CTLT and Friends

Zemsky, chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education, wrote in The Chronicle in August. Shifting to a three-year baccalaureate, Zemsky added, would force universities to "judge whether their shorter degree programs were achieving the same learning outcomes as their four-year programs had promised; they would find themselves in need of the performance measures they had hitherto eschewed." The idea has stirred some support, as well as considerable opposition.

the reality is that the question of whether or not this makes sense may have already been made for us by the Bologna Process, which has been moving toward mainstreaming and standardizing three-year degrees across the European Union and beyond (46 countries are participating) for some time now.

This idea treats an academic credit as a purchasable commodity, and a college experience as quantifiable, subject to rules of efficiency rather than humane values. In reality, so-called "credits" have no standard meaning or value. Furthermore, the idea on its own is superficial. Why not two years? One? Five?

"There are … disturbing signs that many students who do earn degrees have not actually mastered the reading, writing, and thinking skills we expect of college graduates. Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined."

But a major contributing factor is that the customers of higher education—students, parents, and employers—have few true measures of quality on which to rely. Is a Harvard education really better than that from a typical flagship state university, or does Harvard just benefit from being able to enroll better students? Without measures of value added in higher education, that's difficult, if not impossible, to determine.

Yet what is remarkable about the survey is that participating institutions generally do not release the results so that parents and students can compare their performance with those of other colleges.

Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell's talk on the future of gaming is thought provoking. It gives some interesting insights into what educational assessment might look like by mid 21st Century.

Fourth, an observation: Schools tend to pose problems to students in the form of puzzles far more than in the form of games. This can result in students being taught to think that there is an answer to every question, a solution to every problem. There is an endless array of secrets that others know and you don’t. When students leave school they frequently find that problems in the “real world” tend not to have “once and for all” solutions. Many problems seem to have no solution at all. People create problems themselves and solve problems created by others. They begin to think in terms of strategies for coping with their problems, strategies that serve their ends but can be expected to conflict with other people’s goals. Therefore a puzzle-based education might not prepare people for life after school as well as a game-based education might.

they should do so in ways that reinforce the behaviors they want to see -- and avoid the kinds of perverse incentives that are so evident in many policies today.

This is especially true, several speakers argued, on the thorniest of higher education accountability questions -- those related to improving student outcomes.

Oh, and one or two people actually talked about how nice it would be if policy makers still envisioned college as a place where people learn about citizenship or just become educated for education's sake.)

Several years ago, a small group of faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington decided to do something about the problem. The key, they concluded, was to construct every history course around two core skills of their discipline: assembling evidence and interpreting it.

The historians at Indiana have tried to help students through several specific bottlenecks by dividing large concepts into smaller, evidence-related steps. (See the box below.)

"Students come into our classrooms believing that history is about stories full of names and dates," says Arlene J. Díaz, an associate professor of history at Indiana who is one of four directors of the department's History Learning Project, as the redesign effort is known. But in courses, "they discover that history is actually about interpretation, evidence, and argument."

I actually learned something in these classes for 3 main reasons. The first reason was that the class size was small, and my interaction with my classmates and professor/teacher made the material meaningful and educational. Secondly, the essays required for these classes pushed me in my writing skills, and promoted independent research and construction of ideas through writing.

Taking the class with students who were serious and knowledgeable about their field of study made my experience educational. Sitting in a large lecture hall with 200 other students who also are taking the class just to get the requirement is not educationally stimulating.

Spending money on classes that don’t have any impact is especially hard now that tuition has gone through the roof. Requiring less classes of greater quality will help alleviate this problem and help students graduate on time.

the goal of the program is for students to submit their portfolios at the start of their junior year, and only about 34 percent are managing to do that.

Writing Assessment Program received the 2009 “Writing Program Certificate of Excellence”

If students delay completing their portfolio until late in their junior year, or into their senior year, she said, “it undermines the instructional integrity of the assessment.”

“Well-attended lectures were well-watched; poorly attended lectures were not watched,” Stringer said, pointing to research she had conducted at Stanford. "If you’re bad, you’re bad. If you’re bad online, you’re bad in lectures, students don’t come.”

Our students at Berkeley tell us that this is supplemental material, and it doesn’t affect their decision to attend class,” said Mara Hancock, director for educational technologies at the University of California at Berkeley

The faculty’s general unwillingness to work with lecture capture technology prompted Purdue to enlist the educational technology firm Echo360 to formulate a work-around solution that would require minimal cooperation from professors.