Contents contributed and discussions participated by Ed Webb
What Cliff? Data and the Destruction of Public Higher Ed | Just Visiting - 1 views
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That higher education institutions are facing a “demographic cliff” in the coming years has become conventional wisdom. But what if there is no cliff? What if we’ve instead been subjected to a narrative rooted in limited data that serves the interests of corporations and is doing real damage to our public institutions?
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Currently, the NCES projects relatively constant numbers of high school graduates through 2030, with total graduates expected to increase in the mid-2020s, followed by a modest decline, making the projected 2029–30 number slightly greater than in 2016–17. Further, it is important to note that since the 1970s, the total number of high school graduates in the U.S. has declined several times before. More importantly for higher education, the NCES projects modest increases in higher education enrollments through 2029.
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WICHE is an interest group with an explicit policy agenda—“focus areas”—which includes “developing and supporting innovations in technology and beyond that improve the quality of postsecondary education and reduce costs.”
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Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever - The Verge - 6 views
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it may also be that in an age where every conceivable user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories for the tasks they do
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While many of today’s professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today’s students increasingly don’t remember a world without them
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though directory structures exist on every computer (as well as in environments like Google Drive), today’s iterations of macOS and Windows do an excellent job of hiding them
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Bill Maher vs. higher ed | Bryan Alexander - 0 views
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First, Maher gets certain things wrong, and many people share those errors, so addressing them might be beneficial. Second, several of his criticisms point to more broadly held American attitudes. Better understanding them can help higher ed as it tries to navigate an increasingly challenging battle for public support.
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Accurately, he points out that published prices have risen faster than inflation for a generation. However, setting aside the reasons for that inflation, this misses two key points. First, the tuition amounts cited are published prices, not what institutions actually charge most students. Widespread tuition discounting means only the richest tend to pay full price, which subsidizes everyone else, who pay less.
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ignoring the wide range of low cost colleges and universities
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Socialthinking - Free Articles & Strategies - 1 views
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anecdote
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learn to be comfortable with discomfort
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The nowness of now rut occurs when students seek relief right now from anything that makes them feel uncomfortable when they should be doing an assignment, going to a class, meeting people to work on a project, etc.
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The Fall, and Rise, of Reading - 1 views
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During a normal week — whether in two-year or four-year colleges, in the humanities or STEM — about 20 to 40 percent of students do the reading.
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The average college student in the United States spends six to seven hours a week on assigned reading, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement (which started tracking the statistic in 2013). Other countries report similarly low numbers. But they’re hard to compare with the supposed golden age of the mid-20th century, when students spent some 24 hours a week studying, Baron says. There were far fewer students, they were far less diverse, and their workload was less varied — “studying” meant, essentially, reading books.
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more students are on track to being ready for college-level reading in eighth and 10th grade” — about 62 percent — “than are actually ready by the time they reach 12th grade.
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Literacy Levels Among College Students | Faculty Focus - 0 views
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While we’d like to think that our students are prepared for the challenging content we assign, collegiate students are still developing as readers and we need to help them in this process.
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Looking at the average literacy levels for students enrolled in two- and four-year institutions, the authors report that while college students on average score significantly higher than the general adult population in all three literacy types, the average score would be characterized at the intermediate literacy level.
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some important findings for those institutions of higher education whose missions include working with first-generation college students or with international students. Students whose parents are college graduates score significantly higher across all literacy types than those students whose parents did not attend any post-secondary education. Foreign-born students score significantly lower across every literacy type than their US-born peers.
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Liberal Education after the Pandemic | AAUP - 1 views
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The current massive and unanticipated experiment in online education could transform higher education as we know it. We should begin these difficult conversations about the future of the liberal arts now, in cyberspace, before the new normal takes shape—whenever that may be. Even if we feel trapped in our own homes and beset with anxiety and cabin fever, we also have an opportunity to reconsider the aims of higher education not in the abstract but in this concrete historical moment, with attention to specific institutional needs, public policy proposals, ideological pressures, and the overarching economic crisis.
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A genuine commitment to ethical, historically aware, egalitarian, or democratic principles can land an individual in a world of trouble. I am thinking, for example, of the basic scientific literacy, historical awareness, and ethical commitment that equip an individual citizen to recognize the expertise of infectious disease specialists and reject the common sense of neighbors or the priorities and demands of an employer—or to spot the bogus claims, fundamental incompetence, or ethical depravity of some elected leaders. Such scientific literacy and basic familiarity with statistical analysis allow nonexperts to understand the arguments of climatologists and reject the sophistry of coworkers or talk show hosts or governors who point out, for example, that “the climate has always been changing.”
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The reason that individual institutions cannot pitch such potential outcomes under ordinary circumstances is that these intellectual faculties serve the public good but do not necessarily advance the economic interests or career objectives of individual prospective or current students, especially those incurring significant debt. Being a whistleblower, for example, is generally a costly, painful career move—but the public needs to know nonetheless if the US military is shooting civilians in the streets of Baghdad; or the pharmaceutical industry is engineering a profitable opioid epidemic; or the health insurance industry is denying legitimate claims.
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Donald Clark Plan B: 100 learning theorists... 2500 years of learning theory... - 1 views
UDL: The UDL Guidelines - 1 views
Lucy Kellaway: what my students have taught me about race | Financial Times - 1 views
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By the time I left the FT I had spent the best part of six decades associating almost exclusively with people who had been to top universities and did grandish jobs and were all white. I sometimes felt sheepish about this but never thought it was my fault. I was merely a product of class, generation, education and profession.
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this uncomfortable audit began, not with the killing of a black man in Minnesota, but three years earlier, when I started teaching in a school in Hackney. At the age of 58 I was lifted out of a world in which everyone was like me into a world where I was in a minority as a white Brit. My pupils’ families came from all over the place: first-, second- and sometimes third-generation immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana, from the Caribbean, from Turkey and Bangladesh and Vietnam.
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It wasn’t a question of being “politically correct”. The matter was as simple as this: if I say something that causes offence, then I have to learn to stop saying it. Right away.
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September 7th, 2020 - 0 views
The academy's neoliberal response to COVID-19: Why faculty should be wary and... - 1 views
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In the neoliberal economy, workers are seen as commodities and are expected to be trained and “work-ready” before they are hired. The cost and responsibility for job-training fall predominantly on individual workers rather than on employers. This is evident in the expectation that work experience should be a condition of hiring. This is true of the academic hiring process, which no longer involves hiring those who show promise in their field and can be apprenticed on the tenure track, but rather those with the means, privilege, and grit to assemble a tenurable CV on their own dime and arrive to the tenure track work-ready.
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The assumption that faculty are pre-trained, or able to train themselves without additional time and support, underpins university directives that faculty move classes online without investing in training to support faculty in this shift. For context, at the University of Waterloo, the normal supports for developing an online course include one to two course releases, 12-18 months of preparation time, and the help of three staff members—one of whom is an online learning consultant, and each of whom supports only about two other courses. Instead, at universities across Canada, the move online under COVID-19 is not called “online teaching” but “remote teaching”, which universities seem to think absolves them of the responsibility to give faculty sufficient technological training, pedagogical consultation, and preparation time.
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faculty are encouraged to strip away the transformative pedagogical work that has long been part of their profession and to merely administer a course or deliver course material
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The Progressive Stack and Standing for Inclusive Teaching - The Tattooed Professor - 2 views
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There are two fundamental truths about Inclusive Pedagogy: it is an eminently desirable set of practices for teaching in higher ed, and it is an eminently difficult set of practices for teaching in higher ed
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Put simply, the Progressive Stack is a method of ensuring that voices that are often submerged, discounted, or excluded from traditional classroom discussions get a chance to be heard
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There are personal, cultural, learning, and social reasons people don’t speak up in class. Students of color and women of all races, introverts, the non-conventional thinkers, those from poor previous educational backgrounds, returning or “nontraditional students,” and those from cultures where speaking out is considered rude not participatory are all likely to be silent in a class where collaboration by difference is not structured as a principle of pedagogy and organization and design. Who loses? Everyone. Arguments that are smart and valuable and can change a whole conversation get lost in silence and, sometimes, shame. When that happens, we don’t really have discussion or collaboration. We have group think–and that is why we all lose.
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Education Department Grants Coronavirus Relief To Small Colleges : Coronavirus Live Upd... - 0 views
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The 20 institutions that received the most amount of money from the unmet-need fund serve less than 3,000 students combined, and about half are religious schools — including Bible colleges and seminaries — several of which serve less than 100 students.
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Much of the CARES Act's more than $14 billion for higher education is being distributed according to the number of full-time low-income students a college serves, which is measured through federal Pell Grants. The $350-million unmet-need fund followed a different formula. Miller says for this particular pot, schools that did not receive $500,000 or more from other available CARES Act funds were given the difference between what they did receive and $500,000 limit. "So the result is that the smaller you are and the less money you've already gotten, the more you get from this program," Miller says. But $350 million can only go so far. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was given the discretion to choose which schools would benefit from the fund, and by how much.
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Brad Smith, the president of Bakke Graduate University in Dallas, which was allotted $497,338 in federal aid, says he didn't learn of his school's eligibility until he was contacted by NPR. "I don't know anything about this," Smith says, noting that his school hadn't asked for additional federal help. "I'm taking responsibility to find out what it means."
Why hard work and specialising early is not a recipe for success - The Correspondent - 0 views
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dispelling nonsense is much harder than spreading nonsense.
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a worldwide cult of the head start – a fetish for precociousness. The intuitive opinion that dedicated, focused specialists are superior to doubting, daydreaming Jacks-of-all-trades is winning
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astonishing sacrifices made in the quest for efficiency, specialisation and excellence
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