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"April 3, 2011 A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 By Thomas H. Benton What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem. In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in the context of President Obama's call for more students to attend college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked, should we send more students to college-at an ever greater cost-when more than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" after four years of education? This month I want to speculate on why students (and, to a lesser extent, their parents) are not making choices that support educational success. What could they possibly be thinking? The student as consumer. Surely adolescent expectations of Animal House debaucheries have been with us since the decline of college as preparation for the ministry. But, in the past few generations, the imagery and rhetoric of academic marketing have cultivated a belief that college will be, if not decadent, at least primarily recreational: social activities, sporting events, and travel. Along the way, there may be some elective cultural enrichment and surely some preprofessional training and internships, the result of which will be access to middle-class careers. College brochures and Web sites may mention academic rankings, but students probably won't read anything about expectations of rigor and hard work: On the contrary, "world-renowned professors" will provide you with a "world-class education." Increasingly, students are buying an "experience" instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract cu

"Guido Sarducci and the Purpose of Higher Education March 14, 2011, 10:38 am By Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson The way college courses generally work is that a teacher presents a group of students with some subject matter, then attempts through tests and papers to determine how well the students have mastered the subject matter. Those judgments are summarized in a letter grade. A list of those subject matters and grades constitutes the transcript that describes what the student has learned and what the student's performance was overall. The students and the teacher are focused on the subject matter, and the implied view is that the learning in college is captured in the exercises that inform those grades. The limitations of this "subject matter recall" model of higher education are hilariously captured in Don Novello's comic performance on Saturday Night Live as Father Guido Sarducci, who marketed the "Five Minute University": http://youtu.be/kO8x8eoU3L4 Sometimes, in some subjects, the mastery of specific subject matter is precisely what is at stake. Students aiming to be engineers will make pretty direct use of the principles they learn in a course in mechanics, for example. Students focused on other particular occupational qualifications, whether in certificate, associate-degree, or bachelors'-degree programs, will probably make direct use of some of the subjects they are taught. However, the learning produced in large parts of a college education is-or at least should be-different from that, and the role of tests and grades is correspondingly different. As economics professors, we have always understood that little of what students learned in advanced economics courses-neither the factual content nor the specific analytical techniques-was ever going to come up in their later lives (unless fate intervened and made them economists). We suspect that the same is true of other advanced courses, whether in mathematics or literature or psyc

The Chronicle of Higher Education February 19, 2012 How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture By Dan Berrett Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos. It happens frequently, when he asks the 80 students in his evolutionary-biology class at the University of Colorado at Boulder to work in small groups to solve a problem, or when he asks them to persuade one another that the answer they arrived at before class is correct. When they start working together, his students rarely stay in their seats, which are bolted to the floor. Instead they gather in the hallway or in the aisles, or spill toward the front of the room, where the professor typically stands. Mr. Martin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, drops in on the discussions, asking and answering questions, and hearing where students are stumped. "Students are effectively educating each other," he says of the din that overtakes his room. "It means they're in control, and not me." Enlarge Image How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture 2 Benjamin Rasmussen for The Chronicle Students discuss the relationship between finches' beak sizes and survival rates during Andrew Martin's evolutionary-biology class at the U. of Colorado at Boulder. Such moments of chaos are embraced by advocates of a teaching technique called "flipping." As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or list

"Microsoft Research Unveils Online Observatory of NASA Images of Mars By Jeff Young The crowd-science trend has reached Mars. Students and amateur scientists can now explore the Red Planet online, using software released today by Microsoft Resarch based on NASA images. Though many of the images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are already available on the space agency's Web site, Microsoft has now loaded them into its WorldWide Telescope interface, which creates a way for users to easily pan around the images to see them in context, and presents them in higher resolution than previously available online. "You can actually see rover tracks on the Martian surface," said Dan Fay, director of earth, energy, and environment for Microsoft Research, in an interview. The WorldWide Telescope software is free but only runs on Microsoft's Windows operating system. A Web interface of the system is available, but the Mars images are not yet available there. The company's research division teamed up with astronomers to build the Web-based telescope to experiment with better ways to manage and analyze large data sets (so the company can improve its Bing search engine and its software). Meanwhile, some professors and schoolteachers use the Web telescope in their classrooms, and anyone online is encouraged to scour the images to find unique features of Mars that professional researchers might have missed."

Here is a real example of a red balloon-like $25,000 prize offered by the Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge contest that was awarded to a Second Life learning environment featuring Mars at the Defense GameTech 2010 conference. The award went to the Mars Expedition Strategy Challenge that could incorporate Nasa images. It remains to be seen how technologies such as Worldwide Telescope can mash up into Virtual Environments. A worthy applied R&D topic for an academic DARPA group. This site has a Slidecast with audio narration explaining the project. http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/2010/01/mars-expedition-strategy-challenge.html

"A Program Is Not a Plan January 13, 2011 By John N. Gardner and Andrew K. Koch One of the main thrusts of what has come to be called "the undergraduate student success movement" is misguided. Yes, we did mean to use the term "misguided." A strong word and a strong assertion, but we have equally strong evidence. Simply stated, higher education institutions in the United States focus heavily on student success programs, but rarely do they have a comprehensive plan to guide those programs. In the absence of a plan, redundancies and gaps occur, and retention stagnates. In short, a program or programs do not a successful plan make. Of course, making this assertion means that John Gardner, one of this essay's authors and a key architect in the national student success movement, has to admit that over the years he may not have given the best advice to all people at all times. For about three decades, Gardner has gone around the country telling college educators that their institutions need to adopt or adapt one form of student success program or another. Drawing from his experiences, the recommended program was often a first-year seminar -- a contemporary staple in the American college curriculum that dates back to the 1880s. And, in fact, research does correlate participation in first-year seminars with positive differences in student retention and graduation rates. At the same time that Gardner was advocating for first-year seminars in particular, he was also advocating for a broader philosophical approach to the first year. He coined the term, "the first-year experience," and meant it to encompass a total campus approach to the first year, not a single program. Upon reflection, it seems that speaking about one program extensively while at the same time advocating for a collective approach may have fostered a bit of confusion. And today the "first-year experience" can mean anything from a single course to a full-fledged coordinated effort to improve the fir

"February 13, 2011 Scholars Question New Book's Gloom on Education Doubts are raised about study behind 'Academically Adrift' Scholars of Education Question the Limits of 'Academically Adrift' By David Glenn It has been a busy month for Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. In mid-January, the University of Chicago Press published their gloomy account of the quality of undergraduate education, Academi­cally Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Since then the two sociologists have been through a torrent of radio interviews and public lectures. In the first days after the book's release, they had to handle a certain amount of breathless reaction, both pro and con, from people who hadn't actually read it. But now that more people in higher education have had time to digest their arguments, sophisticated conversations are developing about the study's lessons and about its limitations. Many college leaders are praising the ambition of Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa's project, and some say they hope the book will focus new attention on the quality of undergraduate instruction. When the authors spoke last month at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in San Francisco, the ballroom far overfilled its capacity, and they were introduced as "rock stars." But three lines of skepticism have also emerged. Fiirst, some scholars say that Academically Adrift's heavy reliance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a widely used essay test that measures reasoning and writing skills, limits the value of the study. Second, some people believe the authors have not paid enough attention to the deprofessionalization of faculty work and the economic strains on colleges, factors that the critics say have played significant roles in the ero­sion of instructional quality. Third, some readers challenge the authors' position that the federal government should provide far more money to study the quality of college learning, but should not otherwise do mu

"February 20, 2011 A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I By Thomas H. Benton Unsurprisingly, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reveals that at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years." And that's just the beginning of the bad news. Meanwhile, in his State of the Union address, President Obama included a call for more Americans to go to college in order to make us more competitive in a global context. This is "our generation's Sputnik moment," he said. Many professors will recall that the arms race with the Soviet Union motivated a surge in support for higher education that lasted until the end of the 1960s. It was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including the arts and humanities. Fifty years later, perhaps the most visible remnant of the original "Sputnik moment" is the belief that everyone should go to college. But that raises the question: What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students? Arum and Roksa point out that students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences-rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields-tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers."

"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

"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

"Smarter Than You Think Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself By STEVE LOHR October 4, 2010 Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined - win at chess, predict the weather - and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence. Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day. Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University - supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo - has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer - calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week - that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself. "

"Measuring Student Learning: Many Tools November 23, 2010, 2:44 pm By David Glenn Suppose that you've served on a faculty committee that has devised a list of collegewide learning objectives for your undergraduates. You don't want that list to just sit there on a Web site as a testimony to your college's good intentions. (Right?) You want to take reasonable steps to measure whether your students are actually meeting the goals you've defined. How best to do that is, of course, a highly contested question. Some scholars urge colleges to use nationally normed tests, like the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that attempt to capture students' critical-thinking and analytic-writing skills. Others say it is better to use student portfolios that allow students to demonstrate their skills in the context of their course work. (For a taste of that debate, see this post and the comments it engendered.) Charles Blaich, director of Wabash College's Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, advocates an all-of-the-above approach. Colleges should use as many reasonable kinds of data as they can get their hands on, he says. The CLA and other national tests can be powerful tools, but they can't possibly capture a college's full range of learning objectives."

"Special Report A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 2) December 16, 2010 Advising and Tutoring There are two basic ways that students can seek outside assistance. For administrative or customer service questions, they can contact their course adviser; for questions related to the actual course material, they have the allotted 10 hours of SmarThinking tutoring (minus five minutes per session for "processing"). I found that my course adviser -- who (along with Burck Smith and StraighterLine generally) had no knowledge of this article until after I finished the class -- was available and willing to assist me; I e-mailed him at least a half dozen times as I went through the course, and in each case he wrote back within a day, and often sooner (his replies tended to be very brief but -- more often than not -- helpful). The tutoring arrangement is less convenient. For those unfamiliar with the service, SmarThinking tutoring takes place in a sort of chat session; the interface is a large white browser window into which students can type questions and their tutors can type responses. My questions showed up in large red letters, while my tutor's replies were in large blue ones. This was helpful for distinguishing between my words and those of my tutor, although the format of the chat session is such that our words often overlapped and became illegible. When one "page" of type is filled up, the chat session opens a new, blank page, and my tutor and I frustrated one another - and wasted time - by inadvertently moving back and forth between pages. Special Report Inside Higher Ed's Serena Golden took StraighterLine's Economics 101 course this year. This article recounts her experiences and what they reveal about the much-discussed curricular experiment. Tutors have no access to the course materials or any of the work that students have done, so each question must be explained in the absence of any context - and unlike at a university tutoring center, where this m

"Upstart Course-Management Provider Goes Open Source January 31, 2011, 10:27 pm By Josh Keller Instructure, a course-management software company that recently won a large contract in Utah, announced on Tuesday that it would make most of its software platform available for free under an open-source license. Instructure is one of a wave of new entrants into an increasingly competitive market for learning-management software in higher education. The company's year-old Canvas platform allows instructors and students to manage course materials, grades, and discussions online. In offering its basic software for free, the company could offer new competition for Moodle and Sakai, the two main existing open-source platforms. Like commercial arms of those platforms, Instructure intends to make money from colleges by supporting, hosting, and extending its software. In December, the company won a bid to provide software to a collection of Utah colleges that serve roughly 110,000 students, provoking a lawsuit from a competitor that lost that bid, Desire2Learn. The suit was quickly withdrawn. Instructure says it has signed contracts with a total of 25 colleges. Josh Coates, Instructure's chief executive, promoted the platform's ease of use and its integration with outside services like Facebook and Google Docs. "I don't consider what we've done at Instructure like rocket science," Mr. Coates said. "But it feels like it because we're sort of working in the context of the Stone Age.""

"Wikipedia Aims Higher July 11, 2011 BOSTON - The United States' foremost custodian of public records had advice for professors whose colleagues still turn up their noses at Wikipedia. "If all else fails, you can tell them, 'If it's good enough for the archivist of the United States,' " said David Ferriero, who was appointed to the post in 2009, " 'we should at least take a look at it on campus.' " Five years ago, many professors had pegged Wikipedia as a pariah. Now, four years into its first coordinated effort to recruit professors and students to its cause, Wikipedia's overseers believe they have successfully recast the free, publicly edited encyclopedia as an ally of respectable scholarship. Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have "Wikipedia ambassadors" tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero's office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a "Wikipedian in residence" in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Late last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the encyclopedia, took another step toward assuming the mantle of an accessory of higher education: it held an academic conference. The first-ever Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit convened professors who had incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, as well as others who were considering doing so, to talk about pros and cons of assigning students to improve the publicly edited online encyclopedia. The foundation also made it clear that Wikipedia plans to expand its relationship with academe. When the foundation started recruiting professors several years ago for its Public Policy Initiative - an effort to improve articles relating to U.S. public policy - it already had its eye set on developing "mechanisms and systems that would enabl

"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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology ended 2011 with a grand announcement: It would broadcast massive, open online courses - equal in rigor to its on-campus offerings - to tens of thousands of non-enrolled, non-paying learners around the world. Eventually, the university would offer these students a pathway to some sort of credential.

"Annals of Higher Education Get Rich U. There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be? by Ken Auletta April 30, 2012 Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university's focus on interdisciplinary education. Photograph by Aaron Huey. inShare214 Print E-Mail Single Page Related Links Audio: Ken Auletta on Silicon Valley and Stanford University. Keywords Stanford University; Silicon Valley; John Hennessy; Education; Entrepreneurs; Distance Learning; Technology Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it's as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Stanford duck syndrome": students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley. Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late twe

"February 12, 2012 'Academically Adrift': The News Gets Worse and Worse 'Academically Adrift': The News Gets Worse and Worse 1 Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Kevin Carey In the last few months of 2010, rumors began circulating among higher-education policy geeks that the University of Chicago Press was about to publish a new book written by a pair of very smart sociologists who were trying to answer a question to which most people thought they already knew the answer: How much do students learn while they're in college? Their findings, one heard, were ... interesting. The book, Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, fulfilled that promise-and then some. It was no surprise that The Chronicle gave prominent coverage to the conclusion that "American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students," but few people anticipated that the book would become the rare piece of serious academic scholarship that jumps the fence and roams free into the larger culture. Vanity Fair used space normally allotted to Kennedy hagiography to call it a "crushing exposé of the heretofore secret society known as 'college.'" The gossip mavens at Gawker ran the book through their patented Internet cynicism machine and wrote that "To get a college degree, you must go into a soul-crushing amount of debt. And what do you get for all that money? Not learning." The New Yorker featured Academically Adrift in a typically brilliant essay by Louis Menand. In one of her nationally syndicated columns, Kathleen Parker called the book a "dense tome" while opining that the failure of higher education constituted a "dot-connecting exercise for Uncle Shoulda, who someday will say-in Chinese-'How could we have let this happen?'" Her response proved that Kathleen Parker has a gift for phrasing and did not actually read the book, whose main text runs to only 144 concise and well-argued pages. But the definitive

College is expensive. Ask any family with post-secondary students and they will tell you just how outrageous are the costs of college education today. And yes, gas, food, and life in general are expensive. But college costs have risen much faster than average inflation for decades so this isn't a [...]

But this course, Building a Search Engine, is taught by two prominent computer scientists, Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford research professor and Google fellow, and David Evans, a professor on leave from the University of Virginia. The big names have been a big draw. Since Udacity, the for-profit startup running the course, opened registration on Jan.