From the "Good Grief!" Department

from Inside Higher Ed

U of California Criticized for Extending Transfer Deadline

December 14, 2015

The University of California announced 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.

But the Los Angeles Times 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.

And then there were ...

From Inside Higher Ed

College of New Rochelle Goes Completely Coed

December 9, 2015

Another women's college has decided to go completely coeducational.

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.

“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.

A Facebook page for New Rochelle alumni contained a mix of comments, many supportive and understanding but several quite critical.

Will Free Community College Put HBCUs Out of Business?

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 America's College Promise."  I confess to ignorance about the details of ACP, but it seems like something we should be paying attention to at tuition-driven SLACs.

See also AACC on America's College Promise Act and this brief from democrats on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. 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:

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.

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.

Wisconsin Center for Education Research

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 10 am - 11:00 am

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.

MOOC on Universal Design in February

Accessibility: Designing and Teaching Courses for All Learners 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.

During this six-week course, you’ll learn how to:

●     Recognize and address challenges faced by students with disabilities related to access, success, and completion.

●     Articulate faculty and staff roles in reducing barriers for students with disabilities.

●     Apply the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in designing accessible learning experiences.

●     Analyze the benefits of Backward Design when developing learning experiences.

●     Use Section 508 standards and WCAG 2.0 guidelines to create accessible courses.

●     Determine which tools and techniques are appropriate based on course content.

You will have the opportunity to earn badges that recognize your mastery of these competencies.

Audience: 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.

Why take the Access MOOC? Watch this short video to find out! (Audio described version)

Access MOOC begins on February 22^nd

Next steps:

1.       Register at Canvas Network

2.       Share and follow the conversation on Twitter using #AccessMOOC

3.       Follow our Access MOOC Facebook Page

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.

How Does This Figure in Our Strategic Plans?

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. By contrast Berkeley and UCLA have over 20% out of state.

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.

But now that will change.

According to the UC Newsroom: "The University of California will significantly boost enrollment of California freshman and transfer students next year.

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. 

Under the plan, all nine UC campuses that educate undergraduates will enroll more California students.

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.

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.

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.

Taking Note of Taking Notes on a Laptop

From Harvard Business Review

BUSINESS WRITING

What You Miss When You Take Notes on Your Laptop

Maggy McGloin

JULY 31, 2015

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.

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.

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 study conducted by Princeton’s Pam A. Mueller and UCLA’s Daniel M. Oppenheimer. 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.

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?

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.

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.”

Read rest of article at HBR

Sometimes Best Learning Bears No Credit Value

From the New York Times

EDUCATION LIFE

How to Live Wisely

RICHARD J. LIGHT
JULY 31, 2015

Imagine you are Dean for a Day. What is one actionable change you would implement to enhance the college experience on campus?

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.

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?

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 “Reflecting on Your Life.” 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.

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.

• 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.
  
  Finally, we pose the question: How well do your commitments actually match your goals?
  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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.