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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Disrupting College - 3 views
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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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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! -
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?
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U.S. Urged to Raise Teachers' Status - NYTimes.com - 77 views
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“Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation,”
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“Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership.”
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In South Korea, teachers are known as ‘nation builders,’ and I think it’s time we treated our teachers with the same level of respect,” Mr. Obama said in a speech on education on Monday.
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“Make a concerted effort to raise the status of the teaching profession”
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University teaching programs in the high-scoring countries admit only the best students, and “teaching education programs in the U.S. must become more selective and more rigorous,”
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ROK banned "beating" in schools about a month ago. So things are indeed different. We can compare pedagogy, but can we compare culture and outcomes that are embedded in culture? When children leave the classroom to take the TIMMS or PISA test, the rest of the class stands to applaud. When I explained this to my students, they were dumbfounded that Korean kids did anything that wasn't directly connected to personal advantage.
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Free Social Teaching and Learning Network focused solely on education - 17 views
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SOPHIA is made possible by Capella University. Capella supports innovative and affordable pathways that extend access to education on a broad scale.
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shared by Javier E on 19 May 11
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The Decline of Final Exams - NYTimes.com - 52 views
ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-decline-of-final-exams
testing education university learning assessment
shared by Javier E on 19 May 11
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Keith O’Brien surveys a national decline in final exams, reflected at Harvard, where fewer than a quarter of the undergraduate courses scheduled the tests in the spring term last year.
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There’s nothing magical about finals, Bangert-Drowns added. They can be arbitrary and abstract — an inauthentic gauge of what someone knows.
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many still find value in the final exam. It might be stressful, even terrifying, but it has the singular power to force students to go back over material, think critically about what they have read, review hard-to-grasp-topics once more, and even talk about the subject matter with classmates and instructors — all of which enhance learning.
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Gender Games - Born on Sideline, Cheering Clamors to Be Sport - NYTimes.com - 20 views
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taking their place in a thriving American tradition that has been around for nearly as long as football
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taking their place in a thriving American tradition that has been around for nearly as long as football
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athletic feats of grace and strength
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a complicated and emotional question has arisen: has cheerleading become a true sport?
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For many women
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especially those who worked at the forefront of the push for equality in college sports, the answer for a long time was no
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endorsing an embarrassing holdover from a time when girls in tight-fitting outfits were expected to do little more than yell support for boys
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skeptical of high schools and universities that counted female cheerleaders as athletes as a way to evade their obligation to provide opportunities for women in more traditional sports, like softball and soccer
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Why should cheerleading not be considered a sport when it required a complex set of technical skills, physical fitness and real guts?
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School of Education at Johns Hopkins University-How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education - 80 views
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Put aside time for "student directed" questions, including "off-topic" subjects. Put it as an item in the daily agenda, create a lesson plan with this built in. -
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Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
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f they are unaware of their beliefs, values, and metaphors about learning, teaching, and the nature of knowledge itself
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Only by including the internal processes through which those externals are filtered will we gain a more complete perspective
News: 'Academically Adrift' - Inside Higher Ed - 40 views
www.insidehighered.com/...lege_students_don_t_learn_much
education learning assessment university US
shared by Javier E on 20 May 11
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Common Core Curriculum Maps | - 152 views
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themes
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literary forms
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grasp the relationship between local concerns and universal questions
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literature from around the world
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Russian
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Asian
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African/Middle Eastern
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flexibility
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Latin American
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select three out of the four
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historical and cultural context
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Embracing the Cloud: Caveat Professor - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 37 views
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My work as chief privacy and security officer at a large public university has, however, given me pause to ask if our posture toward risk prevents us from fully embracing technology at a moment of profound change.
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Consequently, faculty members are accepting major personal and institutional risk by using such third-party services without any institutional endorsement or support. How we provide those services requires a nuanced view of risk and goes to the heart of our willingness to trust our own faculty and staff members.
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The technologically savvy among us recognize that hard physical, virtual, and legal boundaries actually demark this world of aggressively competitive commercial entities. Our students, faculty, and staff often do not.
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But can we embrace the cloud? Can the faculty member who wears our institution's name in her title and e-mail address, to whom we've entrusted the academic and research mission of the institution, be trusted to reach into the cloud and pluck what she believes is the optimal tool to achieve her pedagogical aims and use it? Unfortunately, no. Many faculty and staff members simply use whatever service they choose, but they often do not have the knowledge or experience needed to evaluate those choices. And those who do try to work through the institution soon find themselves mired in bureaucracy.
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First we review the company's terms of service. Of course, we also ask the company for any information it can provide on its internal data security and privacy practices. Our purchasing unit rewrites the agreement to include all of the state-required procurement language; we also add our standard contract language on data security. All of this information is fed into some sort of risk assessment of varying degrees of formality, depending on the situation, and, frankly, the urgency. That leads to yet another round of modifications to the agreement, negotiations with the company, and, finally, if successful, circulation for signatures. After which we usually exhume the corpse of the long-deceased faculty member and give him approval to use the service in his class. We go through this process not from misguided love of bureaucracy, but because our institutions know of no other way to manage risk. That is, we have failed to transform ourselves so we can thrive and compete in the 21st century.
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But our faculty and staff are increasingly voting with their feet—they're more interested in the elegance, portability, and integration of commercial offerings, despite the inability to control how those programs change over time. By insisting on remaining with homegrown solutions, we are failing to fall in lockstep with those we support.
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Data security? Of course there are plenty of fly-by-night operations with terrible security practices. However, as the infrastructure market has matured (one of the generally unrecognized benefits of cloud services), more and more small companies can provide assurances of data security that would shame many of us even at large research-intensive institutions.
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If higher education is to break free of the ossified practices of the past, we must find ways to transfer risk acceptance into the faculty domain—that is, to enable faculty to accept risk. Such a transformation is beyond the ability of the IT department alone—it will require our campus officials, faculty senates, registrars, and research and compliance officers working together to deeply understand both the risks and the benefits
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The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views
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First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.
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Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
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Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
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The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.
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the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
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1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.
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intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
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2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
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they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
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3. Students tend to think less deeply.
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4. Students may fall apart when they fail.
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5. Students value ability more than effort
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This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
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They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
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When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
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It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
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But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
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just smart
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luck:
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tried hard
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task difficulty
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It bodes well for the future
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the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
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In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
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When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
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And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
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The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
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the problem with tests is not limited to their content.
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if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
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As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
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Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
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the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
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The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
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The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
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But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
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Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
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grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
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research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
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Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
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The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing. -
The Poor Quality of an Undergraduate Education - NYTimes.com - 30 views
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Harvard University Press - Field Notes on Science and Nature - 93 views
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Slideshow runs to reveal pictures from famous scientists' notebooks. Kids would be amazed to see the detail of work these hold and hopefully inspired to replicate the greats. -
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Thoreau - Walking - Webtext - 41 views
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When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-south-west. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks, would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.
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West = new + free, East = old + constrained Not a reference to world history, but to the American context (West = frontier). The Americas were the West (to Europe) and the West was America (as Turner/Billington argue).
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I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.
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There's Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 1 views
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magine a busy commuting student preparing both emotionally and intellectually for class by listening to a podcast on the drive to school, then reinforcing the day’s learning by listening to another podcast, or perhaps the same podcast, on the drive back home.
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Can I use video camera to capture in class reading? What kind of parental permission is needed?
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native expressiveness,
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s there a noncommercial alternative to Podshow, Odeo, or other such services? Yes: “Ourmedia: The Global Home for Grassroots Media” (http://www.ourmedia.org/).
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Apple’s iTunes version 4.9, which incorporates an extensive podcast directory-and-subscription service into the structure of the iTunes Music Store.
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Why is Apple’s embrace of podcasting troubling to educators? Because this easy-to-use audio-content manager just happens to sit inside a store that sells music.
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Listening is an activity. No good audience is passive.
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Done well, podcasting can reveal to students, faculty, staff, communities—even the world—the essential humanity at the heart of higher education. Among the impressive facilities and intricate processes, colleges and universities are essentially collections of human beings who seek to share the fruits of their labors with the world that helps support them. If this position seems extreme or sentimental, consider Todd Cochrane’s assertion: “Podcasting represents a new way for individuals to communicate about the things they love. They can actually broadcast content that comes from their hearts.”10 If a mass-market text on podcasting begins by stressing the affective dimension of this new medium, educators would do well to think about how they might harness that energy in their teaching and learning practices.
