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Gary Brown

The Chimera of College Brands - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65764

quality market accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 10 Jun 10 - Cached
  • What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands—that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards—is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions.
  • With a grant from the nonprofit Lumina Foundation for Education, physics and history professors from a range of Utah two- and four-year institutions are applying the "tuning" methods developed as part of the sweeping Bologna Process reforms in Europe.
  • The group also created "employability maps" by surveying employers of recent physics graduates—including General Electric, Simco Electronics, and the Air Force—to find out what knowledge and skills are needed for successful science careers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • If a student finishes and can't do what's advertised, they'll say, 'I've been shortchanged.'
  • Kathryn MacKay, an associate professor of history at Weber State University, drew on recent work from the American Historical Association to define learning goals in historical knowledge, thinking, and skills.
  • In the immediate future, as the higher-education market continues to globalize and the allure of prestige continues to grow, the value of university brands is likely to rise. But at some point, the countervailing forces of empiricism will begin to take hold. The openness inherent to tuning and other, similar processes will make plain that college courses do not vary in quality in anything like the way that archaic, prestige- and money-driven brands imply. Once you've defined the goals, you can prove what everyone knows but few want to admit: From an educational standpoint, institutional brands are largely an illusion for which students routinely overpay.
  • Gary Brown on 10 Jun 10
     
    The argumet for external stakeholders is underscored, among other implications.
Gary Brown

Comments on the report - GEVC Report Comments - University College - Washington State U... - 2 views

universitycollege.wsu.edu/...default.aspx

general education

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • My primary concern rests with the heavy emphasis on "outcomes based" learning. First, I find it difficult to imagine teaching to outcomes as separate from teaching my content -- I do not consider "content" and "outcomes" as discrete entities; rather, they overlap. This overlap may partly be the reason for the thin and somewhat unconvincing literature on "outcomes based learning." I would therefore like to see in this process a thorough and detailed analysis of the literature on "outcomes" vs content-based learning, followed by thoughtful discussion as to whether the need to focus our energies in a different direction is in fact warranted (and for what reasons). Also, perhaps that same literature can provide guidance on how to create an outcomes driven learning environment while maintaining the spirit of the academic (as opposed to technocratically-oriented) enterprise.
  • Outcomes are simply more refined ways of talking about fundamental purposes of education (on the need for positing our purposes in educating undergraduates, see Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, ch. 3). Without stating our educational purposes clearly, we can't know whether we are achieving them. "
  • I've clicked just about every link on this website. I still have no idea what the empirical basis is for recommending a "learning goals" based approach over other approaches. The references in the GEVC report, which is where I expected to find the relevant studies, were instead all to other reports. So far as I could tell, there were no direct references to peer-reviewed research.
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  • I do not want to read the "three volumes of Pascaralla and Terenzini." Instead, I would appreciate a concise, but thorough, summary of the empirical findings. This would include the sample of institutions studied and how this sample was chosen, the way that student outcomes were measured, and the results.I now understand that many people believe that a "learning goals" approach is desirable, but I still don't understand the empirical basis for their beliefs.
Gary Brown

The Ticker - Education Dept. Criticizes Accreditor Over Credit-Hour Standards - The Chr... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...8993

seat time accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 29 Nov 09 - Cached
  • The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools cannot consistently ensure the quality of academic programs it reviews without clearly defining what constitutes a credit hour, according to a report issued on Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general. The accrediting organization, which assesses colleges in 11 states, responded that the variety of experiential, online, and distance courses that institutions now offer makes it impossible to define a single, common standard for credit hours. "The traditionally accepted definitions of semester credit hours and quarter credit hours based almost exclusively on seat time can no longer be applied to half of the credits now being awarded by our higher-education institutions," the association wrote in answer to the report.
  • Gary Brown on 29 Nov 09
     
    Outcomes are mentioned as an alternative in the comments, but in a disconcerting way. As is the alternative approach to study time....
Gary Brown

Evaluations That Make the Grade: 4 Ways to Improve Rating the Faculty - Teaching - The ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65226

evaluating teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 27 Apr 10 - Cached
  • For students, the act of filling out those forms is sometimes a fleeting, half-conscious moment. But for instructors whose careers can live and die by student evaluations, getting back the forms is an hour of high anxiety
  • "They have destroyed higher education." Mr. Crumbley believes the forms lead inexorably to grade inflation and the dumbing down of the curriculum.
  • Texas enacted a law that will require every public college to post each faculty member's student-evaluation scores on a public Web site.
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  • The IDEA Center, an education research group based at Kansas State University, has been spreading its particular course-evaluation gospel since 1975. The central innovation of the IDEA system is that departments can tailor their evaluation forms to emphasize whichever learning objectives are most important in their discipline.
  • (Roughly 350 colleges use the IDEA Center's system, though in some cases only a single department or academic unit participates.)
  • The new North Texas instrument that came from these efforts tries to correct for biases that are beyond an instructor's control. The questionnaire asks students, for example, whether the classroom had an appropriate size and layout for the course. If students were unhappy with the classroom, and if it appears that their unhappiness inappropriately colored their evaluations of the instructor, the system can adjust the instructor's scores accordingly.
  • The survey instrument, known as SALG, for Student Assessment of their Learning Gains, is now used by instructors across the country. The project's Web site contains more than 900 templates, mostly for courses in the sciences.
  • "So the ability to do some quantitative analysis of these comments really allows you to take a more nuanced and effective look at what these students are really saying."
  • Mr. Frick and his colleagues found that his new course-evaluation form was strongly correlated with both students' and instructors' own measures of how well the students had mastered each course's learning goals.
  • Elaine Seymour, who was then director of ethnography and evaluation research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was assisting with a National Science Foundation project to improve the quality of science instruction at the college level. She found that many instructors were reluctant to try new teaching techniques because they feared their course-evaluation ratings might decline.
  • "Students are the inventory," Mr. Crumbley says. "The real stakeholders in higher education are employers, society, the people who hire our graduates. But what we do is ask the inventory if a professor is good or bad. At General Motors," he says, "you don't ask the cars which factory workers are good at their jobs. You check the cars for defects, you ask the drivers, and that's how you know how the workers are doing."
  • William H. Pallett, president of the IDEA Center, says that when course rating surveys are well-designed and instructors make clear that they care about them, students will answer honestly and thoughtfully.
  • In Mr. Bain's view, student evaluations should be just one of several tools colleges use to assess teaching. Peers should regularly visit one another's classrooms, he argues. And professors should develop "teaching portfolios" that demonstrate their ability to do the kinds of instruction that are most important in their particular disciplines. "It's kind of ironic that we grab onto something that seems fixed and fast and absolute, rather than something that seems a little bit messy," he says. "Making decisions about the ability of someone to cultivate someone else's learning is inherently a messy process. It can't be reduced to a formula."
  • Gary Brown on 27 Apr 10
     
    Old friends at the Idea Center, and an old but persistent issue.
Gary Brown

Disciplines Follow Their Own Paths to Quality - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...125055

assessment accreditation critical thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • But when it comes to the fundamentals of measuring and improving student learning, engineering professors naturally have more to talk about with their counterparts at, say, Georgia Tech than with the humanities professors at Villanova
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10
       
      Perhaps this is too bad....
  • But there is no nationally normed way to measure the particular kind of critical thinking that students of classics acquire
  • er colleagues have created discipline-specific critical-reasoning tests for classics and political science
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  • Political science cultivates skills that are substantially different from those in classics, and in each case those skills can't be measured with a general-education test.
  • he wants to use tests of reasoning that are appropriate for each discipline
  • I believe Richard Paul has spent a lifetime articulating the characteristics of discipline based critical thinking. But anyway, I think it is interesting that an attempt is being made to develop (perhaps) a "national standard" for critical thinking in classics. In order to assess anything effectively we need a standard. Without a standard there are no criteria and therefore no basis from which to assess. But standards do not necessarily have to be established at the national level. This raises the issue of scale. What is the appropriate scale from which to measure the quality and effectiveness of an educational experience? Any valid approach to quality assurance has to be multi-scaled and requires multiple measures over time. But to be honest the issues of standards and scale are really just the tip of the outcomes iceberg.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10
       
      Missing the notion that the variance is in the activity more than the criteria.  We hear little of embedding nationally normed and weighted assignments and then assessing the implementation and facilitation variables.... mirror, not lens.
  • the UW Study of Undergraduate Learning (UW SOUL). Results from the UW SOUL show that learning in college is disciplinary; therefore, real assessment of learning must occur (with central support and resources)in the academic departments. Generic approaches to assessing thinking, writing, research, quantitative reasoning, and other areas of learning may be measuring something, but they cannot measure learning in college.
  • It turns out there is a six week, or 210+ hour serious reading exposure to two or more domains outside ones own, that "turns on" cross domain mapping as a robust capability. Some people just happen to have accumulated, usually by unseen and unsensed happenstance involvements (rooming with an engineer, son of a dad changing domains/careers, etc.) this minimum level of basics that allows robust metaphor based mapping.
Gary Brown

News: Scrutiny for an Accreditor - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...hlc

accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The inspector general essentially accused the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools of shirking its federal gate keeping duties because it granted accreditation to a for-profit university despite a single flaw that the inspector general deemed to be serious.
  • The agency's action stunned many higher education leaders, who characterized it as a misstep of dramatic proportions. "We believe that the OIG's recommendation is an unwarranted overreaction," Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, said in a news release. "To make a sweeping indictment of the HLC's capacity to judge quality based on a single case or even a small group of cases is wrongheaded and overreaching."
  • Added Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and head of the Council of Regional Accreditation Commissions: "This is certainly of concern, because they appear to have put themselves in the place of the evaluators, and made a recommendation that's fairly radical based on one instance at one institution."
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  • the Obama administration, in the presence of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has shown no signs of backing off. While last winter's negotiations over new rules governing accreditation ended in far more accord than did the 2007 discussion that blew up in conflict, the end result left some accreditation experts believing that the federal government was continuing to expand its reach and authority into accreditation matters.
  • Such action, if taken, could impair the ability of the many hundreds of colleges that the commission accredits to award federal financial aid.
  • Gary Brown on 26 Dec 09
     
    The Department of Education and Middle States at odds, and the new scrutiny is revealed.
Joshua Yeidel

The Wired Campus - Online Programs: Profits are There, Technological Innovation Is Not ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...8517

online_education web_2.0

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 22 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Oct 09
     
    "Online programs are generally profitable. But despite the buzz about Web 2.0, the education they provide is still dominated by rudimentary, text-based technology." "Any innovation... [is] really to supplement what is still a pretty rudimentary core."
Gary Brown

Texas A&M's Faculty Ratings: Right and Wrong - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Edu... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...124330

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • "Academia is highly specialized. We don't mean to be exclusive. We are a public-serving group of people. But at the same time, that public isn't well-enough aware of what we do and who we are to evaluate us."
  • But the think tank is correct that taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. Public-university operating costs in Texas have gone up more than 60 percent in the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation, and professors are among the state's highest-paid public employees. The state needs accountability measures, and they must be enforced by a party other than the faculty, who, it could easily be charged, have a conflict of interest. That's what Texas A&M got right.
  • Moosally is right about one thing: The public isn't well aware of what she and many of her colleagues do. But they should be. That is not to say that the public will be able to understand what goes on in all of the chemistry laboratories in Texas. But Moosally teaches English at a college that is not exactly tasked with performing cutting-edge research. Houston-Downtown's mission is to provide "educational opportunities and access to students from a variety of backgrounds including many first-generation college students."
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  • No doubt there is useful research coming out of the university system. But plenty could be omitted without a great deal of detriment to students' education. For instance, Hugill's most recent contributions have included a chapter on "Transitions in Hegemony: A Theory Based on State Type and Technology" and the article "German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896-1914." Moosally's master's thesis was titled "Resumptive Pronouns in Modern Standard Arabic: A Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Account," and her current research interests include "interactions between grammar knowledge and writing abilities/interest [and] cross-linguistic patterns of agreement."
  • Only 35 percent of respondents felt it was very important for colleges to "provide useful information to the public on issues affecting their daily lives."
  • According to a 2004 survey by The Chronicle, 71 percent of Americans thought it was very important for colleges to prepare undergraduates for careers, while only 56 percent thought it was very important for colleges to "discover more about the world through research."
  • What Texas A&M officials have also missed is that faculty members must be held accountable for what they teach.
  • Professors receive more credit for teaching higher-level students. But again, that is backward. The idea should be to give senior faculty members more credit for teaching introductory classes.
  • Moreover, the metric entirely ignores teaching quality. Who cares how many "student hours" professors put in if they are not particularly good teachers anyway?
  • Ultimately there needs to be a systemic solution to the problem of teacher quality. Someone—a grown-up, preferably—needs to get into the classroom and watch what is being done there.
  • Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10
     
    Another one in which the comments say more than I might--but the range of these accountability pieces underscore the work to do....
Gary Brown

Online Colleges and States Are at Odds Over Quality Standards - Wired Campus - The Chro... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...27586

quality accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • the group called for a more uniform accreditation standard across state lines as well as a formal framework for getting a conversation on regulation started.
  • College officials claim that what states really mean when they discuss quality in online education is the credibility of online education in general. John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, said “there is a bit of a double standard” when it comes to regulating online institutions; states, he feels, apply stricter standards to the online world.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Oct 10
     
    I note the underlying issue of "credibility" as the core of accreditation. It raises the question, again:  Why would standardized tests be presumed, as Excelsior does, to be a better indicator than a model of stakeholder endorsement?
Joshua Yeidel

Teaching for America - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...21friedman.html

teaching education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 22 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Nov 10
     
    Tom Friedman reports (approvingly) on Arne Duncan's plans to upgrade the teaching profession.  Any gueses how this might apply to "higher" education?
Kimberly Green

Everyone Else is Keynsian Now (from Inside Higher Ed) - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...global

higher_education

shared by Kimberly Green on 24 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Kimberly Green on 24 Feb 10
     
    The United States is hardly the only country facing tough economic times right now. But a survey of the worldwide response to the recession suggests that American higher education may be uniquely disadvantaged by the way state and federal governments are responding in the U.S., compared to how the rest of the world is dealing with the crisis. Most governments elsewhere have avoided the "uncoordinated cutting of funding for higher education that we generally see in U.S. state systems," says a report being released today by the Center for Studies in Higher Education, at the University of California at Berkeley.
Nils Peterson

National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment - 1 views

learningoutcomesassessment.org/occasionalpapertwo.htm

NILOA Trudy Banta

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Of the various ways to assess student learning outcomes, many faculty members prefer what are called “authentic” approaches that document student performance during or at the end of a course or program of study.  Authentic assessments typically ask students to generate rather than choose a response to demonstrate what they know and can do.  In their best form, such assessments are flexible and closely aligned with teaching and learning processes, and represent some of students more meaningful educational experiences.  In this paper, assessment experts Trudy Banta, Merilee Griffin, Theresa Flateby, and Susan Kahn describe the development of several promising authentic assessment approaches. 
  • Educators and policy makers in postsecondary education are interested in assessment processes that improve student learning, and at the same time provide comparable data for the purpose of demonstrating accountability.
  • First, ePortfolios provide an in-depth, long-term view of student achievement on a range of skills and abilities instead of a quick snapshot based on a single sample of learning outcomes. Second, a system of rubrics used to evaluate student writing and depth of learning has been combined with faculty learning and team assessments, and is now being used at multiple institutions. Third, online assessment communities link local faculty members in collaborative work to develop shared norms and teaching capacity, and then link local communities with each other in a growing system of assessment.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10
       
      hey, does this sound familiar? i'm guessing the portfolios are not anywhere on the Internet, but we're otherwise in good company
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  • Three Promising Alternatives for Assessing College Students' Knowledge and Skills
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10
       
      I'm not sure they are 'alternatives' so much as 3 elements we would combine into a single strategy
Gary Brown

Views: Accreditation 2.0 - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...eaton

accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 22 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The first major conversation is led by the academic and accreditation communities themselves. It focuses on how accreditation is addressing accountability, with particular emphasis on the relationship (some would say tension, or even conflict) between accountability and institutional improvement.
  • The second conversation is led by critics of accreditation who question its effectiveness in addressing accountability
  • The third conversation is led by federal officials who also focus on the gatekeeping role of accreditation.
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  • All are based on a belief that accreditation needs to change, though in what way and at what pace is seen differently
  • The emerging Accreditation 2.0 is likely to be characterized by six key elements. Some are familiar features of accreditation; some are modifications of existing practice, some are new: Community-driven, shared general education outcomes. Common practices to address transparency. Robust peer review. Enhanced efficiency of quality improvement efforts. Diversification of the ownership of accreditation. Alternative financing models for accreditation.
  • The Essential Learning Outcomes of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Voluntary System of Accountability of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities all provide for agreement across institutions about expected outcomes. This work is vital as we continue to address the crucial question of “What is a college education?”
  • peer review can be further enhanced through, for example, encouraging greater diversity of teams, including more faculty and expanding public participation
  • Accreditation 2.0 can include means to assure more immediate institutional action to address the weaknesses and prevent their being sustained over long periods of time.
  • Judith Eaton is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which is a national advocate for self-regulation of academic quality through accreditation. CHEA has 3,000 degree-granting colleges and universities as members and recognizes 59 institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations.
  • Gary Brown on 22 Jan 10
     
    The way the winds are blowing
Nils Peterson

Views: Changing the Equation - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...bassis

shared by Nils Peterson on 25 Mar 10 - Cached
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resource
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
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  • year we strug
  • year we strug
  • those who control influential rating systems of the sort published by U.S. News & World Report -- define academic quality as small classes taught by distinguished faculty, grand campuses with impressive libraries and laboratories, and bright students heavily recruited. Since all of these indicators of quality are costly, my college’s pursuit of quality, like that of so many others, led us to seek more revenue to spend on quality improvements. And the strategy worked.
  • Based on those concerns, and informed by the literature on the “teaching to learning” paradigm shift, we began to change our focus from what we were teaching to what and how our students were learning.
  • No one wants to cut costs if their reputation for quality will suffer, yet no one wants to fall off the cliff.
  • When quality is defined by those things that require substantial resources, efforts to reduce costs are doomed to failure
  • some of the best thinkers in higher education have urged us to define the quality in terms of student outcomes.
  • Faculty said they wanted to move away from giving lectures and then having students parrot the information back to them on tests. They said they were tired of complaining that students couldn’t write well or think critically, but not having the time to address those problems because there was so much material to cover. And they were concerned when they read that employers had reported in national surveys that, while graduates knew a lot about the subjects they studied, they didn’t know how to apply what they had learned to practical problems or work in teams or with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
  • Our applications have doubled over the last decade and now, for the first time in our 134-year history, we receive the majority of our applications from out-of-state students.
  • We established what we call college-wide learning goals that focus on "essential" skills and attributes that are critical for success in our increasingly complex world. These include critical and analytical thinking, creativity, writing and other communication skills, leadership, collaboration and teamwork, and global consciousness, social responsibility and ethical awareness.
  • despite claims to the contrary, many of the factors that drive up costs add little value. Research conducted by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman found that “there is no consistent relationship between spending and performance, whether that is measured by spending against degree production, measures of student engagement, evidence of high impact practices, students’ satisfaction with their education, or future earnings.” Indeed, they concluded that “the absolute level of resources is less important than the way those resources are used.”
  • After more than a year, the group had developed what we now describe as a low-residency, project- and competency-based program. Here students don’t take courses or earn grades. The requirements for the degree are for students to complete a series of projects, captured in an electronic portfolio,
  • students must acquire and apply specific competencies
  • Faculty spend their time coaching students, providing them with feedback on their projects and running two-day residencies that bring students to campus periodically to learn through intensive face-to-face interaction
  • At the very least, finding innovative ways to lower costs without compromising student learning is wise competitive positioning for an uncertain future
  • As the campus learns more about the demonstration project, other faculty are expressing interest in applying its design principles to courses and degree programs in their fields. They created a Learning Coalition as a forum to explore different ways to capitalize on the potential of the learning paradigm.
  • a problem-based general education curriculum
  • After a year and a half, the evidence suggests that students are learning as much as, if not more than, those enrolled in our traditional business program
  • the focus of student evaluations has changed noticeably. Instead of focusing almost 100% on the instructor and whether he/she was good, bad, or indifferent, our students' evaluations are now focusing on the students themselves - as to what they learned, how much they have learned, and how much fun they had learning.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 25 Mar 10
       
      gary diigoed this article. this comment shines another light -- the focus of the course eval shifted from faculty member to course & student learning when the focus shifted from teaching to learning
  • Gary Brown on 25 Mar 10
     
    A must read spotted by Jane Sherman--I've highlighed, as usual, much of it.
Nils Peterson

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...who-needs-harvard.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 04 Sep 09 - Cached
  • "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Sep 09
       
      Several people to follow in this article. They are moving from open content up the ladder. I don't see them pointing to open assessment as Downes did a couple years back, but that may make a place for us to play with them
  • Joshua Yeidel on 04 Sep 09
     
    A good overview of how higher ed's core functions are being remixed online. As you might expect from the source, the emphasis is on the positive.
Gary Brown

Scholars Assess Their Progress on Improving Student Learning - Research - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...48933

teaching learning assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which drew 650 people. The scholars who gathered here were cautiously hopeful about colleges' commitment to the study of student learning, even as the Carnegie Foundation winds down its own project. (Mr. Shulman stepped down as president last year, and the foundation's scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning program formally came to an end last week.) "It's still a fragile thing," said Pat Hutchings, the Carnegie Foundation's vice president, in an interview here. "But I think there's a huge amount of momentum." She cited recent growth in faculty teaching centers,
  • Mary Taylor Huber, director of the foundation's Integrative Learning Project, said that pressure from accrediting organizations, policy makers, and the public has encouraged colleges to pour new resources into this work.
  • The scholars here believe that it is much more useful to try to measure and improve student learning at the level of individual courses. Institutionwide tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment have limited utility at best, they said.
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  • Mr. Bass and Toru Iiyoshi, a senior strategist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's office of educational innovation and technology, pointed to an emerging crop of online multimedia projects where college instructors can share findings about their teaching. Those sites include Merlot and the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive.
  • "If you use a more generic instrument, you can give the accreditors all the data in the world, but that's not really helpful to faculty at the department level," said the society's president, Jennifer Meta Robinson, in an interview. (Ms. Robinson is also a senior lecturer in communication and culture at Indiana University at Bloomington.)
  • "We need to create 'middle spaces' for the scholarship of teaching and learning," said Randall Bass, assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University, during a conference session on Friday.
  • It is vital, Ms. Peseta said, for scholars' articles about teaching and learning to be engaging and human. But at the same time, she urged scholars not to dumb down their statistical analyses or the theoretical foundations of their studies. She even put in a rare good word for jargon.
  • No one had a ready answer. Ms. Huber, of the Carnegie Foundation, noted that a vast number of intervening variables make it difficult to assess the effectiveness of any educational project.
  • "Well, I guess we have a couple of thousand years' worth of evidence that people don't listen to each other, and that we don't build knowledge," Mr. Bass quipped. "So we're building on that momentum."
  • Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09
     
    Note our friends Randy Bass (AAEEBL) and Mary Huber are prominent.
Nils Peterson

Response to critiques of Open Course Educause article and the free economy generally @ ... - 1 views

davecormier.com/...and-the-free-economy-generally

cormier OpenTeach education openCourse

shared by Nils Peterson on 09 Aug 10 - Cached
  • what is the difference between the MOOC model and the commodity model.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 09 Aug 10
       
      And what is the difference between a Massively Open Online Course and a community exploring a shared problem? There is a time factor (perhaps) but communities may run hot and fast. There is a leadership role (perhaps) but a community could galvanize around a leader for its work. There is an institution and a tie to the historical other meanings of course.
  • Earlier this year, while George Siemens and I were working our way through teaching the Edfutures course, we were contacted by the fine folks at the Educause review and asked to contribute an article on ‘the open course.
  • Nils Peterson on 09 Aug 10
     
    Cormier shares a back channel to the Edcause Review article
Theron DesRosier

THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: - 0 views

feeds2.feedburner.com/academic-commons

shared by Theron DesRosier on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 09 Mar 09
     
    "In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive. This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.org/futureofeverything/), brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus. Date: May 19, 2009 Place: Norwood, MA"
Nils Peterson

Change Magazine - The New Guys in Assessment Town - 0 views

www.changemag.org/...full-assessment-town.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 May 09 - Cached
  • if one of the institution’s general education goals is critical thinking, the system makes it possible to call up all the courses and programs that assess student performance on that outcome.
  • bringing together student learning outcomes data at the level of the institution, program, course, and throughout student support services so that “the data flows between and among these levels”
  • Like its competitors, eLumen maps outcomes vertically across courses and programs, but its distinctiveness lies in its capacity to capture what goes on in the classroom. Student names are entered into the system, and faculty use a rubric-like template to record assessment results for every student on every goal. The result is a running record for each student available only to the course instructor (and in a some cases to the students themselves, who can go to the system to  get feedback on recent assessments).
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      sounds like harvesting gradebook. assess student work and roll up
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      This system has some potential for formative use at the per-student leve.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “I’m a little wary.  It seems as if, in addition to the assessment feedback we are already giving to students, we might soon be asked to add a data-entry step of filling in boxes in a centralized database for all the student learning outcomes. This is worrisome to those of us already struggling under the weight of all that commenting and essay grading.”
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      its either double work, or not being understood that the grading and the assessment can be the same activity. i suspect the former -- grading is being done with different metrics
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      I am in the unusual position of seeing many papers _after_ they have been graded by a wide variety of teachers. Many of these contain little "assessment feedback" -- many teachers focus on "correcting" the papers and finding some letter or number to assign as a value.
  • “This is where we see many institutions struggling,” Galvin says. “Faculty simply don’t have the time for a deeper involvement in the mechanics of assessment.” Many have never seen a rubric or worked with one, “so generating accurate, objective data for analysis is a challenge.”  
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      Rather than faculty using the community to help with assessment, they are outsourcing to a paid assessor -- this is the result of undertaking this thinking while also remaining in the institution-centric end of the spectrum we developed
  • I asked about faculty pushback. “Not so much,” Galvin says, “not after faculty understand that the process is not intended to evaluate their work.”
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      red flag
  • the annual reports required by this process were producing “heaps of paper” while failing to track trends and developments over time. “It’s like our departments were starting anew every year,” Chaplot says. “We wanted to find a way to house the data that gave us access to what was done in the past,” which meant moving from discrete paper reports to an electronic database.
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      It's not clear whether the "database" is housing measurements, narratives and reflections, or all of the above.
  • Can eLumen represent student learning in language? No, but it can quantify the number of boxes checked against number of boxes not checked.”
  • developing a national repository of resources, rubrics, outcomes statements, and the like that can be reviewed and downloaded by users
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      in building our repository we could well open-source these tools, no need to lock them up
  • “These solutions cement the idea that assessment is an administrative rather than an educational enterprise, focused largely on accountability. They increasingly remove assessment decision making from the everyday rhythm of teaching and learning and the realm of the faculty.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 06 May 09
       
      Over the wall assessment, see Transformative Assessment rubric for more detail
Gary Brown

Disciplinary vs. General Teaching Workshops - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Educ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...23459

workshops

shared by Gary Brown on 27 Apr 10 - Cached
  • I started to wish that I had the opportunity (or was aware of the opportunity) to participate in more general, broad-based teaching workshops. I've done the disciplinary thing for years; something new could definitely push me in productive ways.
  • But, in my career at least, disciplinary teaching practices have dominated my training, and I've started to look at changing that.
  • Gary Brown on 27 Apr 10
     
    An issue we visit from time to time....
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