tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27039011557846228042024-02-22T08:08:41.425-08:00In Case You Missed It...Articles, essays, and reports on higher education as fodder for collegial conversation about things that matter.Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.comBlogger183125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-87621607859370003112017-04-20T10:27:00.004-07:002017-04-20T10:27:29.147-07:00Hack Your Organizational Problems<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-small;">"Hackathons" are cool. But who knows what they really are and how they work? This makes them ideal things for clueless managers to do poorly. But if we take a little time to understand their "why" and "how" they do represent a potentially useful organizational form that could have a positive impact on sclerotic, inertia bound institutions. For higher educational organizations they have special potential for moving beyond "we tried that 5 years ago" and "not invented here" and for making actual interdisciplinary teams actually effective and the experience of working on institutional problems inspiring instead of demoralizing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-small;">This post from InnovationManagement.se is a good starting point because of how it manages to convey the essence of hackathoning outside the context of coding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-small;">That essence is group process bound in space and time that focuses effort on well defined challenges in a short, structured design sprint. The elements are important:</span></div>
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<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-small;">space/time</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-small;">defined chalenge</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-small;">structured process.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-small;">Especially the last. Read more at <a href="http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2017/04/13/organizational-revolutions-through-idea-hacking/">InnovationManagement.se</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2017/04/13/organizational-revolutions-through-idea-hacking/" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjARngIKnytZ7eLP8DZIEIOzH3A1IJAe0Os-DCJnr3zQMnHuc10iESeJKAIWBBb_R1YL3vPR6xH-VlNPOkrfQ2PofGB6aUkJDXkqbA38HkJAYAAafLoCVvyVkBKth_Mo1_D3NAcHyuCE4/s320/2017-04-20_10-10-05.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-27065516385608594652016-12-14T12:07:00.004-08:002016-12-14T12:07:32.557-08:00Ten Reflections from the Fall Semester<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Notes from this semester. Each semester I jot down observations about organizational practices, usually inspired by events at my place of employment. Every now and then I try to distill them into advice for myself. Most are obvious, once articulated, but they come to notice, usually, because things happen just the other way round.</span><br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Always treat the people you work with as if they are smart; explain why you take a stand or make a decision in a manner that demonstrates that you know they are smart, critical, and open to persuasion by evidence and argument. Set high standards for yourself. Your institutional work should be at least as smart as your scholarly work.<br /></span></li>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">"it is better to be wrong than vague." - Stinchcombe<br /></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If smart people are opposed to your idea, ask them to explain why. And listen non-dismissively and non-defensively. Remember, you goal is to get it right, not to get it your way.<br /></span></li>
</ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Do not put people in charge of cost cutting and budget reductions. Put them in charge of producing excellence within a budget constraint.<br />
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</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Make sure everyone is able to say how many Xs one student leaving represents. How much will it cost to do the thing that reduces the chance a student will get fed up with things?<br />
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</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If most of what a consultant tells you is what you want to hear (or already believe), fire her.<br />
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</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Don't build/design system and policies around worst cases, least cooperative colleagues, people who just don't get it, or individuals with extraordinarily hard luck situations. Do not let people who deal with "problem students" suggest or make rules/policy.<br />
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</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Be wise about what you must/should put up for a vote and what you should not. And if you don't know how a vote will turn out, they are are not prepared to put it up for a vote. Do your homework, person by person.<br /><br />
</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If a top reason for implementing a new academic program is because there's lots of interest among current students, pause. Those students are already at your school. What you want are new programs that are attractive to people who previously would not have given you a second look.<br />
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</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If you are really surprised by the reaction folks have to an announcement or decision then just start your analysis with the realization that YOU screwed up.<br /><br />
</span></li>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Related: and don't assume it was just about the messaging; you might actually be wrong and you should want to know whether that's the case.<br />
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</span></li>
</ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If you or someone else's first impulse when asked to get something done is to form a committee, put someone else in charge of getting that thing done.<br />
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</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Train folks to realize that teams and committees in organizations are not representative democracies. The team does not want your opinions, feelings, experiences, or beliefs; it wants you enrich the team's knowledge base by reporting on a part of the world you know something about. And that usually means going and finding out in a manner that is sensitive to your availability bias. In the research phase, team members are the sense organs of the team. </span></li>
</ol>
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<br />Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-20235142498209106152016-12-14T11:27:00.000-08:002016-12-14T11:27:08.023-08:00American Talent Initiative aims to recruit 50,000 highly qualified students from modest backgrounds<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-weight: normal;">Well, this is good news. Unless, perhaps, you are already an institution that does this - sure the pool is a deep one, but what's the net effect when top schools skim the top of it? Still, attaching the research resources to the effort is a good thing - way too much seat-of-the-pants policy and practice in this area.</span><br />
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<h2>
<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/13/effort-launches-boost-low-income-enrollment-top-colleges"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Looking for Low Income Students</span></a></h2>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">A group of 30 top colleges and universities wants to enroll more low-income students, but critics question whether the focus should be elsewhere.</span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #444444; font-size: xx-small;">By Rick Seltzer Inside Higher Ed December 13, 2016</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A new effort to enroll low- and moderate-income undergraduates at colleges and universities with high graduation rates is being announced today in an attempt to have more students from modest backgrounds graduate from prestigious campuses seen as opening doors to top careers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The effort, called the American Talent Initiative, aims to add 50,000 highly qualified students from modest backgrounds to campuses with high graduation rates by the year 2025. A group of 30 colleges and universities have signed on to the initiative, which is being coordinated by the nonprofit Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program and Ithaka S+R. Bloomberg Philanthropies is providing $1.7 million over two years to start the project, money that won’t go directly to colleges and universities but will be used to fund research on their efforts and related activities.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: orange; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Read more at <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/13/effort-launches-boost-low-income-enrollment-top-colleges" target="_blank"><i>Inside Higher Ed</i></a></span></div>
Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-42297235125637835832016-12-01T12:15:00.001-08:002016-12-01T12:15:22.200-08:00The "Core" COULD actually be a core<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In the <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-a-New-Kind-of/238479">Chronicle of Higher Education Nicholas Lemann argues</a> for an alternative approach to a core curriculum that is explicitly focused on intellectual skills and <i>METHODS</i>. The core courses he proposes would all be interesting to teach:</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Information Acquisition:</b> kinds, acquiring, evaluating</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Cause and Effect:</b> science as style of thought</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Interpretation: </b>close reading of texts</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Numeracy:</b> quantity in everyday life</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Perspective:</b> the limits of one's own viewpoint</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Language of Form:</b> intelligently seeing/producing visual information</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Thinking in Time:</b> thinking historically</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>Argument:</b> how to make a compelling and analytically sound argument</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">One element of what Lemann is responding to should sound familiar: "<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Quite a few colleges … devising a new undergraduate liberal-arts curriculum … these new curricula often identify a suite of intellectual skills … [but] permit a wide array of existing courses to fulfill the requirements … [thus] declaring victory simply by pasting on a new label."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Or, he continues:</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Or they define the new requirements in terms of "learning outcomes" rather than course content, which puts the emphasis on devising an end-of-course assessment rather than on designing the course itself. Or they offer courses on broad interdisciplinary subjects, with words like "ethics," "values," or "justice" in their titles, rather than on the inescapably different project of identifying fundamental methods of understanding and analysis.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And the result of that is something my own school has: a core curriculum that is neither core nor curriculum.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12pt;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">More to the point, many schools (my own included) allow even a "core" which is called skills or competency based to be captured by colleagues who want the content - especially values and worldviews - that they champion to be required for all and who use core requirements to drive enrollments in their departmental courses. The "core" becomes</span></span><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 16px;"> a symbolic expression of whose intellectual and ideological commitments are on top at the moment and then a whole bunch of organizational ritual and hoohah emerges to regularly remind all of whose game it is and to channel resources in their direction. Until the next reimagining of the core elevates so</span><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px;">me other group.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">My colleagues can </span><a href="https://drive.google.com/a/mills.edu/file/d/0BzzwcAySGYcpZ1RHZWpndVBDdnM/view?usp=sharing" style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;" target="_blank">read the article here</a><span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">. If you have premium access to the Chronicle, you can </span><a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-a-New-Kind-of/238479" style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">read the whole article there.</a><br />
<br />
<header style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Heuristica, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px;"><h1 class="content-item__title" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e5266; font-family: "Heuristica Bold", serif; font-size: 40px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.1; margin: 20px 0px 11px;">
The Case for a New Kind of Core</h1>
<figure class="content-item__media content-item__photo" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="content-item__byline" style="border-right: 1px solid rgb(119, 119, 119); box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 18px; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-right: 8px; margin-top: 15px; padding-right: 8px;">By Nicholas Lemann </span><span class="content-item__date" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #777777; font-family: "source sans pro" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase;">NOVEMBER 27, 2016 </span></div>
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<span class="dropcap" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #555555; display: block; float: left; font-size: 5.9em; line-height: 0.9; margin-bottom: -2px; padding-right: 10px;">W</span>hen I was a professional-school dean (at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism), we had no choice but to try to define the specific content of an education in our field. The premise was that if you want to practice a profession, there is a body of material you must master, at least in the early part of your education. That perspective led me to urge, this year <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Should-Graduates-Know-/234824" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #007aad; text-decoration: none;">in The Chronicle Review</a><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">, </em>that undergraduate colleges move in a similar direction: a core curriculum.</div>
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<a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-a-New-Kind-of/238479">READ MORE at CHE</a><br />
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-->Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-18069403672063707352016-09-28T10:26:00.002-07:002016-09-28T10:26:13.658-07:00College Affordability Expert on the Daily Show<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">A friend and <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/But-What-if-the-Shared-Vision/151113">co-author</a> has a new book and did <a href="http://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah/interviews/j0pxvm/exclusive-sara-goldrick-rab-extended-interview">an interview on The Daily Show last night</a>. You don't see too many sociologists on TV, BTW. Sara's new book is a research-based look at the challenges of paying for higher education, with solutions.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah/interviews/j0pxvm/exclusive-sara-goldrick-rab-extended-interview"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvWDKRMsfEabumQAfLYxUOHpMzgVbPSvGNp0o6p-gYfOqImN1WaCRvO5t33kuJoKXnCBeOmTYJyfaNR_WQkoXOXDu4_kI1ZwL6FdE3sG4Wj6mb3QhDaWTE3Jj2bN6-ypPTeD2EYD5hkwE/s320/2016-09-28_10-14-34.png" width="320" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022640434X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=022640434X&linkCode=as2&tag=dary-20&linkId=c2b0f5713e28cc98d7d61c6920c0cbc7"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs6qEaJ2WoZq4CAA0kh9tKgFLbr1Tt5rEh29pbTZmDwlaMx089gGflYjdNeHBf2V3oHEZKB8poxCxjsTXAFB0YJMGO0jvO-OeJDtAG6Br0M-uaQOJXLF2-as4GqsOREenNmsEs9VnowQo/s320/2016-09-28_10-17-59.png" width="216" /></a></div>
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022640434X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=022640434X&linkCode=as2&tag=dary-20&linkId=c2b0f5713e28cc98d7d61c6920c0cbc7"> <br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream</span></i></a><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=dary-20&l=am2&o=1&a=022640434X" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span></i><br />
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<br />Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-30001131556316715422016-09-22T11:13:00.002-07:002016-09-22T11:13:57.191-07:00"But even if they are not valid, they do tell you something...."<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Remember, "validity" means "they measure what you think they measure." "Data driven" can also mean driven right off the side of the road.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">From <i><a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/21/new-study-could-be-another-nail-coffin-validity-student-evaluations-teaching">Inside Higher Ed</a></i></span></h1>
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Zero Correlation Between Evaluations and Learning</h1>
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New study adds to evidence that student reviews of professors have limited validity.</div>
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September 21, 2016</div>
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<a class="username" href="https://www.insidehighered.com/users/colleen-flaherty" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" title="View user profile.">Colleen Flaherty</a></div>
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A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/11/new-analysis-offers-more-evidence-against-student-evaluations-teaching" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">gender</a>.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/01/lafayette-professor-goes-hunger-strike-protest-presidents-veto-his-tenure-bid" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">tenure cases</a> have even hinged on it.</div>
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What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191491X16300323" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">new study</a> suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”</div>
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“Whereas the small sample sized studies showed large and moderate correlation, the large sample sized studies showed no or only minimal correlation between [student evaluations of teaching, or SET] ratings and learning,” reads the study, in press with <em>Studies in Educational Evaluation</em>. <b>“Our up-to-date meta-analysis of all multi-section studies revealed no significant correlations between [evaluation] ratings and learning.”</b></div>
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<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/21/new-study-could-be-another-nail-coffin-validity-student-evaluations-teaching">READ MORE at IHE</a></div>
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Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-53449524929486362022016-08-14T09:43:00.001-07:002016-08-16T09:05:38.576-07:00House of CardsA Facebook post called my attention to <a href="http://regressing.deadspin.com/this-is-why-there-are-so-many-ties-in-swimming-1785234795">a neat little article</a> about why swimming rules only recognize hundredths of seconds even though modern timing technology allows much more precise measurements. The gist is this: swimming rules recognize that construction technology limits the precision with which pools can be built to something like a few centimeters in a 50 meter long pool. At top speed a swimmer moves about 2 millimeters in a thousandth of a second. So, if you award places based on differences of thousandths of a second, you can't know if you are rewarding faster swimming or the luck of swimming in a shorter lane.<br />
<br />
This observation points to the more general phenomena of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_precision">false precision</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)">misplaced concreteness (aka reification, hypostatization)</a>, and organizational irrationality rooted in sloppy and abusive quantification.<br />
<br />
These are endemic in higher education.<br />
<br />
Students graduate with a GPA and it's taken as a real, meaningful thing. But if you look at what goes into it (exams designed less and more well, subjective letter grades on essays, variable "points off" for rule infractions, quirky weighting of assignments, arbitrary conversions of points to letter grades, curves, etc.), you'd have to allow for error bars the size of a city block.<br />
<br />
Instructors fret about average scores on teaching evaluations.<br />
<br />
"Data driven" policies are built around the analysis of tiny-N samples that are neither random nor representative. <br />
<br />
Courses are fielded or not and faculty lines granted or not based on enrollment numbers with no awareness of the contribution of class scheduling, requirement finagling, course content overlap, perceptions of ease, and the wording of titles.<br />
<br />
Budgets are built around seat-of-the-pants estimates and negotiated targets.<br />
<br />
One could go on.<br />
<br />
The bottom line is that decision makers need to recognize how all of these shaky numbers are aggregated to produce what they think are facts about the institution and its environment. This suggests two imperatives. First, we should reduce individual cases of crap quantification. Second, when we bring "facts" together (e.g., enrollment estimates and cost of instruction) we should adopt an "error bar" sensibility - in it's simplest form, treat any number as being "likely between X and Y" - so that each next step is attended by an appropriate amount of uncertainty rather than an inappropriate amount of fantasized certainty.Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-83585646436281015752016-08-01T09:44:00.000-07:002016-08-01T09:44:01.871-07:00"Free College" and the System of Higher Education<br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Finally, someone is writing about the consequences of "free" college for the system of higher education in the US.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
From <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education</i> 1 August 2016<br />
<h2>
How Clinton’s ‘Free College’ Could Cause a Host of Problems</h2>
</div>
<h4>
By SCOTT CARLSON<br />
AND BECKIE SUPIANO</h4>
The policy proposals of presidential campaigns aren’t often burdened by details or even realism. A candidate’s ideas are supposed to represent vision, ambitions, principles — all while taking on the latest American anxiety. <br />
<br />
These days, some of that anxiety concerns the cost of college and the notion that student debt burdens young people as they head out to get jobs, buy homes, and start families. Hillary Clinton’s answer is her “New College Compact,” which includes a plan — adapted from her tenacious primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders — that would cover tuition for students from families earning up to $125,000 a year. <br />
<br />
“College used to be pretty affordable,” says a fact sheet on Mrs. Clinton’s compact. “For millions of Americans, that’s not the case anymore.” Colleges’ systems of grants and other financial assistance are complicated, and “free tuition” is a lot easier to pitch than a plan to tweak the existing patchwork of aid. Simple messages tend to resonate best. <br />
<br />
And this message is a particularly resonant one. Higher education is widely seen as a necessary step on the road to a middle-class lifestyle, and most policy makers agree that the country needs a more educated work force. But as more of the burden of paying for college shifts to students and their families, proposals like Mrs. Clinton’s make a powerful suggestion: that higher education is a public good, which deserves to be treated as such. <br />
<br />
The plan is grand — and very likely dead on arrival in Washington. Although the notion of free college is popular among progressives and young people, conservatives — who will probably retain control of the House of Representatives and many state governments after November — have balked at the cost of various free-college plans. Even some left-leaning policy wonks have questioned whether the plan would drive up tuition, put new burdens on the tax system, or even undermine college access. <br />
<br />
Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether the plan could ever become reality and treat it as a thought experiment: If Mrs. Clinton’s plan passed, what would happen to the higher-ed landscape? Many of the specifics aren’t known yet. But one thing is clear: Policy makers could write a free-college plan that does significant harm and questionable good. <br />
<br />
<h4>
PRIVATE COLLEGES IN PERIL</h4>
First in line for harm, most experts agree, would be private colleges. Although many people (and some policy makers) picture elite, wealthy institutions at the mention of “private colleges,” the category also includes hundreds of small, remote institutions, with tiny endowments. <br />
“These colleges are concentrated in rural areas in the Midwest and Northeast, where high-school populations have been fairly stagnant,” says Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. What’s more, he says, high-school graduates are increasingly minority or first-generation college students with lower incomes. “Because of that, these students might be more price-sensitive and may be interested in going to a public college rather than a private college.” <br />
<br />
There’s a big variable here: Mrs. Clinton’s free-college plan does not make clear whether students at private colleges could still get grants and loans from the federal government. And while free tuition would surely appeal to many families, students don’t choose colleges on price alone. They also care about finding a strong academic program and a good fit. Geography, too, is key: Most students go to college relatively close to home. <br />
<br />
But if public colleges became free for those lower-income students, says Kent John Chabotar, a former president of Guilford College, “small private colleges without endowments in states with highly regarded public universities — particularly the flagship universities — would be in trouble.” <br />
<br />
The private colleges would have to compete to attract students who would be less prepared for college and have lower expected family contributions. “You’re going to see a combination of dropping enrollments and skyrocketing tuition discounting, killing off the weaker, private, unendowed colleges,” Mr. Chabotar says. <br />
<h4>
<br /></h4>
<h4>
PUBLIC COLLEGES PRESSURED </h4>
So let’s say that the migration happens, and a new crop of students chooses public institutions over the private ones. It’s unclear that regional public and community colleges have enough capacity to meet that demand. <br />
<br />
Public two- and four-year colleges already enroll more than three-quarters of the nation’s undergraduates. Even if a college had been planning to grow when Mrs. Clinton’s policy took effect, government funding probably would not keep pace with its needs over time, says Donald Hossler, a senior scholar at the Center for Enrollment, Research, Policy & Practice at the University of Southern California. <br />
<br />
Colleges, he says, would be expected to educate more people with fewer resources per student. The quality of public education could erode. When enrollment is high and funding is tight, it can be hard for students to get all the classes they need to graduate on time. <br />
<br />
At flagships and other selective public colleges, the picture would be more complicated. Flagships already tend to enroll more relatively affluent students, whose socioeconomic advantages give them an edge in admissions. Unless the government were to give the flagships some incentive to grow, they’d have little reason to take on more students. That would mean even more competition for a fixed number of seats. <br />
<br />
So while free in-state tuition might sound like a boon to low-income students, it doesn’t help them much if they can’t get into the public college they want to attend, says Donald E. Heller, provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of San Francisco. <br />
<br />
In fact, some experts worry that free tuition for most families could exacerbate existing inequalities and further stratify higher education. While poor students would attend crowded, lower-tier public colleges at no cost, affluent students could buy their way into elite colleges, public or private. <br />
<br />
Flagships have long worked to bring in more revenue from sources beyond state appropriations, like tuition — by enrolling more out-ofstate students, for instance. That’s unlikely to change. One big question is how much flexibility the institutions would retain in those efforts. What would students whose families make $125,000 or more be asked to pay? <br />
<br />
If the policy applies to out-ofstate students, that eliminates a source of additional revenue. But if it applies only to in-state students, enrolling out-of-staters with family incomes below $125,000 would get harder when those students could attend their in-state colleges free, says Robert K. Toutkoushian, a professor in the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia.<br />
<h4>
<br /></h4>
<h4>
BETTER STUDENT OUTCOMES? </h4>
Free in-state tuition might also change when some students enroll. Mrs. Clinton has proposed that the program start out covering families making $85,000 or less, with the cap rising $10,000 annually for the next four years, until all families making less than $125,000 are covered. A family making $104,000 in the first year of the program might hold off on sending their children to college for a couple of years, Mr. McPherson says. <br />
<br />
You might think that a plan that saves students money, possibly reducing how much they must work outside of class, ought to help them graduate, Mr. Hillman says. But graduation rates are higher at private four-year colleges than at public ones. That probably can’t be chalked up entirely to the colleges themselves — the students who enroll matter, too — but it makes it harder to think of the plan as a boon to college completion. <br />
In the end, the free-college proposal is about one thing: mitigating debt. “Every student should have the option to graduate from a public college or university in their state without taking on any student debt,” says Mrs. Clinton’s website. <br />
<br />
Sure, students from families making up to $125,000 wouldn’t have to borrow for tuition, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have to borrow. They would still have to pay their living expenses, which can be a bigger burden than tuition, especially for needy students. Studies have shown that students on a low hourly wage have a hard time covering those bills. <br />
<br />
Barring sizable government investment, many students would still take out loans, a pattern already established in other countries that have tried “free college.” Even at the handful of wealthy American colleges that meet students’ full financial need — accounting for the full cost of attendance, without loans — some students still borrow. <br />
<br />
Here’s one more unanswered question: Does “free” mean tuition alone, or does it include fees? That’s no small detail: If colleges can’t get more tuition out of most students, they might look to increase fees instead.<br />
<h4>
<br /></h4>
<h4>
ECONOMIC ENGINES </h4>
Colleges are economic engines in their towns — machines that move money around, particularly in rural communities. In many parts of the Northeast, Rust Belt, Midwest, and beyond, small colleges are anchor institutions, helping to prop up communities that long ago lost the manufacturers and farmers that helped create them in the first place. <br />
<br />
Let’s assume that students chase free tuition at the public colleges, abandoning fragile private colleges and leading to their closure. What would happen to a place like Rensselaer, Ind., home of Saint Joseph’s College? <br />
<br />
Saint Joseph’s is a Roman Catholic institution with 2,000 students; 45 percent are first-generation students, most of whom would be covered by the Clinton plan. “If you take 45 percent of our population, and you allow them to go to Purdue or Indiana University or any of the state schools in Indiana for free, more than likely they are not going to be coming here,” says Robert A. Pastoor, the college’s president. “The viability of the institution is going to be seriously called into question.” Indiana has 31 private institutions, he adds, and many of them would find themselves in the same situation. <br />
<br />
In a town of 6,000, the college employs about 250 people. and is a significant economic engine. Students, parents, and alumni shop at the grocery store, eat at the restaurants, sleep in the hotels. Locals go to sports games, celebrate Mass in the college’s Romanesque chapel, and hold wedding receptions and meetings in college facilities. <br />
<br />
“All of that would go away,” says Mr. Pastoor, “and there is nothing to take its place.” Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-9410248777127193872016-01-13T09:25:00.002-08:002016-01-13T09:25:23.181-08:00Student Evaluations of Teaching: WHY is this still a thing?<br />
My institution just created a data science major. But it doesn't care about using data in honest and robust ways any more than other institutions.<br />
<br />
It's gotten to the point that it's intellectually embarrassing and ethically troubling that we are still using student evaluations of teaching (SET) in their current form for assessing instructor job performance. It is laughable that we do so with numbers computed to two decimal places. It is scandalous that we ignore the documented biases (most especially gender-based). But we do.<br />
<br />
Why isn't this an active conversation between faculty and administrators? I certainly find teaching evaluations helpful - trying to understand why I got a 3.91 on course organization but a 4.32 on inspiring interest is a useful meditation on my teaching practice. I have to remind myself that the numbers themselves do not mean much. <br />
<br />
Telling me where my numbers stand vis a vis my colleagues or the college as a whole FEELS useful and informative, but is it? I THINK I must be doing a better job than a colleague who has scores in the 2.0 - 3.0 range. But doing a better job at what? If you think hard about it, all you can probably take the bank is that I am better at getting more people to say "Excellent" in response to a particular question. The connection between THAT student behavior and the quality of my work is a loose one. <br />
<br />
Maybe I am on solid ground when I compare my course organization score to my inspires interest score. MAYBE I am on solid ground when I compare my course organization score in one class to the same score in another the same semester or the same class in another year. I might, for example, think about changes I could make in how I organize a course and then see if that score moves next semester.<br />
<br />
But getting seduced by the second decimal place is ludicrous and mad. Even fetishizing the first decimal place is folly. For that matter, even treating this as an average to begin with is bogus.<br />
<br />
If you also use these numbers to decide whether to promote me, you've gone off into the twilight zone where the presence of numbers gives the illusion of facticity and objectivity. Might as well utter some incantations while you are at it.<br />
<br />
Some new research adds another piece of evidence to the claim that the validity of the numbers in student evaluations of teachers is probably pretty low. Validity means "do they measure what you think they measure?" The answer here is that they do not. Instead, they measure things like "what gender is your instructor?" and "what kind of grade do you expect in this course?"<br />
<br />
These researchers even found gender differences in objective practices like "how promptly were assignments graded" and these persisted when the students were misinformed about gender of instructors.<br />
<br />
Let's start implementing a policy we can have some respect for. No more averaging. No more use of numerical scores in personnel review. No more batteries of questions that ask more or less the same thing (thus distorting the positivity or negativity of the overall impression).<br />
<br />As John Oliver asks, "why is this still a thing?"<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Colleen Flaherty. <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/11/new-analysis-offers-more-evidence-against-student-evaluations-teaching">Bias Against Female Instructors</a>: New analysis offers more evidence against the reliability of student evaluations of teaching, at least for their use in personnel decisions." Inside Higher Education January 11, 2016</li>
<li>Boring, Anne, Kellie Ottoboni, and Philip Stark. "<a href="https://www.scienceopen.com/document/vid/818d8ec0-5908-47d8-86b4-5dc38f04b23e">Student Evaluations of Teaching (Mostly) Do Not Measure Teaching Effectiveness</a>." <i>ScienceOpen Research</i>. 2016-01-07</li>
<li>Stark, Philip B. "<a href="https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/evaluations14.pdf">An Evaluation of Course Evaluations</a>." <i>ScienceOpen</i></li>
</ul>
Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-45411282638834237852016-01-01T11:50:00.006-08:002016-01-01T11:50:51.113-08:00NPR's Cladio Sanchez' "6 Education Stories To Watch In 2016"NPR's senior education correspondent offers his <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/01/01/458782257/6-education-stories-to-watch-in-2016">predictions for stories in education in 2016</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
1. The New Federal Education Law<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The long, grueling fight to overhaul the 14-year-old No Child Left Behind law is over, but that'll turn out to be the easy part. The new Every Student Succeeds Act returns most government oversight of schools back to states. But there are no guarantees that the states will do a better job than the federal government in two key areas: closing the achievement gap and raising the performance of the absolute worst schools.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">There will be some relief for students burdened by excessive testing. But for the most part states will continue to rely on test scores, using them to punish schools rather than for improving curriculum and instruction. Reading and math scores will drop for all kids on the new, tougher standardized tests linked to the Common Core. But the dismal performance of groups that struggle will trigger more scrutiny from civil rights groups in 2016. We'll also see those groups pressure states to deal with teacher quality and funding.</span><br />
<br />
2. Moving On From Common Core<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The controversy over the much-maligned Common Core State Standards will diminish. States will continue their efforts to re-brand or rename the standards, while for the most part following them. Despite the political controversy, the push for high academic standards will continue, and we'll see little of the "race to the bottom" that happened under NCLB.</span><br />
<br />
3. Charter Schools Under A Microscope<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The charter school movement will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2016. With 6,700 schools and nearly 3million students across 43 states and the District of Columbia, charters are a powerful force. The federal government has poured billions of dollars into charters, and polling shows that a majority of Americans support them. But you can expect these publicly funded, privately run schools to face new scrutiny, and new criticism.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">We'll see more scandals involving fraud, corruption and mismanagement, despite efforts to weed out "bad actors" who've exploited weak charter laws in several states. As Joe Nathan, a senior fellow at the Center for School Change, who helped write charter school legislation in 32 states, puts it: "We have not done enough to deal with the crooks and charlatans, of which we have our share."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Charters will also be one of the very few education issues to get any attention in the presidential campaign.</span><br />
<br />
4. Dreamers Dreams Deferred<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">There will be an even stronger backlash against the push for greater access to college for undocumented students. Dreamers — students brought to the U.S. illegally as children — will face greater opposition because of the stalemate over immigration reform. The angry, anti-immigrant rhetoric from Republicans running for president will also shape this debate. Look for state lawmakers to consider even tougher measures to deny dreamers any benefits and push them deeper into a legal and educational limbo.</span><br />
<br />
5. Goodbye Race-Conscious Admissions<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Watch for the U.S. Supreme Court to ban race in college admissions, forcing institutions to abandon affirmative action policies. Schools will have to rethink how they recruit and enroll students in efforts to increase diversity. This will fuel an already tense situation on many campuses. Expect minority student protests and campus unrest to intensify.</span><br />
<br />
6. Student Debt Takes Center Stage<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Higher education leaders, or what presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio calls "the higher-ed cartel," effectively killed the Obama administration's attempt to create a more transparent, consumer-friendly way for students and parents to rate colleges. But with many of the presidential candidates calling for tuition-free or debt-free college, we'll see these institutions undertake a more serious discussion about changing their pricing policies — largely out of fear that lawmakers in Washington will step in and do it for them.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/01/03/374010172/six-education-stories-to-watch-in-2015">Last Year's List</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Standardized Testing Under Fire</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">More Troubles For The Common Core</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">In Congress, Deeper Divisions</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Focus On Campus Behavior</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Teacher Evaluation, Training, And The Vergara Fallout</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Ferguson Effect: New Scrutiny For School Police</span></li>
</ol>
<br />
<br />
And some from NPR's "<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/12/26/373268439/15-education-predictions-for-2015">crowd sourced</a>" predictions for 2015.<br />
<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Blended Learning As A Daily Practice</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">More Scrutiny of Student Data</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Broader Disclosure On Student Loan Defaults</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Moving On From Common Core Debates</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind; More School Choice</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Customizable, Game-Like Platforms</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Transition For The Online Education Space. "Snackable" learning will become a large part of the online education menu.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">More Options For Student Borrowers</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Competency-Based Education Picks Up</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">More Nuanced Kinds Of Data In Schools</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Digital Classroom Meets Labor Issues</span></li>
</ol>
Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-36459537142402969712015-12-14T09:04:00.001-08:002015-12-14T09:04:37.901-08:00From the "Good Grief!" Department<div class="panel-pane pane-node-title extrapadding" style="background: white; border-top-width: 0px; box-shadow: none !important; float: left; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Corbel, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', 'DejaVu Sans', sans-serif; line-height: 25px; padding-left: 10px; padding-top: 10px; width: 450.953px;">
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<span style="color: orange;">from <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/12/14/u-california-criticized-extending-transfer-deadline">Inside Higher Ed</a></span></div>
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U of California Criticized for Extending Transfer Deadline</div>
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December 14, 2015</div>
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The University of California <a href="http://universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university-california-pushes-back-deadline-transfer-applications" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">announced</a> early this month that transfer applicants to system campuses -- who thought they had to finish applications by the end of November -- could apply as late as Jan. 4. The university said it was acting because UC campuses recently committed to admitting more transfer applicants. For students who still want to apply, this is, of course, good news.</div>
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But the <em><a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-transfer-20151214-story.html" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Los Angeles Times</a></em> reported that many of those who met the standard deadline, and the counselors who helped them, are frustrated. Mihai Gherghina, who met the regular deadline, said, "They didn't tell anyone about this extension until after the deadline. It's unfair how some lazy people were given another chance." Adding to the frustration: those who submitted their applications for the early deadline will receive no preference and will not be permitted to edit their applications between now and Jan. 4.</div>
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Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-25618088074539380552015-12-09T13:38:00.002-08:002015-12-09T13:38:39.352-08:00And then there were ...<div class="panel-pane pane-node-title extrapadding" style="background: white; border-top-width: 0px; box-shadow: none !important; color: #444444; float: left; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Corbel, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', 'DejaVu Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 25px; padding-left: 10px; padding-top: 10px; width: 450.953px;">
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<i><span style="background-color: white;">From </span><a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/12/09/college-new-rochelle-goes-completely-coed" style="background-color: orange;">Inside Higher Ed</a></i><br />
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College of New Rochelle Goes Completely Coed</div>
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December 9, 2015</div>
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Another women's college has decided to go completely coeducational.</div>
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The College of New Rochelle on Tuesday announced its plans to begin accepting men into its School of Arts & Sciences in fall 2016. The New York college has been accepting men in other programs for about four decades. Its School of Nursing, School of New Resources (for adult learners) and Graduate School are already coed -- the college's School of Arts & Sciences was the last holdout, and has been women only since the college was founded in 1904.</div>
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“This decision was made after very careful thought, evaluation of several key factors, and above all with a great reverence for the college’s mission,” Elizabeth LeVaca, chair of the college's governing board, said in a statement, adding that the board received supportive feedback on the change.</div>
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A <a href="https://www.facebook.com/cnr.alum/posts/962665727131948" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Facebook page</a> for New Rochelle alumni contained a mix of comments, many supportive and understanding but several quite critical.</div>
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Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-22407800523441564142015-12-03T15:37:00.003-08:002015-12-03T15:37:40.387-08:00Will Free Community College Put HBCUs Out of Business?<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">My colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab wrote a post saying "Short answer: No." But notes it might be because "HBCUs (both public and private) are allocated $10Billion in support under <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/09/fact-sheet-white-house-unveils-america-s-college-promise-proposal-tuitio">America's College Promise</a>." I confess to ignorance about the details of ACP, but it seems like something we should be paying attention to at tuition-driven SLACs.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">See also </span><a href="http://www.aacc.nche.edu/Advocacy/Pages/acpa2015.aspx" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">AACC on America's College Promise Act</a><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> and this </span><a href="http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/sites/democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/files/America's%20College%20Promise%20-%20Summary.pdf" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">brief from democrats on the Committee on Education and the Workforce</a><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">. Are the potential grants to Hispanic Serving Institutions driving some colleges to try to redefine their mission? Here are a few notes from the above document:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-small;">In order to be eligible, MSIs must have a student body that is
at least 35 percent low-income, including Pell-eligible students. Additionally eligible MSIs must commit to maintain or
adopt evidence-based institutional reforms designed to improve student outcomes, and to set performance goals for
improving those outcomes. Eligible MSIs that enter into articulation agreements with community colleges can also
receive grant funds for eligible students who transfer from those community colleges to complete their baccalaureate
degrees.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This is intriguing, but one would expect a bit of careful analysis about the costs, benefits, and implications of chasing this not-yet-existing funding.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho2EkX6E4v-oMxoFIbm0vDe4a5LR9c9K_udXymPYZdxotEPD_jPdZAixYKqc_1crq77p6ijSFGU6RuEUetSpuaNXC7P5P8il-E8xvQZ2cjuL6kpzzpL5Xn_hsrdOSncgiXkjtCI7iqwCk/s1600/12273817_937625336312582_5394395319620560613_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Can Free Tuition to Community Colleges Put Historically Black Colleges and Universities Out of Business? T. Ramon Stuart, Ph.D. Associate Provost and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, West Virginia State University December 4, 2015 I 10 am - 11:00 am Educational Sciences, Room 253, 1025 Wjohnson Street During the 2015 State of the Union Address, President Barack H. Obama announced his vision to provide American citizens free access to higher education through community colleges. While President O bama failed Lo outline the details of his plan, there is no doubt that his plan could drastically increase the number of Americans with a college degree; howeve1~ one very important detail that President Obama omitted from his statement was the cost of this initiative and the impact that fu nding it would have on other institutions of higher education - especially Historically Black Colleges and University. This study uses current IPEDS data to analyze the tuition cost of the 1890 land-grant institutions while also exploring the ave rage tuition cost of L11e community colleges in L11c respective states to see if L11ere is a substantial diffe rence in tuition cost. Please email lpittard@wisc.edu if you are interested in participating in an invitation-onlysu·ategy luncheon for graduate and professional scholars with Dr. Stuart immediately following the research presentation." border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho2EkX6E4v-oMxoFIbm0vDe4a5LR9c9K_udXymPYZdxotEPD_jPdZAixYKqc_1crq77p6ijSFGU6RuEUetSpuaNXC7P5P8il-E8xvQZ2cjuL6kpzzpL5Xn_hsrdOSncgiXkjtCI7iqwCk/s640/12273817_937625336312582_5394395319620560613_o.jpg" title="" width="494" /></a></div>
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Wisconsin Center for Education Research<br />
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Can Free Tuition to Community Colleges Put Historically Black Colleges and Universities Out of Business?</div>
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T. Ramon Stuart, Ph.D.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Associate Provost and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs,West Virginia State University</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
December 4, 2015 10 am - 11:00 am</div>
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During the 2015 State of the Union Address, President Barack H. Obama announced his vision to provide American citizens free access to higher education through community colleges. While President Obama failed to outline the details of his plan, there is no doubt that his plan could drastically increase the number of Americans with a college degree; however one very important detail that President Obama omitted from his statement was the cost of this initiative and the impact that funding it would have on other institutions of higher education - especially Historically Black Colleges and University. This study uses current IPEDS data to analyze the tuition cost of the 1890 land-grant institutions while also exploring the average tuition cost of the community colleges in the respective states to see if there is a substantial difference in tuition cost.<br />
<br />Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-47998524346093920472015-12-01T08:06:00.001-08:002015-12-01T08:06:38.689-08:00MOOC on Universal Design in February<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<b>Accessibility: Designing and Teaching Courses for All Learners</b> is a free 6-week professional development course available that will help you gain a better understanding of accessibility as a civil rights issue and develop the knowledge and skills you need to design learning experiences that promote inclusive learning environments.<u></u><u></u></div>
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During this six-week course, you’ll learn how to:<u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><u></u>Recognize and address challenges faced by students with disabilities related to access, success, and completion.<u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><u></u>Articulate faculty and staff roles in reducing barriers for students with disabilities.<u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><u></u>Apply the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in designing accessible learning experiences.<u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><u></u>Analyze the benefits of Backward Design when developing learning experiences.<u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><u></u>Use Section 508 standards and WCAG 2.0 guidelines to create accessible courses.<u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">●<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><u></u>Determine which tools and techniques are appropriate based on course content.<u></u><u></u></div>
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You will have the opportunity to earn badges that recognize your mastery of these competencies.<u></u><u></u></div>
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<b>Audience</b>: Anyone may enroll and participate in the MOOC. It has been designed for faculty and staff in higher education at any type or level of institution.<u></u><u></u></div>
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Why take the Access MOOC? Watch this short <a href="https://youtu.be/mxmaKKCn1vo" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">video</a> to find out! (<a href="https://youtu.be/rJwf2KbTMBg" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Audio described version</a>)<u></u><u></u></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Access MOOC begins on February 22<sup>nd</sup></span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><u></u><u></u></span></div>
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Next steps:<u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u>1.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span><u></u>Register at <a href="http://bit.ly/AccessMOOC" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Canvas Network</a><u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u>2.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span><u></u>Share and follow the conversation on Twitter using #AccessMOOC<u></u><u></u></div>
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<u></u>3.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal;"> </span><u></u>Follow our Access MOOC <a href="https://www.facebook.com/accessmooc/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Facebook Page</a><u></u><u></u></div>
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The course is a collaborative effort of faculty and staff from SUNY Empire State College and SUNY Buffalo State College, funded by a SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="158" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mxmaKKCn1vo?rel=0&showinfo=0" width="280"></iframe><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="158" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rJwf2KbTMBg?rel=0&showinfo=0" width="280"></iframe>Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-20431332358850900502015-11-20T10:36:00.002-08:002015-11-20T10:36:37.247-08:00How Does This Figure in Our Strategic Plans?<span id="docs-internal-guid-ca2f8029-261b-4efa-42db-c25d3d045aae"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our institution is basically a California school (~82% UG, ~83% G). Four other states send us a over 9 undergrads but all the rest are single digits</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. By contrast Berkeley and UCLA have over 20% out of state. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the one hand, that suggests that we are more of a California state school (or less of a national school) than are some state institutions. On the other hand, it's good for our bottom line if California students' places at UCs are taken by out of state students.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But now that will change.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">According to the <a href="http://universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-dramatically-boost-california-student-enrollment">UC Newsroom</a>: "The University of California will significantly boost enrollment of California freshman and transfer students next year.</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The UC Board of Regents today (Nov. 19) approved a budget plan to enroll an additional 10,000 California undergraduates over the next three years, including 5,000 freshman and transfer students in 2016-17.</span></span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Under the plan, all nine UC campuses that educate undergraduates will enroll more California students.</span></span></blockquote>
Insofar as our business model includes picking up qualified students who do not get into Berkeley but want to study in the Bay Area, this good news for California's students might be disconcerting news for us. Five thousand students over 10 campuses might mean only 500 at UCB and only half of them women. But say 1 in 20 of them would have considered Mills: that's maybe a quarter million in net revenue.<br />
<br />
There might be a glimmer of a bright side: the plan also includes adding up to 600 more graduate students to the system - if we can be a producer of same, options for our alumnae increase. It's a safe guess this won't compete with our graduate programs since most of ours are probably not in the high undergraduate demand column.<br />
<br />
The absence of things like this (that is, external policy changes that can have outsized impact on what we are doing - the "free" community college initiative, for example) on our radar screen suggest (confirm) a dangerously parochial perspective and do not bode well for future success.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span>Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-18283405018106743182015-08-01T15:34:00.001-07:002015-08-01T15:34:31.081-07:00Taking Note of Taking Notes on a LaptopFrom <i><a href="https://hbr.org/2015/07/what-you-miss-when-you-take-notes-on-your-laptop">Harvard Business Review</a></i><br />
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BUSINESS WRITING</div>
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What You Miss When You Take Notes on Your Laptop</h2>
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Maggy McGloin</div>
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JULY 31, 2015<br />
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Even in my relatively short foray into office life, I notice that few people bring a pen and notebook to meetings. I’ve been told that over the years, the spiral notebooks and pens once prevalent during weekly meetings have been replaced with laptops and slim, touch-screen tablets.<br />
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I suppose it makes sense. In a demanding new age of technology, we are expected to send links, access online materials, and conduct virtual chats while a meeting is taking place. We want instant gratification, and sending things after the meeting when you’re back at your desk feels like too long to wait. It seems that digital note-taking is just more convenient.<br />
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But is longhand dead? Should you be embarrassed bringing a pen and paper to your meetings? To answer these questions, I did a little digging and found that the answer is no, according to <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/6/1159">a study conducted by Princeton’s Pam A. Mueller and UCLA’s Daniel M. Oppenheimer</a>. Their research shows that when you only use a laptop to take notes, you don’t absorb new materials as well, largely because typing notes encourages verbatim, mindless transcription.<br />
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Mueller and Oppenheimer conducted three different studies, each addressing the question: Is laptop note taking detrimental to overall conceptual understanding and retention of new information?<br />
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For the first study, the researchers presented a series of TED talk films to a room of Princeton University students. The participants “were instructed to use their usual classroom note-taking strategy,” whether digitally or longhand, during the lecture. Later on, the participants “responded to both factual-recall questions and conceptual-application questions” about the film.<br />
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The students’ scores differed immensely between longhand and laptop note takers. While participants using laptops were found to take lengthier “transcription-like” notes during the film, results showed that longhand note takers still scored significantly higher on conceptually-based questions. Mueller and Oppenheimer predicted that the decrease in retention appeared to be due to “verbatim transcription.”<br />
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Read <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/07/what-you-miss-when-you-take-notes-on-your-laptop">rest of article at HBR</a><br />
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<br />Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-81146481769521477482015-08-01T10:06:00.002-07:002015-08-01T10:06:30.814-07:00Sometimes Best Learning Bears No Credit ValueFrom the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/how-to-live-wisely.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone"><i>New York Times</i></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/education/edlife/index.html" style="color: black; font-size: 0.75rem; letter-spacing: 0.075em; line-height: 1rem; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;">EDUCATION LIFE</a><br />
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How to Live Wisely</h1>
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RICHARD J. LIGHT<br />
JULY 31, 2015</div>
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</header>Imagine you are Dean for a Day. What is one actionable change you would implement to enhance the college experience on campus?<br />
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I have asked students this question for years. The answers can be eye-opening. A few years ago, the responses began to move away from “tweak the history course” or “change the ways labs are structured.” A different commentary, about learning to live wisely, has emerged.<br />
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What does it mean to live a good life? What about a productive life? How about a happy life? How might I think about these ideas if the answers conflict with one another? And how do I use my time here at college to build on the answers to these tough questions?<br />
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A number of campuses have recently started to offer an opportunity for students to grapple with these questions. On my campus, Harvard, a small group of faculty members and deans created a noncredit seminar called “<a href="http://fdo.fas.harvard.edu/pages/reflecting-your-life" style="color: #326891;">Reflecting on Your Life</a>.” The format is simple: three 90-minute discussion sessions for groups of 12 first-year students, led by faculty members, advisers or deans. Well over 100 students participate each year.<br />
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Here are five exercises that students find particularly engaging. Each is designed to help freshmen identify their goals and reflect systematically about various aspects of their personal lives, and to connect what they discover to what they actually do at college.<br />
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<li>For the first exercise, we ask students to make a list of how they want to spend their time at college. What matters to you? This might be going to class, studying, spending time with close friends, perhaps volunteering in the off-campus community or reading books not on any course’s required reading list. Then students make a list of how they actually spent their time, on average, each day over the past week and match the two lists.<br />
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Finally, we pose the question: How well do your commitments actually match your goals? <br />
A few students find a strong overlap between the lists. The majority don’t. They are stunned and dismayed to discover they are spending much of their precious time on activities they don’t value highly. The challenge is how to align your time commitments to reflect your personal convictions.</li>
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<li>Deciding on a major can be amazingly difficult. One student in our group was having a hard time choosing between government and science. How was she spending her spare time? She described being active in the Institute of Politics, running the Model U.N. and writing regularly for The Political Review. The discussion leader noted that she hadn’t mentioned the word “lab” in her summary. “Labs?” replied the student, looking incredulous. “Why would I mention labs when talking about my spare time?” Half an hour after the session, the group leader got an email thanking him for posing the question.</li>
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<li>I call this the Broad vs. Deep Exercise. If you could become extraordinarily good at one thing versus being pretty good at many things, which approach would you choose? We invite students to think about how to organize their college life to follow their chosen path in a purposeful way.</li>
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<li>In the Core Values Exercise, students are presented with a sheet of paper with about 25 words on it. The words include “dignity,” “love,” “fame,” “family,” “excellence,” “wealth” and “wisdom.” They are told to circle the five words that best describe their core values. Now, we ask, how might you deal with a situation where your core values come into conflict with one another? Students find this question particularly difficult. One student brought up his own personal dilemma: He wants to be a surgeon, and he also wants to have a large family. So his core values included the words “useful” and “family.” He said he worries a lot whether he could be a successful surgeon while also being a devoted father. Students couldn’t stop talking about this example, as many saw themselves facing a similar challenge.</li>
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<ul>
<li>This exercise presents a parable of a happy fisherman living a simple life on a small island. The fellow goes fishing for a few hours every day. He catches a few fish, sells them to his friends, and enjoys spending the rest of the day with his wife and children, and napping. He couldn’t imagine changing a thing in his relaxed and easy life.</li>
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A recent M.B.A. visits this island and quickly sees how this fisherman could become rich. He could catch more fish, start up a business, market the fish, open a cannery, maybe even issue an I.P.O. Ultimately he would become truly successful. He could donate some of his fish to hungry children worldwide and might even save lives.
“And then what?” asks the fisherman.
“Then you could spend lots of time with your family,” replies the visitor. “Yet you would have made a difference in the world. You would have used your talents, and fed some poor children, instead of just lying around all day.”
We ask students to apply this parable to their own lives. Is it more important to you to have little, accomplish little, yet be relaxed and happy and spend time with family? Or is it more important to you to work hard, use your talents, perhaps start a business, maybe even make the world a better place along the way?
Typically, this simple parable leads to substantial disagreement. These discussions encourage first-year undergraduates to think about what really matters to them, and what each of us feels we might owe, or not owe, to the broader community — ideas that our students can capitalize on throughout their time at college.
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At the end of our sessions, I say to my group: “Tell me one thing you have changed your mind about this year,” and many responses reflect a remarkable level of introspection. Three years later, when we check in with participants, nearly all report that the discussions had been valuable, a step toward turning college into the transformational experience it is meant to be.Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-61489703282963916742015-07-30T10:06:00.001-07:002015-07-30T10:06:45.746-07:00Two from IHE on Mistakes Deans MakeAbridgements of two from <i>Insider Higher Educatio</i>n. Full articles <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2015/07/24/essay-mistakes-rookie-deans">here</a> and <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/few-more-rookie-dean-mistakes#.VbkKu1ayObw.facebook">here</a>.<br />
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5 Mistakes of Rookie Deans</h1>
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July 24, 2015</div>
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<a class="username" href="https://www.insidehighered.com/users/eli-jones" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" title="View user profile.">Eli Jones</a></div>
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Welcome to the world of being a dean -- one of the most daunting and rewarding jobs in academe. ...</div>
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In my journey, I have talked with many deans and identified the top five mistakes rookie deans make, along with some helpful advice on how to avoid them.</div>
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<strong>1. Underestimating the knowledge, skills and abilities it takes to do the job well.</strong></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><br />
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<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Develop the mental capacity to know a little about a lot versus being narrow and deep.</span></span></li>
<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Envision what you want success to look like so that you lead your team in a positive direction.</span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Understand how to delegate.</span></li>
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<strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">2. Overestimating the power and influence one has in the role.</strong><br />
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<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Take</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">seriously </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">responsibility "power," but don’t let it go to your head. </span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Always share the credit.</span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Focus on how to engage people enough that they </span><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">want </em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">to follow your lead.</span></li>
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<strong>3. Lacking sufficient knowledge about managing oneself.</strong></div>
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Take charge of your schedule and priorities.</div>
<span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><br />
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<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Manage your time.</span></span></li>
<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Control your ego and develop a thick skin.</span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Managing stress. Sort and prioritize and delegate. Talk out tough issues, be honest, reflect and work for clarity, take breaks and stay active.</span></li>
</span></ul>
<strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">4. Lacking sufficient knowledge of how to generate and allocate resources across the enterprise.</strong><br />
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<strong>5. Underappreciating the art and science of relationship building.</strong></div>
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Pursue each relationship within our college and our university and relationships with alumni, donors and friends of the institution as opportunity to build a lifelong, mutually beneficial relationship. These can be pursued through listening tours, outreach to other deans, strategic planning committees, faculty/staff town hall meetings and road trips.</div>
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A Few More Rookie Dean Mistakes</h1>
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July 27, 2015 - 9:26pm</div>
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<a class="username" href="https://www.insidehighered.com/users/matt-reed" style="color: #ef7521; text-decoration: none;" title="View user profile.">Matt Reed</a></div>
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The five mistakes it highlights, it gets right, but I’d add a few.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><em>Applying the standards of proof for an academic publication to daily decision making. </em> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I remember being struck by how quickly a few facts or anecdotes became conclusive. If you start picking those apart, though, you quickly discover why: if you wait for anything decisive, you will wait years. So you have to learn when the call for more analysis is actually helpful, as opposed to when it comes across simply as a delaying tactic. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
<em style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="font-size: large;">Taking the first answer as the last answer. </span></em></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
Many people will respond to any suggestion with a knee-jerk “no” that sounds definitive, but is really a version of “I’m not used to that yet.” </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
Acceptance of new ideas isn’t automatic. It’s a process. That means building some of that time into your process, and accepting that some initial reactions may be discouraging.</div>
<div style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
<em><span style="font-size: large;">Being the smartest person in the room.</span></em></div>
<div style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
When teaching, it’s easy to fall into the trap of being the smartest person in the room. But in administration, if you feel the need to prove yourself all the time, you’ll burn bridges and look ridiculous. </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
<span style="color: #b45f06;"><i>The best administrators I’ve known make a point of surrounding themselves with very smart people, and listening to them. That can mean allowing someone lower on the food chain to win, simply by having the better argument. </i></span><b>When you defer to the better argument -- when you allow truth to trump rank -- you create an environment in which all that intelligence becomes an asset.</b> [emphases, Ryan] If the chief has to win every time, then the organization is limited to the vision of the chief. </div>
<div style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
<em style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="font-size: large;">Neglecting Culture</span></em></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
Every college has quirky arrangements that make no sense on paper, but that work. Or they’re the least-bad compromises among warring factions. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It can be tempting to regard those as low-hanging fruit, but be careful. Ask questions first, and listen for the pauses. The part of the sentence that tails off is often the most important. “We would have changed that, but, well, you know…”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
<em><span style="font-size: large;">Remembering Too Much</span></em></div>
<div style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
Finally, accept that you’ll make mistakes, and sometimes have best-available moves seen as mistakes. Learn from them, but don’t dwell on them. Forgive yourself the honest goofs, own them, and move on. </div>
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Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-68516537262638615072015-07-08T11:07:00.002-07:002015-07-08T11:07:10.932-07:00What the Crazies are Saying, Part 9<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">One of the biggest reasons for smart people to start participating in conversations about the future of higher education is because if we don't then people like Marco Rubio manage to get the attention of decision makers. </span><span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"> It is unfortunate when innovation and change to be defined by ideas like these and we take as our mission the preservation of the status quo. "Slippery slope" can be a lazy person's approach to non-critical thinking. </span><span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Neither the the ostrich or the luddite makes for a good role model. </span><span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">This from the </span><a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/marco-rubio-calls-us-higher-education-overhaul" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Times Higher Education website</a><span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">.</span><br />
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Marco Rubio calls for US higher education overhaul</h2>
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Republican presidential hopeful wants radical reform of university system</div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">JULY 7 2015</span></div>
<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10.2856454849243px; line-height: 15.4284677505493px; text-transform: uppercase;">BY </span><span class="field-content" style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10.2856454849243px; line-height: 15.4284677505493px; text-transform: uppercase;">JOHN MORGAN</span><br />
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Marco Rubio, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has called for a “holistic overhaul” to higher education, bringing in low-cost providers and breaking the existing “cartel” of colleges and universities.</div>
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Mr Rubio, a US senator for Florida, made higher education one of the focuses of his first major<a href="https://marcorubio.com/issues/21st-century-jobs-plan/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Link_Tweet&utm_term=New_American_Century&utm_content=The_Rubio_Jobs_Plan&utm_campaign=Daily_Social_Organic?sc=070715a" style="color: #1468b3; text-decoration: none;">speech</a> on domestic policy, delivered in Chicago today.</div>
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He also pitched an idea for “investors” to pay the tuition fees of students in return for a share of their earnings after graduation.</div>
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“The lesson of history is clear: to empower today’s workers, we must equip them with today’s skills,” he said. “And to do that, we need our higher education system to innovate at the same rate as our economy.”</div>
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Mr Rubio warned that despite employers reporting a lack of skills among graduates, “we still tell students that to get a degree, they have to spend four years on a campus; tens of thousands of dollars on tuition, books, room, board; and hundreds of hours in a classroom, often learning subjects that aren’t relevant to the modern economy”.</div>
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He added: “We do not need timid tweaks to the old system; we need a holistic overhaul – we need to change how we provide degrees, how those degrees are accessed, how much that access costs, how those costs are paid, and even how those payments are determined.”</div>
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And he continued: “As president, I will begin with a powerful but simple reform. Our higher education system is controlled by what amounts to a cartel of existing colleges and universities, which use their power over the accreditation process to block innovative, low-cost competitors from entering the market.</div>
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“Within my first 100 days, I will bust this cartel by establishing a new accreditation process that welcomes low-cost, innovative providers. This would expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition, which would prompt a revolution driven by the needs of students – just as the needs of consumers drive the progress of every other industry in our economy.”</div>
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Mr Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who graduated from the University of Florida before studying law at the University of Miami, also said that he would give students the ability to “choose the right degree at the right price from the right institution for them. I’ve proposed an idea called the ‘Student Right to Know Before You Go Act’, which requires institutions to tell students how much they can expect to earn with a given degree before they take out the loans to pay for it.”</div>
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He also stated that he would make “student loans more manageable by making income-based repayment automatic for all graduates, so the more they make, the faster they pay back their loans; and the less they make, the less strain their loans cause”.</div>
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And Mr Rubio said that he had “proposed an idea called Student Investment Plans, which would let students partner with investors who would pay their tuition in return for a percentage of their earnings for a few years after graduation. It may result in a profit for the investor or it may not – but unlike with loans, none of the risk lies with the student.”</div>
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<a href="mailto:john.morgan@tesglobal.com" style="color: #1468b3; text-decoration: none;">john.morgan@tesglobal.com</a></div>
Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-13806584268401896152015-07-08T10:50:00.000-07:002015-07-08T10:50:33.732-07:00Internships, Experiential Learning, and Learning to ThinkAnother entry in the general skills vs. job skills conversation occasioned by recent decision clarifying unpaid internship rules. IMHO point could be more strongly made: the risk shift from corporate employers to individuals is gigantic distortion in higher education and society in general. This from the <i><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Business-Can-Pay-to-Train-Its/231015/">Chronicle of Higher Education</a>.</i><br />
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June 22, 2015</div>
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Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force</h1>
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By Eric Johnson</div>
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In the spring of my senior year, I interviewed for a contract-negotiation job at a law firm.</div>
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My college major was in peace, war, and defense, which may have sounded intriguing to professional litigants. But I had no legal training. My chief assets were literacy, an eagerness to please, and a pressing need to pay rent.</div>
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The interview got right to the point. "How would you organize a thousand retransmission-consent contracts?" asked the stone-faced lawyer, looking across a conference table.</div>
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Having never heard of a retransmission-consent contract, I offered the only sensible response.</div>
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"Alphabetically?" I asked back.</div>
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This was not the right answer.</div>
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But they hired me anyway and trained me to do the job. This cost them in the short run, while I puzzled my way through FCC regulations and Nielsen ratings, but it paid off nicely over time. My contract knowledge earned the firm solid revenue.</div>
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This is how employment is supposed to work. Companies hire broadly educated workers, invest in appropriate training, and reap the profits of a specialized work force.</div>
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Increasingly, however, employers have discovered a way to offload the nettlesome cost of worker training. The trick is to relabel it as education, then complain that your prospective employees aren’t getting the right kind.</div>
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"Business leaders have doubts that higher-education institutions in the U.S. are graduating students who meet their particular businesses’ needs," reads the first sentence of a Gallup news release issued last year. Barely a third of executives surveyed for the Lumina Foundation agreed that "higher-education institutions in this country are graduating students with the skills and competences that my business needs."</div>
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Bemoaning the unpreparedness of undergraduates isn’t new. Today, however, those complaints are getting a more sympathetic hearing from the policy makers who govern public higher education.</div>
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"We’ve got to adapt our education to what the marketplace needs," Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina said this year at a conference on innovation. "People are ready to get the work. Let’s teach them these skills as quick as possible."</div>
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The governor spoke shortly after a panel session on "New Delivery Models for Higher Education." Moderated by the head of the state’s chamber of commerce, the session highlighted a particularly innovative approach to education in the form of a tech start-up called Iron Yard.</div>
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Iron Yard is a for-profit code school — it teaches people how to program computers, build applications, and design websites. A 12-week course costs $12,000, promising quick proficiency in one of the tech industry’s in-demand skills.</div>
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I don’t object to this, except the part where politicians and business leaders call it a new model for higher education. It is actually a new model for worker training, one in which the workers bear the costs and risks for their own job-specific skill acquisition, while employers eagerly revise the curriculum to meet their immediate needs.</div>
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Critics of contemporary higher education lament the decline of a broad, humanistic education but often misidentify the cause. To the extent that such a curriculum is on the wane, the culprit is not ’60s-vintage faculty radicalism or political correctness run rampant, but the anxiety-driven preference for career-focused classes and majors.</div>
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Most faculty members would love to have more students delving into the classical canon — or any canon, really. But they’re up against policy makers and nervous parents who think average starting salaries are the best metric for weighing academic majors. Private-sector imperatives also threaten to dominate extracurricular time. I now work at a large public university, where I serve as a staff mentor to a cohort of freshmen. Inevitably I spend the first few weeks of the fall semester tamping down anxiety about summer internships. Students who haven’t yet cracked a textbook or met a professor worry about finding summer programs to improve their résumés.</div>
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My university recently began offering grants to low-income students who otherwise can’t afford to take internships. It’s a great program, and I’m glad we have it. But it means that academe and its donors are now responsible for subsidizing profitable companies that want future employees to have work experience but don’t want to pay students for a summer’s work. There are many ways society could choose to address the inequity of unpaid internships. Having colleges collect and distribute tax-deductible grants to the private sector’s trainees is perhaps not the most straightforward.</div>
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This blurring of the distinction between education and job-skill training isn’t simply a fight over academic priorities. It’s a fight about who pays the cost of doing business: the companies that profit, or some combination of workers and taxpayers. The more we’re willing to countenance a redefinition of job training as education, the more we ask society to shoulder what were once business expenses.</div>
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The same tension between public investment and private returns is playing out in the realm of research.</div>
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As state funding for research universities has ebbed, pressure has increased for academic institutions to more efficiently monetize their discoveries. Policy makers talk of shortening the pipeline from laboratory to marketplace, putting ever-greater emphasis on the kind of applied research that yields quick returns.</div>
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This is all perfectly fine — no one begrudges the discovery of a breakthrough drug or a valuable new material. But with finite resources on campus, more emphasis on marketable products will inevitably mean less focus on the foundational, long-range science that may not yield tangible results for decades. This has already happened in the private sector, where a relentless focus on short-term returns has crowded out spending on fundamental research. Sending universities down the same path risks eroding one of our most important bastions of basic science.</div>
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I sat through an economic-development workshop recently — "Research to Revenue" — in which a successful start-up CEO spoke with admirable bluntness about the need to keep university researchers involved in product development but off the company payroll.</div>
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"The salaries of these people are often significant," noted the executive. "As a company, you really don’t want to take that on unless you absolutely have to."</div>
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Of course not. Much better to let taxpayers, through colleges and federal grant dollars, pick up the tab while private-sector "partners" guide faculty efforts toward privately profitable ends. This is what a more entrepreneurial campus means, after all — a campus more attuned to profit.</div>
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"The thought now and then assails us that material efficiency and the passion to ‘get on’ in the world of things is already making it so that the liberal-arts college cannot exist," the University of North Carolina’s president, Edward Kidder Graham, wrote in 1916. "But this is a passing phase," he continued, advising colleges to keep their focus on creating and teaching "the true wealth of life."</div>
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If Graham’s confident vision feels like a hopeless anachronism today, then we begin to measure the distance of our retreat. Faced with recessionary state finances and lawmakers who regard the public good as oxymoronic, university leaders have reached for the language of investment and return. The consequences of that narrow view are mounting.</div>
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Celebrating the intrinsic value of public higher education is not a nostalgic indulgence but a joyful duty. We spoke that language once; we should try it again.</div>
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Eric Johnson works in student-aid communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The views expressed here are his own.</div>
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Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-90373181935083578302015-07-08T10:41:00.000-07:002015-07-08T10:41:31.045-07:00College Affordability and the Size of the Market<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">This piece from, of all places, the </span><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-too-expensive-thats-a-mythcollege-too-expensive-thats-a-myth-1436212158" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Wall Street Journal</a><span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">, and by, of all people, Lamar Alexander, makes the case that college unaffordability is overstated. As such, it's a useful provocation. But buried in it are some numbers that gave me pause. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Consider that only about 15% of students enrolled in colleges and universities attend private non-profit institutions (you don't need to trust Alexander: <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.70.asp">check it here</a>). </span><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">On the one hand, that means the entire conversation about higher education policy is mostly not about us. On the other, at the risk of oversimplifying, when private institutions price themselves like private institutions, they might be eliminating about 85% of the market. By comparison, since about 55% of enrolled students are female, being single sex only eliminates about 45% and being only full time cuts out only about 63% of potential students).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">OPINION COMMENTARY</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-too-expensive-thats-a-mythcollege-too-expensive-thats-a-myth-1436212158">College Too Expensive? That’s a Myth</a></span><br />
Pell grants, state aid, modest loans and scholarships put a four-year public<br />
institution within the reach of most.<br />
<span style="color: #666666;">By LAMAR ALEXANDER</span><br />
<span style="color: #cccccc; font-size: xx-small;">Updated July 6, 2015 9:59 p.m. ET</span><br />
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Paying for college never is easy, but it’s easier than most people think. Yet some politicians and pundits say students can’t afford a college education. That’s wrong. Most of them can.</div>
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Public two-year colleges, for example, are free or nearly free for low-income students. Nationally, community college tuition and fees average $3,300 per year, according to the<a class="icon none" href="http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-published-undergraduate-charges-sector-2014-15" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 30px 30px; color: #0080c3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">College Board</a>. The annual federal <a class="icon none" href="http://www2.ed.gov/finaid/prof/resources/data/pell-2013-14/pell-eoy-2013-14.html" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 30px 30px; color: #0080c3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Pell grant </a>for these students—which does not have to be paid back—also averages $3,300.</div>
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At public four-year colleges, tuition and fees average about $9,000. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, tuition and fees are $11,800. One third of its students have a Pell grant (up to $5,775 depending on financial need), and 98% of instate freshmen have a state Hope Scholarship, providing up to $3,500 annually for freshmen and sophomores and up to $4,500 for juniors or seniors. States run a variety of similar programs—$11.2 billion in financial aid in 2013, 85% in the form of scholarships, according to the<a class="icon none" href="https://www.nassgap.org/viewrepository.aspx?categoryID=3" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 30px 30px; color: #0080c3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"> National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs</a>.</div>
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The reality is that, for most students, a four-year public institution is also within financial reach.<br />
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What about really expensive private colleges? Across the country 15% of students attend private universities where tuition and fees average $31,000, according to the <a class="icon none" href="http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-published-undergraduate-charges-sector-2014-15" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 30px 30px; color: #0080c3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">College Board</a>. Georgetown University costs even more: about $50,000 a year. Its president, John DeGioia, told me how Georgetown—and many other so-called elite colleges—help make a degree affordable.</div>
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First, Georgetown determines what a family can afford to pay. It asks the student to borrow $17,000 over four years and work 10-15 hours a week under its work-study program. Georgetown pays the remainder—at a total cost of about $100 million a year.</div>
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Apart from grants, work and savings, there are federal student loans. We hear a lot of questions about these loans. Are taxpayers generous enough? Is borrowing for college a good investment? Are students borrowing too much?</div>
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An undergraduate today can get a federal loan of up to $5,500 his first year. The annual loan limit rises to $7,500 his junior and senior years. The fixed interest rate for new loans this year is, by law, 4.29%. A recent graduate may pay back the loan using no more than 10% of his disposable income. And if at that rate he doesn’t pay it off in 20 years, taxpayers forgive the loan.</div>
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Are students borrowing too much? The <a class="icon none" href="https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/misc/trends/2014-trends-student-aid-report-final.pdf" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 30px 30px; color: #0080c3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">College Board</a> reports that a student who graduates from a four-year institution carries, on average, a debt of about $27,000. This is about the same amount of the average new car loan, according to the information-services company Experian Automotive. The total amount of outstanding student loans is $1.2 trillion. The total amount of auto loans outstanding in the U.S. is $950 billion.</div>
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But a student loan is a lot better investment. Cars depreciate. College degrees appreciate. The College Board estimates that a four-year degree will increase an individual’s lifetime earnings by $1 million, on average.</div>
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What about the scary stories of students with $100,000 or more in debt? These represent only 4% of all student loans, and 90% of the borrowers are doctors, lawyers, business school graduates and others who have earned graduate degrees.</div>
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About seven million federal student loan borrowers are in default, defined as failing to make a loan payment in at least nine months. That’s about one in 10 of all outstanding federal student loans in default—although the Education Department says most of those loans eventually get paid back.</div>
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Here are five steps the federal government can take to make it easier for students to finance their college education:</div>
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• Allow students to use Pell grants year-round, not only for the traditional fall and spring academic terms, to complete their degrees more rapidly.</div>
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• Simplify the confusing 108-question federal student-aid application form and consolidate the nine loan repayment programs to two: a standard repayment program and one based on their income.</div>
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• Change the laws and regulations that discourage colleges from counseling students against borrowing too much.</div>
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• Require colleges to share in the risk of lending to students. This will ensure that they have some interest in encouraging students to borrow wisely, graduate on time, and be able to pay back what they owe.</div>
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• Clear out the federal red tape that soaks up state dollars that could otherwise go to help reduce tuition. The Boston Consulting Group found that in one year Vanderbilt University spent a startling $150 million complying with federal rules and regulations governing higher education, adding more than $11,000 to the cost of each Vanderbilt student’s $43,000 in tuition. America’s more than 6,000 colleges receive on average one new rule, regulation or guidance letter each workday from the Education Department.</div>
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It is vital that more Americans earn their college degrees, for their own benefit and that of the country. A report by Georgetown University’s <a class="icon none" href="https://cew.georgetown.edu/report/recovery-job-growth-and-education-requirements-through-2020" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 30px 30px; color: #0080c3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Center on Education in the Workforce</a> tells us that if we don’t, we’ll fall short by five million workers with postsecondary education in five years.</div>
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<em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Mr. Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, is chairman of the Senate’s education committee. He has been secretary of the Education Department, president of the University of Tennessee and governor of Tennessee.</em></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Correction</span></div>
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About seven million federal student-loan borrowers are in default. An earlier version of this story referred to seven million dollars, not borrowers.</div>
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Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-42694649684913507202015-07-08T09:37:00.000-07:002015-07-08T09:37:08.149-07:00Innovation in Higher Education Redux<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This from <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/27/education-next-wave/">TechCrunch</a>. There are a lot of smart minds buzzing around "innovation" in the "higher education space." In what's being called the post-MOOC era, we can wait to see who wins or we can jump in and try to shape the conversation and maybe come up with the liberal arts for the 21st century that people keep yammering on about. The folks described in this post seem to get one important thing: lots of false dichotomies in the current conversation (online OR offline, vocational skills OR critical thinking, liberal arts OR experiential learning).</span><br />
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<h2 class="alpha tweet-title" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: #f9f9f9; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: alright_sansblack, HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 2.4375em; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: -1px; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Searching For The Next Wave Of Education Innovation</h2><div class="title-left" style="background-color: #f9f9f9; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; float: left; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 26px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="byline" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #aab6aa; font-family: alright_sansmediumitalic, HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9375em; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Posted <time class="timestamp" datetime="2015-06-27" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Jun 27, 2015</time> by <a href="http://techcrunch.com/author/danny-crichton/" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="Posts by Danny Crichton">Danny Crichton</a> <span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">(<a href="https://twitter.com/DannyCrichton" rel="external" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;">@DannyCrichton</a>)</span></div><div class="byline" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #aab6aa; font-family: alright_sansmediumitalic, HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9375em; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;"></span><br />
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">I’m going to come right out and say it: few areas have been as hopeful and as disappointing as innovation in education.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Education is probably the single most important function in our society today, yet it remains one of the least understood, despite incredible levels of investment from venture capitalists and governments. Why do students continue to show up in a classroom or start an online course? How do we guide students to the right knowledge just as they need to learn it?</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">We may have an empirical inkling and some hunches, but we still lack any fundamental insights.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">That’s truly disappointing. With the rise of the internet, it seemed like education was on the cusp of a complete revolution. Today, though, you would be excused for not seeing much of a difference between the way we learn and how we did so twenty years ago.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">I have attempted to tease out these challenges in two previous essays on <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/17/why-is-the-university-still-here/#.jaimrz:GDP3" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;">what the modern university still offers us</a> and <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/31/how-should-we-learn/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;">how we might learn in the future</a>. One thesis that becomes more clearer over time is simply that we have ignored the more human aspects of education, replacing it instead with a “give ’em tablets and they will learn” mentality.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">The next wave of education innovation won’t come from dumping technology on the problem. Instead, it will come from deeply engaging with people and empowering them to make learning all their own.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">This past month, I talked to two individuals on opposite sides of improving education. Jodi Goldstein, who officially became head of <a href="https://i-lab.harvard.edu/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Harvard’s i-lab startup incubation center</a> this month, discussed the opportunities and challenges of bringing an entrepreneurial mentality into America’s oldest university.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Mattan Griffel, founder of <a href="https://onemonth.com/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">One Month</a>, a subscription-based online education startup, is coming at the problem from the other direction, rethinking online education in the aftermath of the MOOC explosion. “[Online education] has kind of overstepped its current effectiveness,” he argued, “and everyone is saying what is possible by painting this picture, but the tools haven’t reached that point yet.”</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Together, these two trailblazers and many others like them are starting to form the next wave of education innovation – and potentially transform our societies in the process.</span></div><h2 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: alright_sansblack, HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.4375em; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.3; margin: 2em 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">More Transformation Than Disruption</span></h2><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">One interesting change in mentality coming from this new wave is a more mature view about what to do with the infrastructure of learning we already have. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/peter-thiel-thinking-too-highly-of-higher-ed/2014/11/21/f6758fba-70d4-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">While the end of universities</a>has been proposed by people like Peter Thiel, the reality is that the combination of status and endowments will ensure that many universities will survive and even thrive in the online age.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">One interesting change coming to universities is simply that the timeframe of degree programs won’t be as fixed as they are today. As we walked through the i-lab’s new initiatives, Goldstein noted that <a href="http://harvardlaunchlab.com/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Harvard’s Launch Lab</a>, an incubator space for alumni teams, has already engaged with many students in just its first few months of operation. “There has been enormous interest and demand and we have seen such a strong community form with students leveraging each other,” Goldstein said.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Traditionally, students who graduated from the university would be forced to leave, but the Launch Lab ensures that they can maintain a connection to their alma matter. In its first year of operation, the Launch Lab had about 50 alumni teams join the 10,000 square foot space just off of Harvard’s campus in Allston, Massachusetts.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Griffel at One Month, speaking methodically through the changes coming to education, believes that large research universities won’t change much in the near future from new online education initiatives. “The four year degree as we know it symbolically is going to change very little over the next ten years.”</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Instead, he sees a larger cultural shift to the same sort of continuous education that the i-lab is trying to instill in its graduates. “We know that skills are changing faster and faster, so teaching people how to learn new skills is really important,” Griffel said. That skills-based approach is also what he thinks One Month can do to help the current system. “We are not trying to replace the branding of Harvard. It is going to take a long time to see someone with One Month on a resume, which is why we are targeting more about the skills.”</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">One mistake that Griffel sees is in the extensive focus on students over teachers. While the language of education innovation often emphasizes students, empowering teachers may be as important or even more so for rethinking the way we learn. “We need to change the role of teachers. What kind of people do we consider teachers? How do we elevate teachers in society?” He thinks there is an opportunity to make them “rock stars” and bring new perspectives into the profession.</span></div><h2 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: alright_sansblack, HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.4375em; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.3; margin: 2em 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Rethinking Liberal Arts In A Technological Age</span></h2><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Few debates in education get teachers and students alike more worked up than the future of the humanities and the liberal arts. What use is there to English or art in a world where a twelve-week programming class can dramatically change your employment and salary outcomes?</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Goldstein of the i-lab addressed that challenge of balancing the traditional role of the university with the more experiential programs of a startup incubator. “I’m glad that we are not trying to change the curriculum. Harvard is already really good at that, but we can sit along side that,” she said.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Instead, Goldstein sees an opportunity to have students act as ambassadors, learning the trade of entrepreneurship and then bringing that mental model back to Harvard’s other schools. Interestingly, only roughly 30% of students at the center come from the nearby business school.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Goldstein, who first joined the i-lab in 2011, has made it a mission to seek ways of engaging non-traditional entrepreneurs. That’s why the i-lab has moved beyond just offering incubation space and startup events to creating what she called “structured entrepreneurship opportunities.”</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">One example of this is a program <a href="https://i-lab.harvard.edu/experiential-learning/bits-blocks" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #089e00; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">run jointly with IDEO called the Future Lab</a>, in which students go through a design-thinking curriculum developed by the storied design consulting firm while interning at startups and working on their challenges. Last year’s pilot program had 16 students.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Griffel at One Month is sanguine about the future of the liberal arts and believes that startups need to think deeply about how to foster critical thinking. “I think it is kind of like a fool’s choice,” he explained. “We are told that it is a spectrum: either vocational or deep critical thinking. But when you break down deep critical thinking, it is really just a set of skills that is taught.”</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Liberal arts provides a framework for handling the constant changes in skills required to survive in industry. “With the liberal arts approach, we don’t know what we need to train people toward because we don’t know the jobs of the future,” Griffel noted. However, that doesn’t mean universities shouldn’t change their approach. “This becomes less relevant when education is a lifelong thing, rather than just a moment in college.”</span></div><h2 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: alright_sansblack, HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.4375em; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.3; margin: 2em 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Finding The Next Wave</span></h2><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Today, it seems clear that the fusion of online and offline learning is going to be at the core of improving education. Humans are social creatures, and placing them in front of a laptop and hoping that they are just going to soak up the knowledge is often asking too much.</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">At the same time though, we need to be shifting our culture about what the ideal form of education might be. Academic knowledge needs to be complemented with practical learning, a mix that can be customized to each student’s needs. Griffel believes that “We are trying to build this technology that highlights the best content and trying to shift, in the students’ eyes and everyone’s eyes, what is the role of education in your life?”</span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #3e433e; font-family: 'Open Sans', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;"><span class="twitter-handle" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 0.8rem;">Whether through experiential learning with startups or skills-based learning through an online subscription, this next generation of education may be less disruptive and sexy than its immediate predecessor – but it also might just work.</span></div></div></div>Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-56664135524355260082015-07-08T09:23:00.001-07:002015-07-08T09:23:20.394-07:00Two Years of College for "Free": A Trend?<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Smart four year colleges will start planning now to be coordinating with this phenomenon.</span><br />
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Oregon Will Become Second State to Offer Free Community College<br /><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">
Lawmakers approve new program in last minute pre-holiday vote</span></h3>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #58585a; font-family: HelveticaNeue75Bold, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;">July 7th, 2015 3:10 pm | by </span><span class="ByUser" style="background-color: white; color: rgb(214, 107, 40) !important; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.wweek.com/portland/by-author-11-1.html" style="color: rgb(214, 107, 40) !important; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">NIGEL JAQUISS</a></span><br />
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More than 10,000 students are expected to benefit from a last-minute bill passed by legislators this week that makes Oregon only the second state (after Tennessee) to offer free community college.<br />
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The idea, according to state Sen. Mark Hass (D-Beaverton), is that a lot of needy students who might like to attend community college are currently failing to apply for federal grants that could pay for much of their education. <br />
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The new legislation, Senate Bill 81, offers a carrot: If eligible students apply for and receive federal grants for community college, Oregon will pay the balance of their tuition. The recipients must have lived in Oregon for 12 months, begin their community college course work within six months of finishing high school or the equivalent, take courses that are required for graduation and maintain a 2.5 grade point average. (And it's not entirely free—each student must pay a minimum of $50 per term.)<br />
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<a href="http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-33425-oregon_will_become_second_state_to_offer_free_community_college.html">Read more at Willamette Week</a></div>
Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-49738041079281331202015-04-28T11:37:00.001-07:002015-04-28T11:37:25.741-07:00New DropBox Feature Might Make Grading EasierDropBox has introduced a <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/help/9016?_camp=dw&oref=e&_tk=email&_net=email1&_ad=commenting">COMMENTS feature</a> that lets you look at a shared file in your browser (Microsoft office docs and PDFs all seem to work) and make comments in a sidebar. Anyone who can see the file can make comments and you can notify folks that there are comments just by mentioning them.<br />
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Potentially useful for feedback on student papers and for group work or committee work where downloading document or group editing in something like Google docs is either too intrusive or too slow a process. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcdTc8z2EBry1jeyhbHK5MAVAnejaW0rfkaQmXB65XOIGSEm-Foo1koDbpPlVSg4ybc_CZthR7aaUJ5bXOjEucAodoLGQMA2iIh-I-q9EVz6uZH2s8llwL34PXaU-NMC9e_jtBM-cQyxc/s1600/dropbox-comments.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcdTc8z2EBry1jeyhbHK5MAVAnejaW0rfkaQmXB65XOIGSEm-Foo1koDbpPlVSg4ybc_CZthR7aaUJ5bXOjEucAodoLGQMA2iIh-I-q9EVz6uZH2s8llwL34PXaU-NMC9e_jtBM-cQyxc/s1600/dropbox-comments.png" height="256" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2703901155784622804.post-25465986401562271332015-04-23T08:52:00.003-07:002015-04-23T08:52:49.481-07:00ASU and EdX offering Freshman Year Online<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">ASU will offer a freshman year program - all online - that will likely be fully transferrable and will cost around $6000. This latest iteration on MOOCs includes a focus not on isolated courses but a coherent program of courses - a freshman year foundation. The innovation here is the co-design of the courses (12 of them). Of course the experience will be a far cry from what students get at a residential college, but but will it be $12,000 less? Or $40,000 less? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-large;">Promising Full College Credit, Arizona State University Offers Online Freshman Program</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">By TAMAR LEWINAPRIL 22, 2015</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://nyti.ms/1Ftuamj">Arizona State University</a>, one of the nation’s largest universities, is joining with <a href="https://www.edx.org/">edX,</a> a nonprofit online venture founded by M.I.T. and Harvard, to offer an online freshman year that will be available worldwide with no admissions process and full university credit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In the new Global Freshman Academy, each credit will cost $200, but students will not have to pay until they pass the courses, which will be offered on the edX platform as MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">“Leave your G.P.A., your SATs, your recommendations at home,” said Anant Agarwal, the chief executive of edX. “If you have the will to learn, just bring your Internet connection and yourself, and you can get a year of college credit.”</span><br />
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<a href="http://nyti.ms/1OI2Tfv">Continue reading at NYT.com</a></div>
Dan Ryanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15544690248354631910noreply@blogger.com0