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Maureen Greenbaum

'Interactive Learning Spaces' at the center of Ball State U.'s faculty development prog... - 29 views

  • The rooms are part of a larger faculty development program intended to promote active learning techniques and cut down on lecturing
  • university is researching whether teaching at-risk students -- those withdrawing from or earning a D or F in a basic math course -- in the classrooms could improve academic outcomes and, eventually, graduation rates.
  • Pavlechko described the two spaces as “intake classrooms” -- faculty members who work in the development program are required to teach in them for two semesters. By the end of this academic year, the classrooms will have hosted 68 faculty members representing 29 of the university’s 48 departments and more than 3,500 students.
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  • How do we set ourselves apart? In our case, by the development of these interactive learning space classrooms, we are demonstrating to everyone that we are committed to the concept of faculty development.”
  • researchers found at-risk students who took the course in classrooms that promoted active learning (which included some rooms other than the renovated ones) were 2.8 times more likely to succeed -- that is, to earn a grade higher than a D -- than students in traditional classrooms.
  • The company has surveyed hundreds of students and faculty members at the universities it has worked with, and says it has found a statistically significant correlation between classroom configuration and student engagement. The survey doesn't include any academic results.
  • “We actually found a fairly moderate to strong correlation between what they think of these areas and if they think they have the ability to get a higher grade -- or their motivation to attend class and also their engagement in class,”
  • “Perception-wise, students are telling us ‘I can do better when I’m in these spaces,’ ” Jones said. “Maybe that’s enough of a win?”
D. S. Koelling

Shared Governance Is a Myth - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 14 views

  • It takes years of rank and the bitter­sweet experience of extensive committee service to realize that faculty influence on the operation of the university is an illusion, and that shared governance is a myth.
  • Committees report to administrative officers who are at liberty to accept, reject, or substantially alter faculty recommendations.
  • One would think that faculty senates exercise jurisdiction over a range of college life and policy. In reality, the right of many senates does not extend beyond making recommendations to the president, who is under no obligation to accept them.
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  • A more probable source of this way of doing business is the residue of an old ideal of the university. Such survivals of previous practices are not unusual in social life. Physicians, for example, experience a struggle between two competing understandings of their field: the prevalent view that treating patients is a business, and the residue of the old ideal that it is a calling. Ministers live the same ambiguity. Faculty committees constitute the respect that today's university pays to the old notion that it is a community of students and scholars. The impotence of the committees is acknowledgment that at this time in history, institutions of higher education are business ventures, in certain ways similar to factories.
  • If education is primarily a business, managers hire the faculty. If universities are communities of students and scholars, faculty members hire the managers.
  • The growing disempowerment of the faculty is accelerated by the distance of governing boards from campus processes.
Ed Webb

Dawn of the cyberstudent | University challenge | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • students often have more experience of using new technologies than many university managers — even if they need guidance in using them effectively
    • Ed Webb
       
      And there's the rub. Students can often read, too, in the basic sense. But our job as higher educators is to get them to really read, to read critically and do something with that reading. So, too, with the affordances of web2.0.
  • the research process is likely to become much more open
    • Ed Webb
       
      We can hope
  • a balance that suits them, which may lead to more varying degrees of face-to-face and online contact,
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  • "If you are in Second Life listening to a lecture, your ability to fly through a bush isn't that relevant,
  • All this will put added pressure on university staff, with increasing demands to respond to students 24/7. Read suggests one answer could be for universities in different parts of the world to share the load so that, as often happens already in industry "the work moves around with the sun".
    • Ed Webb
       
      Interesting concept. Dickinson and other internationally-connected institutions would be in good shape to innovate here.
  • learning culture
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    Guardian on how higher ed will have to adapt. Not sure the revolution is here quite yet.
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    "Cyberstudent" is a hideous term.
Marge Runkle

Dangerously Irrelevant: Top posts - 1 views

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    Scott McLeod - Ruminations on technology, leadership, and the future of our schools. academia, academic, administration, administrator, administrators, assistant principals, CASTLE, college, colleges, district, districts, edublog, edublogosphere, edublogs, education, educational administration, educational leadership, educational technology, educational technology leadership, higher education, leaders, leadership, leadership development, leadership preparation, leadership training, learners, learning, McLeod, postsecondary, principal, principals, professional development, school, school administration, school administrator, school administrators, school districts, school leaders, school principals, school superintendents, schools, Scott McLeod, scottmcleod, staff development, student, students, superintendent, superintendents, teacher, teachers, teaching, technology, technology coordinators, technology integration, technology leadership, training, UCEA, universities, university
Julie Golden

Need Your Help!! - 35 views

New Link below. Thanks so much for letting me know. Please consider taking my survey. It is anonymous, so I won't be able to send a proper thank you.Please know that I will pay your kindness forwa...

Web 2.0 elearning collaboration E-learning teaching education higher ed edtech

Abir Qasem

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 56 views

shared by Abir Qasem on 09 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • The common experience is that getting admitted is the most exhausting part. After that, the struggle mainly is financial. 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.
  • Academically Adrift ends on a depressing note: "A renewed commitment to improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes to the organizational cultures of colleges and universities." Institutions are inherently conservative; they do not change easily. Many leaps of faith are necessary, and the people involved—teachers, students, parents, administrators, lawmakers, and others—have so many fundamental disagreements about the purposes of higher education that it is hard to know where to begin the conversation. It's far easier to make cuts to an inherently broken system than to begin building something new.
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  • The student as consumer
  • Changing forms of literac
  • Declining academic engagement.
  • Alienation from professors
  • Expanding social and extracurricular commitments.
  • The escalating cost of education.
  • Students feeling disillusioned, bored, apathetic, scared, and trapped
  • Anxiety about future employment.
Sheri Stahler

Should College Gossip Websites be Banned? « OPPapers Blog - 15 views

  • Should College Gossip Websites be Banned?
  • 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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    Review Chronicle article - some schools are banning collegeacb
Thieme Hennis

MOOCs: The cutting announcement of the wrong revolution | betrokken wetenschap - 27 views

  • A critical assessment of mainstream of higher education reveals that universities spent most energy on delivery of knowledge. Application of knowledge is dominated by ‘near transfer’, which means that students learn to give practical examples of theoretical concepts. ‘Far transfer’ originates from the analysis and solving of real problems, without prior exposure to cues regarding relevant knowledge. It occurs in Schools that deploy problem- or project-based learning. Exchange of codified and practical knowledge is absent in general. It might take place during internships, but projects outside the university are better and moreover, they offer opportunity for integration with other learning processes.
  • A balanced and integrated approach of the three learning processes mentioned above is occurring in only few universities. Elsewhere, students learn (and forget) lots of knowledge, have only limited experience with the application of knowledge and are ignorant of the clash between codified and practical knowledge. Consequently, the majority of our universities are disavowing their main goal, the development of ‘readiness for society’. It is this verdict that justifies a revolution in higher education.
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    interesting comments about different types of transfer, and the role of MOOCs.
webExplorations

Disrupting College - 3 views

  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
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  • Recommendations for existing institutions of higher education also emerge from an understanding of disruptive innovation. These colleges and universities should: Apply the correct business model for the task. These institutions have conflated value propositions and business models, which creates significant, unsustainable overhead costs. Drive the disruptive innovation. Some institutions have this opportunity, but to do so, they need to set up an autonomous business model unencumbered by their existing processes and priorities. They can leverage their existing fixed resources in this autonomous model to give themselves a cost advantage over what to this point have been the low-cost disruptive innovators. Develop a strategy of focus. The historical strategy of trying to be great at everything and mimic institutions such as Harvard is not a viable strategy going forward. Frame online learning as a sustaining innovation. Institutions can use this new technology to disrupt the existing classroom model to extend convenience to many more students as well as provide a better learning experience.
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    An article showing how online learning is a disruptive technology. Shining [the challenges of today's higher ed] through the lens of these theories on innovation will provide some insights into how we can move forward and a language that allows people to come together to frame these challenges in ways that will create a much higher chance of success. This report assumes that everyone is adept at online learning. This is not the case and students will have to be trained on how to be effective online learners. Courses will also have to address multiple learning styles and not just the read/write that most online courses currently are programmed for. Despite this missing piece, this is a very important article that focuses on some very key issues of our current higher ed system. The recommendations at the end of the article for policy makers are very apt. Highly recommended reading!
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    Are high schools preparing students for success in college and careers when what we do is so very different from what they will experience when they leave our little boxes?
smilex3md

College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one. - The Washington Post - 32 views

  • What truly makes an education valuable: the effort the student puts into it.
  • Unlike a car, college requires the “buyer” to do most of the work to obtain its value. The value of a degree depends more on the student’s input than on the college’s curriculum.
  • Yet most public discussion of higher ed today pretends that students simply receive their education from colleges the way a person walks out of Best Buy with a television.
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  • If colleges are responsible for outcomes, then students can feel entitled to classes that do not push them too hard, to high grades and to material that does not challenge their assumptions or make them uncomfortable.
  • This point is made succinctly by an apocryphal story about a university president who said this to new freshmen each year: “For those of you who have come here in order to get a degree, congratulations, I have good news for you. I am giving you your degree today and you can go home now. For those who came to get an education, welcome to four great years of learning at this university.”
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    "College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one."
Ed Webb

Times Higher Education - Dummies' guides to teaching insult our intelligence - 0 views

  • if you encourage discussion in class, you have to be prepared for your students to arrive at conclusions that are unpalatable to you.
  • When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer. My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!
  • Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers. A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.
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  • I would have preferred that David Pritchard had written it; his comments above are perfect.
  • Most colleagues with excellent teaching reputations seem not to oppose training per se, but bad training.
Dimitris Tzouris

Diagnosing the Tablet Fever in Higher Education - 17 views

  • So it's worth taking a careful look at whether the company will once again create a new category of device that make waves in education -- as it did with personal computers, digital music players, and smartphones -- or whether the iPad and other tabletss might be doomed to remain a niche offering.
  • Mr. Jobs did mention iTunesU twice when listing the kinds of content that could be viewed on the iPad, referring to the company's partnership with many colleges to offer them free space for multimedia content like lecture recordings. But he otherwise focused on consumer uses -- watching movies, viewing photos, sending e-mail messages, and reading novels published by five trade publishers mentioned at the event. That does not mean that the company won't later promote the iPad's use on campuses, though, since it waited until after iPods and iPhones were established before beginning to work more heavily with colleges to promote those in education.
  • the biggest impact of the iPad would be in the textbook market.
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  • only 2 percent of students said they bought an e-textbook this past fall semester.
  • The City University of New York, for instance, is looking closely at encouraging e-textbooks as part of an effort to lower student costs. "At end of the day, it's how do you drive savings for our students, who are feeling a great economic impact," said Brian Cohen, CUNY's chief information officer.
  • If students do buy them and begin to carry them around campus, they could be a more powerful educational tool than laptop computers.
  • Jim Groom, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, expressed weariness with all the hype around the Apple announcement. He said he is concerned about Apple's policies of requiring all applications to be approved by the company before being allowed in its store, just as it does with the iPhone. And he said that Apple's strategy is to make the Web more commercial, rather than an open frontier. "It offers a real threat to the Web," he said.
  • He also pointed out that several PC manufacturers have sold tablet computers before, which have been tried enthusiastically in classrooms. Their promise is that they make it easy for professors to walk around classrooms while holding the computer, while allowing them to wirelessly project information to a screen at the front of the room. But despite initial hype, very few PC tablets are being used in college classrooms, he said. Now that Apple's long-awaited secret is out, the harder questions might be whether the iPad is the long-awaited education computer.
marcmancinelli

Think Again: Education - By Ben Wildavsky | Foreign Policy - 31 views

  • But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.
  • By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
    • marcmancinelli
       
      US has long been mediocre or at the bottom of international comparisons, but it's not a zer-sum game
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  • J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, argues that the latest PISA test "underscores the need for integrating reasoning and sense making in our teaching of mathematics." Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, claims that the same results "tell us … that if you don't make smart investments in teachers, respect them, or involve them in decision-making, as the top-performing countries do, students pay a price."
    • marcmancinelli
       
      People use crises to advance their own agendas...
  • But don't expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age -- there wasn't one.
  • According to the most recent statistics, the U.S. share of foreign students fell from 24 percent in 2000 to just below 19 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, countries like Australia, Canada, and Japan saw increased market shares from their 2000 levels, though they are still far below the American numbers.
  • And even with its declining share, the United States still commands 9 percentage points more of the market than its nearest competitor, Britain.
  • A 2008 Rand Corp. report found that nearly two-thirds of the most highly cited articles in science and technology come from the United States, and seven in 10 Nobel Prize winners are employed by American universities. And the United States spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent by China, the European Union, and Japan in 2006.
  • But over the long term, exactly where countries sit in the university hierarchy will be less and less relevant, as Americans' understanding of who is "us" and who is "them" gradually changes. Already, a historically unprecedented level of student and faculty mobility has become a defining characteristic of global higher education. Cross-border scientific collaboration, as measured by the volume of publications by co-authors from different countries, has more than doubled in two decades.
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    A great perspective piece on American education compared to the world.
anonymous

University Business - May 2011 [36] - 0 views

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    Collaboration Station: Designing an effective group study space - whether it's out in the open or behind a closed door - takes a team. By Melissa Ezarik (great article on how design impacts study spaces in higher ed)
grayberg

Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education - 48 views

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    This article is one of the many written by D. Randy Garrison on the value of e-learning both as an independent entity and (as in this article) part of the blended learning environment. The authors are Dr. D. Randy Garrison, professor and academic director of Learning Commons at the University of Calgary; and Dr. Heather Kanuka, professor and academic director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta. Both authors have written extensively on the topic of e-learning, distance education, and adult education. This article discusses the potential of blended learning in higher education. The authors conclude that blended learning can have a substantial benefit for the student both in terms of logistics and educational satisfaction. "Blended learning is about rethinking and redesigning the teaching and learning relationship." However, it requires that the program's administrative and leadership issues are addressed and a solid action plan is in place. A "community of inquiry" must be formed by good course design which can be at the same time quite simple and yet complex. This topic is of great interest to me as I would like to reinstate a successful blended learning program at the college where I teach.
Smith Shots

Discovery learning is the new higher learning - The Globe and Mail - 32 views

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    How do your experiences as a student or teacher relate to the article? What changes do you suggest?
Martin Burrett

Girls need more positive experiences of ball skills - 3 views

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    "Children's positive perception of moving is an important supporter for natural physical activity and developing motor skills. A study at the University of Jyväskylä suggests that children had high perceptions of motor skills. Some gender differences were identified, however: girls were better in locomotor skills and boys had higher perception and actual skills in ball skills. "Because ball skills are typically utilized in versatile surroundings and good ball skills are a predictor for more frequent physical activity levels in adolescence, we should encourage girls to play more with balls already in early education," says PhD student Donna Niemistö from Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences. "In boys, there could be more locomotor skills like galloping and hopping involved. Niemistö concludes, "All children regardless of gender have a right to have positive and encouraging experiences of movement.""
Joline Blais

Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know It - NYTimes.com - 33 views

  • GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
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    This is a must read. Taylor's push to eliminate departments sounds much like what Liz Coleman did at Bennington a few years ago.
Roland Gesthuizen

MOOCs Are Finally Being Analyzed by Educators . . . What's the Verdict? | EdTech Magazine - 24 views

  • the best hardware and software for student engagement and learning is a professor that cares about teaching and is interested in improving student learning. The tools they use are just a means to solve the problems they are trying to overcome in their classroom and move their students to a new level. You select the best tool for the job at hand.
  • exciting to think what crowdsourcing could do to gather and catalog data for researchers and what it could mean for just about all fields in academia. It could have a big impact on how we teach
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    "It's a challenging process, and it requires experienced educators and technologists to find value in the data. For that reason, Duke University's Randy Riddle has been working with professors and other faculty for more the last 13 years, honing his expertise and delivering tools that boost engagement and learning. "
Maureen Greenbaum

Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States, 2013 | The Sloan Consortium - 34 views

  • 7.1 million of higher education students are taking at least one online course. The 6.1 % growth rate represents over 400,000 additional students taking at least one online course. The percent of academic leaders rating the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those as in face-to-face instruction, grew from 57% in 2003 to 74% in 2013. The number of students taking at least one online course continued to grow at a rate far in excess of overall enrollments, but the rate was the lowest in a decade.
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    Using responses from more than 2,800 colleges and universities, this study is aimed at answering fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education: Download 45 page pdf
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