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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.

Congress listened to higher education lobbyists and designated accreditors -- teams made up largely of administrators and faculty -- to be “reliable authorities” on educational quality. Intending to protect institutional autonomy, Congress appropriated the existing voluntary system by which institutions differentiated themselves.

Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that many accredited colleges are adding little educational value. The 2006 National Assessment of Adult Literacy revealed that nearly a third of college graduates were unable to compare two newspaper editorials or compute the cost of office items, prompting the Spellings Commission and others to raise concerns about accreditors’ attention to productivity and quality.

accreditation is “premised upon collegiality and assistance; rather than requirements that institutions meet certain standards (with public announcements when they don’t."

A gatekeeping system using peer review is like a penal system that uses inmates to evaluate eligibility for parole. The conflicts of interest are everywhere -- and, surprise, virtually everyone is eligible!

But Congress wouldn’t let them. Rather than welcoming accreditors’ efforts to enhance their public oversight role, Congress told accreditors to back off and let nonprofit colleges and universities set their own standards for educational quality.

ccreditation is nothing more than an outdated industrial-era monopoly whose regulations prevent colleges from cultivating the skills, flexibility, and innovation that they need to ensure quality and accountability.

there is a much cheaper and better way: a self-certifying regimen of financial accountability, coupled with transparency about graduation rates and student success. (See some alternatives here and here.)

Such a system would prioritize student and parent assessment over the judgment of institutional peers or the educational bureaucracy. And it would protect students, parents, and taxpayers from fraud or mismanagement by permitting immediate complaints and investigations, with a notarized certification from the institution to serve as Exhibit A

The only way to protect the public interest is to end the current system of peer review patronage, and demand that colleges and universities put their reputation -- and their performance -- on the line.

Anne D. Neal is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The views stated herein do not represent the views of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, of which she is a member.

include them in their tenure-and promotion portfolios.

As Ernest Boyer said, faculty reward systems will need to be revised in order for faculty members to truly be rewarded on the basis of their scholarship of teaching."

when our students attend three or four schools, the subject of these sentences is considerably weakened in terms of what happens to those students.

Who or what is one accountable to?

For what?

Why that particular “what” -- and not another “what”?

To what extent is the relationship reciprocal? Are there rewards and/or sanctions inherent in the relationship? How continuous is the relationship?

In the Socratic moral universe, one is simultaneously witness and judge. The Greek syneidesis (“conscience” and “consciousness”) means to know something with, so to know oneself with oneself becomes an obligation of institutions and systems -- to themselves.

Obligation becomes self-reflexive.

There are no external authorities here. We offer, we accept, we provide evidence, we judge. There is nothing wrong with this: it is indispensable, reflective self-knowledge. And provided we judge without excuses, we hold to this Socratic moral framework. As Peter Ewell has noted, the information produced under this rubric, particularly in the matter of student learning, is “part of our accountability to ourselves.”

But is this “accountability” as the rhetoric of higher education uses the white noise -- or something else?

in response to shrill calls for “accountability,” U.S. higher education has placed all its eggs in the Socratic basket, but in a way that leaves the basket half-empty. It functions as the witness, providing enormous amounts of information, but does not judge that information.

Every single “best practice” cited by Aldeman and Carey is subject to measurement: labor market histories of graduates, ratios of resource commitment to various student outcomes, proportion of students in learning communities or taking capstone courses, publicly-posted NSSE results, undergraduate research participation, space utilization rates, licensing income, faculty patents, volume of non-institutional visitors to art exhibits, etc. etc. There’s nothing wrong with any of these, but they all wind up as measurements, each at a different concentric circle of putatively engaged acceptees of a unilateral contract to provide evidence. By the time one plows through Aldeman and Carey’s banquet, one is measuring everything that moves -- and even some things that don’t.

Sorry, but basic capacity facts mean that consumers cannot vote with their feet in higher education.

If we glossed the Socratic notion on provision-of-information, the purpose is self-improvement, not comparison. The market approach to accountability implicitly seeks to beat Socrates by holding that I cannot serve as both witness and judge of my own actions unless the behavior of others is also on the table. The self shrinks: others define the reference points. “Accountability” is about comparison and competition, and an institution’s obligations are only to collect and make public those metrics that allow comparison and competition. As for who judges the competition, we have a range of amorphous publics and imagined authorities.

There are no formal agreements here: this is not a contract, it is not a warranty, it is not a regulatory relationship. It isn’t even an issue of becoming a Socratic self-witness and judge. It is, instead, a case in which one set of parties, concentrated in places of power, asks another set of parties, diffuse and diverse, “to disclose more and more about academic results,” with the second set of parties responding in their own terms and formulations. The environment itself determines behavior.

Ewell is right about the rules of the information game in this environment: when the provider is the institution, it will shape information “to look as good as possible, regardless of the underlying performance.”

U.S. News & World Report’s rankings

The messengers become self-appointed arbiters of performance, establishing themselves as the second party to which institutions and aggregates of institutions become “accountable.” Can we honestly say that the implicit obligation of feeding these arbiters constitutes “accountability”?

But if the issue is student learning, there is nothing wrong with -- and a good deal to be said for -- posting public examples of comprehensive examinations, summative projects, capstone course papers, etc. within the information environment, and doing so irrespective of anyone requesting such evidence of the distribution of knowledge and skills. Yes, institutions will pick what makes them look good, but if the public products resemble AAC&U’s “Our Students’ Best Work” project, they set off peer pressure for self-improvement and very concrete disclosure. The other prominent media messengers simply don’t engage in constructive communication of this type.

Ironically, a “market” in the loudest voices, the flashiest media productions, and the weightiest panels of glitterati has emerged to declare judgment on institutional performance in an age when student behavior has diluted the very notion of an “institution” of higher education. The best we can say is that this environment casts nothing but fog over the specific relationships, responsibilities, and obligations that should be inherent in something we call “accountability.” Perhaps it is about time that we defined these components and their interactions with persuasive clarity. I hope that this essay will invite readers to do so.

Clifford Adelman is senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. The analysis and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the positions or opinions of the institute, nor should any such representation be inferred.

Fifty-three percent of respondents said they “learn more effectively” with online lectures, and 54 percent “report that their grades improve when lectures are streamed via video online,”

Nearly three-quarters of students said that streaming lectures online “helps them be better prepared for exams.”

49 percent of students take matters into their own hands and record lectures on their own so they can review the material later.

“indicative” of the modern college-student mindset. “They can’t be bothered with things that require stepping out of their own comfort and convenience zone,” she said. “Rather than adapt themselves … they want things the way they want things.

‘It’s about me and my convenience’ is one that extends into many aspects of their lives, from school, to work, to community obligations,” Gregory said. “How much more self-absorbed does it get?”

we prefer a researcher to consider whether the magnitude of an estimated effect could be readily explained by uncontrolled confounding or selection biases, rather than simply to offer the uninspired interpretation that the estimated effect is significant, as if neither chance nor bias could then account for the findings.

Many data analysts appear to remain oblivious to the qualitative nature of significance testing.

statistical significance is itself only a dichotomous indicator.

it cannot convey much useful information

Even worse, those two values often signal just the wrong interpretation. These misleading signals occur when a trivial effect is found to be ’significant’, as often happens in large studies, or when a strong relation is found ’nonsignificant’, as often happens in small studies.

Another useful paper on this issue is Kristin Sainani, (2010) “Misleading Comparisons: The Fallacy of Comparing Statistical Significance”Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Vol. 2 (June), 559-562 which discusses the need to look carefully at within-group differences as well as between-group differences, and at sub-group significance compared to interaction. She concludes: ‘Readers should have a particularly high index of suspicion for controlled studies that fail to report between-group comparisons, because these likely represent attempts to “spin” null results.”