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?

"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."

I'm interested to hear from you how you arrive at a grade A, B, B+ etc. I assume from reading the various postings here that you use numerical marking (ratio scale) for different criteria to reach a final grade? At our institute we have been using ordinal scales for some time but now find that these are too broad to do justice to the quality of the work that students submit. On the other hand, using a direct ratio scale seems a daunting task for a lot of people and according to the literature is difficult to deal with. I appreciate to hear about your opnions and experiences.

The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.

And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They'd rather see the state spend money on health care."

Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."

Under the proposal, officials will add the money generated by each professor and subtract that amount from his or her salary to get a bottom-line value for each, according to the article.

the public wanted accountability. "It's something that we're really not used to in higher education: for someone questioning whether we're working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on."

American Association of University Professors, blamed a conservative think tank with ties to Gov. Rick Perry for coming up with an idea that he said is simplistic and relies on "a silly measure" of accountability.

Few reliable, comparable measures of student learning across colleges exist. Standardized assessments like the Collegiate Learning Assessment are not widely used—and many experts say those tests need refinement in any case.

"We are the most moribund field that I know of," Mr. Zemsky said in an interview. "We're even more moribund than county government."

Robert Zemsky

Student-centered learning has been largely a rhetorical distinction for decades--e.g., more group work or less group work--because, practically speaking, everything happened in the classroom.

Now, the distinction is not just rhetorical, but a life style distinction: scarcity learning (content delivery) in the classroom or abundance learning (discovery) often out in real-world situations. In scarcity learning, the student is the target for delivery systems, while in abundance learning the student is the locus, the starting point, of learning.

Changes in the American professoriate’s employment patterns and types, demographics, and work life are the greatest we have seen in over half a century.

But averages obscure the widening salary ranges on campuses, particularly between presidents and faculty members

The drive toward institutional prestige that most professors consider a high priority at their four-year institutions has intensified the focus on research there.

We live in a world full of benchmarks and rankings. Consumers use them to compare the latest gadgets. Parents and policy makers rely on them to assess schools and other public institutions,

"Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive -- to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens," says Barankay, whose previous research and teaching has focused on personnel and labor economics. "Workers can become complacent and de-motivated. People who rank highly think, 'I am already number one, so why try harder?' And people who are far behind can become depressed about their work and give up."

mong the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.

Many public universities do offer online courses while primarily maintaining traditional ones. But the public higher-education model for the future may already exist: the completely online Western Governors University (WGU), launched in 1998. Back then, it was described as highly controversial. Now WGU is the largest virtual university in the United States, using technology to offer a flexible structure and reasonable pricing to meet adult learners’ needs.

keeps its costs down by relying heavily on technology and independent learning resources, and by using a student-centric model versus a professor-centric approach

Additionally WGU is the first and only system that gives students credit for what they know rather than the courses they complete.

There are lots of considerations when considering a technology solution to the outcomes assessment process.  The first thing is to be very clear about what a system can and cannot do.  It CANNOT do your program assessment and evaluation for you!  The institution or program must first define the intended outcomes and performance indicators.  Without a doubt, that is the most difficult part of the process.  Once the indicators have been defined you need to be clear about the role of students and faculty in the use of the techology.  Also, who is the technology "owner"--who will maintain it, keep the outcomes/indicators current, generate reports, etc. etc.

Why is there so much faculty dissent nationwide about campus reorganization efforts—so much that proprietary organizations are now offering seminars on how to manage the damage control?

One answer is that change is difficult for anyone, but that seems to be especially true for academics whose training and professional lives are guided by decades-old traditions. Many faculty members find it difficult to imagine a way of doing things different from what they are accustomed to, despite the promised benefits of a reorganization.

Perhaps if, from the outset, more of us avoided a knee-jerk resistance to change and instead attempted to imagine the possibilities, there would be little need for campus unrest, no-confidence votes, or seminars on damage control.

The GAO recommended that Education officials reevaluate their official estimates of the time it takes for colleges to complete IPEDS surveys, communicate to a wider range of colleges the opportunites for training, and coordinate with education software providers to improve the quality and reliability of IPEDS reporting features.

I think part of the problem is not the shortage of time as such, but a feeling that the time available is not under the individual’s control. In other words, the essential independence of spirit that goes with being an academic is being undermined.

Academic life is meant to be collegial, that is based on 'shared power and authority vested among colleagues’ according to the dictionary, but the models of collegiality that have evolved are often solutions to the problems of another age, when universities were typically much smaller and less complex.

Perhaps there are other models of collegiality which might produce a better sense of say? Funnily enough, the most interesting models seem to come from business, often painted as academe’s alter ego.

ccording to the study, teachers value collaboration, but do most of it outside the classroom. They believe they set high standards for students and believe core skills (mathematics and language, for example) are important. They believe all staff, rather than individual teachers, are accountable for student progress. They believe it would help a lot if students took responsibility for their own learning, but less than a third (compared to a very high percentage of students) believe students actually do.

These results strongly suggest that, like humans, Physarum doesn’t attach any intrinsic value to the options that are available to it. Instead, it compares its alternatives. Add something new into the mix, and its decisions change.

But how does Physarum make decisions at all without a brain?  The answer is deceptively simple – it does so by committee. Every plasmodium is basically a big sac of fluid, where each part rhythmically contracts and expands, pushing the fluid inside back-and-forth. The rate of the contractions depends on what neighbouring parts of the sac are doing, and by the local environment. They happen faster when the plasmodium touches something attractive like food, and they slow down when repellent things like sunlight are nearby.

It’s the ultimate in collective decision-making and it allows Physarum to perform remarkable feats of “intelligence”, including simulating Tokyo’s transport network, solving mazes, and even driving robots.

But when the young superstar sat down with the department chair, he seemed to have only one goal: to land a tenure-track position that involved as many sabbaticals and as little teaching as possible

Hacker and his coauthor, New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus, use this cautionary tale to launch their new book, a fierce critique of modern academia called Higher Education? "The question mark in our title," they write, "is the key to this book." To their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education."

They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts.

Why the national attention? Why the second-guessing of the accreditation decisions? It is part of the accidental transformation of accreditation.

Academic quality assurance and collegiality -- the defining features of traditional accreditation -- are, at least for now, taking a backseat to consumer protection and compliance with law and regulation. Government and the public expect accreditation to essentially provide a guarantee that students are getting what they pay for in terms of the education they seek.

Blame the powerful demand that, above all, colleges and universities provide credentials that lead directly to employment or advancement of employment. Driven by public concerns about the difficult job market and the persistent rise in the price of tuition, accrediting organizations are now expected to assure that the colleges, universities and programs they accredit will produce these pragmatic results.

Students can make a small bet on how well they'll do in a course, with a starting limit of $25 on how much they can earn. The students contribute a chunk of the money, and Ultrinsic puts up the rest. If they make the grade, they win it all.

In 2009, they piloted the idea with a different model that put students in the same course in direct competition with each other. Last year, about 600 students from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, the first two campuses where the company's most recent iteration became available, made wagers on Ultrinsic.