And then there were 46

Sweet Briar College in Virginia announced it is closing. According to its Wikipedia entry, it had an endowment of $88 million, academic staff of 64 for 735 students. Unlike many of its peers it had not gone in for graduate programs in recent decades.

Sweet Briar College to close

BY KARIN KAPSIDELIS Richmond Times-Dispatch

SWEET BRIAR — Sweet Briar College announced today it will close Aug. 25, blaming “insurmountable financial challenges” caused by the dwindling number of women interested in single-sex education and the pressures on small, liberal arts schools.

The private, rural college near Lynchburg will hold its last commencement May 16 and cease operations at the end of the summer session after more than a century of educating women.

The college’s board of directors voted unanimously Feb. 28 to shut down after a yearlong study of its future failed to find any viable paths forward.

“This work led us to the unfortunate conclusion that there are two key realities that we could not change,” Sweet Briar President James F. Jones Jr. said.

Few students are choosing to attend rural schools where options for internships and work experiences are limited, and even fewer want to attend a women’s college, he said.

“The liberal arts college sector is embattled now on so many different fronts,” Jones said in an interview.

Sweet Briar will be the third liberal arts college to close in Virginia in the past two years, the result of financial pressures that also claimed Saint Paul's College in Lawrenceville and Virginia Intermont College in Bristol.

Jones broke the heartbreaking news to stunned students in a meeting just before 1 p.m. Some burst out of the auditorium in tears at first word of the closing. Others sobbed and hugged each other, and called their parents on cell phones as the reality hit them.

"Will someone please tell me if this is a joke?" one cried.

A few said they had found out just before the meeting after faculty and staff were told, but most appeared caught unaware.

Continue reading at Richmond Times-Dispatch

See also Inside Higher Ed

Blended Course Design MOOC

UCF is offering the fourth iteration of BlendKit – an open, online course for those interested in blended learning course design, sponsored by ELI and delivered via Canvas Network.

The course begins on Monday and is free (along with a credential option for a fee, for those interested).

BlendKit 2015: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer MOOC

Blended learning (the strategic combination of face-to-face and online learning experiences) is growing in popularity within higher education and K-12 settings around the world. The goal of the BlendKit: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer MOOC is to provide facilitated assistance to faculty members and instructional designers in developing and designing blended courses through (1) a consideration of key issues related to blended learning and (2) practical step-by-step guidance in producing materials for a blended course (e.g., developing design documents, creating content pages, and receiving peer review feedback at one's own institution).

This five-week course involves:

• Expert and peer assessment and critique on design work
• Regular interactions with facilitators and students
• Blogging/social networking interaction opportunities
• Weekly webinars with guest presenters
• Document templates and practical step-by-step “how to” guides
• Readings from scholarly works pertaining to blended learning

A Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) grant in 2011 leveraged the University of Central Florida’s expertise to create the Blended Learning Toolkit as a free, open resource for educational institutions interested in developing or expanding their blended learning initiatives. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), UCF’s grant partner, agreed to use its membership to distribute the toolkit and support new course models. The BlendKit course emerged from the grant to assist educators in designing blended courses and has supported three open, online cohorts since 2012.

BAs at CCs

From the Sacramento Bee

California community colleges board approves 15 pilot bachelor’s degrees

BY ALEXEI KOSEFF

AKOSEFF@SACBEE.COM

01/20/2015 3:08 PM 

 01/21/2015 10:40 AM

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article7780146.html#storylink=cpy

Bachelor’s degrees in mortuary work, ranch management and consumer technology design will soon be coming to California community colleges.

Under legislation signed last fall by Gov. Jerry Brown, the system’s governing board on Tuesday tentatively approved four-year degree programs at 15 community college campuses that will be introduced over the next three academic years.

“This is an historic day in our system,” California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice W. Harris said.

Changing technology and educational expectations have driven employers in fields such as dental hygiene, respiratory therapy and automotive technology – which once required only two-year associate degrees – to seek workers with a baccalaureate.

Advocates of community college bachelor’s degrees, which already are in place in 21 other states, have pushed for their introduction in California to generate up to an additional 1 million degrees in the state workforce by 2025. Senate Bill 850 allowed for up to 15 pilot degreesin majors not offered by the University of California or California State University, with the aim of meeting demand for highly trained workers in technical fields.

The community college system’s “core mission of job training means we have to change to four-year degrees,” Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, who authored SB 850, said at a news conference following the vote. “California should never be behind the curve, and now we are no longer behind the curve.”

A committee selected the 15 college programs from among “34 tremendously done proposals,” Harris said, considering labor market needs and the ability of colleges to deliver on their applications, as well as geographic, institutional and subject diversity.

The board will consider final approval for the plan in March, after consulting with UC and CSU. The pilot degrees must be carried out by the 2017-18 academic year and will sunset in 2022-23.

Following a vote of nine ayes and two abstentions, the audience at the meeting erupted in applause. Block and Constance Carroll, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, who led the push for community college bachelor’s degrees in California, were honored by the board for their efforts.

“This is a game-changer,” Carroll said.

Board member Thomas Epstein praised the rapid turnaround on applications that were first solicited in November. “It’s rare that something this important gets done this quickly by government,” he said

Call The Bee’s Alexei Koseff, (916) 321-5236. Follow him on Twitter @akoseff.

APPROVED PROGRAMS

▪ Antelope Valley College: airframe manufacturing

▪ Bakersfield College: industrial automation

▪ Crafton Hills College: emergency services and allied health systems

▪ Cypress College: mortuary science

▪ Feather River College: equine industry

▪ Foothill College: dental hygiene

▪ MiraCosta College: biomanufacturing

▪ Modesto Junior College: respiratory care

▪ Rio Hondo College: automotive technology

▪ San Diego Mesa College: health information management

▪ Santa Ana College: occupational studies

▪ Santa Monica College: interaction design

▪ Shasta College: health information management

▪ Skyline College: respiratory therapy

▪ West Los Angeles College: dental hygiene

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article7780146.html#storylink=cpy

Is "fix education by starving it" an idea whose time has gone in California?

Nice to see a political analysis of California's higher education problem.  Higher Ed Austerity as political offspring of a failing coalition. (h/t, KTS)

From Inside Higher Ed

The Higher Ed Austerity Deal Is Falling Apart

January 12, 2015

By

Christopher Newfield

For years now, the main trend in public university policy has been to impose budgetary austerity on them. Regardless of the revenue level that universities seek or the efficiencies they announce, the result is always the same: inadequate public funding coupled with rising tuition and student debt.

On the surface, 2015 promises more of the same: more austerity, more fees, more adjuncts, more tech, more management, and more metrics— metrics as a substitute for money. Years of attacks on austerity economics by prominent critics like Paul Krugman have not damaged austerity politics, which favors some powerful interests and which has hardened into a political culture. Our public universities have been stuck in a policy deadlock that I think of as halfway privatization. This has meant the worst of both worlds: not enough tuition and endowment income to escape the perma-austerity of state legislatures, and not enough public funding to rebuild the educational core. 

There are signs now that this framework is coming unglued. One of them is the tuition debate that started up again at the University of California Board of Regents meeting in November 2014. 

Continue reading at Insider Higher Ed

New Genres for Teaching and Learning I

I've been thinking recently about new genres for teaching and learning. Frankly, I've grown bored by thinking in only terms of lectures, class discussions, slide shows, participatory exercises, and the like. I want to put some of my creative teaching energy into practices that have legs, that will engage and be effective in various contexts including when I'm not there. 

What's out there? My previous post of an animation created to accompany the audio of a TED talk was one example. Here is another from Kindea Labs a startup that produces short animated videos it calls "conceptual animation."

One reaction is that this is a creepy mad-men-ification of intellectual life. But what if these work to motivate people to have a look or to get a student interested in something she would have otherwise ignored?

I find myself thinking: could I make one of these for each of my courses? For each section? For each session?  The exercise is useful quite apart from whether I'll ever do it: what is the gist that justifies the cognitive attention I am hoping to motivate? It forces me to do some hard thinking and that's a good thing.

What would a 60 second spot for your favorite course or your research look like?

Promo for Article by Two Carnegie Mellon Professors

Social Network Research from Kindea Labs on Vimeo.

Ancient Economies: Promo for Yale Classics Professor

Ancient Economies from Kindea Labs on Vimeo.

Two Years of Free Community College for Every American???

President Obama will propose free 2 years of community college for all in his State of the Union Whitehouse page with 2 minute presentation by the president.  And here's a paper from last year proposing a variation on what Obama will put forward in SOTU address - main author is the colleague I wrote op-ed post with the other day.

Address (plan is to announce it Friday in Tennessee which has a sort of program). Here's the

It's got potential in terms of combating social inequality in the US, but also potential impact on the business model of non-elite colleges and universities.   If the popular understanding becomes "our society will let you complete the first two years of college for free," it's going to make a whole lot of sense for a large fraction of American families to think in terms of 2+2.

Yes, it's going to mean that CCs are going to have to up their game and they'll need far more comprehensive funding than they are currently receiving.  But assuming things move in that direction, the non-elites might find themselves exposed to price sensitivity like they've never seen before.

These schools may have to choose between more intense competition for dwindling supply of folks who can borrow enough to pay (hiring PR firms to sell the benefits of 4!) or do some serious design thinking about how to thrive in such an environment.  At a minimum, can we expect such schools to have articulation agreements in place for every major with all the top transfer feeder schools?   But will that be enough?  Some careful financial modeling may be in order - to figure out whether there are actually enough dollars out there for the business of degree completion to be sustainable.

Still, the new policy proposal is change you can believe in, as they say.

An Animated Lecture About Education

You could do a lot worse things with the next 11 minutes than watching this video. I'm very intrigued by the genre it represents: taking the audio from a talk or lecture and building a complementary animation. Very interesting possibilities for education.

Plus, Ken Robinson has smart things to say about education.