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"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

Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

"February 2, 2012 Multiyear Study of Community-College Practices Asks: What Helps Students Graduate? By Jennifer Gonzalez Community colleges are brimming with programs and policies designed to help students complete their studies. Practices like requiring orientation and establishing early-academic-warning systems have sprouted since 2009, when President Obama announced that he wanted to make the United States the best-educated country in the world by 2020. Now the questions for the nation's community colleges are: Which of the practices work and why? And perhaps most important, how do colleges expand them to cover all students? A new, multiyear project led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement will attempt to get some answers. The research organization plans to analyze data from four different but related surveys and produce reports annually for the next three years. The surveys represent responses from the perspective of entering and experienced students, faculty members, and institutions. Kay M. McClenney, the center's director and a senior lecturer in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin, says the project will allow community colleges to make more-informed decisions about how they spend money and about the type of policies and programs they want to emphasize. The first of three reports, "A Matter of Degrees: Promising Practices for Community College Student Success" was released last week. It draws attention to 13 strategies for increasing retention and graduation rates, including fast-tracking remedial education, providing students with experiential learning, and requiring students to attend orientation. The strategies specified in the report are not new. In fact, many of them can be found at two-year colleges right now. But how well those strategies are working to help students stay in college and graduate is another matter. The report found peculiarities among responses on similar topics, sugges

"January 24, 2012 Colleges Can Take 4 Steps to Assure Quality, Group Says By Dan Berrett Increasing the percentage of college graduates in the United States has become a collective aspiration of policy makers, advocates for higher education, and President Obama. But this push for quantity will mean little if colleges cannot demonstrate the quality of the degrees they confer, says an advocacy group. The group, the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, released today a set of guidelines it says will help colleges assess and improve student achievement and, in the process, better demonstrate the quality of their offerings. The guidelines are being presented at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation's annual meeting in Washington, with endorsements from 27 organizations, chiefly accreditors and associations. The guidelines stake out four broad principles of assessment and accountability for a college to follow: setting ambitious goals for the outcomes of undergraduate education; gathering evidence about how the institution is faring in pursuit of those outcomes; using that evidence to improve learning; and sharing the results. The essential idea is to clearly articulate and make intentional the objectives that guide student learning, said David C. Paris, executive director of the alliance. "That's our goal," he said, "an evidence-based profession." The alliance was started in 2009 by several higher-education leaders and foundations to respond to growing calls for accountability in the sector. The assumption was that colleges needed to define how they would substantiate student learning-or lawmakers would do it for them. The new guidelines expand on the alliance's previous efforts, including a statement of principles to guide student learning, which were released in 2008, and a pledge by more than 100 college presidents to take steps at their institutions that are largely identical to the ones set out in the new guidelines. O

"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

Washington Post Change.org emerges as influential advocate on issues from bullying to bank fees By Ylan Q. Mui, Published: January 23 Ben Rattray knows that revolution does not always happen spontaneously. The 31-year-old entrepreneur rattles off a list of populist actions over the past year: the consumer revolts against Bank of America's and Verizon's unpopular fees, a drive to enlist the San Francisco Giants to speak out against anti-gay bullying, a petition forcing the South African government to address the rape of lesbians. Each campaign won thousands of supporters, inflamed public opinion, and drew the ire of corporate executives and political leaders. But these were not impromptu rebellions that chanced upon success. They were carefully nurtured by Rattray's fledgling company, a social media site called Change.org that has emerged as one of the most influential channels for activism in the country. "We're in the business of amplifying," Rattray said in an interview. "We're trying to change the balance of power between individuals and large organizations." Rattray said his firm is profitable and hopes to bring in tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue within a few years. It makes money by running campaigns for advocacy groups such as Amnesty International in exchange for a fee. Ordinary users can create an online petition for free. The company, which has headquarters in the District and in San Francisco, has exploded over the past year, growing from a staff of 20 to about 100, with offices around the world. Though originally conceived as a nonprofit, Change.org is now part of an emerging group of "social benefit corporations," such as Patagonia, that seek to both make money and do good. Fueling Change.org's rise is the wave of global unrest that has given birth to other viral movements such as Occupy Wall Street. But Rattray calls these movements "radically under- optimized." They have no leaders and no coordinated mi

"Tue, Jan. 31, 2012, 3:01 AM Global contest will lead to help during heart attacks By Marie McCullough Inquirer Staff Writer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man´s life this month because he knew the location of an AED. MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man's life this month because he knew the location of an AED. Do you know where the nearest defibrillator is located? Yes No View results Post a comment RELATED STORIES Join the MyHeartMap challenge PHILLY.COM's TOP FIVE PICKS Mayor Nutter outraged at suspect's bail Media misled about whereabouts of Santorum daughter Parents: Disabled daughter's transplant could happen Where's the school choice, Chaput? Contest's 1st clue: Find the pig Around the world, the hunt is on for thousands of lifesaving portable medical devices that are hanging in public places - in Philadelphia. Why would someone in, say, Abu Dhabi care about finding devices in Philadelphia? Because a University of Pennsylvania project to map the locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout the city has mushroomed into a global "crowdsourcing" competition fueled by the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones - and the chance to win cash prizes up to $10,000. The ultimate prize, of course, will be saving the lives of cardiac-arrest victims. Penn plans to create an interactive online AED registry that will, for the first time, enable the city's 911 system, emergency responders - and any bystander with a phone - to quickly locate an AED. Beginning Tuesday, participants in Philadelphia will use a free app downloaded to their phones to transmit photos and locations of the city's estimated 5,000 AEDs. These backpack-size machines can assess a cardiac-arrest victim and, if appropriate, deliver an electric shock to restart the heart. Studies show even sixth graders can follow an AED's step-by-step audio directions. But in this age of cyber collaboration, the contest, called "

"Holding Presidents Accountable for Learning September 23, 2010 In an uncommon strategy to improve graduation and retention rates, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia summoned the presidents of its 35 colleges and universities, one by one, to account for problems at their institutions and present three-year plans outlining how they hope to boost the measures of student success. The systemwide challenge was issued earlier this year by Willis J. Potts, Jr., the straight-talking chairman of the Board of Regents and retired paper industry executive. "We have a funding system here in Georgia that financially rewards institutions based on [enrollment] growth," Potts said. "Having been in manufacturing, I know the factor that needs to be studied is what kind of finished product is coming out the other end. Less than 60 percent of the students in our system graduate within a six-year period. I know of no other process that would achieve 60 percent [success] and go out and brag about it." Reflecting on this, Potts said, he and his colleagues were driven to find out what was holding the system's institutions back. So they went straight to the top - at each institution."

"MyEdu & KnowU - Two Approaches to Social Media in Higher Ed Keith Hampson Higher education is trying hard to find the best ways to integrate social media into its practices. They've approached it from a number of angles: marketing, community building, student support, and instruction. Instigators behind the efforts include software vendors looking to build the next edu social platform, colleges, individual educators, and on less formal basis, the students themselves. As of late 2011, there are very few scalable, institution-wide initiatives - but a great deal of isolated experimentation by innovators. The opportunities seem endless, but higher education management professionals are on the lookout for the right approach to make social media work for them today. Not all areas of higher ed will be equally well-suited to the opportunities that social media presents. Of all of the possibilities, integrating social media and instruction may be the most difficult, for example - due to the conflicting properties of social media and higher ed. While social media is particularly well-suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people - with no clear or prescribed beginning and end - higher education has clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. syllabi). Social media is user-generated and leaderless. Higher education is top-down and instructor-directed. Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users. High volume provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency. (Although Twitter and Linked In have over 100 million users, only a fraction of the users are of significance to any one user.) On the other hand, higher education instruction typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. 100 students). This is not to say that higher education won't find ways to use social media for instructi

"The Real Challenge for Higher Education July 15, 2010 By Garrison Walters America, once the world's most educated nation, is fast losing ground. Although we are still second in overall education levels, we are much weaker -- 11th -- in the proportion of younger people with a college degree. In a world where knowledge increasingly drives economic competitiveness, this is a very serious problem. The issue is more than abstract economics, it's also a moral concern: Since 1970, the benefits of higher education have been very unequally apportioned, with the top income quartile profiting hugely and the bottom hardly moving at all (despite starting from a very low level). America's education problem has been apparent for 30 years or so, and there have been a lot of suggestions for making us competitive again. Ideas on the K-12 side include: better trained and motivated teachers, more and better early childhood programs, better prepared school leaders, improved curriculums, higher standards, financial incentives, better data systems, and more rigorous and frequent assessments. On the higher education side, proposals include: motivating professors and administrators with formulas that reward success rather than enrollment, more use of technology, more data, improved administration, and (at least for general education) more testing. And, of course, better funding is relentlessly advocated for the entire educational spectrum. All of these approaches have at least some potential to foster improvement. Some have already demonstrated benefits while some are being seriously oversold (more on that in a separate essay). My fundamental belief, though, is that even if one takes a very optimistic view of the achievable potential of each of these strategies and adds them together, the net result will be significant but insufficient improvement to allow us to catch up in educational levels. If our scope of action is limited to the ideas advanced so far, we will actually contin

"April 2, 2011 Colleges Scramble to Avoid Violating Federal-Aid Limit For-profits' tactics to comply with 90/10 rule raise questions By Goldie Blumenstyk Corinthian Colleges Inc.'s decision this winter to raise tuition at dozens of its Everest, Heald, and WyoTech campuses by an average of 12 percent, knowing that most of its students would have to go even further into debt, had nothing to do with rising costs or any improvements it was making in the curricula. With many of its students already receiving the maximum in federal grants and loans, the company said it was raising its prices to create a financial gap that students would have to cover with private loans or other funds besides those from the federal student-aid programs. Corinthian's move is just one of the latest-and some say one of the most cynical-strategies that some for-profit colleges are using to avoid violating the so-called 90/10 rule, so they can remain eligible for the billions of dollars in federal student aid that have fueled their growth. The rule requires them to receive at least 10 percent of their revenue from other sources. "They are making loans, just like the subprime lenders did, that they know their students will not be able to repay," said Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access & Success. Corinthian's decision to comply with the 90/10 rule in this manner, said Ms. Abernathy, even as it acknowledges that the company-sponsored loan program most of its students will use has a default rate of more than 50 percent, is "the height of cynicism." The 90/10 rule is also driving activities at other college companies. In recent months, Education Management Corporation, parent company of the Art Institutes, South University, and Brown Mackie College, announced it would increase its recruiting of foreign students. Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix created new colleges of "professional studies" so they could count more of their nontraditional-e

"June 25 Selma Botman: University's changes real, and hardly random USM's academic reorganization serves students, galvanizes faculty and saves administrative costs. Reorganizations typically generate concerns and doubts, not to mention a lot of satirical workplace humor. In one Dilbert comic strip, the manager announces a new strategy. "Let me guess," says Dilbert, "you're going to randomly reorganize the department, just like last month." One course of action higher education cannot be accused of is random reorganization. At USM and elsewhere, academic models that made sense a generation ago -- or even a millennium ago -- are long overdue for serious reconsideration. Prompted by a tighter focus on student success and the harsh realities of a new economic climate, USM has spent much of the past year rethinking how its academic programs should be organized. In May, the university's trustees approved an academic reorganization that will transform our university in profound ways. The new plan will further distinguish and energize our academic core, while repositioning us for future growth and sustainability. Most importantly, it will enhance the educational experience for our students. Through a collaborative effort that actively engaged faculty in the process, six schools and colleges have been consolidated into three new colleges. USM's two other colleges, Lewiston-Auburn College and the University of Maine School of Law, are not structurally affected. The plan eliminates the positions of three deans and will lead to the centralization of other administrative services, saving some $1.3 million. FOR THE STUDENTS So how will this plan benefit students? Our reorganization plan, which will be implemented during the 2010-2011 academic year, groups academic disciplines in order to encourage the growth of exciting new opportunities for interdisciplinary studies. This will be an intensely creative moment in USM's academic history. Faculty across the university are

"February 6, 2011 Fast-Growing U. of Phoenix Calculates a More Careful Course By Goldie Blumenstyk In the fall of 2009, after closing the books on yet another banner year of enrollment growth, and with its parent company's stock climbing toward a five-year high of $90 per share, the University of Phoenix began to question fundamental pieces of the very formula that had fueled its years of success. Even as its executives celebrated, recalls one, they were uneasy. A feeling was building "in the pit of everyone's stomach: That felt too good." From that "moment of truth," as that executive, Robert W. Wrubel now describes it, Phoenix quietly began what it calls a major change of direction. Out of the public eye, North America's largest private university not only put in motion an overhaul of what had come to be seen as its grow-at-any-cost admissions practices. It also ended a compensation schedule tied to enrollment, began a required orientation program for inexperienced students, and instituted a host of other reforms in marketing and nearly every other important facet of this 438,000-student institution. The moves, orchestrated from its headquarters here, and from corporate outposts like San Francisco, where the university has assembled a team of Silicon Valley veterans and computer scientists to create a cutting-edge electronic course platform, are part of a top-down campaign led by a team of a half-dozen executives, all of whom have joined its $5-billion parent company within the past four years. excited about an education. "We are investing in academics like no other higher-education company can do," says Joseph L. D'Amico, who as president of Apollo Group Inc. oversees the campaign it calls "Reinventing education, again." The goal, he says, "is to take our business to a new level." Last month Apollo provided The Chronicle a behind-the-scenes (but by no means unfettered) look at some of the new recruiting techniques, educational moves, and marketing tactics

"Obama Proposes Education Technology Agency Modeled After DARPA by Jeffrey Mervis on 4 February 2011 The Obama Administration has proposed a new agency within the Department of Education that will fund the development of new education technologies and promote their use in the classroom. In an updated version of its 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, the White House announced today that the president's 2012 budget request will call for the creation of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education (ARPA-ED). The name is a deliberate takeoff on the Sputnik-era DARPA within the Department of Defense that funded what became the Internet and the much newer Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) that hopes to lead the country into a clean-energy future. ARPA-ED will seek to correct what an Administration official calls the country's massive "underinvestment" in educational technologies that could improve student learning. "We know that information and communications technologies are having a transformative impact on other sectors. But that's not the case in K-12 education." The official cited studies showing that less than 0.1% of the $600 billion spent each year on elementary and secondary school education goes for research on how students learn. "There are a number of good ideas and promising early results about the use of education technology that have led the Administration to be interested in doing more in this area," the official noted. (See a special issue of Science from 2 January 2009 on education and technology.) The goal of ARPA-ED, according to the official, will be to "advance the state of the art and increase demand" for successful technologies that teachers and students can use, such as a digital tutor that can bring students and experts together to enhance learning. Federal agencies now fund only a relative handful of projects in this area, the official added, and most local districts don't have the money to purchase those found to be effec

Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability By Julie Thompson Klein AAC&U is pleased to copublish an important new book by Julie Thompson Klein, Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability. With a foreword by AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider, the book provides a systematic approach to interdisciplinarity on campus, grounded in a conceptual framework, and also presents a portfolio of pragmatic strategies. Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures gives administrators and faculty the tools they need to craft persuasive arguments, make informed decisions anchored in the literature, and devise changes in policy and procedures that will foster successful and sustainable interdisciplinary research and education.

"Advancing by Degrees" is designed to help college officials monitor and improve graduation rates by providing a framework of on-track indicators that reveal patterns among groups of students-including those who are struggling and need help to graduate. These data, in turn, can help drive changes in policies and practices that can boost the number of college graduates. Great report...wonderful questions, practical, focused! Terrific.