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."

Many students are already buying their papers from term-paper factories located in India and other third world countries. Now we are sending those papers back there to be graded. I wonder how many people are both writing and grading student work, and whether, serendipitously, any of those people ever get the chance to grade their own writing.”

The great learning loop of outcomes assessment is neatly “closed,” with education now a perfect, completed circle of meaningless words.

With outsourced grading, it’s clearer than ever that the world of rubrics behaves like that wicked southern plant called kudzu, smothering everything it touches. Certainly teaching and learning are being covered over by rubrics, which are evolving into a sort of quasi-religious educational theory controlled by priests whose heads are so stuck in playing with statistics that they forget to try to look openly at what makes students turn into real, viable, educated adults and what makes great, or even good, teachers.

Colleges thought they were enhancing efficiency when they moved their course evaluations online, but an unintended consequence of the shift to evaluations not filled out in class is that students started skipping them altogether, The Boston Globe reported today.

This publication is a pocket-sized compilation of statistical information covering the broad field of American education from kindergarten through graduate school. The statistical highlights are excerpts from the Digest of Education of Statistics, 2009.

Richard Freeland, state commissioner of higher education, defends such partnerships, which have become a source of research funds for universities.

In California, another for-profit company, Kaplan University, has signed an agreement with the community college system to deliver general education courses online, said Peter Smith, Kaplan’s senior vice president for academic strategy and the former president of the Community College of Vermont.

Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.

She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail.

The American Federation of Teachers is weighing in on the debate over accountability and student success with a new Web site. The site is billed as a "clearinghouse of accountability initiatives" and as a forum for educators to discuss the accountability systems that best help students succeed.

xperts do not agree on the precise numbers, but over the past generation we have moved from an environment in which states paid for 70 percent of cost and students paid 30 percent, to a situation in which those numbers have exactly reversed. Increasingly, tuition accounts for the lion’s share of institutional budgets, with state appropriations playing a minority role.

The sense I got Friday was that higher-education professionals do not expect the ”good old days” to return

the apparent consensus that public education needs to be more productive, because there was no discussion of the definition of productivity. 

Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests

First, the university, a public institution of about 40,000 students in Ohio, needed to comply with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), which requires that state institutions provide data about graduation rates, tuition, student characteristics, and student learning outcomes, among other measures, in the consistent format developed by its two sponsoring organizations, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

And finally, UC was accepted in 2008 as a member of the fifth cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a collaborative body with the goal of advancing knowledge about the effect of electronic portfolio use on student learning outcomes.  

Do you have ideas or examples of good practice of working with employers to promote workforce development? UK universities and colleges are under pressure to do "employer engagement" and some are finding it really difficult. This is sometimes due to the university administrative systems not welcoming non-traditional students, and sometimes because we use "university speak" rather than "employer speak". All ideas very welcome. Thanks. Posted 7 hours ago | Reply Privately /* extlib: /js_controls/_dialog.jsp */ LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-closeWindow', 'Close this window' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-or', 'or' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-cancel', 'Cancel' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-submit', 'Submit' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-error-generic', 'We\'re sorry. Something unexpected happened and your request could not be completed. Please try again.' ); LI.Controls.addControl('control-7', 'Dialog', { name: 'sendMessageDialog', type: 'task-modeless', content: { node: 'send-message-dialog', title: 'Reply Privately' }, extra: { memberId: '19056441', fullName: 'Anita Pickerden', groupId: '2774663', subject: 'RE: Do you have ideas or examples of good practice of working with employers to promote workforce development?' } });

SU research directly supports the economies of so many of our communities statewide – communities and economies many of our graduates will soon take part in when they enter the workforce.  Therefore, it is imperative we align WSU to work closely and strategically with the state, and more specifically, very intimately with the counties, communities and businesses to maximize the efficiency and value of our extension, educational, outreach and research programs

But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources

But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resource

But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources

There has been an upsurge in reports and press coverage concerning accountability issues and student learning outcomes assessment (SLOA) in higher education. This paper is a brief overview of that upsurge, citing and synthesizing some of the most recent information published about accountability and SLOA.

Ohio State is embarking on discussions on how to change the way professors are evaluated for promotion to full professor. University officials argue that, as in tenure reviews, research appears to be the dominant factor at that stage, despite official policies to weigh teaching and service as well.

The concept in play would end the myth that candidates for full professor (and maybe, someday, candidates for tenure) should be great in everything. Why? Because most professors aren't great at everything.

Once research eminence is verified, teaching and service must be found only to be "adequate."

There are obviously real concerns that outcomes measures are measuring the right outcomes.   However, those expressing those concerns seldom are ready to jump in to try to figure out how to measure what they think is important – a position that is ultimately untenable

Learning outcomes risk changing the rules of the game by actually looking at learning itself, rather than using the surrogates of wealth, history, and research.  Since we have considerable data that show that these surrogates do not correlate particularly well with learning outcomes (see e.g. Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges),

 As Bok pointed out, to improve learning outcomes, the faculty would have to learn to teach in new ways.  Most academic leaders would prefer not to get into a game that would require that kind of change!  In fact, at this point I believe that the real, critical, disruptive innovation in higher education is transparent learning outcomes measures.  Such measures are likely to enable the innovations discussed in the first question to transform from sustaining to disruptive.

What do Wikipedia, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Threadless Tees have in common? All were created outside the traditional product development model using a mass collaborative approach. In mass collaborative product development (MCPD), large groups of people compete and collaborate globally to develop new products and services.

the MCPD phenomenon is under way in the management and business communities. But few have examined it from an engineering design standpoint.

A more natural process

The filmmaker touches on topics ranging from the importance of teaching visual literacy to violence in films to the preservation of classic movies

Measuring student engagement is important for WSU

Higher education will have to be more accountable for its performance and more open to consumers about the actual cost of attending a college, and help people make easier comparisons among institutions, in order to succeed as the nation's economic engine, says a new report from two nonprofit think tanks here.

too little information to make informed choices about where they will get the most from their tuition dollars, say researchers at the two organizations, the libertarian-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and Education Sector, which is a proponent of reforming higher education

And without a more thorough and open form of accountability, institutions will not have any incentive to make the changes that will improve students' success,

The State of The Internet