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Gary Brown

Graphic Display of Student Learning Objectives - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...27863

outcomes graphics

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Creating SLOs or goals for a course is simple to us, usually.  We want students to learn certain skills, we create assignments that will help students reach those goals, and we’ll judge how well they have learned those skills. 
  • This graphic displays the three learning objectives for the course, and it connects the course assignment to the learning objectives.  Students can see—at a glance—that work none of course assignments are random or arbitrary (an occasional student complaint), but that each assignment links directly to a course learning objective.
  • The syllabus graphic is quite simple and it’s one that students easily understand.  Additionally, I use an expanded graphic (below) when thinking about small goals within the larger learning objectives.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In fact, The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course (Linda Nilson) is an interesting way to organize graphically an entire course.
  • An example of a graphic syllabus can be found in Dr. W. Mark Smillie’s displays of his philosophy courses [.pdf file].
  • Some students won’t care.  Moreover, they rarely remember the connection between course content and assignments.  The course and the assignments can all seem random and arbitrary.  Nevertheless, some students will care, and some will appreciate the connections.
  • Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10
     
    Perhaps useful resource
Joshua Yeidel

New Web Site Compares Student Outcomes at Online Colleges - Technology - The Chronicle ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...47924

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 06 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 06 Aug 09
     
    "College Choices for Adults [website] provides adults with specific information about what students are supposed to learn in the colleges' mostly career-oriented programs and measurements of whether they did." That's the billing in the Chronicle, but when I wen to the site, I found mostly self-reports of engagement and satisfaction.
Gary Brown

Don't Shrug Off Student Evaluations - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...48338

student evaluations

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Sep 09 - Cached
  • On their most basic level, student evaluations are important because they open the doors of our classrooms. It is one of the remarkable ironies of academe that while we teachers seek to open the minds of our students—to shine a light on hypocrisy, illusion, corruption, and distortion; to tell the truth of our disciplines as we see it—some of us want that classroom door to be closed to the outside world. It is as if we were living in some sort of academic version of the Da Vinci code: Only insiders can know the secret handshake.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Sep 09
     
    A Chronicle version that effectively surveys the issues. Maybe nothing new, but a few nuggets.
Gary Brown

Renewed Debate Over the 3-Year B.A. - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...49043

3 year degree outcomes incoming future

shared by Gary Brown on 10 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Zemsky, chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education, wrote in The Chronicle in August. Shifting to a three-year baccalaureate, Zemsky added, would force universities to "judge whether their shorter degree programs were achieving the same learning outcomes as their four-year programs had promised; they would find themselves in need of the performance measures they had hitherto eschewed." The idea has stirred some support, as well as considerable opposition.
  • the reality is that the question of whether or not this makes sense may have already been made for us by the Bologna Process, which has been moving toward mainstreaming and standardizing three-year degrees across the European Union and beyond (46 countries are participating) for some time now.
  • This idea treats an academic credit as a purchasable commodity, and a college experience as quantifiable, subject to rules of efficiency rather than humane values. In reality, so-called "credits" have no standard meaning or value. Furthermore, the idea on its own is superficial. Why not two years? One? Five?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For those who see college as a place to learn marketable skills, the less time and money it takes, the better. For others who see college as a place to learn to think and to learn about the world and others as broadly as possible, and to grow into one's own, why rush? (The Choice, NYTimes.com)
  • they might want to rethink not just what time of year and how long students are in the classroom, but how student accomplishment is measured.
  • The high schools are not going to suddenly become more rigorous because the colleges reduce their expectations.
  • Gary Brown on 10 Nov 09
     
    Today's rip-tide toward measures, this time from Alexander and Zemsky (and others), and the implications of standardized measures.
Nils Peterson

New Grilling of For-Profits Could Turn Up the Heat for All of Higher Education - Govern... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...66020

shared by Nils Peterson on 25 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Congress plans to put for-profit colleges under the microscope on Thursday, asking whether a higher-education model that consumes more than double its proportionate share of federal student aid is an innovation worthy of duplication or a recipe for long-term economic disaster.
  • The evaluation threatens new headaches for an industry that is sometimes exalted by government policy makers as a lean results-oriented example for the rest of academe, and other times caricatured as an opportunistic outlier that peddles low-value education to unprepared high school dropouts.
  • Economic bubbles such as the unsustainable surge in housing prices "typically are built on ignorance and borrowed money," says one prominent pessimist on the matter, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. "And the reason you've got a higher-education bubble is ignorance and borrowed money," Mr. Reynolds said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Congress and colleges still lack a firm sense of "what our higher education system is producing," said Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education.
  • Mr. Reynolds said. Colleges of all type have been raising tuition for years as the government offers ever-growing amounts of grant aid and loan money, he said. The price inflation is driven by the fact that a government-backed loan, while offering students only a slight break from market interest rates, "looks cheap because you don't have to make payments for a while,"
  • That determination to expand the distribution of federal tuition assistance has left Congress and the White House seeking other ways to ensure that students get quality for their money. Just last week, the House education committee held a hearing in which Democratic members joined the Education Department's inspector general in pressing accrediting agencies to more clearly define the "credit hour" measurement used in student-aid allocations. Some colleges have objected, wanting more flexibility in defining their educational missions.
  • Whether it involves defining credit hours or setting accreditation standards, the root of the problem may be that the government is looking for better ways to ensure that its money is spent on worthwhile educational ventures, and yet it doesn't want to challenge the right of each college to define its own mission. So far that has proven to be a fundamental contradiction in judging the overall value of higher education, said Mr. Merisotis, of the Lumina Foundation. "There's got to be a third way," he said. "We don't have it yet."
Joshua Yeidel

Scholar Raises Doubts About the Value of a Test of Student Learning - Research - The Ch... - 3 views

chronicle.com/...65741

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Beginning in 2011, the 331 universities that participate in the Voluntary System of Accountability will be expected to publicly report their students' performance on one of three national tests of college-level learning.
  • But at least one of those three tests—the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA—isn't quite ready to be used as a tool of public accountability, a scholar suggested here on Tuesday during the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research.
  • Students' performance on the test was strongly correlated with how long they spent taking it.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Besides the CLA, which is sponsored by the Council for Aid to Education, other tests that participants in the voluntary system may use are the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency, from ACT Inc., and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, offered by the Educational Testing Service.
  • The test has sometimes been criticized for relying on a cross-sectional system rather than a longitudinal model, in which the same students would be tested in their first and fourth years of college.
  • there have long been concerns about just how motivated students are to perform well on the CLA.
  • Mr. Hosch suggested that small groups of similar colleges should create consortia for measuring student learning. For example, five liberal-arts colleges might create a common pool of faculty members that would evaluate senior theses from all five colleges. "That wouldn't be a national measure," Mr. Hosch said, "but it would be much more authentic."
  • Mr. Shavelson said. "The challenge confronting higher education is for institutions to address the recruitment and motivation issues if they are to get useful data. From my perspective, we need to integrate assessment into teaching and learning as part of students' programs of study, thereby raising the stakes a bit while enhancing motivation of both students and faculty
  • "I do agree with his central point that it would not be prudent to move to an accountability system based on cross-sectional assessments of freshmen and seniors at an institution," said Mr. Arum, who is an author, with Josipa Roksa, of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press
  • Gary Brown on 02 Jun 10
     
    CLA debunking, but the best item may be the forthcoming book on "limited learning on College Campuses."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 25 Jun 10
     
    "Micheal Scriven and I spent more than a few years trying to apply his multiple-ranking item tool (a very robust and creative tool, I recommend it to others when the alternative is multiple-choice items) to the assessment of critical thinking in health care professionals. The result might be deemed partially successful, at best. I eventually abandoned the test after about 10,000 administrations because the scoring was so complex we could not place it in non-technical hands."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 25 Jun 10
     
    In comments on an article about CLA, Scriven's name comes up...
Gary Brown

Learning Assessments: Let the Faculty Lead the Way - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...26779

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The barriers to faculty involvement in assessment have been extensively catalogued over the years. Promotion and tenure systems do not reward such work. Time is short and other agendas loom larger. Most faculty members have no formal training in assessment—or, for that matter, in teaching and course design. Given developments in K-12, there are concerns, too, about the misuse of data, and skepticism about whether assessment brings real benefits to learners.
  • Moreover, as Robin Wilson points out, some campuses have found ways to open up the assessment conversation, shifting the focus away from external reporting, and inviting faculty members to examine their own students’ learning in ways that lead to improvement.
  • Does engagement with assessment’s questions change the way a faculty member thinks about her students and their learning? How and under what conditions does it change what he does in his classroom—and are those changes improvements for learners? How does evidence—which can be messy, ambiguous, discouraging, or just plain wrong—actually get translated into pedagogical action? What effects—good, bad, or uncertain—might engagement in assessment have on a faculty member’s scholarship, career trajectory, or sense of professional identity?
  • Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10
     
    Hutchings is a critical leader in our work--good links to have available, too.
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."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 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

The Future of Wannabe U. - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124917

outcomes numbers

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Alice didn't tell me about the topics of her research; instead she listed the number of articles she had written, where they had been submitted and accepted, the reputation of the journals, the data sets she was constructing, and how many articles she could milk from each data set.
  • colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime.
  • higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • annabe administrator noted that the recipient had published well more than 100 articles. He never said why those articles mattered.
  • And all we have are numbers about teaching. And we don't know what the difference is between a [summary measure of] 7.3 and a 7.7 or an 8.2 and an 8.5."
  • The problem is that such numbers have no meaning. They cannot indicate the quality of a student's education.
  • or can the many metrics that commonly appear in academic (strategic) plans, like student credit hours per full-time-equivalent faculty member, or the percentage of classes with more than 50 students. Those productivity measures (for they are indeed productivity measures) might as well apply to the assembly-line workers who fabricate the proverbial widget, for one cannot tell what the metrics have to do with the supposed purpose of institutions of higher education—to create and transmit knowledge. That includes leading students to the possibility of a fuller life and an appreciation of the world around them and expanding their horizons.
  • But, like the fitness club's expensive cardio machines, a significant increase in faculty research, in the quality of student experiences (including learning), in the institution's service to its state, or in its standing among its peers may cost more than a university can afford to invest or would even dream of paying.
  • Such metrics are a speedup of the academic assembly line, not an intensification or improvement of student learning. Indeed, sometimes a boost in some measures, like an increase in the number of first-year students participating in "living and learning communities," may even detract from what students learn. (Wan U.'s pre-pharmacy living-and-learning community is so competitive that students keep track of one another's grades more than they help one another study. Last year one student turned off her roommate's alarm clock so that she would miss an exam and thus no longer compete for admission to the School of Pharmacy.)
  • Even metrics intended to indicate what students may have learned seem to have more to do with controlling faculty members than with gauging education. Take student-outcomes assessments, meant to be evaluations of whether courses have achieved their goals. They search for fault where earlier researchers would not have dreamed to look. When parents in the 1950s asked why Johnny couldn't read, teachers may have responded that it was Johnny's fault; they had prepared detailed lesson plans. Today student-outcomes assessment does not even try to discover whether Johnny attended class; instead it produces metrics about outcomes without considering Johnny's input.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10
     
    A good one to wrestle with.  It may be worth formulating distinctions we hold, and steering accordingly.
Gary Brown

Researchers Criticize Reliability of National Survey of Student Engagement - Students -... - 3 views

chronicle.com/...125438

NSSE

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • "If each of the five benchmarks does not measure a distinct dimension of engagement and includes substantial error among its items, it is difficult to inform intervention strategies to improve undergraduates' educational experiences,"
  • nly one benchmark, enriching educational experiences, had a significant effect on the seniors' cumulative GPA.
  • Other critics have asserted that the survey's mountains of data remain largely ignored.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Nov 10
     
    If the results are largely ignored, the psychometric integrity matters little.  There is no indication it is ignored because it lacks psychometric integrity.
Nils Peterson

It's Time to Improve Academic, Not Just Administrative, Productivity - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...18a02601.htm

active learning chronicle

shared by Nils Peterson on 03 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Nils Peterson on 03 Feb 09
     
    Kimberly said of this: The focus on activity deals directly with the learning process - one that pushes students to take a more active role - while assessment supplies faculty members with the feedback necessary to diagnose and correct learning problems. Technology allows such active learning processes to be expanded to large courses and, as learning software and databases become better, to use faculty time more effectively. Relates to clickers and skylight learning activities/assessments, in the large class context, as well as the elusive LMS.
Gary Brown

Learning to Hate Learning Objectives - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 4 views

chronicle.com/...49399

assessment outcomes faculty development

shared by Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Brottman's essay is a dangerous display of educational malpractice. Those who argue that principles of good assessment intrude upon teaching and learning disclose the painful fact that many educators are not adequately prepared to teach.
  • Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
     
    Read it and weep.
  • Ashley Ater Kranov on 30 Dec 09
     
    I think this reader comment captures it: Right--it's not about the students learning anything--it's about YOUR learning, and you let them come along for the ride. How could you fit that into learning objectives? Please. This is why people think all of us are navel-gazing, self-indulgent mopes.
  • Matthew Tedder on 13 Jan 10
     
    Doesn't it depend on the nature of the learning objectives? I mean, you could list a set of facts and skills levels students should have attained. You could specify a number of discrete facts and skills to be attained within certain areas of the course curriculum. Or, you could do something more creative such as measure the number of claims with evidence in student writing that is within the subject matter of the course to demonstrate a level of articulation.

    At CTLT, I never did become fully settled on certain subject types though, like mathematics and natural sciences. Depending on the subject matter, specific facts like natural laws and methods must be discretely learned and learned perfectly. And, indeed in some subjects, there is such a thing as perfect understanding where anything even slightly less is failure to learn. This is rigid, yes.. But I do not see the alternative in some subjects and teachers of those subjects certainly don't either. I do think that sometimes there can be more flexibility in the order of learning of discrete fundamentals. Learning out of order often convinced me of the importance of things skipped, causing me to go back and study more comprehensively on my own, in my own time, and according to my own interest.
Gary Brown

Learning to Hate Learning Objectives - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...49399

shared by Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Perhaps learning objectives make sense for most courses outside the humanities, but for me—as, no doubt, for many others—they bear absolutely no connection to anything that happens in the classroom.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      The homeopathic fallacy, debunked by volumes of research...
  • The problem is, this kind of teaching does not correlate with the assumption of my local accreditation body, which sees teaching—as perhaps it is, in many disciplines—as passing on a body of knowledge and skills to a particular audience.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      A profoundly dangerous misperception of accreditation and its role.
  • We talked about the ways in which the study of literature can help to develop and nurture observation, analysis, empathy, and self-reflection, all of which are essential for the practice of psychotherapy,
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      Reasonable outcomes, with a bit of educational imagination and an understanding of assessment obviously underdeveloped.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • They will not achieve any "goals or outcomes." Indeed, they will not have "achieved" anything, except, perhaps, to doubt the value of terms like "achievement" when applied to reading literature.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      good outcome
  • To describe this as a learning objective is demeaning and reductive to all concerned.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      Only in the sense Ralph Tyler criticized, and he is the one who coined the term and developed the concept.
  • except to observe certain habits of mind, nuances of thinking, an appreciation for subtleties and ambiguities of argument, and an appreciation of the capacity for empathy, as well as the need, on certain occasions, to resist this capacity. There is no reason for anyone to take the course except a need to understand more about the consciousness of others, including nonhuman animals.
Gary Brown

Accrediting Agencies Confront New Challenges - Letters to the Editor - The Chronicle of... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63530

accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 19 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The Chronicle, December 17). In an era of global expansion in higher education, accreditation agencies are increasingly confronted with myriad challenges surrounding various forms of distance education (whether virtual, so-called branch campuses, or study abroad) and cross-institutional certification.
  • the American Academy for Liberal Education is particularly well placed to view this changing pedagogical and institutional landscape, both domestically and worldwide.
  • AALE goes several steps further in evaluating whether institutions meet an extensive set of pedagogical standards specifically related to liberal education—standards of effective reasoning, for instance, and broad and deep learning. This level of assessment requires extensive classroom visitations, conversations with students and faculty members, and the time to assess the climate of learning at every institution we visit.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Innovation and quality in higher education can only join hands when institutions aspire—and are held to—independent, third-party standards of assessment.
  • Gary Brown on 19 Jan 10
     
    a small but clear stress made for independent review
Joshua Yeidel

Caring for the Whole Student, Wholeheartedly - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of ... - 1 views

jobs.chronicle.com/...63289

education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 01 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 01 Feb 10
     
    "Robby... came in search of understanding and affirmation as well as tea and fried eggs." A beautiful, wise, and humorous reflection on caring for the development of students as whole people.
Gary Brown

Wise Men Gone: Stephen Toulmin and John E. Smith - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63649

critical thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Toulmin, born in London in 1922, earned his undergraduate degree in 1942 from King's College, Cambridge, in mathematics and physics. After participating in radar research and intelligence work during World War II in England and at Allied headquarters in Germany, he returned to Cambridge, where he studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the greatest influence on his thought, earning his Ph.D. in moral philosophy in 1948.
  • Toulmin moved to the United States, where he taught at Brandeis, Michigan State, and Northwestern Universities and the University of Chicago before landing in 1993 at the University of Southern California.
  • Toulmin's first, most enduring contribution to keeping philosophy sensible came in his 1958 book, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press). Deceptively formalistic on its surface because it posited a general model of argument, Toulmin's view, in fact, was better described as taxonomic, yet flexible. He believed that formal systems of logic misrepresent the complex way that humans reason in most fields requiring what philosophers call "practical reason," and he offered, accordingly, a theory of knowledge as warranted belief.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Toulmin rejected the abstract syllogistic logic, meant to produce absolute standards for proving propositions true, that had become fashionable in analytic philosophy. Instead he argued (in the spirit of Wittgenstein) that philosophers must monitor how people actually argue if the philosophers' observations about persuasion are to make any sense. Toulmin took jurisprudential reasoning as his chief example in The Uses of Argument, but he believed that some aspects of a good argument depend on the field in which they're presented, while others are "field invariant."
  • Toulmin's "central thesis is that every sort of argumentation can in principle claim rationality and that the criteria to be applied when determining the soundness of the argumentation depend on the nature of the problems to which the argumentation relates."
  • But Toulmin, trained in the hard sciences and mathematics himself, saw through the science worship of less-credentialed sorts. He didn't relent, announcing "our need to reappropriate the wisdom of the 16th-century humanists, and develop a point of view that combines the abstract rigor and exactitude of the 17th-century 'new philosophy' with a practical concern for human life in its concrete detail."
  • Toulmin declared its upshot: "From now on, permanent validity must be set aside as illusory, and our idea of rationality related to specific functions of ... human reason. ... For me personally, the outcome of 40 years of philosophical critique was thus a new vision of—so to speak—the rhetoric of philosophy."
  • Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10
     
    FYI, Toulmin was the primary influence on the first WSU Critical Thinking Rubric. (Carella was the other philosopher.)
Nils Peterson

Washington State's Dilemma: How to Serve Up a Book Criticizing the Food Industry - Chro... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...email2.php

chronicle community

shared by Nils Peterson on 26 May 09 - Cached
  • Nils Peterson on 26 May 09
     
    The last paragraph is a good one and the core question I think we have been working on with harvesting gradebook - make not only the student work, but the assignment and the assessment criteria open as community property. Why not have community involved in the conversation about what is important to study?
Judy Rumph

High Response Rates Don't Ensure Survey Accuracy - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle... - 6 views

chronicle.com/...48642

shared by Judy Rumph on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Emerging research shows that despite all the hand-wringing about survey nonresponse, the actual effect of response rate on survey accuracy is generally small and inconsistent, and in any case it is less consequential than many other serious but often ignored sources of bias. Ironically, by drawing time and attention away from the prevention and correction of those other forms of bias, efforts to minimize nonresponse bias may actually decrease the accuracy of higher-education surveys
  • Gary Brown on 05 Oct 09
     
    Key link for much of our work as we prepare for another round of concern about response rates.
  • Judy Rumph on 05 Oct 09
     
    I like this summary of issues with surveys, you can't just throw some questions in a survey and expect meaningful results.
  • Peggy Collins on 11 Oct 09
     
    hi I cant see more than the first paragraph as this says this is locked content for subscribers. Is there a CTLT subscription?
Gary Brown

Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...48777

Open education Western Governors competency credentialing

shared by Gary Brown on 14 Oct 09 - Cached
  • At this point in the openness conversation, the example you hear over and over is a little-known university in Utah that took the old model, and, in the words of its president, "blew that up." That is Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education. "We view the role of the university of the future as measuring and credentialing learning, not the source of all learning," says Robert W. Mendenhall, the president.
  • Gary Brown on 14 Oct 09
     
    Wiley gets prime time along with challenges to open ed from the "Chronicle of Ancient Education," but blooming in the desert is an emergent species of education. This piece echoes cites Nils' has marked in emerging market nations, but through the Chronicle's lens.
Theron DesRosier

An Expert Surveys the Assessment Landscape - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...48945

chronicle kuh assessment accountability higher_education

shared by Theron DesRosier on 30 Oct 09 - Cached
  • What we want is for assessment to become a public, shared responsibility, so there should be departmental leadership.
  • Theron DesRosier on 30 Oct 09
     
    "What we want is for assessment to become a public, shared responsibility, so there should be departmental leadership." George Kuh director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.
  • Theron DesRosier on 30 Oct 09
     
    Kuh also says, "So we're going to spend some time looking at the impact of the Voluntary System of Accountability. It's one thing for schools to sign up, it's another to post the information and to show that they're actually doing something with it. It's not about posting a score on a Web site-it's about doing something with the data." He doesn't take the next step and ask if it is even possible for schools to actually do anything with the data collected from the CLA or ask who has access to the criteria: Students? Faculty? Anyone?
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