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Sandra Jordan

Article from Change on Financial Strategies for Higher Ed - 1 views

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    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
George Mehaffy

Finance: A Reset for Higher Education - Almanac of Higher Education 2010 - The Chronicl... - 0 views

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    August 22, 2010 A Reset for Higher Education By Joni E. Finney Many of us have seen trouble coming for a long, long, time. Did we really believe that endowment growth, state support, and tuition dollars could or would provide an unchecked revenue stream, tempered only by short downturns in the economy, followed by fairly quick recoveries? Did we really believe that we could expand administrative structures and shortchange instruction, but still maintain quality institutions? Did we think that poor completion rates and the achievement gaps between whites and minority groups could be solved only with more money? Did we honestly believe that expensive amenities and increased financial aid for upper-middle-class and wealthy students could be sustained? Of course not. To understand what needs to be done now-a "reset" in higher education-we need to first understand the changes pressuring our enterprise: deficits, demographics, and demand. States' structural deficits, or the gap that occurs when states fail to tax new types of economic activity, have been documented for years. A previously good economy permitted states to postpone those problems, but now, state leaders must revise their tax structures to generate more revenue. The most optimistic economic projections say the recession may end in 2013. Even then, states will be hard-pressed to return to the status quo in terms of appropriations. IN THE RIGHT COLUMN: Charts and Graphics on Finance BROWSE THE ALMANAC: More Statistics and State-by-State Profiles Many in higher education lament states' "disinvestment." The problem is much more complex. States have been reliable partners in financing higher education. While enrollments grew, state support also grew, by 24 percent from 2005 to 2008, followed by a decline of 1.7 percent from 2008 to 2010. At the same time, the federal government spent $6.6-billion in 2009-10 under the stimulus bill for states, an amount that increases to $23-billion once federal
George Mehaffy

Kaplan CEO's book takes on higher ed's incentive system | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    "Ready for Change.edu? January 11, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain Andrew S. Rosen takes the long view when talking about higher education. As CEO of Kaplan, Inc., he often defends the role of for-profit colleges in an evolving marketplace, peppering versions of his stump speech with tales about the creation of public universities and community colleges. His point is that some skepticism about for-profits is similar to the snobbery those older sectors faced from elite private higher education. Rosen goes further in his debut book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, which attempts to paint a picture of higher education's future as well as its history. He also takes a turn as a journalist of sorts - an interesting twist for the former general counsel of the Washington Post Co. - writing about his campus visits to other institutions, a couple of which are Kaplan competitors. The book is ambitious in its scope, particularly for an author with obvious vested interests. But most reviewers have given Rosen high marks. Kirkus Reviews writes: "Incredibly, his argument never comes off as self-serving; the author's thorough exploration of 'Harvard Envy' and the rise of 'resort' campuses is both fascinating and enlightening." Rosen recently answered questions over e-mail about his book, which was released by Kaplan Publishing. Q: The book arrives amid a series of challenges for your industry. What did you hope to accomplish by writing it? A: I've spent most of my life studying or working in education, with students of all ages and preparation levels: top students from America's most elite institutions and working adults and low-income students who have few quality choices to change their lives. I've come to see how the American higher education system (as with K-12) is profoundly tilted in favor of those who already have advantages. Our society keeps investing more and more in the relatively small and unchanging number of students who have the privil
George Mehaffy

The Extraordinary Value of Great Universities - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities - 0 views

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    "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'
George Mehaffy

Using Big Data to Predict Online Student Success | Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

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    "Big Data's Arrival February 1, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain New students are more likely to drop out of online colleges if they take full courseloads than if they enroll part time, according to findings from a research project that is challenging conventional wisdom about student success. But perhaps more important than that potentially game-changing nugget, researchers said, is how the project has chipped away at skepticism in higher education about the power of "big data." Researchers have created a database that measures 33 variables for the online coursework of 640,000 students - a whopping 3 million course-level records. While the work is far from complete, the variables help track student performance and retention across a broad range of demographic factors. The data can show what works at a specific type of institution, and what doesn't. That sort of predictive analytics has long been embraced by corporations, but not so much by the academy. The ongoing data-mining effort, which was kicked off last year with a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is being led by WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies. Project Participants American Public University System Community College System of Colorado Rio Salado College University of Hawaii System University of Illinois-Springfield University of Phoenix A broad range of institutions (see factbox) are participating. Six major for-profits, research universities and community colleges -- the sort of group that doesn't always play nice -- are sharing the vault of information and tips on how to put the data to work. "Having the University of Phoenix and American Public University, it's huge," said Dan Huston, coordinator of strategic systems at Rio Salado College, a participant. According to early findings from the research, at-risk students do better if they ease into online education with a small number of courses, which flies in the face of widely-he
George Mehaffy

MITx: 3 Cheers and 3 Questions | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    "MITx: 3 Cheers and 3 Questions December 19, 2011 - 8:00pm By Joshua Kim MITx is very big news. For a great overview of MIT's plans, check out Audrey Watters' excellent writeup MITx: The Next Chapter for University Credentialing? The MIT student paper The Tech also has a great article. The MIT press release and accompanying FAQ also go into detail about MITx. 3 Cheers and 3 Questions for MITx: Cheer 1 - Leadership: All of us in higher ed should take a moment to recognize and commend MIT for the institutions continued bold leadership in higher education and the open education movement. The wonderful thing about higher ed is that when one institution innovates it grows the pie for all of us - we all benefit. Cheer 2 - Risk Taking: What I love most about MITx is MIT leaders' willingness to learn as they go. Rather than endlessly talk about the next innovation that will make it possible to offer high quality postsecondary education to large numbers of people at affordable prices, MIT is actually doing something. I have no doubt that the MITx model will change and morph over time, but the only way to figure this out is to run lots of experiments and be willing to fail, learn, and evolve. Cheer 3 - Recruiting: A program like MITx raises my opinion of MIT as a parent (my kids launch in 2015 and 2017), potential donor and even a potential employee. The market for higher ed talent is worldwide, and the best people are motivated by mission and culture. MITx is a clear stake in the ground about MIT's values. Question 1 - Platform?: From what I understand from the articles, MITx will run on a new platform that MIT is developing on its own, and that will be made open source. Is this a totally new platform? Are existing open source LMS platforms like Sakai or Moodle utilized at all? What platforms will be utilized for course videos? Again, a new platform, or an existing open source lecture capture and video management platform like OpenCast? Question 2 - Partnersh
George Mehaffy

Examining For-Profits and Cost Structure - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    "Examining For-Profits and Cost Structure January 10, 2011, 11:23 am By Peter Wood Is the for-profit sector of higher education worth preserving from the current onslaught of regulatory challenges coming from the Obama administration? In the first two parts of this series, I described those challenges and outlined a reason why we should resist the urge to drive the for-profit colleges and universities out of business. My answer is that we need them not for what they are now, but for what they are likely to become as the old models of not-for-profit higher education falter. In this third of four installments, I contrast the difficulty that the not-for-profit sector has with containing costs to the streamlined approach of the for-profit institutions. (1) Not-for-profit education's cost problem The "bubble" in higher education-the risk that the public will in significant numbers draw back from college because it perceives that a college education is likely not worth the investment of time and money-is a prognosis of tough times ahead for all of higher education. If the bubble bursts, however, it will be the not-for-profit sector that is hit hardest. There are several reasons for this, including the likelihood that public disaffection with mainstream higher education will mean an unwillingness on the part of legislatures and taxpayers to bail out the industry. The rhetoric of higher-education lobbying about the personal advantages of getting a college degree won't avail. Why should the public pay for a private good, especially one that increasingly looks self-indulgent and impractical for many students? Nor will the rhetoric that emphasizes that higher education spending promotes "national competitiveness" (or mutatis mutandis, prosperity in individual states) carry the political debate. Higher education promotes national or regional competitiveness when students learn internationally competitive skills, but not when they graduate in large numbers ma
George Mehaffy

A College Education for All, Free and Online - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Edu... - 1 views

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    "July 10, 2011 A College Education for All, Free and Online By Kevin Carey All around the world, people have been waiting for someone like Shai Reshef to come along. Reshef is the founder and president of the University of the People, a tuition-free online institution that enrolled its first class of students in 2009. UoPeople strives to serve the vast numbers of students who have no access to traditional higher education. Some can't afford it, or they live in countries where there are simply no good colleges to attend. Others live in rural areas, or identify with a culture, an ethnicity, or a gender that is excluded from public services. UoPeople students pay an application fee of between $10 and $50 and must have a high-school diploma and be proficient in English. There are also small fees for grading final exams. Otherwise, it's free. The university takes advantage of the growing body of free, open-access resources available online. Reshef made his fortune building for-profit higher-education businesses during the rise of the Internet, and he noticed a new culture of collaboration developing among young people who grew up in a wired world. So UoPeople relies heavily on peer-to-peer learning that takes place within a highly structured curriculum developed in part by volunteers. The university plans to award associate and bachelor's degrees, and it is now seeking American accreditation. Rather than deploy the most sophisticated and expensive technology, UoPeople keeps it simple-everything happens asynchronously, in text only. As long as students can connect their laptops or mobile devices to a telecommunications network, somewhere, they can study and learn. For most of humanity, this is the only viable way to get access to higher education. When the university polled students about why they had enrolled, the top answer was, "What other choice do I have?" Some observers have wondered how effective such an unorthodox learning model can be. But UoPeople's tw
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    I wonder how the University of the People will evolve compared to the fledgling Open Educational Resources University that is being founded by a few key institutions around the world. OERU has its business model roots in Web 2.0 as the foundation for collaboration. A group within OERU is also participating in Ray Schroeder's EduMOOC. For more info on OERU see http://wikieducator.org/images/c/c2/Report_OERU-Final-version.pdf
George Mehaffy

Gonick essay predicting higher ed IT developments in 2012 | Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

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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
George Mehaffy

Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    "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. VoilĂ : 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
George Mehaffy

Selma Botman: University's changes real, and hardly random | The Portland Press Herald ... - 0 views

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    "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
George Mehaffy

Views: Fixing the Broken Financing Model - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

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    "Fixing the Broken Financing Model October 4, 2010 By Darryl G. Greer and Michael W. Klein In the title of a recent paper, David Breneman, a regarded higher education economist, asks: "Is the Business Model of Higher Education Broken?" While he objectively weighs the pros and cons of his question, we answer emphatically, yes! Put simply, the way in which America finances public colleges and universities, which serve over 70 percent of college students nationally, is severely and irreparably broken and needs to be changed. Without a new model, public higher education will fail its principal purpose of providing broad college opportunity, especially to low- and middle-income students and an emerging population of new Americans. Moreover, without a new funding rationale that has transparency and predictability for all funding partners, these colleges will lose the public trust - a critical element in sustaining the American democratic experience through education. Public colleges can achieve the dual goals of public and private benefits only by demonstrating equity and fairness regarding who goes to college; legitimacy for who pays and how; and responsibility for how colleges account for educational outcomes and sustaining the public trust. The solution as we see it should include a new public service corporation model that creates private partnerships; produces new revenue to replace lost public financing; protects and enhances the core educational enterprise; and, thereby, generates greater transparency, accountability and public trust that will support a sustained investment in public colleges. The Problem There is widespread evidence, in addition to opinion, that the longstanding model for financing public colleges that has seemed to work so well in many states for decades, now seems, even with an expected economic recovery, to need radical change. (See the soon-to-be-published "A New Model of Financing Public Colleges and Universities," in On the H
George Mehaffy

News: 'The Great Brain Race' - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

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    "American academic leaders are casting a wary eye on developments in higher education in the rest of the world. Will the Bologna Process give Europe an edge? Will the development of research universities in countries outside the West stop the best talent from coming to the United States? What does it mean when American colleges and universities open up campuses thousands of miles away from their home base? Ben Wildavsky argues that these and many other changes are indeed significant and are bringing about a "globalization" of higher education. But while some observers fear these developments could hurt American higher education, Wildavsky argues that the changes have the potential to be a win-win for all involved (and that these and other forms of globalization are now inevitable). He makes his case in a new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton University Press). Wildavsky, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, answered questions about the themes of the book."
John Hammang

Transforming Course Design - 3 views

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    "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] "
George Mehaffy

Charles Kolb: Reforming American Postsecondary Education - 1 views

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    Charles Kolb, President, Committee for Economic Development January 11, 2011 03:35 PM Reforming American Postsecondary Education Are we about to enter an era of postsecondary education reform comparable to what we've seen in the K-12 arena for almost 30 years? In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education released perhaps its most famous and widely read report, "A Nation At Risk." Referring to "a rising tide of mediocrity" in America's elementary and secondary school system, "A Nation At Risk" described the stark challenges faced by American elementary and secondary education. The report became an immediate catalyst for the school reform movement of the last 27 years. That reform movement included initiatives such as education secretary William Bennett's "Wall Chart of State Performance Indicators," the 1989 Charlottesville education summit between President George H.W. Bush and the nations' governors, the subsequent bipartisan national education goals effort that spanned the first Bush and Clinton Administrations, George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act," and now President Obama's "Race to the Top" challenge for state structural reform. As with many K-12 education reform efforts, change has been hesitant, often rancorous, and has achieved mixed results. Nonetheless, there has been steady progress on standards, accountability, measurements and assessment, and a growing consensus about what our children need to know and how we should measure their achievements as they progress toward high-school graduation. What is strikingly absent is that throughout this period of K-12 activity, American postsecondary education has received a "pass." Not a passing grade -- just a pass. There has been precious little discussion about what our young people should be learning in their postsecondary education experience. The typical postsecondary-education debate in Washington and around the country has concerned access and funding. These topics are certainly important, but they h
George Mehaffy

2 Studies Shed New Light on the Meaning of Course Evaluations - Faculty - The Chronicle... - 1 views

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    "December 19, 2010 2 Studies Shed New Light on the Meaning of Course Evaluations By David Glenn Under the mandate of a recently enacted state law, the Web sites of public colleges and universities in Texas will soon include student-evaluation ratings for each and every undergraduate course. Bored and curious people around the planet-steelworkers in Ukraine, lawyers in Peru, clerical workers in India-will be able, if they're so inclined, to learn how students feel about Geology 3430 at Texas State University at San Marcos. But how should the public interpret those ratings? Are student-course evaluations a reasonable gauge of quality? Are they correlated with genuine measures of learning? And what about students who choose not to fill out the forms-does their absence skew the data? Two recent studies shed new light on those old questions. In one, three economists at the University of California at Riverside looked at a pool of more than 1100 students who took a remedial-mathematics course at a large university in the West (presumably Riverside) between 2007 and 2009. According to a working paper describing the study, the course was taught by 33 different instructors to 97 different sections during that period. The instructors had a good deal of freedom in their teaching and grading practices-but every student in every section had to pass a common high-stakes final exam, which they took after filling out their course evaluations. That high-stakes end-of-the-semester test allowed the Riverside economists to directly measure student learning. The researchers also had access to the students' pretest scores from the beginning of the semester, so they were able to track each student's gains. Most studies of course evaluations have lacked such clean measures of learning. Grades are an imperfect tool, as students' course ratings are usually strongly correlated with their grades in the course. Because of that powerful correlation, some studies have suggested that
George Mehaffy

News: The For-Profit LMS Market - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

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    "The For-Profit LMS Market November 1, 2010 Blackboard historically has been synonymous with learning management technology. While the company in recent years has lost some clients in that market to competitors, it still provides the learning management platform for more than half of nonprofit institutions, according to the latest data from the Campus Computing Project. But in the growing for-profit market for learning management, Blackboard is not king. That crown belongs to eCollege, the learning-management provider owned by the media conglomerate Pearson. A peon in the nonprofit world (it owns less than 2 percent market share, according to the Campus Computing Project), eCollege cornered the for-profit market early on by offering a product tailored to meet the unique needs of that type of institution, says Richard Garrett, managing director of the higher ed consulting firm Eduventures. The online learning platforms offered by eCollege and Blackboard "were evolved with different goals in mind," says Garrett. The eCollege platform "was built with top-down enterprises in mind," he says, whereas Blackboard's product was designed to "enable individual faculty to experiment with online, or to use it at an individual course level as a supplement to the classroom" - more in line with the governance structure of the traditional college, where professors have more autonomy."
Glenn Gabbard

Twitter Snapshot: Dan Pink contests carrots and sticks - 2 views

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    How do we facilitate--both structurally and culturally--opportunities for creativity in developing opportunities for profound transformation of the work of colleges and universities?
George Mehaffy

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 0 views

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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
George Mehaffy

The Disruption Is Here | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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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
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