Group items tagged

Conservative columnist David Brooks makes a case for the importance of liberal arts and humanities, first in economic contexts, but later (more interestingly and importantly) in the context of human living.

"America is slowly coming out of the Recession of 2007-only to find itself on a collision course with the future: not enough Americans are completing college . . . By 2018, we will need 22 million new workers with college degrees-but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million postsecondary degrees . . . At a time when every job is precious, this shortfall will mean lost economic opportunity for millions of American workers."

A report of a Georgetown University study that describes the shift in the job market toward requiring post-secondary education (up from 20% of jobs in 1973 to 59% of jobs in 2018) and the looming shortfall of college-eduvated workers. The director of the study opines that that means more vocational orientation in college education, but the report stops short (thankfully) of that mis-conclusion.

Describes a "meta-versity" concept based on cloud computing shared by HE institutions. Although the article focuses on the institution level, many of the considerations also occur in department-level movement toward the cloud.

Treading lightly, ProfHacker looks at Faculty Development offices (also called centers for teaching and learning).

"All are focusing, to varying degrees, on learning communities as a way to improve remedial education. The idea is that the linked courses create peer-support networks, build greater cohesion in the curriculum, and enable students to earn some college credits along with precollege work."

One aspect of the Gates Foundation's massive move into higher education. The remedial aspect quoted may raise memories for some of us...

Some context for rubrics like ours

Quoting a 1984 study, "higher education should ensure that the mounds of data already collected on students are converted into useful information and fed back [to campus officials and faculty] in ways that enhance student learning and lead to improvement in programs, teaching practices, and the environment in which teaching and learning take place." The example given is an analysis of test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District by the LA Times.

It's going to take some assessment (and political) smarts to deflect the notion that existing data can be re-purposed easily to assess "value-added".

Lumina proposes that the US "adapt and apply the lessons learned from the Bologna Process in the EU, which has developed methodologies that "uniquely focus on linking student learning and the outcomes of higher education" -- tautological though that sounds.

Apparently the "audacious" discussion in the WCET webinar yesterday (to be linked) featuring Ellen Wagner and Peter Smith is old hat in Europe. A national "degree framework" is almost inconceivable in the US, but 'tuning' -- "faculty-led approach that involves seeking input from students, recent graduates and employers to establish criterion-referenced learning outcomes and competencies" -- sounds a lot like in goal-setting.

A summary of the current state of "thinking" with regard to CLA. Many fallacies and contradictions are (unintentionally) exposed. At least CLA appears to be more about skills than content (though the question of how it is graded isn't even raised), but the "performance task" approach is the smallest possible step in that direction.

A more modest attempt to "open up" education, using a study-group model rather than a course model like P2PU.

"So how does the maintenance of high academic ranking as a research institution fit into the land-grant mission? Simply put, it doesn't."

Another for the "HE Identity Crisis" collection...

This article provides an international view of the commodification of academic research, including this base line definition, from an email interview with Hans Radder, a professor of the philosophy of science and technology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Q: Academic research has always cost money to produce, and led to products that made money for others. How is the "commodification" of research different today than in past periods? A: Commodification means that all kinds of activities and their results are predominantly interpreted and assessed on the basis of economic criteria. In this sense, recent academic research is far more commodified than it was in the past. In general terms, one can say that the relation between "money" and specific academic activity has become much more direct. Consider the following examples: first, the amount of external funding acquired is often used as a measure of individual academic quality; second, specific assessments by individual scientists have a direct impact on departmental budgets; for instance, if I now pass this doctoral dissertation, my department receives a substantial sum of money; if not, it ends up with a budget deficit; third, the growing practice of patenting the results of academic research is explicitly aimed at acquiring commercial monopolies. Related to these financial issues are important and substantial changes of academic culture. Universities are increasingly being run as big corporations. They have a top-down command structure and an academic culture in which individual university scientists are forced to behave like mini-capitalists in order to survive, guided by an entrepreneurial ethos aimed at maximizing the capitalization of their knowledge.

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.

"Q: What elements help make institutional effectiveness assessment successful? Suskie: One factor really stands out: If institutional leaders really value assessment results and use them to inform important decisions on important goals, your institutional effectiveness efforts will be a resounding success."

"A million dollars a year is a lot of money, yet colleges can hand over that much or more every year to software companies that supply and maintain essential systems for accounting, human resources, and student enrollment. Now, fed up with the fees, some colleges are ditching giant vendors for a small company that promises to support this software at half the price."

What this article fails to mention is that when you can get support only from the vendor, their incentive to provide good service is minimal, because the lock-in (the cost of moving to another platform) makes change-over almost unthinkable.

An article on budget cuts by Ed Lazowska, who holds the Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at UW. Dr Lazowska states that "the principal role of great public universities is to provide socioeconomic upward mobility to the citizens of their states," and claims that the "capacity" of UW and other bachelor-granting institutions is insufficient and shrinking. Many questionable assumptions

"If you're wondering what use Google's new Wave tool might have for teaching, one online-learning leader has an answer: combining classes from different colleges."