Here are some industry articles that caught our eye recently.
Take Note. “The results (see below) mostly confirmed that hypothesis; students in the control group scored the equivalent of a letter grade higher than the students texting about topics unrelated to the lecture. Yet students who texted about the contents of the video, regardless of how often they did so, earned scores that were nearly on par with students in the control group.”
2 + 2 Shouldn’t = 5. “At most universities it takes 100 to 130 units to earn a degree. Students with 80 to 90 units should be 60 percent of the way toward a degree, but they’re not, Teniente-Matson said. ‘They’ll run out of institutional aid before they earn a degree.’ And that could be one reason why the majority of community college students who want to earn a bachelor’s degree don’t do so, said Bruce H. Leslie, chancellor of Alamo Colleges.”
Creating Emergencies. “Still, I have to acknowledge Ebbeler’s point about the issues unique to scale. With a small pilot group, many of the back-office issues get resolved through customized workarounds. That’s defensible when you have a cohort of, say, twenty. But if you’re running thousands of students through at once, it’s impossible to get away with that. You have to go to the trouble of actually developing system-level fixes. Assuming the presence of sufficient resources, and significant tolerance for error on the first go-round, the occasional state of emergency can help distinguish real and significant issues from garden-variety foot-dragging. It requires clear and strong direction from the top, and sustained attention over time, but used sparingly, it can bring clarity.”
Oh, Wisconsin. “The discussion should be about the broader constituency public higher education serves, students and the public. Wisconsin, with its Wisconsin Idea, is better positioned to change this narrative than just about any other university system. Talk about how public education has served generations of citizens well, and that one of the reasons it has been doing less well as of late, is because of the kinds of policies that the Wisconsin legislature wishes to enact where “business” interests and political bureaucracy interferes with the ability to do the work. Ask people if it makes sense to have politicians and high placed administrators, rather than educators, decide what is effective when it comes to education.”
Higher Ed Lobby Quietly Joins For-Profit Schools to Roll Back Righter Rules. “The emerging alliance points to a new calculation by the higher education lobby. By throwing in with the for-profits, traditional schools might be able to capitalize on the Republicans’ current control of Congress in order to limit the government’s reach into their own campuses. Among other things, colleges and universities would like to block the proposed new federal ratings system designed to help families choose institutions based on how many of their students graduate and where they get jobs. This bid for GOP favor may seem counter-intuitive, given that many conservatives view academia as a bastion of pampered liberalism. In reality, the higher education lobby represents an industry as self-interested as any other—the two largest of its many trade groups reported spending $500,000 on federal lobbying last year—and it sees an opportunity in the de-regulatory instincts of the Republican majority.”
Moodle Association: New pay-for-play roadmap input for end users. “One obvious change is that Moodle partners (companies like Blackboard / Moodlerooms, RemoteLearner, etc) will no longer be the primary input to development of core Moodle. This part is significant, especially as Blackboard became the largest contributing member of Moodle with its acquisition of Moodlerooms in 2012. This situation became more important after Blackboard also bought Remote-Learner UK this year. It’s worth noting that Martin Dougiamas, founder of Moodle, is also a board member for the Remote-Learner parent company. A less obvious change, however, is that the user community – largely composed of schools and individuals using Moodle for free – has to contend with another pay-for-play source of direction. End users can pay to join the association, and the clear message is that this is the best way to have input.”
From Teaching To Consulting: Librarians as Information Designers. An Interview with Carrie Donovan. “I feel lucky that library instruction and information literacy is the focus of my work because I do think it is poised for a transformation that, for those of us who have been around for a while, will be groundbreaking and inspiring. I don’t exactly know what will be next in the evolution of librarians’ teaching, but I do think it will become more and more about collaborative, campus-level initiatives that situate information literacy firmly and securely in the student experience – both in and beyond the classroom.”
How to Advocate for the Liberal Arts: the State-University Edition. “Teach your majors about career services, and vice versa. The belief that the liberal arts leave students unprepared for jobs after graduation is so widespread that liberal-arts students have little confidence that career-services offices can do anything for them. As a result, staff members in career services often get little experience counseling liberal-arts majors and may feel little pressure to develop resources and knowledge that can help those students — as the few liberal-arts majors who venture into career services quickly discover. Encourage your students to start exploring careers sooner rather than later, and keep the career-services office informed about the kinds of jobs your recent alumni have found. Students don’t always recognize potential professional experience when they’re getting it, so validate the learning they’re acquiring in those terms. Their leadership of a successful group project, the strong corrective role they played in a class discussion, the paper that effectively challenged received wisdom — all of those things are transferable skills.”
Change in Tone. “Others aren’t so sure. Henry Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University at East Bay and chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said he wouldn’t be so concerned about the future of tenure in Wisconsin if the Legislature was just planning to take it out of state statute. But the proposed language making anyone terminable for broad variety of programmatic reasons is unusual and worrisome, he said — especially as the university system is facing down a proposed $250 million budget cut over two years.”
Poor Grades From the Public. “And based on answers from all respondents to the poll, public perception of the value of a degree has turned sour over the past decade. Sixty-eight percent of surveyed parents said they viewed undergraduate degrees in a positive light 10 years ago but only 44.6 percent saw the degrees favorably now, and there was a similar drop from 73.2 percent to 57.9 percent for graduate degrees. Jerry Lindsley, president of the Center for Research and Public Policy, the organization that helped to develop and conduct the poll, said other industries often score in the high 80s or even low 90s in terms of favorability, and the low overall rating of the college selection process showed that institutions have to determine how best to improve the system.”
Catalog to Completion. “The upgraded website now makes the courses needed as part of the transfer pathway more prominent during searches. Students can narrow what they’re looking for by geographic location, subject or institutional segment, said Steve Klein, program director for California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative. By making the courses easier to find, the hope is that students will be able to smoothly finish their degree programs, he said. If a student needs a course that is part of their degree or transfer path but isn’t available at his or her ‘home’ college, the idea is to find the course and enroll through the virtual campus.”
Acceleration. “Acceleration can help with student success. Some of it is based on outrunning life. The longer that students take, the more opportunities arise for life to get in the way. That’s probably why our course completion rate in the January Intersession period are always well into the nineties, which is off the charts for community colleges generally. When courses are so short, life doesn’t have time to intervene. Students don’t have time to fall behind.”
Four Traps … “Rote memorization works well for a small number of items, but more active learning techniques work better for more extensive or complex information. Chunking or chaining information — that is, dividing it into smaller units or identifying ways to link items together – is helpful. So, too, is making notes from memory. Spaced practice – reviewing material over time rather than in a single intensive session — is known to be far more effective than cramming. Reorganizing information – finding patterns or narratives — is a proven method for cementing memory. That is why teaching the material oneself has proven to be particularly effective in helping an individual memorize information.”
Palimpsest of School Reform: Personalized Learning. “Personalized learning, i.e., tailoring knowledge and skills to the individual student, has been the dream of Progressive educators since the early 20th century and put into partial practice then, in the 1960s, and now. The School of One, AltSchool, and different contemporary versions of online and teacher-student interactions–a sub-set of what many call ‘blended learning’–have written over the original Progressive rhetoric and actions of a half-century and century ago. Knowing that Progressive under-text about past efforts to educate Americans–the “earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible”–could bring a sharper perspective to the contemporary claims that champions of personalized learning–however defined–bring to policymakers, parents, and teachers. That resurrecting of the under-text highlights the pedagogical and efficiency-driven wings of the Progressive movement then and today.”
Instructor Replacement vs. Instructor Role Change. “From what Michael and I have seen in the e-Literate TV case studies as well as other on-campus consulting experiences, the use of adaptive software or personalized learning being used to replace faculty members is a red herring. Faculty replacement does happen in some cases, but that debate masks a more profound issue – how faculty members have to change roles to adapt to a student-centered course design. For this remedial math course, the faculty member changes from one of content delivery to one of oversight, intervention, and coaching.”
4+1 Interview: Theron Hitchman. “Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) is an umbrella term for a family of class structures that focus on getting students involved in the work of a particular discipline. For mathematics, that means I want to get my students engaged in doing authentic mathematical work at the appropriate level. How IBL manifests in a particular setting depends a lot on the circumstances. As guidance, I ask myself these questions, and the more often I can answer ‘the students’ rather than ‘the instructor’ the more I view a course as an IBL environment.”
Flawed Evaluations. “Survey responses gathered by the committee from some 9,000 professors suggest diminishing student response rates for course evaluations, too much focus on such evaluations alone in personnel decisions — especially for non-tenure-track faculty — and a creep of the kinds of personal comments seen on teacher rating websites into formal evaluations. But while the committee argues that whatever value student evaluations ever had is shrinking, it says student surveys can play an important role in a more holistic faculty evaluation system.”
Coursera, Apple, and the Future of Global Higher Education. “The future of global higher education is competency-based and mobile. Blended learning will define the high-quality, high-status and high-value end of the postsecondary equation. Campuses will not go away, in fact the campus experience will become more valuable. What will happen in higher education in the emerging world is the same thing that has occurred in the rich world. The educational floor will raise, and some college education will become normative. The tens of millions of students looking for college credentials (if not full bachelor degrees) will do much of their learning on smart phones, and will receive alternative credentials (certificates, badges) as opposed to traditional degrees. Coursera, edX, and other nontraditional education postsecondary providers, partners, and aggregators will need to fill in where the public sector (and their traditional campus based education systems) cannot.”
What Smart People Look Like. “In academic circles, we speak of a “growth mindset,” as opposed to a “fixed mindset.” The former is the idea that intelligence is a muscle, and that it can be trained to get stronger. The latter is the idea that intelligence is a given trait that you have or you don’t. Lots of people believe in the “fixed” mindset, even though it’s largely false. Worse, it’s debilitating; it suggests that if you struggle to learn something, you probably shouldn’t bother. You’ll never be good. Hard work is a sign that you’ve already failed. I’d like to see some vaguely realistic portrayals of reasonably smart people actually working to figure something out. And I don’t mean the reflection of the young man’s face in a computer screen, either. I mean actually grappling with something, making mistakes, and getting better.”
After Wisconsin. “The erosion, or worse, destruction of tenure is very bad news for contingent faculty. The forces that seek to erode tenure are the exact same ones that are the root causes of the adjunctification of the professorate, shrinking public support of higher education and the increasing influence of corporate and political interests in governing the public sphere. Regardless of what happens in Wisconsin, these issues aren’t going away. Indeed, as evidenced by the adjunctification of faculty, they’ve already been with us for many years. Apparently, it takes crises like Wisconsin’s to make us pay attention.”
Three R’s that universities care about. “I would argue that most good vice chancellors, provosts, presidents etc are legitimately concerned about three areas, as they seek to pursue their overall mission of educating people: Recruitment – depending on who you are, getting students is an issue. If you are an elite university it is not so much a matter of getting sufficient students, but getting the types of students you want. Either way recruiting students is the lifeblood of any university. Retention – having recruited students, you then need to keep them. Why do students drop out within a module, or fail to progress to another module? What can we do to help students with particular needs? How can we be flexible enough to accommodate non-traditional students? Reputation – what is the reputation of the university with potential students (see recruitment), the general population, the local community, the media, government, etc. What is it known for? What perceptions or misconceptions about it do people hold?”
Can We Teach Students How to Pay Attention? “One of the central questions explored in the piece is how teachers might help students discover the power that derives from attention that is all-consuming. We regularly teach material that students don’t see as interesting or relevant. … Less often do we purposefully show what can be learned and experienced when serious attention is paid to something, really to anything. At this point, our content simply becomes the example. We want students to share interest in what captivates our attention. … And regularly we are disappointed by students’ complete lack of interest in, if not disdain for, these subjects that hold endless fascination for us. Maybe we need to be less idealistic and more realistic. The article made me wonder whether teaching students to pay attention might not be the more enduring lesson they could take from our courses. If our demonstration of how to attend to detail and how to study, analyze, question, pursue evidence, and untangle complexities might not be the more powerful gift, the one that will enable them to pursue to the depths whatever fascinates them.”
McGraw-Hill Education transitions to digital market. “Even at McGraw-Hill, you notice “publisher” is not in our name in any way. It’s McGraw-Hill Education, and we are defining ourselves as a learning science company that’s serving the art of teaching. And all of our future-facing development is not around the book, it’s not about the e-book, because 100 years from now no one will even remember what the e-book was. In education, the things that we’re developing now with interactivity, engagement, driving teacher effectiveness, those things are the reason for educational technologies. Because they can be delivered through educational technology in a way that we can measure outcomes and determine where students are in their learning trajectory, and we can help them move along that trajectory. We are really overhauling our processes, our approaches, our staff. We’re investing heavily in our platform, our adaptive engines, our assessment tools.”
Practicing Critical Information Literacy. Interview with Troy Swanson. “I have always felt that the value of critical information literacy (applying critical pedagogy to information literacy) is as a lens through which to view the cycle of information production within society. Information products (whether online or in a physical container) are not apolitical. They are produced through systems that carry biases, barriers to access, and interest in maintaining existing power structures. A critical information literacy approach provides an opportunity to examine the power structures that underpin the information production process. As you note, librarians have long been champions of intellectual freedom, and I see critical information literacy as an extension of this value.”
To Get More College-Ready Students, Drop the GED. “Really, then, the only difference between the students in the remedial courses and the ones in the GED program is that those in the latter group do not have their high-school diplomas. However, this means that the student in our program who does pass the GED exam and wants to enroll in college must then turn around and take the college-placement exam. Efficiency experts have a term for this: redundancy.”
Rich vs. Poor: The Growing “Class” Gap in Higher Education. “The study then tracked sophomores through a battery of math and reading tests to determine whether the most disadvantaged students were simply overconfident with their dreams ‘outstripping their academic skills.’ The finding is telling: ‘educational achievement does not explain the gap in bachelor’s degree attainment.’ Put in other terms: ‘Class trumps ability when it comes to college graduation.’ Both reports raise the question of whether education from ‘cradle to career’ is in a crisis from which it can recover. Can American educational policy adjust in time to maintain its primacy and uniqueness historically as the world’s educator, if the product exported does not meet the needs of the markets that it proposes to serve?”
Teaching vs. Learning. “Many of the richest learning experiences, especially in the humanities, involve learning, but not structured teaching (as generally defined). Nor do these experiences depend on a teacher as authority figure or fount of knowledge. To teach is to impart knowledge and skills or to give instruction. To learn, however, is generally quite different. To be sure, it involves acquiring knowledge and skills—though this is rarely the product of oral transmission. It is to construct a framework for understanding and to acquire enduring mastery over a wide range of content, skills, and habits of mind. It involves synthesis, interpretation, judgment, and application. It is attained partly by listening, but also by practice, problem-solving, reflection, and active learning.”
A Path to Debt-Free. “Making college more affordable, she said, would require a boost in federal spending but also greater accountability for how colleges and states use that money — a ‘one-two punch’ that she said should have bipartisan appeal. Warren wants a new federal program that would provide funds to states that make some public higher education options so inexpensive that borrowing would not be required, and she wants more federal funding to come with more strings attached.”
Remediation for Job Seekers. “In recent years a wide range of companies have sprung up to help fix the so-called skills gap — the gulf between what employers need and what college graduates can do. These upstarts include coding academies and job-training boot camps, where job seekers, many of whom already hold degrees, spend 10 weeks or so and a few thousand dollars learning the skills necessary to get a gig with a technology start-up. Likewise, massive open course providers have moved in this direction, getting less massive and less open by offering microcredentialsvaimed at specific workforce needs. Traditional colleges are in the space, too, particularly a growing number of two-year colleges that are partnering directly with employers to create course content aimed at the skills those companies say they need. The in-demand skills training can be designed for students who are working toward a degree, or for adult students who are returning to college to try to break into a new field.”
Study Views Academic Publishing as an Oligopoly. “The five largest research publishers (a group that changes a bit by discipline) started publishing half of academic papers in 2006, up from 30 percent in 1996 and 20 percent in 1973, according to new research published Wednesday in PLOS ONE by researchers at the University of Montreal. The piece argues that this concentration has reached oligopoly status and poses dangers to academic publishing.”
Privacy for the Public. “Curiously enough, librarians are far less sanguine about libraries. We fear irrelevance. We feel that we’re in competition with Google and Amazon and have to scurry to catch up because they are killing our market share. We need to provide an improved user experience even if that means letting go of outdated shibboleths about privacy. Well, guess what? Privacy is in. A recent poll conducted by researchers at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania found that people are not okay with the way companies collect their personal data. They just feel powerless to fight it.”
How information will drive college transformation. “A quiet information revolution is taking several forms. First, the now-familiar US News & World Report rankings have spawned a range of other ratings. Some, such as Forbes and Kiplinger, focus on providing prospective students with detailed comparisons of actual expected costs and graduation rates. Meanwhile, reflecting different visions of ‘value,’ the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) looks at how colleges stack up in providing key areas of knowledge. The sophistication of these rating systems is steadily improving, and this will help students become more knowledgeable buyers and sharpen competition between institutions.”
The Open Flip. “I circulate in different overlapping communities: OERs, open access journals, MOOCs, open textbooks. I’ve noticed a common theme emerging which you could label the “open flip”. Briefly stated, it is that money shifts from purchasing copyrighted resources to production of open ones. Cable Green, speaking of open textbooks, says we have lots of money in education, we’re just really bad at spending it. His claim is that the cost savings for schools buying books is considerable, once you make this shift. Similarly, for open access journals, there is a good argument to stop buying journals, but instead start producing them ourselves. Or we stop buying elearning content and produce OERs.”
Professors Looking to Remain in Academy Longer. “In other words, said Yakoboski, the psychosocial motivation for staying in the academy outweighed some of the figures that have traditionally pulled people into retirement (such as a desire to spend more time with family, wanting to embark on something different or no longer being as fulfilled in one’s career). However, it is undeniable that finances do play a role. Over half of those who consider themselves ‘reluctantly reluctant’ (59 percent) said their personal finances necessitate continued work and 38 percent said they need the insurance benefits provided through their university. With the Supreme Court expected to release its opinion on the ongoing effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act any day now, the availability of affordable health care and health insurance options is a real concern for many. But just as the Labor Department projected an overall decline in workers in their ‘prime’ working age, so too are younger professors finding it increasingly more difficult to secure jobs in the academy.”
Federal Dollars Finance Ever-Greater Share of Higher Education, Analysis Shows. “In debating the merits and value of higher education, knowing who pays for what can be an important part of the discussion. When it comes to government funding, the decline in state support is well documented. But a report released on Thursday by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows just how much the balance of responsibility has shifted from the states to the federal government. The report, which includes a state-by-state analysis, shows that from 2000 through 2012 spending from federal sources per full-time-equivalent student increased by 32 percent, while state spending dropped by 37 percent.”
‘Debt-Free College’ Is Democrats’ New Rallying Cry. “The concept has obvious political appeal: It resonates with Millennials, a key voting bloc for Democrats. And it appeals to middle-class parents, who are increasingly anxious about the cost of college. If the concept makes it into the Democratic platform, it would be one of the boldest higher-education proposals that the party has offered in years. That’s true even though the definition of ‘debt-free college’ depends on whom you ask.”
Lingua Franca for Credentials. “The draft system draws heavily from competency-based learning. The framework’s competencies are ‘common reference points to help understand and compare the levels and types of knowledge and skills that underlie degrees, certificates, industry certifications’ and the various other forms of credentials. Competencies are grouped under categories of knowledge and skills, with the latter broken into subdomains for specialized skills, personal skills and social skills. The categories feature eight levels, which indicate the breadth or depth of learning achieved.”
The Dilemma of Fast, Cheap, and Good: You Can Only Pick Two. “For a classroom, putting an innovation into practice is one thing, expanding the innovation to an entire school is another. To build project-based learning across an entire high school is also done in increments and takes longer … The switch from one pedagogy to another or installing a new way of teaching across all subjects courts failure when done in one fell swoop. In those high schools where teachers put into practice PBL, more often than not, it occurred in chunks. Two steps forward, one step backward. Trial and error. And it takes time. ‘Good’ trumps ‘fast.’ Implementation involving teacher time in picking up expertise at every step of the way, however, is seldom cheap.”
Lecturing to ghosts: Blurring the face-to-face and online divide. “Obviously, the mission of a college professor is not to be an entertainer and reimagining the role might seem more difficult to construe. If we can face the reality of electronics in the classroom, what kinds of creative solutions can be offered to work with the ghosts in our classrooms? If we abandon the notion that the saber tooth should be coaxed out of its cave and we take on the ghostly realm itself, what might our face-to-face classrooms become? Perhaps one can start by considering that students are both face-to-face and online students at the same time – a kind of lively ghost. In essence, we design all of our face-to-face classes into a new form of blended course design. What may emerge is some as-of-yet unnamed course design that ignores the formal distinction and takes on the real nature of teaching in the time of Google – ‘Yoda Google.’”
High Tech Higher Ed: How Changes in Educational Technology are Transforming the Industry. “The growth of more sophisticated online learning experiences will continue to shift the responsibility of procuring and curating learning resources to students, even outside of competency-based learning programs. Syllabi will remain an important part of the class experience to provide high-level direction, but more sophisticated virtual assessment instruments will allow instructors to quantify learning in a way that decouples a learner’s competency from traditional conventions of time, method and geography. This progressive unraveling of the Carnegie Unit and an increased prioritization of the assessment function by universities will draw on a myriad of technology-enabled methods and resources that are highly personalized and adaptive. Big Data and analytics will accelerate this process, but I believe the big ideas in digital learning assessment are yet to come. These learner-centric, technology-enabled trends will continue to shift the university’s role to that of convener or facilitator with a more singular focus on accurate assessment to help provide gatekeeping to credentialing. Universities, institutions or companies who thrive in this space of assessment and facilitation will become leaders in the next evolution of higher education.”
Personalized Learning Changes: Effect on instructors and coaches. “There is another side to this coin, however, as pointed out by someone at the WCET Summit. With so many personalized learning programs funded by foundations and even institutional investments above normal operations, there is a question of sustainability. It’s all well and good to demonstrate that a school is investing in new programs, including investments in faculty and TA support, but I do not think that many programs have considered the sustainability of these initiatives. If the TA quoted in the previous blog is accurate, ASU went from 2 to 11 TAs for the MAT 110 course. Essex County College invested $1.2 million in an emporium remedial math program. Even if the payoff is “retention”, will there be enough improvement in retention to justify an ongoing expenditure to support a program? Sustainability should be another key metric as groups evaluate the effectiveness of personalized learning approaches.”
The EDUCAUSE NGDLE and an API of One’s Own. “Up until now, building digital learning environments has been more like building operating systems than like building mobile apps. When my colleagues and I were thinking about SUNY’s digital learning environment needs back in 2005, we wanted to create something we called a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS), but not because we thought that either learning management or operating systems were particularly sexy. To the contrary, we wanted to standardize the unsexy but essential foundations upon which a million billion sexy learning apps could be built by others. Try to remember what your smart phone was like before you installed any apps on it. Pretty boring, right? But it was just the right kind of standardized boring stuff that enabled such miracles of modern life as Angry Birds and Instragram. That’s what we wanted, but for teaching and learning.”