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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).

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.

NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Ed Edition The NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE Program. This ninth edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education. Six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, as well as key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning.

"Background Student authentication in distance education has been an issue of interest to federal policy makers for several years. The growth in enrollments and in the number of educational providers of online learning fueled concerns about the ability of institutions to verify the identity of online students throughout the cycle of an online course: registration, participation, assessment, academic credit. Passage of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, followed by federal rulemaking, resulted in new regulations. One regulation required accrediting agencies to assure distance and correspondence education programs have processes in place to verify student identity. Photo of Asian female student in front of computer The issue is complex and frequently misrepresented. Among many e-learning professionals, the issue seems unfairly aimed only at online education when similar concerns of identity falsification could apply in traditional higher education settings. The policy and regulatory conversations concerning identify authentication, originally focused on academic dishonesty, now encompass the serious problem of financial aid fraud, as reported in some high profile cases. WCET has led a number of important efforts aimed at informing policy makers, accrediting agency leaders, and online program administrators of different approaches-pedagogical as well as technological-that ensure their compliance with the regulation but also raise the conversation to a more widely relevant discussion of academic integrity. WCET's Study Group on Academic Integrity and Student Authentication, established in March 2008, continues its work to identify and disseminate information on promising practices to promote academic integrity of which identity authentication is but one component."

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.

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.  

Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) Areas measured by the AUSSE The survey instruments used in the AUSSE collect information on around 100 specific learning activities and conditions along with information on individual demographics and educational contexts.The instruments contain items that map onto six student engagement scales: Academic Challenge - the extent to which expectations and assessments challenge students to learn; Active Learning - students' efforts to actively construct knowledge; Student and Staff Interactions - the level and nature of students' contact and interaction with teaching staff; Enriching Educational Experiences - students' participation in broadening educational activities; Supportive Learning Environment - students' feelings of support within the university community; and Work Integrated Learning - integration of employment-focused work experiences into study. The instruments also contain items that map onto seven outcome measures. Average overall grade is captured in a single item, and the other six are composite measures which reflect responses to several items: Higher-Order Thinking - participation in higher-order forms of thinking; General Learning Outcomes - development of general competencies; General Development Outcomes - development of general forms of individual and social development; Career Readiness - preparation for participation in the professional workforce; Average Overall Grade - average overall grade so far in course; Departure Intention - non-graduating students' intentions on not returning to study in the following year; and Overall Satisfaction - students' overall satisfaction with their educational experience.

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

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.

American Association for Higher Education ASSESSMENT FORUM 9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning The assessment of student learning begins with educational values. Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most value for students and strive to help them achieve. Educational values should drive not only what we choose to assess but also how we do so. Where questions about educational mission and values are skipped over, assessment threatens to be an exercise in measuring what's easy, rather than a process of improving what we really care about.

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.

Exploring Students' E-Textbook Practices in Higher Education ShareShare RecommendLog in to Recommend by Aimee deNoyelles, John Raible, and Ryan Seilhamer Published on Monday, July 6, 20150 Comments Key Takeaways A two-year university-wide study of students' e-textbook practices found that e-textbook use has increased and become broader demographically. Lower cost and convenience remain the top reasons students purchase an e-textbook, not the interactive features designed to enhance learning. The instructor's role has not changed significantly in the past two years, suggesting the need for further professional development including increased awareness, instruction, and active modeling.

How California's Online Education Pilot Will End College As We Know It GREGORY FERENSTEIN posted yesterday (Jan 15, 2013) Today, the largest university system in the world, the California State University system, announced a pilot for $150 lower-division online courses at one of its campuses - a move that spells the end of higher education as we know it. Lower-division courses are the financial backbone of many part-time faculty and departments (especially the humanities). As someone who has taught large courses at a University of California, I can assure readers that my job could have easily been automated. Most of college-the expansive campuses and large lecture halls-will crumble into ghost towns as budget-strapped schools herd students online.

"In a 2002 case, the United States Supreme Court suggested that Congress envisioned FERPA applying only to files kept in a central file by a records custodian designated by the school, not to every record that might be generated across the school district by which a student can be identified. In Owasso Independent School Dist. No. I-011 v. Falvo, the Supreme Court found that students' assignments are not educational records under FERPA. 534U.S. 426. In so doing, the Court clarified that not every record in a school concerning a student is an education record. The Court looked to a provision in FERPA, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g(b)(4)(A), which requires that a record of access be kept when a request for student records is made. That record must be kept "with the education records" of the student. The Court found that this suggested that Congress intended that education records would be kept in one place. Moreover, FERPA requires that a "school official" and "his assistants" are responsible for the custody of the records. The Court indicated that this implies that "education records are institutional records kept by a single central custodian, such as a registrar, not individual assignments handled by many student graders in their separate classrooms."  534U.S. at 434-435."

""We got rid of tuition fees because we do not want higher education which depends on the wealth of the parents," Gabrielle Heinen-Kjajic, the minister for science and culture in Lower Saxony, said in a statement. "

Information technology has been an important part of higher education since the development of the lantern slide in the mid-1800s. However, occasions in which the academy has been transformed by technology are rare. Viewed in a historical perspective, these occasions can be considered as a series of three epochs: the online public-access catalog epoch; the personal computer, Internet, and web epoch; and the enterprise systems (ERP, CMS) epoch. Certainly, developments are continuing, but for most colleges and universities, these three epochs no longer represent technological frontiers. Looking forward, those of us in higher education are now focusing our attention on technology applications for teaching, learning, and research-or what can be viewed as the epochs of teaching and learning with technology, and cyberinfrastructure. In this commentary, I'll be confining my comments to teaching and learning.

New York Times to Suspend Online-Education Program June 11, 2012, 6:37 pm By Angela Chen The New York Times is bowing out of the online-education business just as a growing number of colleges are putting their own courses on the Web. Knowledge Network, the distance-learning initiative started by the company in September 2007, will suspend operations on July 31, a company spokesperson said today.

Faculty Development Programming: If We Build It, Will They Come? © 2008 Ann Taylor and Carol McQuiggan. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3 (July-September 2008) A faculty development survey analyzed what faculty want and need to be successful teaching online By Ann Taylor and Carol McQuiggan The number of courses offered online grows every year, resulting in an increasing number of higher education faculty entering a virtual classroom for the first time.1 It has been well documented that faculty need training and assistance to make the transition from teaching in a traditional face-to-face classroom to teaching online.2 Faculty professional development related to teaching online varies widely, from suggested readings to mandated training programs. Various combinations of technological and pedagogical skills are needed for faculty to become successful online educators, and lists of recommended competencies abound.

Publications and News Mapping Australian higher education The Rights of International Students Australian higher education: trends, policies, performance Subsidy review plan neither fair nor enticing Filling the university information gap The Rise of University Rankings The University Gender Gap

"BECAUSE QUALITY AND EXCELLENCE IN ONLINE LEARNING MATTER The drive behind the Online Learning Consortium In 1997, Frank Mayadas, President of the Online Learning Consortium (renamed OLC), affirmed that any learner who engages in online education should have, at a minimum, an education that represents the quality of the provider's overall institutional quality. Any institution, he maintained, demonstrates its quality in five inter-related areas - learning effectiveness, access, scale (capacity enrollment achieved through cost-effectiveness and institutional commitment), faculty satisfaction, and student satisfaction. These five have become OLC's Five Pillars of Quality Online Education, the building blocks which provide the support for successful online learning. The intent of the quality framework, which is always a work in progress, is to help institutions identify goals and measure progress towards them"