Skip to main content

Home/ CTLT and Friends/ Group items tagged lumina

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Joshua Yeidel

Refining the Recipe for a Degree, Ingredient by Ingredient - Government - The Chronicle... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...125545

assessment accreditation outcomes

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Supporters of the Lumina project say it holds the promise of turning educational assessment from a process that some academics might view as a threat into one that holds a solution, while also creating more-rigorous expectations for student learning. Mr. Jones, the Utah State history-department chairman, recounted in an essay published in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History how he once blithely told an accreditation team that "historians do not measure their effectiveness in outcomes." But he has changed his mind. The Lumina project, and others, help define what learning is achieved in the process of earning a degree, he said, moving beyond Americans' heavy reliance on the standardized student credit hour as the measure of an education. "The demand for outcomes assessment should be seized as an opportunity for us to actually talk about the habits of mind our discipline needs to instill in our students," Mr. Jones wrote. "It will do us a world of good, and it will save us from the spreadsheets of bureaucrats."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 04 Jan 11
     
    Lumina Foundation pushes a Eurpopean-style process to define education goals state- and nation-wide, with mixed success. "Chemistry, history, math, and physics have been among the most successful", whileothers have had a hard time beginning. "Supporters of the Lumina project say it holds the promise of turning educational assessment from a process that some academics might view as a threat into one that holds a solution, while also creating more-rigorous expectations for student learning. Mr. Jones, the Utah State history-department chairman, recounted in an essay published in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History how he once blithely told an accreditation team that "historians do not measure their effectiveness in outcomes." But he has changed his mind. The Lumina project, and others, help define what learning is achieved in the process of earning a degree, he said, moving beyond Americans' heavy reliance on the standardized student credit hour as the measure of an education. "The demand for outcomes assessment should be seized as an opportunity for us to actually talk about the habits of mind our discipline needs to instill in our students," Mr. Jones wrote. "It will do us a world of good, and it will save us from the spreadsheets of bureaucrats."
Gary Brown

It's the Learning, Stupid - Lumina Foundation: Helping People Achieve Their Potential - 3 views

www.luminafoundation.org/...2009-10-14.html

learning accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Oct 09 - Cached
  • My thesis is this. We live in a world where much is changing, quickly. Economic crises, technology, ideological division, and a host of other factors have all had a profound influence on who we are and what we do in higher education. But when all is said and done, it is imperative that we not lose sight of what matters most. To paraphrase the oft-used maxim of the famous political consultant James Carville, it's the learning, stupid.
  • We believe that, to significantly increase higher education attainment rates, three intermediate outcomes must first occur: Higher education must use proven strategies to move students to completion. Quality data must be used to improve student performance and inform policy and decision-making at all levels. The outcomes of student learning must be defined, measured, and aligned with workforce needs. To achieve these outcomes (and thus improve success rates), Lumina has decided to pursue several specific strategies. I'll cite just a few of these many different strategies: We will advocate for the redesign, rebranding and improvement of developmental education. We will explore the development of alternative pathways to degrees and credentials. We will push for smoother systems of transferring credit so students can move more easily between institutions, including from community colleges to bachelor's degree programs.
  • "Lumina defines high-quality credentials as degrees and certificates that have well-defined and transparent learning outcomes which provide clear pathways to further education and employment."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And—as Footnote One softly but incessantly reminds us—quality, at its core, must be a measure of what students actually learn and are able to do with the knowledge and skills they gain.
  • and yet we seem reluctant or unable to discuss higher education's true purpose: equipping students for success in life.
  • Research has already shown that higher education institutions vary significantly in the value they add to students in terms of what those students actually learn. Various tools and instruments tell us that some institutions add much more value than others, even when looking at students with similar backgrounds and abilities.
  • The idea with tuning is to take various programs within a specific discipline—chemistry, history, psychology, whatever—and agree on a set of learning outcomes that a degree in the field represents. The goal is not for the various programs to teach exactly the same thing in the same way or even for all of the programs to offer the same courses. Rather, programs can employ whatever techniques they prefer, so long as their students can demonstrate mastery of an agreed-upon body of knowledge and set of skills. To use the musical terminology, the various programs are not expected to play the same notes, but to be "tuned" to the same key.
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

University World News - US: America can learn from Bologna process - 0 views

www.universityworldnews.com/article.php

Bologna higher_education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 22 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Sep 10
     
    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.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Sep 10
     
    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.
Nils Peterson

Goal 2025 - Lumina Foundation: Helping People Achieve Their Potential - 0 views

www.luminafoundation.org/...goal3.html

attainment lumina assessment higher_education

shared by Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09
     
    "Based on current estimates, to reach the 60 percent level by 2025, the U.S. higher education system must produce 23 million more college graduates than are expected at present rates of production. The actual size of the gap will shift annually, as we make progress and new data become available. Obviously, we can't close this gap overnight. But, for example, if we can start to increase the rate of attainment each year and produce 150,000 more graduates than the year before - an annual increase of about 5 percent - we will reach the big goal by 2025."
  • Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09
     
    adding 150,000 more college graduates/year each year from now to 2025 is a significant scaling up. Spread over 5000 institutions its only 30/institution on average, which many could manage. Or perhaps Western Governors could absorb many of them.
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.
Nils Peterson

The New Muscle: 5 Quality-of-Learning Projects That Didn't Exist 5 Years Ago - Special ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...124205

shared by Nils Peterson on 30 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The New Muscle: 5 Quality-of-Learning Projects That Didn't Exist 5 Years Ago   Lumina Foundation for Education's Tuning USA Year started: 2009 What it does: Supports statewide, faculty-led discussions, meetings, and surveys to define discipline-specific knowledge and skills that college and state officials, students, alumni, and employers can expect graduates of particular degree programs to have.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 30 Aug 10
       
      That they lump VSA in here with the others suggests to me that the Chronicle's author doesn't distinguish the nuance.
Gary Brown

News: No Letup From Washington - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...hlc

accountability accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Virtually all of the national higher education leaders who spoke to the country's largest accrediting group sent a version of the same message: The federal government is dead serious about holding colleges and universities accountable for their performance, and can be counted on to impose undesirable requirements if higher education officials don't make meaningful changes themselves.
  • "This is meant to be a wakeup call," Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said in Monday's keynote address
  • I believe it’s wise for us to assume they will have little reservation about regulating higher education now that they know it is too important to fail."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Obama administration will be tough on colleges because its officials value higher education and believe it needs to perform much better, and successfully educate many more students, to drive the American economy.
  • In her own speech to the Higher Learning Commission’s members on Sunday, Sylvia Manning, the group’s president, cited several signs that the new administration seemed willing to delve into territory that not long ago would have been viewed as off-limits to federal intrusion. Among them: A recently published “draft” of a guide to accreditation that many accrediting officials believe is overly prescriptive. A just-completed round of negotiations over proposed rules that deal with the definition of a “credit hour” and other issues that touch on academic quality -- areas that have historically been the province of colleges and their faculties. And, of special relevance for the Higher Learning Commission, a trio of critical letters from the Education Department’s inspector general challenging the association’s policies and those of two other regional accreditors on key matters -- and in North Central’s case, questioning its continued viability. With that stroke, Manning noted, the department’s newfound activism “has come to the doorstep, or into the living room, of HLC.”
  • Pressure to measure student learning -- to find out which tactics and approaches are effective, which create efficiency without lowering results -- is increasingly coming from what Broad called the Obama administration's "kitchen cabinet," foundations like the Lumina Foundation for Education (which she singled out) to which the White House and Education Department are increasingly looking for education policy help.
  • She cited an October speech in which the foundation's president, Jamie P. Merisotis, said that student learning should be recognized as the "primary measure of quality in higher education," and heralded the European Union's Bologna process as a potential path for making that so
  • we cannot lay low and hope that the glare of the spotlight will eventually fall on others," Broad told the Higher Learning Commission audience.
  • While higher ed groups have been warned repeatedly that they must act before Congress next renews the Higher Education Act -- a process that will begin in earnest in two or three years -- the reality is that politicians in Washington no longer feel obliged to hold off on major changes to higher education policy until that main law is reviewed. Congress has passed "seven major pieces of legislation" related to higher education in recent years, and "I wish I could tell you that the window is open" until the next reauthorization, Broad said. "But we cannot presume that we have the luxury of years within which to get our collective house in order. We must act quickly."
  • But where will such large-scale change come from? The regional accreditors acting together to align their standards? Groups of colleges working together to agree on a common set of learning outcomes for general education, building on the work of the American Association of Colleges and Universities? No answers here, yet.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Apr 10
     
    Note the positions of the participants
Gary Brown

Accountability Effort for Community Colleges Pushes Forward, and Other Meeting Notes - ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65168

accountability VSA

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • A project led by the American Association of Community Colleges to develop common, voluntary standards of accountability for two-year institutions is moving forward, and specific performance measures are being developed, an official at the association said.
  • financed by the Lumina Foundation for Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is now its second phase
  • The project's advocates have begun pushing a public-relations campaign to build support for the accountability effort among colleges.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • common reporting formats and measures that are appropriate to their institutions
  • Mr. Phillippe said one area of college performance the voluntary accountability system will measure is student persistence and completion, including retention and transfer rates. Student progress toward completion may also be measured by tracking how many students reach certain credit milestones. Other areas that will be measured include colleges' contributions to the work force and economic and community development.
  • Gary Brown on 20 Apr 10
     
    Footsteps....
Gary Brown

Measures of Colleges' Quality Should Focus on Learning, Speaker Says - Government - The... - 3 views

chronicle.com/...48812

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Oct 09 - Cached
  • To improve how student learning is measured, Lumina will seek to support and advance tools, tactics, and systems that effectively define and measure both generalizable skills, like abstract reasoning and critical thinking, and subject-specific skills that students learn. The nation should also learn from measurement tools now in use, like the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Voluntary System of Accountability, Mr. Merisotis says.
  • Gary Brown on 15 Oct 09
     
    The comments section reveal the tenor of the issue.
Nils Peterson

Will a Culture of Entitlement Bankrupt Higher Education? - Commentary - The Chronicle o... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...48819

shared by Nils Peterson on 20 Oct 09 - Cached
  • No other country has so many fully accredited colleges or has provided such widespread access to student financial aid.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Oct 09
       
      But other countries have better rates of attaining higher education (% population with a degree) than US. See Lumina Foundation goals to increase US rate from 40 to 60%
  • The reality is that higher education is expensive, and students and their families will be asked to pay an ever-larger share of the costs. Although annual increases in tuition have diminished recently, tuition is still rising faster than inflation.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Oct 09
       
      Why is this the reality? There is reason to believe that it is not -- especially if one is able to remove what he calls the "entitlements."
1 - 11 of 11
Showing 20▼ items per page