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George Bradford

Q&A with authors of book arguing that learning is waning in higher ed | Inside High... - 0 views

  • the agenda focused on the quality of learning
  • Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, longtime scholars and administrators
  • complain that institutions have overemphasized rankings and enrollment growth and sports and research
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Instead, they make the case that too little of what happens in institutions of "higher education" deserves to be called "higher learning" -- "learning that prepares students to think creatively and critically, communicate effectively, and excel in responding to the challenges of life, work and citizenship."
  • most have focused on the rising price of college tuition and the declining productivity of the U.S. "system" of higher ed. Yours zeroes in on whether students are learning enough. Why is that the most important issue in your eyes?
  • A. There’s no question that high costs are a problem. But low value is a bigger problem. No matter what the cost is, higher education is overpriced if it fails to deliver on its most basic promise: learning.
  • We are facing a national crisis in higher learning, or, rather, in the lack thereof. Improving efficiency and lowering costs are just not enough; we need to improve value. And we can only improve value by increasing the quality and quantity of learning in college.
  • A: We know from both research and experience that the greater the amount of time, effort, and feedback, the greater the amount of higher learning. Logically, then, we want more students to stay in and complete college, and we would agree that promoting retention and completion are appropriate and needed public policy. But just being in college and getting through, accumulating enough credits to get a degree, are not sufficient. Access, retention, and completion are not -- or, at least, should not be -- considered ends in themselves. We should not uncouple them from the primary purpose of college, which is higher learning. So we suggest focusing on learning, because in fact the more success we have in promoting significant learning, the greater will be retention and completion.
  • Faculty were educated to be masters of a discipline and producers of new knowledge. Few were required in their graduate programs to learn about learning and teaching, or to practice and improve their teaching skills.
  • So faculty are behaving exactly as they have been educated, acculturated, and reinforced to do. The culture of higher education generally does not elevate teaching, and its intended purpose, learning, to high priority.
  • In our consulting work we regularly encounter dedicated faculty members who are interested in students, focused on learning, motivated to improve their teaching, and struggling to balance those commitments with the demands of promotion and tenure. On most campuses, faculty and institutional culture provide counter-incentives to faculty who want to hold students to higher standards, raise their expectations for student effort and work, and provide abundant and timely feedback. As we argue in our book, what is then needed is a fundamental cultural change on most campuses and in the field of higher education. Faculty must both lead and be at the center of such change.
  • Our concern is about how implementing a three-year undergraduate curriculum and degree would affect the quality and quantity of learning. Maintaining current curriculums, pedagogy, and levels of student effort, but compacting undergraduate education into three versus four years, might increase certain efficiencies, but will not improve educational value.
  • We know that achieving the key desired outcomes of higher learning is a cumulative, collective process that takes time and demands integration and synthesis from the learner.
  • Students come to college inadequately prepared for college-level work as it is; even four years may not be adequate for many to learn enough.
  • If reduction of time to degree is implemented, it will be essential to determine how it affects the efficacy of higher learning.
  • Q. The undergraduate program you outline for producing a true culture of "higher learning" includes a lot of elements -- across-the-board first-year seminars, comprehensive exams, capstone courses/experiences -- that can be costly to institute as broadly as you recommend. How big an impediment are institutional finances to your agenda, especially in an era of diminishing (or at least flattening) resources?
  • A. Budgets express institutional priorities. As it is, too many budgets reflect priorities that have little to do with learning -- high-priced varsity athletic coaches and programs, expensive and elaborate facilities, and, often, reduced teaching loads to allow professors to spend less time with undergraduates and more time on research.
  • what we are proposing should not be seen as additions to a currently dysfunctional system, but as reallocations of resources toward learning. More is not necessarily better; better is more.
  • Still missing, though, are two things: first, operational definitions of these outcomes adapted to the missions, contexts, and student bodies of individual institutions, and second, ways of knowing such learning when we see it. These needs speak to the imperative for appropriate assessment of learning -- not necessarily done by common exams across all colleges and universities (although doing so would allow for some useful peer-campus benchmarking) but certainly by diligent, rigorous assessment practices that document what learning is taking place on each campus.
  • We think it is reasonable to expect that each institution assess students’ learning of commonly agreed learning goals and make public how such assessment is taking place and what the results are. Over time, we would learn which learning and assessment methods are most effective. Without serious assessment, the establishment of core learning outcomes will be futile and unproductive.
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    With most critics of higher education focused on rising prices or on whether American colleges and universities are producing enough degree and certificate holders with sufficient skills to keep the U.S. economy vibrant and competitive -- the latter known in shorthand as the "completion agenda" -- a few analysts are homing in on the quality and rigor of what students are learning (or not) en route to those credentials. Last year's Academically Adrift set the tone, providing data suggesting that many colleges are imposing relatively minimal academic demands on their students and that, perhaps as a result, many students do not appear to gain in some measures of cognitive abilities as they move through college. The authors of We're Losing Our Minds (Palgrave MacMillan) add their own clamoring to the agenda focused on the quality of learning. Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, longtime scholars and administrators, describe themselves as "friendly critics" of higher education, and unlike many of academe's naysayers, they don't spend a lot of time trashing the faculty as overpaid and underworked or bashing administrators as fat-cat corporatizers (though they do complain that institutions have overemphasized rankings and enrollment growth and sports and research -- take your pick depending on institution type).
George Bradford

An Australian University Boosts Retention With Mentoring - Global - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views

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    March 11, 2012 An Australian University Boosts Retention With Mentoring David Dare ParkerSamantha Saw (left), mentor-program administrative assistant, and Amy Hetherington, prospective-student adviser, help run Curtin U.'s mentorship program. The university started the program after discovering that 95 percent of students who dropped out had talked to no one. By David L. Wheeler Seven years ago, Curtin University administrators were unhappy to discover that their institution had middle-of-the pack student-retention numbers among Australia's 39 universities. They set out to change that. Now, with the addition of student-led mentoring and other programs, the university calculates that it prevents about 300 students a year from dropping out and thus saves at least $3.2-million (U.S.) annually in tuition and fees that would have been lost. The mentoring program also helps students "make connections and friends sooner than if they were left on their own," says Amanda Smith, the mentor-program coordinator.
George Bradford

How should faculty deal with classroom disruptors | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    Class Problem March 26, 2012 - 3:00am By Kaustuv Basu The YouTube video of a Florida Atlantic University student losing control last week in a classroom and threatening her classmates has gone viral, disturbing many who teach in college classrooms. Campus safety experts say that the clip reveals challenges faced by faculty members who are usually the first point of contact when it comes to disruption in the classroom -- and who sometimes may not be trained on how to respond.
George Bradford

No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month Tuition for Onlin... - 0 views

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    March 29, 2012 No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month Tuition for Online Courses Matt McLoone Of his tuition pricing for New Charter University, the educational entrepreneur Gene Wade says: "This is not buying a house. This is like, do I want to get cable?"Enlarge Image By Marc Parry It's a higher-education puzzle: Students are flocking to Western Governors University, driving growth of 30 to 40 percent each year. You might expect that competitors would be clamoring to copy the nonprofit online institution's model, which focuses on whether students can show "competencies" rather than on counting how much time they've spent in class. So why haven't they? Two reasons, says the education entrepreneur Gene Wade. One, financial-aid regulatory problems that arise with self-paced models that aren't based on seat time. And two, opposition to how Western Governors changes the role of professor, chopping it into "course mentors" who help students master material, and graders who evaluate homework but do no teaching.
George Bradford

U21 Rankings of National Higher Education Systems - 0 views

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    U21 Rankings of National Higher Education Systems A ranking of higher education systems based on resources, environment, connectivity and output. New research into national education systems gives the first ranking of countries and territories which are the 'best' at providing higher education. Universitas 21 has developed the ranking as a benchmark for governments, education institutions and individuals. It aims to highlight the importance of creating a strong environment for higher education institutions to contribute to economic and cultural development, provide a high-quality experience for students and help institutions compete for overseas applicants.
George Bradford

Bill Gates on Higher Education, Part 2 - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    Bill Gates on Higher Education, Part 2 June 26, 2012, 6:31 pm By Jeffrey R. Young
George Bradford

A Conversation With Bill Gates - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    June 25, 2012 A Conversation With Bill Gates About the Future of Higher Education By Jeffrey R. Young Bill Gates never finished college, but he is one of the single most powerful figures shaping higher education today. That influence comes through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, perhaps the world's richest philanthropy, which he co-chairs and which has made education one of its key missions.
George Bradford

Early Computing's 'Deal With the Devil' - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    July 9, 2012 Early Computing's 'Deal With the Devil' Victoria StoddenGeorge Dyson, son of the physicist Freeman Dyson and author of Turing's Cathedral, grew up playing with discarded bits of early computers at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.Enlarge Image By Marc Parry In 1936, the British logician Alan Turing imagined a universal computing machine. In the wake of World War II, at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, a team of mathematicians and engineers built one. The machine stood roughly the size of four refrigerators. People called it Maniac, for Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer. At its heart was "a 32-by-32-by-40 bit matrix of high-speed, random-access memory-the nucleus of all things digital ever since," writes George Dyson in a new book, Turing's Cathedral (Pantheon Books). How that computer came to be, he says, is the story of "a deal with the devil." Mathematicians built a machine that helped create the hydrogen bomb. In exchange, they got a new breed of computer that enabled incredible scientific progress.
George Bradford

'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas - College 2.0 - T... - 0 views

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    'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas By Jeffrey R. Young The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market.
George Bradford

From Idea to Action: Promoting Responsible Management Education Through a Semester-Long... - 0 views

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    From Idea to Action: Promoting Responsible Management Education Through a Semester-Long Academic Integrity Learning Project Marc H. Lavine marc.lavine@umb.edu Christopher J. Roussin Abstract The authors describe a semester-long action-learning project where undergraduate or graduate management students learn about ethics, responsibility, and organizational behavior by examining the policy of their college or university that addresses academic integrity. Working in teams, students adopt a stakeholder management approach as they make recommendations for improvements to their school's academic integrity policy, its dissemination and enforcement. The authors detail their efforts facilitating this project at three universities. As students examine how an ethical conduct policy informs and is informed by individual and organizational behaviors, they come to more deeply understand the social processes through which all manner of responsibility-promoting outcomes are enacted. The approach to learning described in this project promotes students' internalization of ethical principles and accountability for responsible behavior that is consonant with the core aims and principles of responsible management education.
George Bradford

Mapping Australian Higher Education - Grattan Institute - 0 views

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    Publications and News Mapping Australian higher education Publication | 29 Jan 2012 | Andrew Norton Australia's higher education system is entering one of its most significant years in recent history. To meet a government goal to increase the number of young adults holding a degree, restrictions on undergraduate student numbers have been lifted. Yet despite the system's importance to Australia's economy and society, it is often hard to know what is going on inside it. Mapping Australian higher education, the first report from Grattan Institute's Higher Education program, puts in one place facts, figures and analysis relevant to understanding institutions, students, and outcomes.
George Bradford

Rice University announces open-source textbooks | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    But soon, introductory physics texts will have a new competitor, developed at Rice University. A free online physics book, peer-reviewed and designed to compete with major publishers' offerings, will debut next month through the non-profit publisher OpenStax College.
George Bradford

Online education advocates look to make their message viral | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    Meme-ifying Online Advocacy February 24, 2012 - 3:00am By Steve Kolowich The case for online education is often made like many other cases in higher education: in dense research papers with plenty of caveats. To wit, perhaps the most-cited document by advocates of online learning is a 2009 meta-study by the U.S. Education Department, which concluded that online education is probably at least as good as the face-to-face kind. That study has not appeared to have much pull with skeptical academic leaders and faculty. According to the Babson Survey Research Group, while student enrollments in online courses have increased 348 percent since 2003, the percentage of academic administrators who believe that learning outcomes in online courses are equal or superior to those of face-to-face courses has increased by only 10 percent during that time, from 57 to 67 percent. Those academic leaders estimate that even fewer of their faculty have changed their minds about online learning since early last decade. Now four lecturers at the University of Edinburgh are trying a different advocacy tack -- one more suited to the viral culture of the modern Web.  
George Bradford

College Stats | College Completion - 0 views

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    Graduation rates by state
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