In Case You Missed It...

Thursday, October 31, 2013

As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry

from the New York Times

Lists That Rank Colleges’ Value Are on the Rise

Rankings that privilege affordability and "return on investment" are becoming more common. They tend to look very different from more conventional lists. It becomes problematic if one falls into the false dichotomy trap: either you care about ROI or you care about "intellectual, social and civic value of education." One advantage of a liberal arts education is that it teaches you "both/and" as well as "either/or" thinking. We need to recognize that paying attention to cost and career value does not mean abandoning other education fundamentals.

From The New York Times

By ARIEL KAMINER
Published: October 27, 2013

Looking out over the quadrangle before him as students dashed from one class to the next, James Muyskens was feeling proud one recent afternoon, and why not?

The college he had led for the past 11 years had just been awarded second place in a new ranking of American higher education — ahead of flagship state universities, ahead of elite liberal arts colleges, even ahead of all eight Ivy League universities.

The college is Queens College, a part of the City University of New York with an annual tuition of $5,730, and a view of the Long Island Expressway.

Catering to working-class students, more than half of whom were born in other countries, Queens does not typically find itself at the top of national rankings. Then again, this was not a typical ranking. It was a list of colleges that offer the “best bang for the buck.”

“Elation,” said Dr. Muyskens, recalling his delight when he learned of the honor. “Thrilled!”

Purists might regard such bottom-line calculations as an insult to the intellectual, social and civic value of education. But dollars-and-cents tabulations like that one (which was compiled by Washington Monthly), are the fastest-growing sector of the college rankings industry, with ever more analyses vying for the attention of high school students and their parents who are anxious about finances.

In ‘Flipped’ Classrooms, a Method for Mastery

From the New York Times Opinionator Blog

Developments in the 10,000 Dollar Degree Movement

From The New York Times 18 October

Low-Cost B.A. Starting Slowly in Two States

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: October 18, 2013

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — With tuition, student loan debt and default rates all spiraling higher, what’s not to love about a $10,000 bachelor’s degree?

In the last two years, two Republican governors — Rick Perry in Texas and Rick Scott in Florida — have challenged their states’ public colleges to develop bachelor’s degrees costing no more than $10,000, less than a third of the average sticker price for tuition and fees at a four-year public college. Governor Perry said he hoped 10 percent of the state’s degrees would meet that goal with online learning and new efficiencies. Governor Scott sought low-cost degrees in high-demand fields.

Six Hats and Better Meetings

Almost nobody likes meetings and almost everybody will agree that precious little ever seems to get accomplished in meetings. And yet we keep on having them. There are a lot of ideas out there about how to improve meetings and one useful insight is that there are different kinds of meetings and some techniques work better for some kinds than for others.

One intriguing approach for meetings of collaborative teams developed by E. deBono is called "six hats." I first came across it when my step-son learned about it in a week-long workshop on team-work that he participated in during "Independent Activities Period" (IAP) at MIT. They are teaching it to young engineers as a set of skills right alongside integration by parts and balancing equations.

The basic idea is to recognize that there are different genres of contribution to conversations and that it can be helpful to recognize and manage/organize these. They are:

Yellow = ideas, speculation, "how about...", "what if..."
Red = feelings, emotions, intuitions
Blue = agenda, sequence, process, rules of the road
Green = creative, options, alternatives
White = facts & figures, observations not interpretations, usuble info, checked facts
Black = criticism, flaw-finding, no need to be balanced or fair

Participants can self-consciously identify the kind of contribution they are making, a facilitator can ask for specific genres, or the agenda can be dedicated to a specific sequence of contribution types.

Here are some slides from a 2010 talk I gave for Division of Student Life staff on the technique:

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Technology and Learning around the Country

Although examples of the technology tail wagging the pedagogical dog are a dime a dozen, there are places that seem to be doing a noteworthy job of building an infrastructure that supports the use of technology in innovative teaching. The elements of such infrastructures include things like high quality training, ongoing colloquia series, two-way conversations between teachers and instructional technologists, institutional subscriptions to vetted products, release time for tooling up and content creation, and staff support for faculty teaching innovation.

A few examples that highlight various avenues:

Technology for Teaching at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Technology for Education at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon
Teaching with Technology at Brown University
Teaching with Technology Tuesdays at Yale's Collaborative Learning Center

Online Learning and Liberal Arts Colleges

From Inside Higher Ed

June 29, 2012

By

Steve Kolowich

Online learning is no longer foreign to traditional universities, where courses formerly held in large lecture halls are migrating to the Web. But at residential liberal arts colleges, whose appeal often lies in the promise of small classes and regular face time with professors, online education has had a harder time gaining a foothold.

That could soon change. Several top-rated liberal arts colleges have begun experimenting with online course modules. Professors at those colleges hope the technology, which tutors students in certain concepts via artificially intelligent tutoring software in lieu of static textbooks or human lecturers, will help level the playing field for academically underprepared students while giving instructors more flexibility in planning their syllabuses.

Professors at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University, two colleges that stake their value on intimate classroom experiences, have begun experimenting with online courses developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI), a project that is more frequently discussed in conversations about the power of artificially intelligent learning platforms to take over certain teaching functions from human instructors. The OLI modules are designed to guide students through the equivalent of textbook material while quizzing them frequently along the way. By constantly gauging comprehension, the software gets a detailed read on the strengths and weaknesses of individual students and generates new tips and exercises aimed at closing gaps in their understanding.