E-learning is a growing trend at community colleges, according to survey results from the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) and Hewlett-Packard (HP).
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Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation - Early College High School Initiative - 5 views
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E-learning on the rise - 28 views
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E-learning is already used at 47 percent of community colleges and is expected to increase to 55 percent within two years. The survey of 578 community college faculty was conducted by Eric Liguori, an assistant professor at California State University.
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The top five benefits of e-learning identified by respondents are: It increases access through location and time-flexible learning. More resources and information are available to students 24/7. Teachers can use a wide variety of tools and methods for teaching. It is a good supplement to face-to-face curriculum. It can lead to a richer learning experience if integrated correctly, freeing up class time for more engaging activities. This experience is often referred to as “flipping the classroom.”
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When asked about the barriers to adopting online learning, faculty cited such concerns as doubt about its capability and reliability, acceptance by students and teachers, and lack of resources, such as time and technical support.
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Twenty-three percent of respondents said the effectiveness of e-learning depends on the resources available, including the format and features of courses. For example, e-learning is best when teachers are adequately trained to use it, there is high-quality content and curriculum design, it’s used in conjunction with real-world situations and there is opportunity for student-teacher interactions, discussion boards and collaborative projects.
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“Our survey looked at how community college faculty members are using e-learning as a cost-effective means” to increase completion rates and ensure that “students walk away with credentials that are meaningful in the workplace and that they are prepared for the careers they hope to pursue, including, for many, the start of entrepreneurial endeavors,” said NACCE President and CEO Heather Van Sickle.
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How to Improve Public Online Education: Report Offers a Model - Government - The Chroni... - 18 views
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education technology Teaching innovative higher education computers public online online education report government
shared by Jim Aird on 23 Apr 13
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they can improve their online-education efforts to help students find streamlined, affordable pathways to a degree.
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"Taken together, these steps result in something that looks less like an unorganized collection of Internet-based classes, and more like a true public university."
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I am always miffed at the people within Higher Ed who recognize that nothing about pedagogy has changed in 50 years except computers and PowerPoint but they still rationalize that nothing needs changed or fixed.
College Is Dead. Long Live College! | U.S. | TIME.com - 48 views
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A growing industry caters to college cheats - 26 views
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.“The students and the people who are selling these services have the idea that all that really matters is the end, and that the processes that get you there, aren’t really significant.”To fight cheating, she said, colleges need to do a better job of teaching the value and relevance of learning.
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Testing the Teachers - NYTimes.com - 79 views
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There has to be a better way to get data so schools themselves can figure out how they’re doing in comparison with their peers.
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If you go to the Web page of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and click on “assessment,” you will find a dazzling array of experiments that institutions are running to figure out how to measure learning.
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Some schools like Bowling Green and Portland State are doing portfolio assessments — which measure the quality of student papers and improvement over time. Some, like Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, use capstone assessment, creating a culminating project in which the students display their skills in a way that can be compared and measured.
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The challenge is not getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It’s mobilizing them to actually enact it in a way that’s real and transparent to outsiders.
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There's an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America's colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it's not clear how much actual benefit they are providing.
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The real economics of massive online courses (essay) | Inside Higher Ed - 2 views
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MOOC credentials education higher education
shared by Tracy Tuten on 09 Aug 12
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Is there a model out there, or an institution/student mix that could effectively utilize MOOCs in such a way as to get around this flaw? It’s hard to tell. Recent articles on Inside Higher Ed have suggested that distance education providers (like the University of Maryland’s University College – UMUC) may opt to certify the MOOCs that come out of these elite schools and bake them into their own online programs. Others suggest that MOOCs could be certified by other schools and embedded in prior learning portfolios.
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The fatal flaw that I referred to earlier is pretty apparent: the very notions of "mass, open" and selectivity just don’t lend themselves to a workable model that benefits both institutions and students. Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.
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In other words, as economists tell us, students themselves are an important input to education. The fact that no school uses a lottery system to determine who gets in means that determining who gets in matters a great deal to these schools, because it helps them control quality and head off the adverse effects of unqualified students either dropping out or performing poorly in career positions. For individual institutions, obtaining high quality inputs works to optimize the school’s objective function, which is maximizing prestige.
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We also know that there are plenty of low- to no-cost learning options available to people on a daily basis, from books on nearly every academic topic at the local library and on-the-job experience, to the television programming on the National Geographic, History and Discovery channels. If learning can and does take place everywhere, there has to be a specific reason that people would be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years of their life to get it from one particular source like a college. There is, of course, and again it’s the credential, because no matter how many years I spend diligently tuned to the History Channel, I’m simply not going to get a job as a high-school history teacher with “television watching” as the core of my resume, even if I both learned and retained far more information than I ever could have in a series of college history classes.
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Imagining College Without Grades :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for N... - 0 views
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A professor who tells his students that “grades are the death of composition.” Another said: “Grades create a facade of coherence.”
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politically impossible
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grades were squelching intellectual curiosity.
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growing use of e-portfolios
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most professors and students are much more likely to complain about grading than to praise its accuracy or value.
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the elimination of grades — if they are replaced with narrative evaluations, rubrics, and clear learning goals — results in more accountability and better ways for a colleges to measure the success not only of students but of its academic programs.
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the idea of consistent and clear grading just doesn’t reflect the mobility of students
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ending grades can mean much more work for both students and faculty members.
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When faculty members are providing written, detailed analyses of multiple course objectives and are also — for majors — relating performance to larger goals for the major, so much more is taking place she said, than in a letter grade.
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the training that colleges provide to professors before they start producing narrative evaluations, and officials of the no-grades colleges all said that training was extensive, and that faculty members needed mentors as they started out.
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they end up favoring the evaluation system
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News: The 'Prior Learning' Edge - Inside Higher Ed - 15 views
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An examination of the educational records of more than 62,000 adult undergraduates at 48 colleges finds that students who had sought and been awarded academic credit by their institutions for "prior learning" earned in the military, corporate training and other non-classroom settings were more than twice as likely to graduate, and to persist even if they did not graduate, than were their peers who had not earned such credit.
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“CAEL’s research confirms that prior-learning assessment can help adults move faster toward their associate’s and baccalaureate degrees. We need to see more institutions offering this option and more adults participating in it.”
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The concept of "prior learning assessment" is decades old, and it has grown to include multiple types of mechanisms for measuring knowledge and skills that students have accumulated through various types of formal and less formal formats, such corporate training, work experience, and independent study. The most common types of assessments include standardized exams developed by the College Board (the College Level Examination Program exams and Advanced Placement exams), the American Council of Education's guides for recognizing credit for instructional programs offered in the military and by employers, and institutional reviews of individualized student portfolios.
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credit awarded through prior learning assessments offers an opportunity to entice adults back to college with the prospect that they can build on learning they've already gained and reduce both the time and money they might have to expend to earn a credential.
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"Do PLA students have higher graduation rates because PLA enhances the self-esteem and motivation of students by showing them that they have already mastered college-level learning? Is it also because PLA students already possess characteristics that are associated with better academic outcomes? What institutional policies are influencing whether and how students are using (or not using) PLA, and whether or not this helps them achieve a shorter time to degree?"
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College Freshmen Stress Levels High, Survey Finds - NYTimes.com - 13 views
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In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.
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“More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support, and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students, as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.”
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“Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past,” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University. “These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.”
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For many young people, serious stress starts before college. The share of students who said on the survey that they had been frequently overwhelmed by all they had to do during their senior year of high school rose to 29 percent from 27 percent last year.
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The gender gap on that question was even larger than on emotional health, with 18 percent of the men saying they had been frequently overwhelmed, compared with 39 percent of the women.
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Should College Gossip Websites be Banned? « OPPapers Blog - 15 views
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Dennis Lynch collegeacb.com juicycampus.com collegeacb
shared by Sheri Stahler on 03 Feb 11
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The Chronicle on Higher Education reports on College ACB: Millsaps blocked access to the site a month ago after student leaders suggested a review of the site contents, said Brit Katz, vice president for student life and dean of students, in an e-mail to The Chronicle. Millsaps had also banned JuicyCampus. Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs and dean of students at Washington and Lee University, said administrators there pulled the plug late last year after their numerous requests to Mr. Frank to remove most content mentioning the university were denied. Ms. Watkins said a number of reported cases of cyberbullying among first-year female students prompted those requests. When asked whether restricting access to the site was a freedom-of-speech issue, Ms. Watkins and Mr. Katz both said their primary responsibilities were to prevent anonymous postings that name individuals
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AVID | Decades of College Dreams - 31 views
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AVID, Advancement Via Individual Determination, is a college readiness system for elementary through higher education that is designed to increase schoolwide learning and performance. The AVID College Readiness System (ACRS) accelerates student learning, uses research based methods of effective instruction, provides meaningful and motivational professional learning, and acts as a catalyst for systemic reform and change.
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A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 43 views
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But, in the past few generations, the imagery and rhetoric of academic marketing have cultivated a belief that college will be, if not decadent, at least primarily recreational: social activities, sporting events, and travel.
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Increasingly, students are buying an "experience" instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract customers, that's what's colleges are selling.
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a growing percentage of students are arriving at college without ever having written a research paper, read a novel, or taken an essay examination. And those students do not perceive that they have missed something in their education; after all, they have top grades. In that context, the demands of professors for different kinds of work can seem bewildering and unreasonable, and students naturally gravitate to courses with more-familiar expectations.
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Students increasingly are pressured to go to college not because they want to learn (much less become prepared for the duties of citizenship), but because they and their parents believe—perhaps rightly—that not going will exclude them from middle-class jobs.
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At most universities, a student is likely to be unknown to the professor and would expect to feel like a nuisance, a distraction from more important work.
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As academic expectations have decreased, social programming and extracurricular activities have expanded to fill more than the available time. That is particularly the case for residential students, for whom the possibility of social isolation is a source of great anxiety.
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College has become unaffordable for most people without substantial loans; essentially they are mortgaging their future in the expectation of greater earnings. In order to reduce borrowing, more and more students leave class early or arrive late or neglect assignments, because they are working to provide money for tuition or living expenses.
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As students' anxiety about the future increases, no amount of special pleading for general-education courses on history, literature, or philosophy—really anything that is not obviously job-related—will convince most students that they should take those courses seriously.
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But at the major universities, most professors are too busy to care about individual students, and it is easy to become lost amid a sea of equally disenchanted undergraduates looking for some kind of purpose—and not finding it.
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A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views
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at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
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What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
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students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
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Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
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As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
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Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
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Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
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It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
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Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
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Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
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Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
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Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
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Colleges Must Reach Out to Younger Students - Education Week - 11 views
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High School Graduates Feel Unprepared For College and Work, Survey Finds - College Boun... - 44 views
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5. Have an assessment late in high school so students can find out what they need for college (77 percent.)
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So, how can high schools better serve students and bridge this divide? Respondents' top suggestions for change: 1. Provide opportunities for real-world learning (90 percent);
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A recent survey of public high school graduates finds about half feel they are unprepared for life after high school and most would have worked harder if they had realized the expectations of college and the workplace.
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I'm not so sure that I believe that less than 1,500 graduates nationwide over the span of just three graduating classes is exactly representative of all high school grads in America, but at least it was conducted by a nonprofit and not one of our education deformer companies or a textbook publisher. Also, isn't a certain amount of laissez-faire attitude a normal teenage brain condition? "I wish I'd paid more attention in high school" was a major theme of conversation at *my* 20 year high school reunion last year (did I just date myself) BUT I did feel better prepared in study skills and habits, perhaps because in 1993 we weren't so test-centered. Just sayin' Thanks for sharing!
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10 Things Every College Professor Hates - Business Insider - 42 views
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NCES report: Students in 4 out of 5 high schools take college courses :: National Allia... - 0 views
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college report dual credit dual enrollment concurrent enrollment
shared by Randolph Hollingsworth on 15 May 13
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National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in U.S. DoE report on 2010-11 school year - estimated increase to 82% of all high schools offering college credit opportunities - most of which (77%) are offered on their high school campus in a "career center." A companion report on postsecondary providers of dual enrollment courses will be released in March. Full report available at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013001.pdf