary in the corporate world is all too strong.”
Give All Students a Chance to Walk Across the Stage. “Simply put, early college works. More students have access to a college education because of these programs. Although free to students and families, school districts often cannot support early college programs due to tuition costs, causing program instability. So, we introduced the Go to High School, Go to College Act to expand education opportunities to more young Americans and support school districts and programs. Specifically, our bill allows low-income students enrolled in early colleges to use Pell Grants to help pay for college while maintaining accountability. This way we can work to ensure every dollar spent on earned college credits protects students and increases the effectiveness of the Pell Grant program. Our bill also helps early colleges become more sustainable across the country and encourages more school districts and higher education institutions to develop similar programs.”
5 Tips for Social Media Engagement. “Less is More – Don’t try to be everywhere all at once. Focus on a single social media channel (e.g. Twitter) and then make sure that you provide content and conversations galore. Also, if you’re just sending out links/information, you’re doing it wrong. Sorry to be so harsh, but engagement doesn’t mean that you replicate a bulletin board in a digital context. Promotion of events/services should be done on a limited basis. Be social with social media and engagement will occur.”
Canceling My Netflix DVD Plan & The Last New Lecture Hall. “There is nothing more conducive or catalytic to an authentic education than a built environment designed to support learning. Good education spaces enable and encourage collaboration, conversation, and shared work. Good education spaces take into account the social nature of learning. The traditional tiered lecture hall has had a good run. Every campus has great lecturers, and great lectures should be a part of any education. We should all have fewer but much nicer auditoriums – spaces that can be used for lecture classes when lecture is the most appropriate pedagogical approach. Places with comfortable seats, terrific acoustics, well-thought out sight lines, and the very best and brightest screens that money can buy. (Not to mention strong WiFi and advanced but simple A/V controls). Our other physical learning spaces should be flat and flexible.”
Best Practice. “One of our deans likes to say that community is something we ‘do.’ I would argue that like playing the piano or learning a language, it takes practice. The season of awards, graduations, and retirement ceremonies always reminds me that such gatherings constitute a ‘best practice,’ because we practice our best behavior when gathered for moments of mutual reflection and celebration. The sessions at yesterday’s forum were informative, but the practice we each garnered of explaining ourselves to folks we rarely see or those we had never previously met gave us an opportunity to build community. We save such occasions for the beginning and end of the academic year with a brief nod towards communal spirit at the close of the calendar year. In between, we get out of practice.”
Beyond ‘Are You Kidding Me?’ Mornings. “It’s impractical to plan for every crisis, but it’s irresponsible to stumble unprepared into the same issues that other institutions deal with over and over — especially when there are so many resources at our disposal to avoid such a fate. And no institution exists in a vacuum, which means you need to be prepared should reporters or members of your campus community try to connect you to the issues facing your peers or other institutions in your media market.”
Risk Sharing, Yes. But How? “Democrats and Republicans on the Senate education committee were in agreement that the government’s existing accountability metrics, like default rates, are inadequate. And nearly all backed the concept of risk sharing — the idea that individual colleges need to have a greater financial stake in what happens to the federal loans that students use to attend their institutions. For all the bipartisan rhetoric about risk sharing, though, Wednesday’s hearing also showed that hammering out the details of a new accountability regime won’t be easy.”
Widening Wealth Gap. “The Century Foundation found in 2013 that for every 14 wealthy students at the most elite and selective colleges, there was one low-income student. In short, the wealth gap not only creates inequities among universities, but also among the students they serve. ‘The students who are able to go to these wealthy institutions will have extraordinary resources devoted to them, relative to the students who are everywhere else,’ said Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. The gap between wealthy colleges and the rest of the pack is clearly wide, and getting wider each year, leading some to question if these rich universities need much of the public aid they receive. And if they are receiving public money, should they be doing more to enroll a higher percentage of low-income students?”
‘Simple and Seamless’ or ‘Significant Obstacle’? “Elsevier, which publishes thousands of journals, introduced the policy last month. It aims to strike a balance between making sharing ‘simple and seamless’ and ‘being consistent with access and usage rights associated with journal articles,’ the publisher said in a blog post. Many librarians and open-access advocates, however, see the policy as an attack on institutional repositories, where colleges collect and make available research their faculty members produce. The new policy does not allow authors to share their journal article manuscripts publicly through those repositories, only privately ‘with a colleague or with an invitation-only online group.’ Availability through the repositories is subject to journals’ embargo periods, which in some cases last for several years.”
If Students Are Smart, They’ll Major in What They Love. “As professors and academic advisers, we must be mindful of how pervasive these misconceptions are. We should take every opportunity to offer guidance to our students as they make these decisions. The premise that choosing a major is choosing a career rests on the faulty notion that “the major” is important for its content, and that the acquisition of that content is what’s valuable — meaning valuable to employers. But information is fairly easy to acquire. And much of the information acquired in 2015 will be obsolete by 2020. What is valuable is not the content of a major, but rather the ability to think with and through that information. That is the aim of a liberal-arts education, no matter the major.”
Miami, Harvard and MIT: Disability discrimination lawsuits focused on schools as content providers. “The DOJ insists not only that software include capabilities for accommodation of students with disabilities but also that schools actually include the content and related metadata that is required for compliance. It is no longer enough for schools to buy software that is ‘ADA compliant’. Faculty or instructional designers need to include captions, alt-texts and alternate pathways for students to have equal access. The origin of the Miami U lawsuit and the DOJ intervention is based on blind students, but the issues are the same. Repeatedly the DOJ referred to edtech ‘as implemented by Miami University’. As noted by reader Brian Richwine, the original lawsuit does reference Sakai (the LMS at the time of lawsuit), but the focus is still on how the content was provided.”
LMS Observations: You had me until you went nihilist. “Two measures of value in a traditional LMS can be thought of as how well it ‘gets out of the way’ and how well it enables apps that can directly affect student learning. From my experience, the various LMS options differ greatly in these two attributes. I have seen examples at campuses where an LMS adoption led to one that was much more intuitive, reliable, and easy to adopt to the point that training resources were diverted away from ‘here’s how to migrate a course and which button to push’ to ‘here are some pedagogical improvements to consider using online tools’. I have seen schools benefit simply from having reliable systems that don’t go down during exams. In other words, and LMS solution can significantly reduce the “cost in terms of time spent by academic and administrative staff”. And by the way, that choice might not always be the same LMS – it depends greatly on course design and pedagogical models.”
James Carville on Public Higher Education. “This, Carville said, ‘Kinda reminds me of the greatest movie ever made about higher education: Animal House.’ Technicians to the side of the stage cued a clip on two enormous screens, and Carville said Kevin Bacon, in the parade-riot scene at the end of the film, represented the official take on higher ed problems, and that ‘the people of the LSU community’ were represented by the stampeding crowd. ‘Remain calm! All is well!’ he said, imitating Bacon just before he’s flattened. ‘That’s us,’ Carville said, after the clip played. ‘And we’re not calm. […] All is not well.’ From there his speech began to swell and was often rousing, though he never laid out much of the context or specifics of state cuts, so it would have been possible for members of the audience who weren’t there to hear him rip on Jindal, and who didn’t know exactly how or to what degree LSU was threatened, to have been puzzled.”
The Other Lesson of Kennesaw. “The video and its fallout have mostly been framed as being about racial and gender politics, and there’s good reason for that. It’s hard not to wince when you watch it. But it’s also about a shift of control. I don’t know either of the parties to the video, so this isn’t really about them. But as a manager, I saw the difference between rule-bound discipline and unbound discipline. … The new reality of the threat of public exposure may motivate institutions to allow managers to address problem employees with greater dispatch before the problems go viral. After all, ‘looking the other way’ is only an option when you control who’s looking. If you don’t have exposure control, you need damage control. If you don’t have either, you’ll spin entirely out of control, and in less time than it would have taken to jump through the first bureaucratic hoop.”
Free tuition would be nice, but is it what community college students really need? “I give Obama credit for trying to reduce tuition costs as a way to leave more dollars in a student’s pocket to pay the rent. It is simpler politically and administratively to provide financial support that way than by subsidizing food and lodging. Unfortunately, free tuition does nothing for another big issue for Peters’ former students and just about every recent study of higher education: Community colleges provide such a disorganized mess of courses with so many dead-ends that many students never get to where they want to go.”
House Calls For Cheaper College Textbooks. “Alarmed that college textbooks now cost an average of $1,200 per year per student, the state House of Representatives voted unanimously Tuesday to create a pilot program to help bring down the costs. By a vote of 144 – 0 with seven lawmakers absent, the House called for a program for using online textbooks, which can cut the price by nearly 90 percent. The pilot will be conducted at the University of Connecticut and colleges in the Board of Regents for Higher Education system.”
Study: Online Ed Execs Need More Accurate Measures of Students’ Career Success. “According to the annual Future of Online and Professional Education Survey, 95 percent of the senior executives who responded said they want to do a better job of evaluating the career outcomes of their graduates. The survey, prepared by EAB, a division of the Advisory Board Co., found that conventional ways of evaluating success — average starting salaries or the number of graduates who get jobs upon graduation — are losing relevance. Many of the respondents said they would prefer to measure career success over a period of time, instead of limiting the measurements to the period immediately following graduation.”
How Public Universities Shortchange Poor and Minority Students. “In the pursuit of prestige, revenue, and rankings, more public universities have turned to dangling merit-based scholarships to attract more out-of-state students, according to a report by the New America Foundation released earlier this week. The result: shortchanging both poor students, who are less likely to receive such aid, and students in the states the universities are funded to serve. Public colleges once devoted the biggest chunk of their financial aid money, some 34%, to students in the bottom income quartile, giving just 16% to the wealthiest students, the report says. That has now shifted dramatically: Financial aid at public colleges now goes equally to the top and bottom quartile of students, with wealthy students receiving 23% of financial aid. The poorest students now receive only 25%.”
Worth Considering: Students can have their own perspectives on edtech initiatives. “One key theme coming through from comments at the Chronicle is what I perceive as an unhealthy cyncism that prevents many people from listening to students and faculty on the front lines (the ones taking redesigned courses) on their own merits. Michael called out this situation in the same comment: What bothers me is the seemingly complete lack of interest among the commenters in this thread about actually hearing what these teachers and students have to say, and the disregard for the value of their perspectives.”