Group items tagged

"Making Data More Usable with ScraperWiki," by Jason B. Jones in PROFHACKER, The Chronicle of HE. Includes a short (2.36 minutes) video on ScraperWiki, a tool to gather information systematically from websites, Twitter, etc. and download it into an Excel spreadsheet for further study. September 20, 2011

By Goldie Blumenstyk in The Chronicle of Higher Education - Administration section, May 22 2013. Announcement of a new report by the Century Foundation looking at the growing differences between 2-Year and 4-Year schools and considering socioeconomic impact of that gap.

By Jennifer Gonzalez from the Students section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept 19 2012. The article highlights a study, "State High School Exit Exams: A Policy in Transition" from the Center on Education Policy at George Washington University. It looks at 8 states that require HS exit exams that measure college-readiness, either via Common Core Standards or other.

By Nick DeSantis, technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education April 15 2012. According to this article, at present most student-related data (grades, course selection, graduation rates, etc.) is "locked-up" within colleges. In this new era of "open data" the Dept of Ed and others are calling on colleges and universities to make this data more accessible to developers -- including students in their own institutions.

By Josh Fischman, and part of The Chronicle (of Higher Education's) 2011 Special Report on Online Learning, published Nov 6 2011. Central Piedmont Community College developed an Online Student Portal learning system to improve retention among its students. They have had success with the system (in use 2004-2008). Now, with a Next Gen grant, they will roll the system out to 6 additional local schools to see if they can match the retention improvements. The system is based both on learning styles and on frequent intervention by students and counselors.

By Marc Parry, Technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18 2012. This piece profiles some of the new "Big Data" innovations at Arizona State University, the largest public university in the US. There are systems to track students against the requirements of their majors; recommendations about classes in which they might be successful, etc., all towards the goal of improving retention and graduation rates.

Many provocative ideas in this article, not the least of which is how these applications speak to various "recommender systems," whether telling students what courses to take, professors how to teach, administration how to track, etc.

A special feature in the Technology section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 26 2012. The 12 Innovators run the gamut and include an advocate for mobile learning, edu-Punk and digital storytelling (ds) 106 guru, ideas about open learning from Carnegie Mellon, and the director of Hathi Trust's digital library. None of these profiles is in-depth, but each might launch a more in-depth look at the individual or his/her project.

Related: Hacking the Academy. One of the innovators mentioned in this article, Dan Cohen, is at George Mason University, the institution behind Hacking the Academy.

Microsite produced by The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2012. This space provides data and analysis about completion for all aspects of the college spectrum: public universities, community colleges, private colleges, and non-profits. All data is from the cohort that began college in fall 2004.

By Sophia Lin in Wired Campus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 28 2010. An online textbook project at the University of Illinois that will also serve Illinois' community colleges. The comments are also of interest.

By Jennifer Gonzalez, the Chronicle of Higher Education, August 9 2010. Before an audience at the University of Texas at Austin, Obama called for "the United States to produce and additional eight million college graduates by 2020."

By Robin Wilson in the Faculty section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept 5 2010. This article looks at the resistance to measuring learning outcomes -- and the progress that is being made, as well.

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.

A blog by the Chronicle of Higher Education that started in May 2010, Innovations brings together several regular bloggers on the topic of innovations. Bloggers include Sandy Baum (Skidmore College), Michael McPherson (Spencer Foundation), Marybeth Gasman (Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania), Richard Kahlenberg (Century Foundation), and Richard Vedder (Center for College Affordability and Productivity/Ohio University).

By Sara Lipka in the Students section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov 11 2010. Reporting on the latest report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement, which states that "Increasing college completion is meaningless unless certificates and degrees represent real learning, which community colleges must work harder to ensure."

"Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas," the Chronicle of Philanthropy is a good site to keep up to date with philanthropy, non-profits, and foundations.

By Jennifer Howard in the Technology section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29 2011. Interview with Nancy Sims, lawyer, librarian and copyright-program librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. A basic overview of copyright law, particularly in academic setting, includes a list of additional copyright resources at the end of the article.

Whole page of resources on distance learning for college students--really like the podcast: New Gates Foundation Grants Focus on "The Learning Moment." Mark Milliron, Gates dep director for higher education (in February 2011 at least) focuses on data to target at risk students, triggering student support, and tailoring that student support to meet the students' needs. He also emphasizes the leveraging of technology to support students and for data collection and analysis

"where most participants were involved with blended education, Ms. Joosten was shocked to learn that only about 20 percent had faculty development.)"

by Derek Bruff, November 6, 2011. The best justification of the Innovation Lab premise that I have seen. "Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."" Often our students engage in what Ken Bain, vice provost and a historian at Montclair State University, calls strategic or surface learning, instead of the deep learning experiences we want them to have. Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient-they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning. Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community. My students might not see the beauty and power of mathematics, but they can look forward to participating in a community effort to learn about math. Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

By Jennifer Gonzalez, Students section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February2 2012. The new project is being led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement and will analyze data from four different surveys: Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the Survey of Entering Student Engagement, the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, and the newly created Community College Institutional Survey. Reports will be produced annually for the next three years. See CCCSE tag for first year's report.