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Nils Peterson

2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views

  • This session explores the notion that assessment for transformational learning is best utilized as a learning tool. By providing timely, transparent, and appropriate feedback, both to students and to the institution itself, learning is enhanced – a far different motive for assessment than is external accountability.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      need to get to these guys with our harvesting gradebook ideas...
    • Nils Peterson
       
      decided to attend another session. Hersh was OK before lunch, but the talk by Pan looks more promising
  • Academic and corporate communities agree on the urgent need for contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement in STEM fields. Participants will learn how leaders from academic departments and institutions have collaborated with leaders from the corporate and business community in regional networks to ensure that graduates meet the expectations of prospective employers and the public.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      here is another session with links to CTLT work, both harvesting gradebook and the ABET work
  • Professor Pan will discuss the reflective teaching methods used to prepare students to recognize and mobilize community assets as they design, implement, and evaluate projects to improve public health.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Students tasked to learn about a community, ride the bus, make a Doc appt. Then tasked to do a non-clinical health project in that community (they do plenty of clinical stuff elsewhere in the program). Project must build capacity in the community to survive after the student leaves. Example. Work with hispanic parents in Sacramento about parenting issue, ex getting kids to sleep on time. Student had identified problem in the community, but first project idea was show a video, which was not capacity building. Rather than showing the video, used the video as a template and made a new video. Families were actors. Result was spanish DVD that the community could own. Pan thinks this is increased capacity in the community.
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  • Freshman Survey annually examines the academic habits of mind of entering first-year students.  Along with academic involvement, the survey examines diversity, civic engagement, college admissions and expectations of college. 
  • The project aims to promote faculty and student assessment of undergraduate research products in relation to outcomes associated with basic research skills and general undergraduate learning principles (communication and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and integration and application of knowledge).
  • They focus educators on the magnitude of the challenge to prepare an ever-increasingly diverse, globally-connected student body with the knowledge, ability, processes, and confidence to adapt to diverse environments and respond creatively to the enormous issues facing humankind.
  • One challenge of civic engagement in the co-curriculum is the merging of cost and outcome: creating meaningful experiences for students and the community with small staffs, on small budgets, while still having significant, purposeful impact. 
  • a)claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and b) counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences.  
    • Nils Peterson
       
      also, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
  • This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes.
  • Exciting pedagogies of engagement abound, including undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and international study.  However, such experiences are typically optional and non-credit-bearing for students, and/or “on top of” the workload for faculty. This session explores strategies for integrating engaged learning into the institutional fabric (curriculum, student role, faculty role) and increasing access to these transformative experiences.
  • hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy but how can this be provided in increasingly larger introductory classes? 
  • As educators seek innovative ways to manage knowledge and expand interdisciplinary attention to pressing global issues, as students and parents look for assurances that their tuition investment will pay professional dividends, and as alumni look for meaningful ways to give back to the institutions that nurtured and prepared them, colleges and universities can integrate these disparate goals through the Guilds, intergenerational membership networks that draw strength from the contributions of all of their members.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      see Theron's ideas for COMM.
  • Civic engagement learning derives its power from the engagement of students with real communities—local, national, and global. This panel explores the relationship between student learning and the contexts in which that learning unfolds by examining programs that place students in diverse contexts close to campus and far afield.
  • For institutional assessment to make a difference for student learning its results must result in changes in classroom practice. This session explores ways in which the institutional assessment of student learning, such as the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, can be connected to our classrooms.
  • Interdisciplinary Teaching and Object-Based Learning in Campus Museums
  • To address pressing needs of their communities, government and non-profit agencies are requesting higher education to provide education in an array of human and social services. To serve these needs effectively, higher educationneeds to broaden and deepen its consultation with practitioners in designing new curricula. Colleges and universities would do well to consider a curriculum development model that requires consultation not only with potential employers, but also with practitioners and supervisors of practitioners.
  • Should Academics be Active? Campuses and Cutting Edge Civic Engagement
  • If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it?  How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment? 
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Purpose of university is not to grant degrees, it has something to do with learning. Keeling's perspective is that the learning should be transformative; changing perspective. Liberating and emancipatory Learning is a complex interaction among student and others, new knowledge and experience, event, own aspirations. learners construct meaning from these elements. "we change our minds" altering the brain at the micro-level Brain imaging research demonstrates that analogical learning (abstract) demands more from more areas of the brain than semantic (concrete) learning. Mind is not an abstraction, it is based in the brain, a working physical organ .Learner and the environment matter to the learning. Seeds magazine, current issue on brain imaging and learning. Segway from brain research to need for university to educate the whole student. Uses the term 'transformative learning' meaning to transform the learning (re-wire the brain) but does not use transformative assessment (see wikipedia).
  • But as public debates roil, higher education has been more reactive than proactive on the question of how best to ensure that today’s students are fully prepared for a fast-paced future.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Bologna process being adopted (slowly) in EU, the idea is to make academic degrees more interchangeable and understandable across the EU three elements * Qualification Frameworks (transnational, national, disciplinary). Frameworks are graduated, with increasing expertise and autonomy required for the upper levels. They sound like broad skills that we might recognize in the WSU CITR. Not clear how they are assessed * Tuning (benchmarking) process * Diploma Supplements (licensure, thesis, other capstone activities) these extend the information in the transcript. US equivalent might be the Kuali Students system for extending the transcript. Emerging dialog on American capability This dialog is coming from 2 directions * on campus * employers Connect to the Greater Exceptions (2000-2005) iniative. Concluded that American HE has islands of innovation. Lead to LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) Initiative (2005-2015). The dialog is converging because of several forces * Changes in the balance of economic and political power. "The rise of the rest (of the world)" * Global economy in which innovation is key to growth and prosperity LEAP attempts to frame the dialog (look for LEAP in AACU website). Miami-Dade CC has announced a LEAP-derived covenant, the goals must span all aspects of their programs. Define liberal education Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world intellectual and practical skills responsibility integrative skills Marker of success is (here is where the Transformative Gradebook fits in): evidence that students can apply the essential learning outcomes to complex, unscripted problems and real-world settings Current failure -- have not tracked our progress, or have found that we are not doing well. See AACU employer survey 5-10% percent of current graduates taking courses that would meet the global competencies (transcript analysis) See NSSE on Personal and social responsibility gains, less tha
  • Dr. Pan will also talk about strategies for breaking down cultural barriers.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Pan. found a non-profit agency to be a conduit and coordinator to level the power between univ and grass roots orgs. helped with cultural gaps.
Gary Brown

More thinking about the alignment project « The Weblog of (a) David Jones - 0 views

  • he dominant teaching experience for academics is teaching an existing course, generally one the academic has taught previously. In such a setting, academics spend most of their time fine tuning a course or making minor modifications to material or content (Stark, 2000)
  • many academic staff continue to employ inappropriate, teacher-centered, content focused strategies”. If the systems and processes of university teaching and learning practice do not encourage and enable everyday consideration of alignment, is it surprising that many academics don’t consider alignment?
  • student learning outcomes are significantly higher when there are strong links between those learning outcomes, assessment tasks, and instructional activities and materials.
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  • Cohen (1987) argues that limitations in learning are not mainly caused by ineffective teaching, but are instead mostly the result of a misalignment between what teachers teach, what they intend to teach, and what they assess as having been taught.
  • Make explicit the quality model.
  • Build in support for quality enhancement.
  • Institute a process for quality feasibility.
  • Levander and Mikkola (2009) describe the full complexity of managing alignment at the degree level which makes it difficult for the individual teacher and the program coordinator to keep connections between courses in mind.
  • Raban (2007) observes that the quality management systems of most universities employ procedures that are retrospective and weakly integrated with long term strategic planning. He continues to argue that the conventional quality management systems used by higher education are self-defeating as they undermine the commitment and motivation of academic staff through an apparent lack of trust, and divert resources away from the core activities of teaching and research (Raban, 2007, p. 78).
  • Ensure participation of formal institutional leadership and integration with institutional priorities.
  • Action research perspective, flexible responsive.
  • Having a scholarly, not bureaucratic focus.
  • Modifying an institutional information system.
  • A fundamental enabler of this project is the presence of an information system that is embedded into the everyday practice of teaching and learning (for both students and staff) that encourages and enables consideration of alignment.
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    a long blog, but underlying principles align with the Guide to Effective Assessment on many levels.
Corinna Lo

The End in Mind » An Open (Institutional) Learning Network - 0 views

shared by Corinna Lo on 15 Apr 09 - Cached
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    Jon said "I wrote a post last year exploring the spider-starfish tension between Personal Learning Environments and institutionally run CMSs. This is a fundamental challenge that institutions of higher learning need to resolve. On the one hand, we should promote open, flexible, learner-centric activities and tools that support them. On the other hand, legal, ethical and business constraints prevent us from opening up student information systems, online assessment tools, and online gradebooks. These tools have to be secure and, at least from a data management and integration perspective, proprietary. So what would an open learning network look like if facilitated and orchestrated by an institution? Is it possible to create a hybrid spider-starfish learning environment for faculty and students?"
Gary Brown

The Wired Campus - At Distance-Learning College, Flash Drive Replaces Course-Management... - 0 views

  • At Distance-Learning College, Flash Drive Replaces Course-Management System By Erica Hendry Soon, online students at Thomas Edison State College won't even have to be online to complete their course work.Beginning this fall, students at the Trenton-based distance-education institution will have the option of using a 2GB flash drive instead of a course-management system to prepare for and complete their classes.
  • the college hopes to install technology that will allow the flash drive to automatically connect to a folder hosted by the college, so students can submit assignments whenever the flash drive detects an Internet connection.
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    The inevitable extension of the LMS from the Morgan study to now: the college hopes to install technology that will allow the flash drive to automatically connect to a folder hosted by the college, so students can submit assignments whenever the flash drive detects an Internet connection.
Theron DesRosier

Education Data Model (National Forum on Education Statistics). Strategies for building ... - 0 views

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    "The National Education Data Model is a conceptual but detailed representation of the education information domain focused at the student, instructor and course/class levels. It delineates the relationships and interdependencies between the data elements necessary to document, operate, track, evaluate, and improve key aspects of an education system. The NEDM strives to be a shared understanding among all education stakeholders as to what information needs to be collected and managed at the local level in order to enable effective instruction of students and superior leadership of schools. It is a comprehensive, non-proprietary inventory and a map of education information that can be used by schools, LEAs, states, vendors, and researchers to identify the information required for teaching, learning, administrative systems, and evaluation of education programs and approaches. "
Nils Peterson

Pandemic flu, school closing and community learning « Community-based learning - 0 views

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    updating my thinking on pandemic flu and university response
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    Pandemic flu could lead to school closing. To avoid financial ruin by having to return tuition universities might consider trying to move online. There is a way to implement this movement, but not with the traditional course management system.
Joshua Yeidel

Strategic Directives for Learning Management System Planning | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

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    A largely sensible strategic look at LMS in general. "The LMS, because of its integration with other major institutional technology systems, has itself become an enterprise-wide system. As such, higher education leaders must closely 7 monitor the possible tendency for LMSs to contribute only to maintaining the educational status quo.40 The most radical suggestion for future LMS use would dissolve the commercially enforced "course-based" model of LMS use entirely, allowing for the creation of either larger (departmental) or smaller (study groups) units of LMS access, as the case may require. This ability to cater to context awareness is perhaps the feature most lacking in most LMS products. As noted in a study in which mobile or handheld devices were used to assemble ad hoc study groups,41 this sort of implementation is entirely possible in ways that don't necessarily require interaction through an LMS interface." Requires EDUCAUSE login (free to WSU)
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    The EDUCAUSE paper suggests "dissolv[ing] the commercially enforced 'course-based' model of LMS". How about dissolving the "course-based" model of higher education on which the commercial LMS is based?
Gary Brown

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching - Curriculum - The Chroni... - 4 views

  • "Without an unrelenting focus on quality—on defining and measuring and ensuring the learning outcomes of students—any effort to increase college-completion rates would be a hollow effort indeed."
  • If colleges are going to provide high-quality educations to millions of additional students, they said, the institutions will need to develop measures of student learning than can assure parents, employers, and taxpayers that no one's time and money are being wasted.
  • "Effective assessment is critical to ensure that our colleges and universities are delivering the kinds of educational experiences that we believe we actually provide for students," said Ronald A. Crutcher, president of Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, during the opening plenary. "That data is also vital to addressing the skepticism that society has about the value of a liberal education."
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  • But many speakers insisted that colleges should go ahead and take drastic steps to improve the quality of their instruction, without using rigid faculty-incentive structures or the fiscal crisis as excuses for inaction.
  • Handing out "teacher of the year" awards may not do much for a college
  • W.E. Deming argued, quality has to be designed into the entire system and supported by top management (that is, every decision made by CEOs and Presidents, and support systems as well as operations) rather than being made the responsibility solely of those delivering 'at the coal face'.
  • I see as a certain cluelessness among those who think one can create substantial change based on volunteerism
  • Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods.
  • The approach that makes sense to me is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in a discussion of the future and the implications of the future for their field, their college, their students, and themselves. You are invited to join an ongoing discussion of this issue at http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/addressing-the-problem-of
  • Putting pressure on professors to improve teaching will not result in better education. The primary reason is that they do not know how to make real improvements. The problem is that in many fields of education there is either not enough research, or they do not have good ways of evaluationg the results of their teaching.
  • Then there needs to be a research based assessment that can be used by individual professors, NOT by the administration.
  • Humanities educatiors either have to learn enough statistics and cognitive science so they can make valid scientific comparisons of different strategies, or they have to work with cognitive scientists and statisticians
  • good teaching takes time
  • On the measurement side, about half of the assessments constructed by faculty fail to meet reasonable minimum standards for validity. (Interestingly, these failures leave the door open to a class action lawsuit. Physicians are successfully sued for failing to apply scientific findings correctly; commerce is replete with lawsuits based on measurement errors.)
  • The elephant in the corner of the room --still-- is that we refuse to measure learning outcomes and impact, especially proficiencies generalized to one's life outside the classroom.
  • until universities stop playing games to make themselves look better because they want to maintain their comfortable positions and actually look at what they can do to improve nothing is going to change.
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    our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.
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    How about using examples of highly motivational lecture and teaching techniques like the Richard Dawkins video I presented on this forum, recently. Even if teacher's do not consciously try to adopt good working techniques, there is at least a strong subconscious human tendency to mimic behaviors. I think that if teachers see more effective techniques, they will automatically begin to adopt adopt them.
Joshua Yeidel

The Wired Campus - Could Google Wave Replace Course-Management Systems? - The Chronicle... - 3 views

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    Not much new in the article, but the comments have an interesting backward-looking quality, referring often to integration of campus systems, and not at all to new ways of learning.
Gary Brown

2 Efforts to Provide Data on Colleges to Consumers Fall Short, Report Says - Administra... - 2 views

  • Higher education will have to be more accountable for its performance and more open to consumers about the actual cost of attending a college, and help people make easier comparisons among institutions, in order to succeed as the nation's economic engine, says a new report from two nonprofit think tanks here.
  • too little information to make informed choices about where they will get the most from their tuition dollars, say researchers at the two organizations, the libertarian-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and Education Sector, which is a proponent of reforming higher education
  • And without a more thorough and open form of accountability, institutions will not have any incentive to make the changes that will improve students' success,
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  • "If existing flaws are not resolved, the nation runs the risk of ending up in the worst of all worlds: the appearance of higher education accountability without the reality," the authors say.
  • The two voluntary systems criticized in the study are the University and College Accountability Network, begun in September 2007 by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities to provide information about private colleges, and the Voluntary System of Accountability,
  • it does not obligate institutions to gather or reveal any data that are not already available elsewhere,"
  • associations are beginning to offer workshops and other opportunities for system participants to learn how to use the data they're collecting to improve the college experience for students, she said
  • VSA has the testing lobby written all over it
  • We may all appreciate the cultural context inhibiting public accountability but it is also important to understand that this same accountability is lacking internally where it effectively thwarts attempts to manage the institution rationally; i.e., informed with a continuous flow of mission-critical performance information. With the scant objective information at their command, college presidents and their associates must perform as shamans, reading the tea leaves of opinion and passion among stakeholders.
  • On balance, America's institutions of higher education function in a managerial vacuum.
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    More of the same and the discussion is familiar--our challenge is to bring this topic to the attention of our points.
Nils Peterson

Swift Kick Central: Playing Catch Up: Colleges and the Web - 1 views

  • Based on the incredible investment of universities in social architecture: in quads, residence halls and lounges, it's ironic that most universities still do not see the internet as cost effective social venue, despite the countless examples online
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Found this guy because he put our Harvesting Gradebook YouTube in his feed. At this blog, and at Tom Krieglstein he is writing some interesting analysis.
  • Universities just couldn't see how to extend the old value and investment into connecting and learning, to the new field.
  • Universities are following along the same trends of the internet as a whole, with a bit of a lag. College websites are still mostly "web 1.0": characterized by static content, controlled by a centralized office.  Curriculum and learning is still centralized and controlled in learning managment systems like Blackboard. Where there are discussion features in Blackboard, the content stays centralized with the class and is lost at the end of the term. Where there are blogs on university websites, they tend to be written by selected and edited "brand ambassadors" - an attempt to put a real face on a preferred message.This year, often led by the admissions department, it has become fashionable for schools to use social media links on their sites. The thinking, however, is still mostly in the 1.0 paradigm: "follow the school on twitter" or "become a fan of the university on Facebook." In this paradigm, the university is still the focus, a one to many publisher in the center. Based on competition and financial pressures, businesses based on publishing models are scrambling to decentralize, lower cost structures, and move their models towards connecting and aggregating. When will the paradigm shift for the University?
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Is he asking the right, hard question, or, does the publishing model not apply?
Gary Brown

Under Obama, Accreditation Is Still in the Hot Seat - Government - The Chronicle of Hig... - 1 views

  • George Miller, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House education committee, said defining a credit hour is critical to ensure that students and taxpayers, through federal student aid, are not footing the bill for courses that are not worth the amount of credit being awarded.
    • Gary Brown
       
      "Worth" opens up some interesting implications.  Intended I suspect, to dampen courses like basket-weaving, the production of outcomes cannot be far off, the production of economic impact related to those outcomes a step or less behind. 
  • Senators also questioned the independence of accreditors, which are supported by dues from member institutions and governed by representatives of the colleges they accredit.
  • Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the top Republican on the Senate Education Committee, has said he wants Congress to look beyond just problems in the for-profit sector. He said at a hearing last month that he would be "working to lay the groundwork for a broader, thorough, and more fair investigation into higher education" that would ask whether taxpayers are getting an appropriate value for the money they spend on all colleges.
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  • State and federal governments are better equipped to enforce consumer protections for students, say accreditors, who have traditionally focused on preserving academic quality.
  • Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents about 3,000 colleges, said that over the past several years accrediting organizations have responded to the growing calls for accountability and transparency from the public and lawmakers. The groups, she said, have worked to better identify and judge student achievement and share more information about what they do and how well the institutions are performing.
  • Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, said the debate boils down to whether accreditors should serve primarily as consumer protectors or continue their traditional role of monitoring academic quality more broadly.
  • Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability & Productivity and a member of the Spellings Commission
  • "We should be moving to more of a Consumer Reports for colleges, to provide the public with information that the college rankings do imperfectly," he said.
  • accreditation will have to evolve to meet not only government's expectations but also the changing college
  • market
  • Nearly two years into the Obama Administration, colleges have not gotten the relief they expected from the contentious battles over measuring quality that defined the Bush Education Department.
  • Bracing for the prospect of new rules and laws that could expand their responsibilities, accreditors and the institutions they monitor are defending the self-regulation colleges use to ensure academic quality. But they are also responding to the pressures from the White House and Capitol Hill by making some changes on their own, hoping to stanch the possibility of more far-reaching federal requirements.
  • Advocates of change say the six regional and seven national accreditors have varying standards that are sometimes too lax, allowing for limited oversight of how credits are awarded, how much learning is accomplished, and what happens to the mission of institutions that change owners.
Peggy Collins

Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process - 0 views

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    from Michael Feldstein advice on LMS migration and selection which does not just apply to small schools
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