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.
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Wired Campus: Lev Gonick: How Technology Will Reshape Academe After the Econo... - 0 views
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Where will higher education be the day after the current global economic crisis passes? If you think things will simply go back to the way they were once the economy recovers in a year or two, think again.
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New Grilling of For-Profits Could Turn Up the Heat for All of Higher Education - Govern... - 1 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,"
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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.
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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."
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Op-Ed Columnist - History for Dollars - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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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.
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HELP WANTED PROJECTIONS of JOBS and EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS Through2018 - 0 views
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"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."
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THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: - 0 views
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"In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive. This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.org/futureofeverything/), brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus. Date: May 19, 2009 Place: Norwood, MA"
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OECD Project Seeks International Measures for Assessing Educational Quality - Internati... - 0 views
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The first phase of an ambitious international study that intends to assess and compare learning outcomes in higher-education systems around the world was announced here on Wednesday at the conference of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
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Richard Yelland, of the OECD's Education Directorate, is leading the project, which he said expects to eventually offer faculty members, students, and governments "a more balanced assessment of higher-education quality" across the organization's 31 member countries.
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learning outcomes are becoming a central focus worldwide
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the feasibility study is adapting the Collegiate Learning Assessment, an instrument developed by the Council for Aid to Education in the United States, to an international context.
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At least six nations are participating in the feasibility study.
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14 countries are expected to participate in the full project, with an average of 10 institutions per country and about 200 students per institution,
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The project's target population will be students nearing the end of three-year or four-year degrees, and will eventually measure student knowledge in economics and engineering.
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While the goal of the project is not to produce another global ranking of universities, the growing preoccupation with such lists has crystallized what Mr. Yelland described as the urgency of pinning down what exactly it is that most of the world's universities are teaching and how well they are doing
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Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, said she was also skeptical about whether the project would eventually yield common international assessment mechanisms.
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Ms. Eaton noted, the same sets of issues recur across borders and systems, about how best to enhance student learning and strengthen economic development and international competitiveness.
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Would You Like Credit With That Internship? - Students - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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Students pay tuition to work for free ... unpaid internships are growing in this down economy, favoring the wealthy who can afford them. But internships are generally valuable for students, administrators say. The complementary courses involve journals, essays, oral presentations, or work portfolios. Independent studies lean toward academics. Companies often see academic credit as substitute compensation that qualifies interns as legally unpaid trainees and keeps them on their colleges' liability insurance. Advertisements specify: "Candidates must be able to receive academic credit." That makes some campus officials bristle. "What they're saying is holding the institution hostage," says Kathy L. Sims, director of career services at the University of California at Los Angeles. Employers don't know colleges' academic standards, she says. "It's really not their call whether their experience is creditworthy." Colleges have dealt with that quandary in various ways. Some, especially those with traditions of experiential learning, vet and monitor internships, enrolling students in courses designed to complement their real-world work. Others let professors sponsor independent studies based on internships. More and more have devised some form of noncredit recognition to try to satisfy employers without altering academic philosophies or making students pay tuition to work free. At Bates College, the game is up. "We're quite adamant about our refusal to play along," says James W. Hughes, a professor of economics. As chairman of the department eight years ago, he got dozens of calls from students, parents, and employers asking for credit for unpaid internships, mainly in the financial industry. "Why is it that we have to evaluate this experience," he says, "just so some multibillion-dollar bank can avoid paying $7.50 an hour?" But the law is vague, and arguably antiquated. In the for-profit sector, guidelines for legally unpaid internships come from a 1947 U
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For Accreditation, a Narrow Window of Opportunity - Commentary - The Chronicle of Highe... - 4 views
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After two years as president of the American Council on Education, I feel compelled to send a wake-up call to campus executives: If federal policy makers are now willing to bail out the nation's leading banks and buy equity stakes in auto makers because those companies are "too big to fail," they will probably have few reservations about regulating an education system that they now understand is "too important to fail."
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Regardless of party, policy makers are clearly aware of the importance of education and are demanding improved performance and more information, from preschool to graduate school. In this environment, we should expect college accreditation to come under significant scrutiny.
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It has also clearly signaled its interest in using data to measure institutional performance and student outcomes, and it has invested in state efforts to create student-data systems from pre-kindergarten through graduate school.
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Higher education has so far navigated its way through the environment of increased regulatory interest without substantial changes to our system of quality assurance or federally mandated outcomes assessment. But that has only bought us time. As we look ahead, we must keep three facts in mind: Interest in accountability is bipartisan, and the pendulum has swung toward more regulation in virtually all sectors. The economic crisis is likely to spur increased calls from policy makers to control college prices and demonstrate that students are getting value for the dollar. The size of the federal budget deficit will force everyone who receives federal support to produce more and better evidence that an investment of federal funds will pay dividends for individuals and society.
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If we do not seize the opportunity to strengthen voluntary peer accreditation as a rigorous test of institutional quality, grounded in appropriate measures of student learning, we place at risk a precious bulwark against excessive government intervention, a bulwark that has allowed American higher education to flourish. When it comes to safeguarding the quality, diversity, and independence of American higher education, accreditors hold the keys to the kingdom.
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share plain-language results of accreditation reviews with the public.
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all accreditors now require colleges and universities to put more emphasis on measuring student-learning outcomes. They should be equally vigilant about ensuring that those data are used to achieve improvements in outcomes
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It takes very little close reading to see through the self-serving statements here: namely that higher education institutions must do a better PR job pretending they are interested in meaningful reform so as to head off any real reform that migh come from the federal authorities.
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THEREFORE, let me voice a wakeup call for those who are really interested in reform--not that there are many.1.There will never be any meaningful reform unless we have a centralized and nationalized higher educational system. Leaving higher education in the hands of individual institutions is no longer effective and is in fact what has led to the present state we find ourselves in. Year after countless year we have been promised changes in higher education and year after year nothing changes. IF CHANGE IS TO COME IT MUST BE FORCED ONTO HIGHER EDUCATION FROM THE OUTSIDE.
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Higher education in America can no longer afford to be organized around the useless market capitalism that forces too many financially marginalized institutions to compete for less and less.
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Keeping Quiet by Pablo NerudaIf we were not so singled-mindedabout keeping our lives moving,and for once could do nothing,perhaps a huge silencemight interrupt this sadnessof never understanding ourselvesand of threatening ourselves with death.
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Declining Study Time Signals Falling Standards, Report Says - The Ticker - The Chronicl... - 0 views
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The amount of time spent studying has fallen drastically among full-time students in all demographic groups, whether they work or not, at all types of four-year colleges, according to a report released on Thursday by the American Enterprise Institute.
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they cater to students' preferences for leisure, the report says, a shift that may slow economic growth.
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Perhaps a partial explanation for resistance to innovations that promote authentic and group work?
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Home Page | The College Completion Agenda - 1 views
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The percentage of American adults with postsecondary credentials is not keeping pace with other industrialized nations. Improving postsecondary success for all our citizens, but most urgently for low-income and minority students, is critical to our nation's economic and social health. To help policymakers and educators achieve the goal of 55% by 2025, The College Board Advocacy & Policy Center has developed the College Completion Agenda
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Ranking Employees: Why Comparing Workers to Their Peers Can Often Backfire - Knowledge@... - 2 views
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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,
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"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."
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mong the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.
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Nothing is more compelling than data from actual workplace settings, but getting it is usually very hard."
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Instead, the job without the feedback attracted more workers -- 254, compared with 76 for the job with feedback.
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"This indicates that when people are great and they know it, they tend to slack off. But when they're at the bottom, and are told they're doing terribly, they are de-motivated," says Barankay.
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In the second stage of the experiment
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it seems that people would rather not know how they rank compared to others, even though when we surveyed these workers after the experiment, 74% said they wanted feedback about their rank."
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Of the workers in the control group, 66% came back for more work, compared with 42% in the treatment group. The members of the treatment group who returned were also 22% less productive than the control group. This seems to dispel the notion that giving people feedback might encourage high-performing workers to work harder to excel, and inspire low-ranked workers to make more of an effort.
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The aim was to determine whether giving people feedback affected their desire to do more work, as well as the quantity and quality of their work.
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top performers move on to new challenges and low performers have no viable options elsewhere.
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feedback about rank is detrimental to performance,"
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it is well documented that tournaments, where rankings are tied to prizes, bonuses and promotions, do inspire higher productivity and performance.
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"In workplaces where rankings and relative performance is very transparent, even without the intervention of management ... it may be better to attach financial incentives to rankings, as interpersonal comparisons without prizes may lead to lower effort," Barankay suggests. "In those office environments where people may not be able to assess and compare the performance of others, it may not be useful to just post a ranking without attaching prizes."
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"The key is to devote more time to thinking about whether to give feedback, and how each individual will respond to it. If, as the employer, you think a worker will respond positively to a ranking and feel inspired to work harder, then by all means do it. But it's imperative to think about it on an individual level."
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the conflation of feedback with ranking confounds this. What is not done and needs to be done is to compare the motivational impact of providing constructive feedback. Presumably the study uses ranking in a strictly comparative context as well, and we do not see the influence of feedback relative to an absolute scale. Still, much in this piece to ponder....
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Under Obama, Accreditation Is Still in the Hot Seat - Government - The Chronicle of Hig... - 1 views
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George Miller, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House education committee, said defining a credit hour is critical to ensure that students and taxpayers, through federal student aid, are not footing the bill for courses that are not worth the amount of credit being awarded.
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"Worth" opens up some interesting implications. Intended I suspect, to dampen courses like basket-weaving, the production of outcomes cannot be far off, the production of economic impact related to those outcomes a step or less behind.
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Senators also questioned the independence of accreditors, which are supported by dues from member institutions and governed by representatives of the colleges they accredit.
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Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the top Republican on the Senate Education Committee, has said he wants Congress to look beyond just problems in the for-profit sector. He said at a hearing last month that he would be "working to lay the groundwork for a broader, thorough, and more fair investigation into higher education" that would ask whether taxpayers are getting an appropriate value for the money they spend on all colleges.
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State and federal governments are better equipped to enforce consumer protections for students, say accreditors, who have traditionally focused on preserving academic quality.
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Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents about 3,000 colleges, said that over the past several years accrediting organizations have responded to the growing calls for accountability and transparency from the public and lawmakers. The groups, she said, have worked to better identify and judge student achievement and share more information about what they do and how well the institutions are performing.
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Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, said the debate boils down to whether accreditors should serve primarily as consumer protectors or continue their traditional role of monitoring academic quality more broadly.
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Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability & Productivity and a member of the Spellings Commission
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"We should be moving to more of a Consumer Reports for colleges, to provide the public with information that the college rankings do imperfectly," he said.
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accreditation will have to evolve to meet not only government's expectations but also the changing college
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market
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Nearly two years into the Obama Administration, colleges have not gotten the relief they expected from the contentious battles over measuring quality that defined the Bush Education Department.
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Bracing for the prospect of new rules and laws that could expand their responsibilities, accreditors and the institutions they monitor are defending the self-regulation colleges use to ensure academic quality. But they are also responding to the pressures from the White House and Capitol Hill by making some changes on their own, hoping to stanch the possibility of more far-reaching federal requirements.
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Advocates of change say the six regional and seven national accreditors have varying standards that are sometimes too lax, allowing for limited oversight of how credits are awarded, how much learning is accomplished, and what happens to the mission of institutions that change owners.
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Recruiters Pick State Schools, Pass on Ivies - WSJ.com - 0 views
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Recruiters say graduates of top public universities are often among the most prepared and well-rounded academically, and companies have found they fit well into their corporate cultures and over time have the best track record in their firms.
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Recruiter salaries, travel expenses, advertising and relocation costs run upwards of $500,000 to recruit 100 college grads, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
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The Journal asked companies to rank schools that produce the best-qualified graduates—overall and by major. Recru
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Partnerships also play a key role. Universities and companies strike research collaborations that often include student participation. Companies get an early look at promising students, leading to internships and job offers.
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Partnerships can help boost brand awareness among talented students. The economic climate led Dennis Cornell, head of recruiting for LSI Corp. of Milpitas, Calif., to narrow his on-campus recruiting to three schools where the tech firm wanted to expand its reputation:
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Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College? - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Educ... - 2 views
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Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.
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I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of persons attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning.
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As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down (something already happening I suspect) or drop-out rates will rise.
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The relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership is incompatible with this view
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Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher education apologists is causing more and more persons to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level –there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.Ds, other doctorates, or professional degrees.
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“Estimating Marginal Returns in Education,”
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In other words, even if on average, an investment in higher education yields a good, say 10 percent, rate of return, it does not follow that adding to existing investments will yield that return, partly for reasons outlined above.
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should we be subsidizing increasingly problematic educational programs for students whose prior academic record would suggest little likelihood of academic much less vocational success?
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I think the American people understand, albeit dimly, the logic above.
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Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.
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The tone is not the same as Berliner's, but the numbers suggest WSU's and others goals merit a second look.
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Commodification of Academic Research (Inside HIgher Ed) - 0 views
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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.
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stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News - 0 views
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In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
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2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views
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This session explores the notion that assessment for transformational learning is best utilized as a learning tool. By providing timely, transparent, and appropriate feedback, both to students and to the institution itself, learning is enhanced – a far different motive for assessment than is external accountability.
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decided to attend another session. Hersh was OK before lunch, but the talk by Pan looks more promising
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Academic and corporate communities agree on the urgent need for contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement in STEM fields. Participants will learn how leaders from academic departments and institutions have collaborated with leaders from the corporate and business community in regional networks to ensure that graduates meet the expectations of prospective employers and the public.
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here is another session with links to CTLT work, both harvesting gradebook and the ABET work
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Professor Pan will discuss the reflective teaching methods used to prepare students to recognize and mobilize community assets as they design, implement, and evaluate projects to improve public health.
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Students tasked to learn about a community, ride the bus, make a Doc appt. Then tasked to do a non-clinical health project in that community (they do plenty of clinical stuff elsewhere in the program). Project must build capacity in the community to survive after the student leaves. Example. Work with hispanic parents in Sacramento about parenting issue, ex getting kids to sleep on time. Student had identified problem in the community, but first project idea was show a video, which was not capacity building. Rather than showing the video, used the video as a template and made a new video. Families were actors. Result was spanish DVD that the community could own. Pan thinks this is increased capacity in the community.
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Freshman Survey annually examines the academic habits of mind of entering first-year students. Along with academic involvement, the survey examines diversity, civic engagement, college admissions and expectations of college.
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The project aims to promote faculty and student assessment of undergraduate research products in relation to outcomes associated with basic research skills and general undergraduate learning principles (communication and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and integration and application of knowledge).
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They focus educators on the magnitude of the challenge to prepare an ever-increasingly diverse, globally-connected student body with the knowledge, ability, processes, and confidence to adapt to diverse environments and respond creatively to the enormous issues facing humankind.
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One challenge of civic engagement in the co-curriculum is the merging of cost and outcome: creating meaningful experiences for students and the community with small staffs, on small budgets, while still having significant, purposeful impact.
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a)claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and b) counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences.
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This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes.
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Exciting pedagogies of engagement abound, including undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and international study. However, such experiences are typically optional and non-credit-bearing for students, and/or “on top of” the workload for faculty. This session explores strategies for integrating engaged learning into the institutional fabric (curriculum, student role, faculty role) and increasing access to these transformative experiences.
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hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy but how can this be provided in increasingly larger introductory classes?
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As educators seek innovative ways to manage knowledge and expand interdisciplinary attention to pressing global issues, as students and parents look for assurances that their tuition investment will pay professional dividends, and as alumni look for meaningful ways to give back to the institutions that nurtured and prepared them, colleges and universities can integrate these disparate goals through the Guilds, intergenerational membership networks that draw strength from the contributions of all of their members.
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Civic engagement learning derives its power from the engagement of students with real communities—local, national, and global. This panel explores the relationship between student learning and the contexts in which that learning unfolds by examining programs that place students in diverse contexts close to campus and far afield.
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For institutional assessment to make a difference for student learning its results must result in changes in classroom practice. This session explores ways in which the institutional assessment of student learning, such as the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, can be connected to our classrooms.
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Interdisciplinary Teaching and Object-Based Learning in Campus Museums
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To address pressing needs of their communities, government and non-profit agencies are requesting higher education to provide education in an array of human and social services. To serve these needs effectively, higher educationneeds to broaden and deepen its consultation with practitioners in designing new curricula. Colleges and universities would do well to consider a curriculum development model that requires consultation not only with potential employers, but also with practitioners and supervisors of practitioners.
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Should Academics be Active? Campuses and Cutting Edge Civic Engagement
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If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it? How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment?
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Purpose of university is not to grant degrees, it has something to do with learning. Keeling's perspective is that the learning should be transformative; changing perspective. Liberating and emancipatory Learning is a complex interaction among student and others, new knowledge and experience, event, own aspirations. learners construct meaning from these elements. "we change our minds" altering the brain at the micro-level Brain imaging research demonstrates that analogical learning (abstract) demands more from more areas of the brain than semantic (concrete) learning. Mind is not an abstraction, it is based in the brain, a working physical organ .Learner and the environment matter to the learning. Seeds magazine, current issue on brain imaging and learning. Segway from brain research to need for university to educate the whole student. Uses the term 'transformative learning' meaning to transform the learning (re-wire the brain) but does not use transformative assessment (see wikipedia).
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But as public debates roil, higher education has been more reactive than proactive on the question of how best to ensure that today’s students are fully prepared for a fast-paced future.
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Bologna process being adopted (slowly) in EU, the idea is to make academic degrees more interchangeable and understandable across the EU three elements * Qualification Frameworks (transnational, national, disciplinary). Frameworks are graduated, with increasing expertise and autonomy required for the upper levels. They sound like broad skills that we might recognize in the WSU CITR. Not clear how they are assessed * Tuning (benchmarking) process * Diploma Supplements (licensure, thesis, other capstone activities) these extend the information in the transcript. US equivalent might be the Kuali Students system for extending the transcript. Emerging dialog on American capability This dialog is coming from 2 directions * on campus * employers Connect to the Greater Exceptions (2000-2005) iniative. Concluded that American HE has islands of innovation. Lead to LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) Initiative (2005-2015). The dialog is converging because of several forces * Changes in the balance of economic and political power. "The rise of the rest (of the world)" * Global economy in which innovation is key to growth and prosperity LEAP attempts to frame the dialog (look for LEAP in AACU website). Miami-Dade CC has announced a LEAP-derived covenant, the goals must span all aspects of their programs. Define liberal education Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world intellectual and practical skills responsibility integrative skills Marker of success is (here is where the Transformative Gradebook fits in): evidence that students can apply the essential learning outcomes to complex, unscripted problems and real-world settings Current failure -- have not tracked our progress, or have found that we are not doing well. See AACU employer survey 5-10% percent of current graduates taking courses that would meet the global competencies (transcript analysis) See NSSE on Personal and social responsibility gains, less tha
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Dr. Pan will also talk about strategies for breaking down cultural barriers.
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Pan. found a non-profit agency to be a conduit and coordinator to level the power between univ and grass roots orgs. helped with cultural gaps.
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Everyone Else is Keynsian Now (from Inside Higher Ed) - 0 views
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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.
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2 Efforts to Provide Data on Colleges to Consumers Fall Short, Report Says - Administra... - 2 views
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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.
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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
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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,
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"If existing flaws are not resolved, the nation runs the risk of ending up in the worst of all worlds: the appearance of higher education accountability without the reality," the authors say.
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The two voluntary systems criticized in the study are the University and College Accountability Network, begun in September 2007 by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities to provide information about private colleges, and the Voluntary System of Accountability,
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it does not obligate institutions to gather or reveal any data that are not already available elsewhere,"
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associations are beginning to offer workshops and other opportunities for system participants to learn how to use the data they're collecting to improve the college experience for students, she said
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VSA has the testing lobby written all over it
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We may all appreciate the cultural context inhibiting public accountability but it is also important to understand that this same accountability is lacking internally where it effectively thwarts attempts to manage the institution rationally; i.e., informed with a continuous flow of mission-critical performance information. With the scant objective information at their command, college presidents and their associates must perform as shamans, reading the tea leaves of opinion and passion among stakeholders.
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On balance, America's institutions of higher education function in a managerial vacuum.
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More of the same and the discussion is familiar--our challenge is to bring this topic to the attention of our points.