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In the last years of the nineteenth century, Charles Dow created an index of 12 leading industrial companies. Almost none of them exist today. While General Electric remains an industrial giant, the U.S. Leather Company, American Cotton Oil, and others have long since disappeared into bankruptcy or consolidation.

Every other Monday, right before class ends, Muhammad Zaman, a Boston University biomedical engineering professor, hands out a one-page form asking students to anonymously rate him and the course on a scale of one to five. Enlarge This Image Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times Muhammad Zaman, who teaches biomedical engineering at Boston University, graphs the results of his evaluations and e-mails to explain how he will make changes. News, data and conversation about education in New York. Join us on Facebook » Follow us on Twitter » .It asks more, too: "How can the professor improve your learning of the material?" "Has he improved his teaching since the last evaluation? In particular, has he incorporated your suggestions?" "How can the material be altered to improve your understanding of the material?" "Anything else you would like to convey to the professor?" College learning assessments and professorial ratings come in many forms, with new ones popping up all the time. Ratemyprofessors.com has been going strong for years, and almost everywhere, colleges ask students to fill out end-of-term evaluations - and increasingly, midterm evaluations as well. Many professors with large lecture classes swear by clickers that help them keep tabs on how well their students are following the material. Some online courses include dashboards that let professors see which students are stuck, and where. And thousands of professors use some variation of K. Patricia Cross's "One-Minute Paper" approach, in which, at the end of each class, students write down the most important thing they learned that day - and the biggest question left unanswered. But even in an era when teacher evaluations and learning assessments are a hot topic in education, Dr. Zaman stands out in his constant re-engineering of his teaching: He graphs the results the day he collects them (an upward trend is visible), sends out an e-mail telling the class abo

"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

"January 17, 2012 Investors Backed by Publishing Giant Team Up With Calif. University to Start a Bilingual College By Goldie Blumenstyk A $100-million investment fund backed by the German publishing and media giant Bertelsmann and the endowment for two Texas public university systems is jumping into higher education with two ventures aimed key markets. One is a new bilingual college aimed at Hispanic students, in partnership with an affiliate of Chapman University. The other is a new London-based distance-education company that will assist European universities in creating, marketing, and managing online courses and degree programs. For the yet-to-be-named Hispanic-serving college, the new fund, called University Ventures, will form a partnership with Brandman University, an 11,000-student nonprofit institution now known for serving working adult students at its 25 campuses in California (plus one in Washington State) through online and face-to-face courses. Once known as Chapman University College, it was separately accredited from Chapman three years ago and renamed for a benefactor, the Brandman Foundation, in April. Gary Brahm, Brandman's chancellor, said his institution has a good record in serving and graduating Hispanic students, who make up more than a quarter of Brandman's enrollment. (It claims a six-year graduation rate for students, all of whom now enter with at least 12 credits, of 68 percent.) The new partnership with University Ventures presents a chance "to do something very significant in higher education and to do something very significant in California," he said in an interview on Monday. The program will be aimed at the many students from Spanish-speaking homes who have learned enough English to graduate from high school but either are too intimidated or too inadequately prepared to get through traditional college programs taught fully in English. "This has the opportunity to significantly improve their success," he said. Together, Unive

"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

"What Does It Mean To Be an Academic? January 6, 2012, 4:21 pm By Nigel Thrift There is a fascinating moment when academics reflect upon their practices in ways that are not just emblematic but are clearly leading to real change in what the practice of being an academic actually means. I have been reminded of this fact twice recently as I have considered practices of teaching and research at a number of universities around the world. First, in the case of teaching, there was seeing some of the new educational technology which is coming into operation. I am not just talking about remarkable educational sites like the interactive simulation site for the physical sciences, PhET, which is used by so many science professors. As good as these undoubtedly can be at allowing students to reach a level of competence in particular problems before they come near a lecture, there is also the new software which allows real interaction in the classroom and the tracking of the reaction to that interaction in order to enable new rounds of inquiry. The consequences are only just being worked through but in time, I am now pretty sure, the lecture in its old form, understood as a direct oral presentation intended to present information or to teach students about a particular subject and delivered by a lecturer standing at the front of the room and giving out information and judgments, will become a minority teaching method. Instead, what were lectures will be recorded for students to consult-many universities have already produced a library of such presentations-and the time previously put by for lectures will be used as a surgery, as a time for problem-solving, clarification, and the like. This is a no less time-consuming method of teaching-indeed, it may involve more work. But I think it is likely to become the norm in many disciplines. Second, in the case of research, there has been reading Paul Rabinow's latest book, The Accompaniment, which includes a fascinating cha

"The Extraordinary Value of Great Universities Richard Florida Dec 15, 2011 2 Comments The Extraordinary Value of Great Universities Reuters Share Print Email The United States is home to more than a third of the world's top 400 research universities. But how exactly do universities factor into the wealth, innovation, and economic competitiveness of their host nations? To get at this, my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I looked into the statistical associations between a nation's concentration of leading universities and broader measures of economic competitiveness, innovation, human capital and social well-being. We based our analysis on a statistical technique that enables us to control for the effects of population size. While correlation is not causation (none of these findings prove that anything more than an association exists) the results are nonetheless striking. In fact, they number among the very strongest I have ever seen in this type of analysis. The concentration of great universities in a nation is extraordinarily closely related to its economic competitiveness. It is closely associated with economic output per capita (.74), total factor productivity (.77) and overall competitiveness (.71) based on the Global Competitiveness Index developed by Harvard's Michael Porter. Universities are also a key force in technology. A nation's concentration of leading universities is closely associated with its level of innovation, measured as patents (.78) and its research and development expenditures (.74). While Stanford's role in Silicon Valley-style high-technology entrepreneurship is the stuff of legend, universities are closely associated with the entrepreneurial level of nations. The concentration of world-class universities is closely associated with a nation's level of entrepreneurship as measured on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (.69). Technology is one key factor in economic competitiveness, but a nation'

"Do Cities Need Universities to Survive? Nate Berg Jan 13, 2012 3 Comments Do Cities Need Universities to Survive? Courtesy: UCLA Share Print Email The so-called "town and gown" relationship between cities and universities has become increasingly important in recent years. As universities contribute more and more to the local economy through research, reputation and building, they're seen not only as educational and cultural institutions, but economic development tools. But how much should cities rely on universities? This essentially was the question posed to four university professors at a panel discussion in Los Angeles. Hosted by Zocalo Public Square and moderated by The Chronicle for Higher Education editor Jeff Selingo, the event asked whether universities can save cities. "We really can't believe that universities can save cities," said Gene Block, chancellor at the University of California Los Angeles. He argues that even though universities contribute to a city's culture and economy, they can't be fully relied upon to solve major foundational problems should they arise. And so far they haven't, according to Rice University President David Leebron. "I don't really see it so much as a question of whether universities can save cities. Cities generically aren't really in any danger," Leebron said. "The real question, I think, is can universities make our cities more competitive, and more competitive on a global scale?" Leebron said universities can play a major role in helping cities provide jobs and education that attract people and businesses from all over the world. "That's both in terms of what they can contribute to the economic advancement of the city, but also importantly what the universities contribute to the quality of life in the city and the quality of governance in the city," Leebron said. Arizona State University President Michael Crow said that universities will continue to be a part of ensurin

"Publishing, Education and "How A Book Is Born" January 9, 2012 - 8:30pm By Joshua Kim If you work in higher ed, you fall asleep every night asking yourself the following questions: Will we suffer the same fate as the record industry, the bookstores and the newspaper business? Is higher ed another example of a physical, as opposed to a digital, information industry - and therefore ripe for disruption? If the core business model of education is built on scarcity, will we survive this transition to information abundance? I imagine that these questions also haunt the dreams of people who work in publishing? All these questions, and more, make reading How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding a worthwhile investment of our time. The barriers to reading this book are actually amazingly low. This Kindle Single is only $1.99. At 62 pages, it will not take much time. And if you have read Harbach's The Art of Fielding (a terrific campus novel), then description this backstory is probably irresistible. One thing we learn from How A Book Is Born is that publishing is very big business: "……total book sales in the United States last year were $13.9 billion - and twice that if you include textbooks and other educational materials. Random House, the biggest of the so-called Big Six publishers, brings in about $2.5 billion a year in revenue; Hachette Book Group, at the smaller end of the Big Six, brings in about $700 million. Michael Pietsch's Little, Brown, which sold 21 million books in 2010, accounted for more than a quarter of that. The vast majority of publishers' revenue (100 percent, in the case of Little, Brown) is from the sale of books and subsidiary rights to books; for the moment, publishers really have no other way to make money." The question is, will e-books change not only how books are read, but how they are published? Traditionally, one of the major roles of the publisher has been to place books in bookstores. Will

"Alan Jacobs - Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College. He blogs at ayjay.tumblr.com. The Great Unbundling of the University By Alan Jacobs Jan 23 2012, 2:14 PM ET 14 The bundle of knowledge and certification that have long-defined higher education is coming apart, but what happens now? Felix Salmon tells the story of how Sebastian Thrum was so overwhelmed by the success of his online Introduction at Artificial Intelligence course -- 160,000 students enrolled! -- that he decided to quit teaching at Stanford and start his own online university, where he'll begin by teaching the people who sign up how to build a search engine. Well, how cool is this? There are about a thousand things I could say about this development, but let's boil it down to the essentials. For a long time now, universities have flourished by offering a bundled package of knowledge and credentialing. People attended university in order to learn stuff that they couldn't learn elsewhere -- because the experts weren't elsewhere -- and to be certified by those experts as having actually learned said stuff. The bundle has been a culturally powerful one. But now: unbundling. Clearly, many universities have come, or are coming, to the conclusion that their primary product is the credentialing, and that they can give knowledge away either as a public service or as brand consolidation (choose your interpretation according to your level of cynicism). Those 160,000 students may have learned a great deal about artificial intelligence, and the successful ones received a "statement of accomplishment ... sent via e-mail and signed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig." But in announcing the course the instructors were careful to note that the "statement of accomplishment ... will not be issued by Stanford University." The big question for universities going forward is this: Can control of credentialing last for long without control of knowledge? If a great many people learn

"Sebastian Thrun Resigns from Stanford to Launch Udacity Written by Sue Gee Monday, 23 January 2012 16:07 Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity - an online educational venture. Udacity's first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car. Attendees at this year's DLD (Digital Life,Design) , Conference being held in Munich, Germany and livestreamed around the world, were probably expecting to hear Sebastian Thrun say something of Google's Driverless Car project, but instead that was only covered in the session introduction. (See video below for the full presentation.) DLDTalkThrun Instead Thrun's talk, University 2.0, was devoted to the idea of online education, in particular the experiences and consequences of delivering the Online AI class. As Thrun also explains on his homepage: One of the most amazing things I've ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" to the world online, free of charge. We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career. Speaking at DLD12, Thrun gave other interesting contrasts between the real-world class and the online one: there were more online students from the small country of Lithuania there on all the courses at Stanford combined and while no Standford student had a perfect score on the course, 248 online students scored 100% - i.e completed the assignments and exam question without a single wrong answer. Something that I don't think he should be as proud about i

A growing body of evidence from the classroom, coupled with emerging research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is lending insight into how people learn, but teaching on most college campuses has not changed much, several speakers said here at Harvard University at a daylong conference dedicated to teaching and learning. Too often, faculty members teach according to habits and hunches, said Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has extensively studied how to improve science education. In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop. "It really requires someone to be doubly expert," Mr. Wieman said. As sometimes happens in some disciplines and departments, a few people develop deeper knowledge of pedagogy. These doubly expert faculty members, he said, can show colleagues how to apply new approaches to teaching the discipline.

Those innocent-seeming brochures imploring students to find their passions and express themselves may be helping to widen the socioeconomic achievement gap, a new study finds. A team of researchers led by Northwestern University assistant professor Nicole M. Stephens argues that American academic institutions expect a level of independence that is uncomfortable for many first-generation college students, who researchers say are more likely to come from poorer backgrounds that emphasize collaboration and interdependence. "They experience more of a culture shock," Stephens said. "The experiences and norms can be different than what they're used to." By making small changes in how expectations are presented to students and how classes are taught, the researchers said, colleges can help level the playing field for first-generation students. The study will appear in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education By Seth Godin For 400 years, higher education in the United States has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amounts of time and money and prestige in the college world have been climbing. I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it. Most undergraduate college and university programs are organized to give an average education to average students. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up. The definition of "best" is under siege. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect. Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem."

"The Solution They Won't Try June 4, 2010 By Bob Samuels If public universities are really committed to promoting access, affordability, and quality, they should consider increasing their funding by accepting more undergraduate students instead of raising tuition and restricting enrollments. While many would argue that higher education institutions are already unable to deal with the students they currently enroll, in reality, it costs most public research universities very little to educate each additional student, and the main reason why institutions claim that they do not get enough money from state funds and student dollars is that they make the students and the state pay for activities that are not directly related to instruction and research. To calculate how much public research universities spend on educating each undergraduate student, we can look at national statistics regarding faculty salaries and how much it costs a university to staff undergraduate courses. According to a recent study by the American Federation of Teachers, "Reversing Course," the average salary cost per class for a tenured professor at a public research university is $20,000 (4 classes at $80,000), and it costs $9,000 for a full-time non-tenure-track teacher and $4,500 for a part-time instructor to teach the same course."

"Experts Ponder the Future of the American University By Karin Fischer and Ian Wilhelm Washington American universities have long set a global standard for higher education. But U.S. institutions will have to change, an international panel of experts said Monday, if they want to retain their edge and help the country in an economy ever more dependent on knowledge and innovation. "The American model is beginning to creak and groan, and it may not be the model the rest of the world wants to emulate," said James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and one of the speakers on a panel assembled by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars here to discuss the university of the future and the future of the university. The other panel members largely agreed with Mr. Duderstadt's assertion that higher education could be among the next economic sectors to "undergo a massive restructuring," like the banking industry has seen. Among the factors that could lead to change, they said, are the globalization of commerce and culture, the accessibility of information and communication technologies, and the shift in demographics in developed countries that will result in the need to educate greater numbers of working adults. One model of a new approach to education could be the for-profit University of Phoenix, whose president, William J. Pepicello, also spoke at the Wilson Center forum. He argued that higher education must be more responsive to and tailor the curriculum to students' needs. Web sites like Google and Yahoo take note of users' preferences to give them information more attuned to their needs, he noted, adding, "Is there any reason why a higher-education platform shouldn't be able to adapt?"

"Tenured Faculty in Nevada Lose Pay Protection The Nevada Board of Regents has changed its regulations so that if the state orders salary cuts of state employees, tenured faculty members are more likely to be included among those who lose some of their pay, The Reno Gazette-Journal reported. Current regulations require the board to declare a financial emergency before tenured faculty members can lose any of their salaries, and the board declined to do so during the last state-ordered pay cut. The shift means that any future cuts will affect tenured faculty and other employees consistently."

"Wal-Mart to Offer Its Workers a College Program By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM Published: June 3, 2010 FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Now on sale at Wal-Mart: college degrees for its employees. The purveyor of inexpensive jeans and lawnmowers is dipping its toe into the online-education waters, working with a Web-based university to offer its employees in the United States affordable college degrees. The partnership with American Public University, a for-profit school with about 70,000 online students, will allow some Wal-Mart and Sam's Club employees to earn credits in areas like retail management and logistics for performing their regular jobs. The university will offer eligible employees 15 percent price reductions on tuition, and Wal-Mart will invest $50 million over three years in other tuition assistance for the employees who participate. "

"Brands are a mighty force in this complicated world. They provide clarity and predictability, a way of quickly categorizing information. Branding seems a natural fit with the predominant method of organizing and governing higher education: creating institutions. Institutions have deep roots in our society and collective consciousness. They create tribes whose markings last a lifetime. The more people around the world who need and desire higher education, the more important institutional brands appear to be. Yet brands fit the reality of higher education less snugly than they seem to. Every Banana Republic in America will sell you the same merino sweater. Even closer parallels in the intellectual-property business have identifiable standards. A randomly selected album issued by Matador Records will almost surely feature fine indie rock. So too with Basic Books, with its roster of nonfiction books by distinguished authors, or the Met, with its renowned operas. What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands-that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards-is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions."

"Attrition Among Chief Academic Officers Threatens Strategic Plans Turnover of Chief Academic Officers Threatens Strategic Plans 1 By Tim Mann The high turnover rate of chief academic officers is a disturbing but little-known fact in higher education today. Frequent turnover can hurt institutional planning and a college's capacity to achieve its strategic goals, especially during these times of economic strain and calls for change within the academy. The role of the CAO, or provost, varies based on a college's identity and how the president defines the job. But the chief academic officer almost always plays a vital role in shaping and executing the strategic plan, leading the design and refinement of academic programs, and recruiting and retaining faculty members. It takes several years to carry out major planning initiatives associated with institutional strategy, curriculum design, and the faculty. Without stable and effective CAO leadership, making progress toward institutional goals is extremely challenging, if not impossible."