Group items tagged

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. This resource hosts communities for members to contribute and share learning and teaching materials. The communities are categorized by higher education disciplines. In addition to contributing materials, members can comment about outside learning materials that are used, share information about themselves and knowledge about their discipline, put together personal collections to use in the classroom and become a Peer Reviewer of learning materials in member's discipline. In addition to discipline communities, there is the Community of MERLOT Partner Academic Support Services (COMPASS). This community is made up of ePortfolio, Faculty Development, Library and Information Services, Online Courses and Pedagogy. The ePortflio Portal centers educational resources around ePortfolio use in higher education, among students and faculty. Partner Communities like GLOBE extend the MERLOT network. The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance was established between ARIADNE Foundation in Europe, Education Services Austrailia, LORNET in Canada, National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan and MERLOT with the goal to "work collaboratively on a shared vision of ubiquitous access to quality educational content." The majority of MERLOT members are faculty/instructors and the balance are students, campus administrators, librarians and other members of higher education who are concerned with online learning materials, technology, teaching and learning, and innovation.

"Learning is at the center of higher education. It is an essential part of the mission of all colleges and universities. The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) is a community of higher education institutions and organizations committed to advancing learning through information technology (IT) innovation. ELI is a strategic initiative of EDUCAUSE. While EDUCAUSE serves those interested in advancing higher education through technology, ELI specifically explores innovative technologies and practices that advance learning. As these innovations mature, ELI works with the larger EDUCAUSE community to integrate them into the higher education mainstream."

By Lloyd Armstrong on his blog Changing Higher Education, May 23 2011. Announcement of a new Gates Foundation grant to aggregate data from several large post-secondary systems that are members of WICHE (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Ed) in order to get a better picture of outcome data.

By Paul Basken, in the Government section, Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 21, 2010. President Obama's education agenda "seeks to inject more accountability into higher education through smarter use of data." This article is available by subscription. To access full text, check with your local library.

MZ has posted the full text (as PDF) in her Coffee Klatch post of Feb 22, 2010.

By Kevin Carey in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Issue #15, Winter 2010. In this editorial, Carey (policy director of think tank Education Sector) argues that colleges are not fulfilling their mission to students: costs are rising and students are not learning (or even graduating). He argues for transparency and studies of the effectiveness of teaching and learning, and warns of the education-related lobbies that keep the rest of us in the dark about higher education.

In the Students section of The Chronicle of Higher Education by Katherine Mangan, Jan 23 2013. The article summarizes a report by the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment. The commission just completed a year-long review of completion issues.

By Nadine Dolby, Commentary column, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9 2012. In this commentary piece, Dolby describes a panel in which she invited her undergraduate education students to meet with a panel of "real" parents in the hopes of getting some new perspectives on K-12 education. As a matter of course, she required them to refrain from using cell phones, texting or tweeting. And she observed that these students then had a great deal of trouble just listening. She argues that, in a democracy, it's not enough just to share your own opinions, you must also listen to those of others. She concludes, "Teaching our students how to truly listen may be the most important multicultural lesson of all."

By Doug Lederman in the News column of Inside Higher Ed, Jan 25 2011. The Lumina Foundation has released a draft of their Degree Qualifications Profile (see link in article), with broad "degree objectives" for those who earn associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees. This article briefly describes the report and also provides some context, including some criticism from those who work in higher education. See degree_qualification tag for more.

By Jack Stripling in Leadership & Governance column, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 2011. All sitting presidents (except recently hired Donald J. Laackman) of the City Colleges of Chicago "will be forced to reapply for their jobs if they want to keep them,and they must commit to achieving higher student-success rates if they are reappointed...." According to the article, "just 7 percent of City College students who require remediation go on to earn a degree...."

by David Glenn in The Faculty Section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 2010. See page 12. Jamie P. Merisotis, president of Lumina Foundation for Education gives the plenary at the annual conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in January 2010.

From PA: "According to the Chronicle, he (Jamie Merisotis) addressed this very issue of 'quality'"

By Eric Bettinger and Bridget Terry Long, forthcoming in Economic Inequality and Higher Education: Access, Persistence and Success, Stacy Dickert-Conlin and Ross Rubenstein, eds., Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2006. Looks at preparation and remediation generally, but also focuses on a database of students maintained by the Ohio Board of Regents.

This link provides background and live webcast for the debate, The Cost of Higher Education, held on April 27 2010. Panelists include Gail Mellow, president of LaGuardia Community College and co-PI of the GSCC project.

By Elyse Ashburn in The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9, 2011. A recently released national survey, commission by the Pearson Foundation, has revealed that one in five community college students had difficulty getting into at least one course they needed in fall 2010, and almost a third could not get into a class that they wanted.

J.E.C. shared this story. It offers some statistics. (Survey available on Pearson; will bookmark as soon as found.)

A collection of related studies looking at college completion and student success from the ECS Research Studies Database. Studies are from a variety of sources -- not the ECS (e.g. Journal of Higher Education, National Bureau of Economic Research, and American Educational Research Journal).

The Community College Research Center (CCRC) is part of the Insitute on Education and the Economy, Teacher's College, Columbia University. From their site: "CCRC"s mission is to conduct research on major issues affecting community colleges in the United States and to contribute to the development of practice and policy that expands access to higher education and promotes success for all students."

By Andrea Fuller in the Government section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2010. At North Virginia Community College, President Obama signs legislation that ends the bank-based lending system for student loans. The savings from ending this program will be used to provide spending on education. The president also announces that Jill Biden will lead a community-college summit at the White House in the fall.

By Klara Bolander Laksov, Sarah Mann, Lars Owe Dahlgren in Higher Education Research & Development, v 27 (2), June 2008, p 121-132. From the abstract, "this case study describes the process of a collaborative project aimed at increasing the educational quality at a research-intensive department...." Full-text is available for sale at this site. Check with your local library for access.

By Jeffrey R. Young, in Technology (College 2.0), The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27 2011. A variety of ways that college students are seeking "relevant" education outside of the classroom, some of which are more technology-reliant than others. The article cites the National Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University) and states that "four of the eight 'high-impact' learning activities identified required no classroom time at all...."

Looks closely at learning outside of the classroom.

By Kara Spak, Chicago Sun-Times, May 31, 2011. This article cites a recent report released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which finds that "as many as one-third of students entering higher education need to take some sort of remedial or developmental course...." Putting a human face on these statistics is the profile of one student who graduated from high school with a 3.0 GPA and a B in "College Algebra" but still needed to take a non-credit developmental math course when she got to community college.

By Kevin Carey in the Commentary section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15 2011. Carey cites a recent negotiation between the US Departments of Education and Labor in which community colleges can compete for federal funds "to serve students online" but, in exchange, will also provide those online tools, free, via Creative Commons license.