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"The Disruption Is Here September 15, 2011 - 3:00am Michael Staton A recent essay here by Robert Archibald and David Feldman challenged the idea of a "higher education bubble." They argued that a degree, even an expensive degree, is still worth it. They correctly pointed out that a degree is not an asset that responds to supply and demand like other markets. Their point that "on average most of us are average, and the data show that college is a very good investment for the average person," is true enough. But their real message was: there's no need to panic, the status quo is still working. I disagree. Said essay is part of a broader continuing discussion, this round set off by Peter Thiel's statements surrounding his 20 Under 20 Program encouraging students to "stop out" of college - with the idea that they are more likely to achieve entrepreneurial breakthroughs on their own than with more formal education. Thiel is a managing partner at one of the venture investors, Founders Fund, in my company, Inigral. Ironically, Inigral serves educational institutions with our Schools App, and most of our clients are traditional colleges and universities. (Schools App is a community platform inside Facebook and on mobile devices that helps to welcome the incoming class during the admissions, orientation, and first-year experience, making sure students find their "fit" and get off on the right foot.) So my company helps keep students in college while Thiel is going around talking about the potential value of "stopping out." Given this irony, people often ask me what I think about Thiel's comments suggesting that higher education is in a bubble. Here's what I think: He is mostly right, but the future prospects for education are more optimistic than Thiel suggests for two primary reasons: 1) Though it looks like an economic bubble, it's unlikely that there will be a precise moment in which the market crashes. Instead, there will be a slow market shift towards amor

"The Year Ahead in IT, 2012 January 6, 2012 - 3:00am By Lev Gonick This series of annual Year Ahead articles on technology and education began on the eve of what we now know is one of the profound downturns in modern capitalism. When history is written, the impact of the deep economic recession of 2008-2012 will have been pivotal in the shifting balance of economic and political power around the world. Clear, too, is the reality that innovation and technology as it is applied to education is moving rapidly from its Anglo-American-centered roots to a now globally distributed dynamic generating disruptive activities that affect learners and institutions the world over. Seventy years ago, the Austrian-born Harvard lecturer and conservative political economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the now famous description of the logic of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The opening of new markets, foreign or domestic … illustrate(s) the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use that biological term - that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Our colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, are among the most conservative institutions in the world. The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with higher education. The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocatio

"Disruption, Delivery and Degrees February 9, 2011 WASHINGTON -- Many college professors and administrators shudder at comparisons between what they do and what, say, computer or automobile makers do. (And just watch how they bristle if you dare call higher education an "industry.") But in a new report, the man who examined how technology has "disrupted" and reshaped those and other manufacturing industries has turned his gaze to higher education, arguing that it faces peril if it does not change to meet the challenge. The report, "Disrupting College," was also the subject of a panel discussion Tuesday at the Center for American Progress, which released the report along with the Innosight Institute. (A video recording of the event is available here.) Clayton M. Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, coined the term "disruptive innovation" in a series of books (among them The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution) that examined how technological changes altered existing markets for key products and services, usually by lowering prices or making them available to a different (and usually broader) audience. While Christensen's early work focused on manufacturing industries and commercial services like restaurants, he and his colleagues, in their more recent studies, have turned to key social enterprises such as K-12 education and health care. America's constellation of higher education institutions is ripe for such an analysis, Michael B. Horn, executive director of education at the Innosight Institute and a co-author of the report, said during Tuesday's event. (In addition to Christensen and Horn, the other authors are Louis Soares of the Center for American Progress and Louis Caldera of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.) Traditional institutions have "done so much for our country for so many decades and have played such an illustrious part in the country's success," said Horn. And while th

March 18, 2012 A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups Despite recession investors see technology companies' 'Internet moment' By Nick DeSantis Harsh economic realities mean trouble for college leaders. But where administrators perceive an impending crisis, investors increasingly see opportunity. In recent years, venture capitalists have poured millions into education-technology start-ups, trying to cash in on a market they see as ripe for a digital makeover. And lately, those wagers have been getting bigger. Investments in education-technology companies nationwide tripled in the last decade, shooting up to $429-million in 2011 from $146-million in 2002, according to the Na­tional Venture Capital Association. The boom really took off in 2009, when venture capitalists pushed $150-million more into education-technology firms than they did in the previous year, even as the economy sank into recession. "The investing community believes that the Internet is hitting edu­cation, that education is having its Internet moment," said Jose Ferreira, founder of the interactive-learning company Knewton. Last year Mr. Ferreira's company scored a $33-million investment of its own in one of the biggest deals of the year. Enlarge Image A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups 2 Mark Abramson for The Chronicle Huge advances in computing power at colleges have created a fertile ground for companies offering technology services, like the computer-learning group Knewton (above), where staff members recently gathered for a meeting. The scramble to make bets on a tech-infused college revolution has led to so many new companies that even Mr. Ferreira can't keep track. Udacity, Udemy, and University­Now all have plans to revolutionize online learning. There's the Coursebook, a young online-learning start-up. And Coursekit, a nascent challenger to Blackboard in the market for learning-management software. And Courseload, the Indiana-based digital-textbook enterprise. And CourseRank, the cl

"University Ventures Letter Volume II, #2 Announcing University Ventures Thirty years ago America was an economic basket case. The official unemployment rate in 1982 exceeded 10%, but apples-to-apples unemployment (counting it the way we do today) was over 16%. Inflation was north of 6% and the prime interest rate reached 21.5% in June 1982. Things weren't much better in the UK where deindustrialization had resulted in unemployment over 20% in many regions, and where the 'workshop of the world' became a net importer of goods for the first time ever. It's always darkest before the dawn. So few recognized we were on the verge of a revolution in information technology that would drive productivity increases across almost all industries and create new ones over the next two decades. If there's any consensus at all in today's debate about how to rekindle economic growth, it's the importance of education, and particularly higher education. We need more educated workers to innovate and increase productivity. Not coincidentally, the largest industry that has not seen much in the way of productivity improvements since 1982 is education. All but a handful of the 170 million students currently enrolled at tertiary institutions around the world are learning the way their parents and grandparents learned (often learning virtually the same curriculum). The 'sage on a stage' model remains unchanged, and the well over $1 trillion in annual spending on higher education continues to be directed to the same functions. And so the stage (if not the sage) is set for the world to focus on higher education as it never has before, and for dramatic changes in programs, delivery models, costs and learning outcomes. While the private sector will play a key role in this next revolution, it cannot succeed alone. Traditional universities and colleges - public and private -- will be the crucibles of change, in partnership with entrepreneurs and companies. The

"January 22, 2012 MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency James Yang for The Chronicle By Kevin Carey The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things-radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained. MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations-more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far. Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together-free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­-and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something-you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it. The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputat

"December 31, 2011 Let's Improve Learning. OK, but How? By W. Robert Connor Does American higher education have a systematic way of thinking about how to improve student learning? It would certainly be useful, especially at a time when budgets are tight and the pressure is on to demonstrate better results. Oh, there's plenty of discussion-bright ideas, old certainties, and new approaches-and a rich discourse about innovation, reinvention, and transformation. But the most powerful ideas about improving learning are often unspoken. Amid all the talk about change, old assumptions exert their continuing grasp. For example, most of us assume that expanding the number of fields and specialties in the curriculum (and of faculty to teach them), providing more small classes, and lowering teaching loads (and, hence, lowering student-faculty ratios) are inherently good things. But while many of those ideas are plausible, few have been rigorously evaluated. So maybe it's time to stop relying on assumptions about improving learning and start finding out what really works best. A genuine theory of change, as such a systematic evaluation of effectiveness is sometimes called, would be grounded in knowledge about how students learn, and in the best way to put that knowledge to work. The theory should also be educationally robust; that is, it should not just help colleges expose students to certain subject matter, but also challenge institutions to help students develop the long-lasting survival skills needed in a time of radical and often unpredictable change. And it must also have its feet on the ground, with a sure footing in financial realities. Above all, those who would develop a truly systematic way of thinking about and creating change must be able to articulate their purpose. Given the great diversity of institutional types, student demographics, history, and mission among American colleges and universities, it's hard to discern a shared sense of purpose. But when f

"January 8, 2012 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 1 Photo illustration by Bob McGrath for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of "badges" to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain-intentionally so-to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom. At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a "Great Listener" badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short educational clips. With enough of those badges, paired with badges earned for passing standardized tests administered on the site, users can earn the distinction of "Master of Algebra" or other "Challenge Patches." Traditional colleges and universities are considering badges and other alternative credentials as well. In December the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will create MITx, a self-service learning system in which students can take online tests and earn certificates after watching the free lecture materials the university has long posted as part of its OpenCourseWare project. MIT also has an arrangement with a company called OpenStudy, which runs online study groups, to give online badges to students who give consistently useful answers in discussion forums set up around the university's free course materials. But the b

"Is Higher Ed Ready to Change? November 17, 2010 INDIANAPOLIS -- One's perception of how widely colleges and universities have embraced the necessity and inevitability of fundamental transformative change -- in how the institutions educate students, how they finance themselves, etc. -- is likely to depend on which sorts of higher education conferences he or she attends. Meetings like the higher education productivity conference sponsored here this week by the Lumina Foundation for Education are filled with true believers -- state legislators and governors' aides staring at massive budget deficits, higher education system officials charged with increasing the number of graduates their institutions produce, and the legions of policy analysts and foundation officials who beat the drum about college completion and efficiency. Far more skepticism is in evidence at conferences held by faculty groups, where professors are increasingly distressed by the (non-collaborative, they say) ways in which their institutions are going about making hard budget decisions, such as cutting academic programs or personnel benefits."

For a second there, I thought you were at the ASHE conference George...

"January 31, 2012 'Change.edu' and the Problem With For-Profits 'Change.edu' and the Problem With For-Profits 1 Kaplan Andrew S. Rosen, chief executive of Kaplan and author of a new book on for-profit colleges Enlarge Image By Robert M. Shireman It is clear that Andrew Rosen, the chief executive of Kaplan, wants to leave readers of Change.edu with the idea that for-profit colleges are innovative, efficient, and effective in serving people left out by traditional higher education, and that their bad reputation is the result of unfair attacks. I picked up Rosen's book wanting to see how the power of the market can transform the enterprise and improve student learning. Instead, I am now more concerned about the hazards of for-profit colleges than I was before. The eye-opening, gasp-inducing elements involve Rosen's descriptions of the intense pressures on company executives to produce quick, huge profits for investors by shortchanging students. "An investor who wants to make a quick hit can, at least theoretically, buy an institution, rev up the recruitment engine, reduce investment in educational outcomes," and deliver "a dramatic return on investment." The nefarious temptation is not just theoretical, though, and Rosen says so when he introduces the case of abuses by the Career Education Corporation. "There will always be some leaders who choose to manage for the short term ... particularly when they hold the highly liquid equity stakes that the leadership of private-sector institutions sometimes receive as part of their compensation. This isn't a theoretical issue; it has happened." The word "always" concerns me. Always as in: This can't be fixed? And how many are the "some" who would eagerly dismiss student needs in the pursuit of a rapid, profitable expansion? I would have liked to hear that the contrasting example to CEC is the for-profit college where the investors are committed to the long term and never bring up the idea of a get-rich-quick scheme tha

"The Self-Absorbed Higher-Education System October 6, 2011, 10:29 pm By Jeff Selingo American academics often like to talk about how the higher-education system in the United States is the best in the world. I'm not quite sure how this status is determined-especially given our declining position in the OECD rankings-but we seem to have adopted the belief that the problems in the U.S. education system reside in elementary and secondary schools, not on college campuses. Perhaps it's just a sign of the times in which we live. Modesty, it seems, is out of style. In a thought-provoking talk at the Washington Ideas Forum this week, the New York Times columnist David Brooks maintained that we live in an era of "expanded conception of self." That attitude, he believes, results in the trends we have witnessed in recent years toward increased consumption, polarization, and risk. "We have moved from a culture of self-effacement to one of self-expansion," Brooks said. In some ways, the Brooks lecture was a fitting endnote to a conversation earlier in the day at the forum where I gathered with a dozen education, business, and think-tank leaders for a spirited discussion of the state of the American higher-ed system. After two hours of talking, there was no more agreement on how to improve the system than when we had walked into the room. Indeed, the diversity of constituencies represented in the room couldn't even settle on what the system should be doing. (That was despite the best efforts of the moderator, Clive Crook, who as a Brit admitted at the outset how confusing and complex the U.S. higher-ed system is.) Higher ed is feeling good about itself these days because it remains in demand. Why offer classes at more convenient times when you're getting a record number of applicants? Why hold the line on rising costs when students are willing to take on more debt? Why collect better job-placement data to provide to prospective students when they're

"ST. PAUL, MINN. -- Pockets of experimentation and potential change are cropping up all over the place in higher education. Here, it's the OpenCourseWare movement. There, colleges are adopting "just in time" remediation. And over here, some states are changing funding formulas to reward institutions for graduating students rather than merely enrolling them. But what do the individual innovations amount to? Do they point the way to the sort of transformative change that, given the likelihood of constrained budgets going forward, is probably necessary if higher education is to not only sustain the current level of postsecondary attainment in the country, but increase it in the way many policy experts believe is needed? Share This Story * Bookmark and Share * E-mail * Print Related Stories * Community Colleges' Unfunded Mandate May 17, 2010 * The Accountability/Improvement Paradox April 30, 2010 * Looking Before They Leap April 27, 2010 * Retention, From Beginning to End April 26, 2010 * What the Pledge Means April 21, 2010 FREE Daily News Alerts Advertisement Even longtime advocates of higher education appear to be coming around to the conclusion that the status quo won't suffice. But acknowledging that fact is a far cry from identifying a framework that might lead to such a transformed future. It was in recognition of the latter goal that an unusually diverse group of college administrators and professors, higher education analysts, state officials, and others gathered here last week to talk about how to use data to provoke change and improve performance in higher education"

"January 23, 2012 Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere By William Pannapacker By now most everyone has heard about an experiment that goes something like this: Students dressed in black or white bounce a ball back and forth, and observers are asked to keep track of the bounces to team members in white shirts. While that's happening, another student dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into their midst, looks around, thumps his chest, then walks off, apparently unseen by most observers because they were so focused on the bouncing ball. Voilà: attention blindness. The invisible-gorilla experiment is featured in Cathy Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011). Davidson is a founder of a nearly 7,000-member organization called Hastac, or the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, that was started in 2002 to promote the use of digital technology in academe. It is closely affiliated with the digital humanities and reflects that movement's emphasis on collaboration among academics, technologists, publishers, and librarians. Last month I attended Hastac's fifth conference, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Davidson's keynote lecture emphasized that many of our educational practices are not supported by what we know about human cognition. At one point, she asked members of the audience to answer a question: "What three things do students need to know in this century?" Without further prompting, everyone started writing down answers, as if taking a test. While we listed familiar concepts such as "information literacy" and "creativity," no one questioned the process of working silently and alone. And noticing that invisible gorilla was the real point of the exercise. Most of us are, presumably, the products of compulsory educational practices that were developed during the Industrial Revolution. And the way most of us teach is a relic of the s

During one of the most tumultuous periods of higher education transformation, some of the individuals most responsible for governing universities appear content to sit back and let others call the plays, a new report finds. In "Still On The Sidelines," released Wednesday by Public Agenda, a New York-based nonprofit research organization, researchers -- through a series of anonymous interviews with 39 trustees -- concluded that the majority of board members believe their role is to select and support good institutional leaders, rather than to directly question university administrators and initiate reforms, even as they recognize that higher education faces unprecedented challenges. "We are a policy board," the report quoted one anonymous chairman of a two-year public college board as saying. "We don't get involved in the day-to-day operations. Our president comes to us with different proposals and ideas, which we discuss and, if appropriate, approve or deny." "I think the primary ideas have to come from your executive with support from your trustees, and with ideas coming from the trustees," another community college board chairman said. "Frankly, I can't think of too many ideas that have come from the trustees that were not first proposed by the administration." At a time when many in higher education are questioning whether traditional models of financing a university and educating students need to be revamped, the Public Agenda report indicates that most trustees are not willing to broach such issues on campus or engage in the wider debate. The report's findings also raise questions about the breakdown of responsibility between institutional administrators and governing boards, as well as how involved trustees should be in managing the daily operations of campus and shaping an institution's strategic vision. The major division that emerges from the report involves who is responsible for the problems facing higher educati

"The Better-Mousetrap Problem By Kevin Carey Discussions of technology and higher education tend to veer from "This. Changes. Everything" techno-triumphalism to assertions that using the Internet to educate people is clearly a plot to turn higher education into a cheap corporate commodity on par with bulk packages of frozen french fries. As is often the case, the most interesting work in the field right now sits close to the equipoise between the two, as my colleague Ben Miller documents in his new report, The Course of Innovation, which you should read. The report focuses on the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), which has spent the last decade working with scores of colleges and universities to transform mostly introductory college courses with technology. NCAT's track record is impressive. To the extent that such things can be proven without elaborate randomized control trials, they've proven that thoughtful, faculty-driven course redesign can simultaneously improve student learning and reduce per-student costs. Not by a little, either: Many colleges have cut costs by over 50 percent and improved learning in the bargain. NCAT's suite of course transformation models have proved effective in a wide variety of subjects and settings, from rural community colleges to Research I universities, in courses ranging from math and foreign language to composition and women's studies. (I've written previously about NCAT success stories here and here.) Yet in many ways the most interesting part of the NCAT story isn't the colleges that have adopted these proven methods. It's the colleges that haven't-i.e., most colleges. NCAT has built a better mousetrap, but the world hasn't beaten a path to its door. This is despite the fact that the mousetrap in question improves student learning and cuts costs in a time when colleges are constantly being harangued by policy makers about learning and the economic environment has left many institutions desperately sear

"Transforming Course Design is a process to improve student learning while simultaneously addressing the issue of instructional costs. Faculty from a variety of disciplines and institutions describe the steps they took to redesign their course structures to meet these goals, and the impact on their students and on their own perspectives on instruction. [more on Course Redesign] "

"September 14, 2010 Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change By Karin Fischer Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization. Despite the global economic crisis, "large parts of the education sector have probably missed the opportunity for real change," Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Insead, a French business school, told the audience at a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More With Less." The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers, Mr. Dutta, who is also academic director of elab@INSEAD, a center for excellence in teaching and research in the digital economy, evoked the analogy of a frog: Place it in a pot of boiling water, and it will immediately jump out. Put the frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature-it won't react to change and will be cooked to death. Even with a "dose of hot water" caused by the recession, Mr. Dutta said, most universities have tinkered at the margins, freezing faculty recruitment and reducing administrative expenses, rather than taking a hard look at how they do business. "Have we really jumped, have we really changed?" he said. "I look around, and I see honestly very little change." To meet growing and diversifying worldwide demand for higher education, Mr. Dutta and his fellow panelists said, colleges must embrace new models, transforming how they deliver education. For one, they argued, both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society."

"High-Profile Trader's Harsh Critique of For-Profit Colleges Steven Eisman, the Wall Street trader who was mythologized in Michael Lewis's The Big Short as that rare person who saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming and made a killing as a result, thinks he has seen the next big explosive and exploitative financial industry -- for-profit higher education -- and he's making sure as many people as possible know it. In a speech Wednesday at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference, an exclusive gathering at which financial analysts who rarely share their insights publicly are encouraged to dish their "best investment ideas," Eisman started off with a broadside against Wall Street's college companies. "Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry," said Eisman, of FrontPoint Financial Services Fund. "I was wrong. The For-Profit Education Industry has proven equal to the task." Eisman's speech lays out his analysis of the sector's enormous profitability and its questionable quality, then argues that the colleges' business model is about to be radically transformed by the Obama administration's plan to hold the institutions accountable for the student-debt-to-income ratio of their graduates. "Under gainful employment, most of the companies still have high operating margins relative to other industries," Eisman said. "They are just less profitable and significantly overvalued. Downside risk could be as high as 50 percent. And let me add that I hope that gainful employment is just the beginning. Hopefully, the DOE will be looking into ways of improving accreditation and of ways to tighten rules on defaults." Stocks of the companies appeared to fall briefly in the last hour of trading Wednesday, after news of Eisman's speech made the rounds."

"Technology and the Completion Agenda November 9, 2010 The White House, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Call them the Three Tenors of the completion agenda. In one of his first speeches as president, Barack Obama emphasized the need for a higher rate of postsecondary completion. Lumina had already been investing in projects designed to get more Americans into college and out with a degree. And Gates has, in recent years, made college completion as basic to the legacy of its eponymous benefactor as, well, BASIC. (Others have since echoed the call.) Now, the technology section is joining the band - and may be holding the instruments that could make the whole song a hit: data analytics. "This has been building for a while," says Donald Norris, president and founder of Strategic Initiatives, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in "transformative change" in higher ed and elsewhere, which has lately taken a strong interest in analytics. But only now, Norris says, as institutions grapple with the challenge of enrolling more students and increasing success with fewer resources, has the subject of data analytics - and the tools that technology vendors have been developing to wield those data - emerged at the forefront of conversations about technology in education. Data analytics is shorthand for the method of warehousing, organizing, and interpreting the massive amounts of data accrued by online learning platforms and student information systems - now as elemental to higher education as classrooms and filing cabinets - in hopes of learning more about what makes students successful, then giving instructors (and the platforms themselves) the chance to nudge those students accordingly. "

"More Than Bridgepoint on Trial March 11, 2011 WASHINGTON -- Given how the latest in U.S. Senator Tom Harkin's series of hearings on for-profit higher education unfolded on Thursday, Andrew S. Clark, CEO of Bridgepoint Education, Inc., had to be glad that he and his lawyers decided he shouldn't appear at the session, which focused on the exploits of his publicly traded company. Sylvia Manning, president of the regional agency that accredited Bridgepoint's Ashford University, probably wishes she too had found an excuse not to attend. The hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions was framed as a "case study" of how for-profit colleges have embraced online education to fuel explosive growth and drive large profits, and Bridgepoint (the case study, in absentia) and for-profit colleges in general took a lot of hits from Harkin. He at one point called Bridgepoint "a scam, an absolute scam." But while the career colleges were Harkin's primary targets, as they have been throughout his yearlong examination, accrediting agencies and, to a lesser degree, state and federal governments, absorbed plenty of collateral damage. Harkin, for one, made it clear that he believes many accreditors lack the expertise to keep tabs on the increasingly complex operations of the biggest for-profit colleges, and warned that "something has got to change" if the agencies -- as the federal government's subcontractor on assessing institutional quality -- are to continue to grant colleges access to federal financial aid. "Many of these for-profit education companies are becoming multi-state corporations, and their main focus is becoming their bottom line rather than their students," the Iowa senator said during an exchange with Manning. "The question I would ask is, in their current state, are our accreditation agencies equipped to oversee billion-dollar, multi-state corporations?" As is common on Capitol Hill, he didn't wait for her answer, providing