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George Bradford

Why science is like play - CNN.com - 0 views

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    (CNN) -- Anything creative begins with a question. The problem is that questions take us into uncertainty, which is a very dangerous place to be. If there were a predator next to you and your brain wasn't absolutely sure what to do, then it'd probably be too late. The need to translate ambiguous sensory information into meaningful behavior has been the fundamental drive of brain evolution, without which survival in a complex world would not have been possible. And yet a deep irony is that the best questions -- i.e., the ones that challenge our deepest sense of what is true -- create the most uncertainty.
George Bradford

http://www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/ESS_ECore_1.pdf - 0 views

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    Calling for Success: Online Retention Rates Get Boost From Personal Outreach BY MANDY ZATYNSKI »By mid-term summer semester 2012, Gina Cannell was struggling with her online statistics course. After failing a few quizzes and an exam, she worried her C grade would get worse. She asked her professor for extra help, but couldn't work through sample problems alone online. She needed live instruction. For two years, Cannell, a 43-year-old senior test engineer for Delta Air Lines, had excelled as an online student, but now she was facing failure or having to drop out. Her full-time job, family responsibilities, and a side business in interior design put on-campus classes-as well as tutoring-out of reach. Cannell wasn't sure what to do. Then Julili Fowler rang.
George Bradford

How California's Online Education Pilot Will End College As We Know It | TechCrunch - 0 views

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    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.
George Bradford

Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States | The Sloa... - 0 views

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    "The tenth annual survey, a collaborative effort between the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, is the leading barometer of online learning in the United States.  Based on responses from over 2,800 academic leaders, the complete survey report, "Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States" can be downloaded here. Read the press release"
George Bradford

A Dozen Strategies for Improving Online Student Retention | Faculty Focus - 0 views

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    "A Dozen Strategies for Improving Online Student Retention By: Al Infande, EdD in Online Education Add Comment Online student retention is one of the most critical components for the success of any college or university. The key to a successful online retention program is the realization that student retention is everybody's job. The main objective of a well-established online retention program is to maintain a student's enrollment and to keep him highly satisfied with the level of education he is acquiring in an online environment. This is not an easy task since there are many reasons why a student might need or want to withdraw or leave the program of study. Below are a dozen strategies for improving online student retention for administrators and faculty:"
George Bradford

Quality Framework - OLC - 0 views

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    "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"
George Bradford

Effective Practice Evaluation Criteria | Online Learning Consortium, Inc - 0 views

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    "EFFECTIVE PRACTICE EVALUATION CRITERIA"
George Bradford

Thinking collaboration: Top 10 skills for the future - 0 views

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    "Top 10 skills for the future A while ago, I came across a 'top 10 skills for the future' image, formed by the World Economic Forum following their Future of Jobs report. It really caught my attention and a lot of other people found it useful too. After recently experimenting with creating images for our Twitter page (@refthinking) and this blog, I loved the idea of mixing it up a little and adding some images. Feel free to share it, but please let us know by mentioning us if it's a tweet, as it's great to see it being shared even more! "
George Bradford

elearnspace › learning, networks, knowledge, technology, community - 0 views

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    ELEARNSPACE LEARNING, NETWORKS, KNOWLEDGE, TECHNOLOGY, COMMUNITY
George Bradford

h2g2 - The Quote 'May You Live in Interesting Times' - 0 views

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    The Quote 'May You Live in Interesting Times' Front Page What is h2g2? Who's Online Write an Entry Browse Announcements Feedback h2g2 Help RSS Feeds Contact Us   In a speech in Cape Town, South Africa, on 7 June, 1966, Robert F Kennedy said: There is a Chinese curse which says, 'May he live in interesting times'. Like it or not, we live in interesting times... Journalists endorsed the phrase and it has become well known. While widely reported as being an ancient Chinese curse, the phrase is likely to be of recent and Western origin. When created it seems to be intended to sound Chinese in the 'Confucius he say' mould. Most Chinese scholars will not recognise the 'curse' as Chinese, because if it is of Chinese origin, it has somehow escaped mention in all of the ancient Chinese literature. It may, however, be a paraphrase of a liberal translation from a Chinese source, and therefore unrecognisable when translated back to Chinese. One possibility is a relation to the Chinese proverb, 'It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period.'
George Bradford

NMC Horizon Report > 2012 Higher Ed Edition | The New Media Consortium - 0 views

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    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.
George Bradford

ISTE | NETS Standards - 0 views

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    ISTE developed the NETS with input from the field and pioneered their use among educators. The National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) are the standards for learning, teaching, and leading in the digital age and are widely recognized and adopted worldwide. The family of NETS-NETS for Students (NETS*S), NETS for Teachers (NETS*T), NETS for Administrators (NETS*A), NETS for Coaches (NETS*C), and NETS for Computer Science Teachers (NETS*CSE)-work together to transform education.
George Bradford

Harvard Conference Seeks to Jolt University Teaching | LinkedIn - 0 views

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    February 5, 2012 Harvard Conference Seeks to Jolt University Teaching By Dan Berrett Cambridge, Mass. A growing body of evidence from the classroom, coupled with emerging research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is lending insight into how people learn, but teaching on most college campuses has not changed much, several speakers said here at Harvard University at a daylong conference dedicated to teaching and learning.
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

Review brings opportunity and obligation - Swinburne Media Centre - 0 views

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    "Broadly, Knight calls for students applying for programs in the 39 universities to be considered under the least onerous visa arrangements. Immigration will effectively accept the judgement of the universities that a student with an offer is a genuine student (provided they meet other threshold requirements). Applicants for programs in most other sectors will be assessed according to the existing framework. The Department of Immigration will therefore retain direct influence over growth in the non-university sector. The immigration handbrake can be engaged at any time. Universities, on the other hand, are expected to regulate their own growth strategies. "Government departments will monitor the responses of the universities, with the ultimate and humiliating penalty of exclusion from the streamlined visa arrangements available if universities become intoxicated by their new 'freedom'. "We don't yet know the metrics that immigration officials will monitor, these are under development, but we can assume that they will include a range of visa-related measures combined with assessments of student progress and outcomes..................................... "If we are to truly live up to the expectations that the new arrangements place upon us, we will need to focus squarely on recruiting new students at the front end and providing outstanding outcomes (education, research, professional and visa outcomes) at the other. Our international student support programs, already strong by world standards, assume a new importance. Our ability to monitor student progress and to jump in to provide assistance when it is required, will also assume a new importance. We will need to find new and proactive working relationships with DIAC as universities and immigration officials share accountability for visa outcomes."
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

http://www.sinclair.edu/support/success/ea/ - 0 views

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    Early Alert Program The Early Alert classroom assistance program at Sinclair Community College is an intervention program teaming faculty, counselors, and advisors together in order to promote the success of students facing challenges.   An Overview:    Early Alert is an intervention program that allows for faculty to notify advisors/counselors of issues that may affect the success of a student.  It is a simple way of assisting students in difficulty find the help they need while taking very little time. Web-based Early Alert notifications are easy ways to promote the retention efforts of the college and the success of students. Utilized currently in all DEV courses, English 111, select Math courses, and SCC 101 courses.  
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.
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