Group items tagged

"Ditching a Textbook: An Update January 10, 2011, 11:00 am By Amy Cavender Back in July, I wrote about an experiment I was planning in my two Political Issues sections. I'd opted to try this for a number of reasons: (1) I was dissatisfied with the standard readers available, as they tend to present issues in binary fashion, and real-world issues are seldom that simple. (2) I wanted to be able to take up much more recent issues than I could if I relied on textbooks (it takes too long for things to get into print). (3) I wanted students to help determine the topics for the course, and to develop their skills in locating good sources to help them develop their thinking on issues of interest to them. (4) I wanted to reduce costs for students. So, last semester, I used only one primary textbook: Glenn Tinder's Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions (the writing-intensive section also made use of Muriel G. Harris' Prentice Hall Reference Guide). I've yet to find a good substitute for that particular book; it frames the underlying questions of politics nicely, and I wanted my students to have that background as they thought about contemporary issues. For the contemporary issues themselves, though, I started off by selecting a few myself (e.g., technology and privacy, technology and civic discourse, immigration), and showing students the kinds of resources they might be able to find. Then, for the latter part of the course, they chose the issues, found sources, and shared them in the class Zotero library. Working in teams or as individuals (depending on which section they were in), they were then responsible for running a class session and assigning readings for that session. So, how did it work out? Well, I've got some tweaking to do. In the future, I need to provide more guidance on evaluating and using sources (bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of students in Political Issues are first-years). To accomplish that I may need to drop some of

"December 13, 2010 Higher-Education Groups Lay Out Strategies to Reach Obama's College-Completion Goal By Eric Kelderman President Obama's ambitious goal for the nation to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020 can be reached, says a new report by three higher-education organizations. But getting there, the groups say, will require a commitment to action by federal, state, and institutional leaders, and not just the arcane discussions of process that have so far dominated the response to the 2020 goal. "The collective effort to strengthen higher-education performance has yet to materialize," says the report, "Strengthening College Opportunity and Performance," which was produced by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability; the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems; and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. "Over the last year, instead of vigorous debate about strategies for increasing educational attainment," the report says, "we saw technical arguments among a few think tanks and foundations about how goals are set." The groups lay out a series of recommended policies and actions that should be taken to put the country on course to meet President Obama's objective. The federal government, the groups say, needs to define explicit goals for all states and make sure that policies and regulations contribute to meeting goals rather than inhibiting them. For example, the kinds of data that the government collects and reports are not helpful for determining how well states and institutions are really performing in higher education, the report says. States must have a full understanding of how many more degrees colleges should be producing, make sure that the colleges within their borders have clearly defined roles, and overhaul appropriations policies to make sure that institutions that will enroll the most students are getting an adequate amount of money a

"$2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning January 22, 2011, 9:49 am By Marc Parry Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be-if it comes at all-remains unclear. One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet. That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT's plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT's radical idea as official policy-dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses. "With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan's agency is working with the Labor Department on the program. So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here's what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves. And it demands open access to everything: "All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, vi

"Documenting the Damage to Cal State Students at California State University at Northridge are being hit by worsening personal economic conditions, higher tuition rates and greater difficulty getting into courses, according to a report, "Squeezed From All Sides," being released today by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles. Researchers surveyed more than 2,000 students at Northridge, which like most of the Cal State campuses is ethnically diverse and includes many first generation college students. Among the findings: * Students' families have taken hard hits. More than 10 percent of students reported that at least one parent had lost a job since 2008, and 21 percent reported that at least one parent had lost income or hours of work. * Paying for college has become more difficult. Among students enrolled for at least two years, 57 percent said that paying had become "a little more difficult" and another 28 percent said that it had become "a lot more difficult." * Getting into courses has become more difficult, with 77 percent of students reporting that the inability to get into classes will result in longer time to degree."

"March 13, 2011 Many For-Profits Are 'Managing' Defaults to Mask Problems, Analysis Indicates 3-year default rates on student loans are 5 times as high as 2-year rates at some colleges By Goldie Blumenstyk and Alex Richards It is no surprise that student-loan default rates go up the longer they're tracked: Give borrowers more time, and more of them will default. But a Chronicle analysis has found that at hundreds of colleges, most of them for-profit, the three-year default rate is inordinately greater than the two-year rate, giving credence to concerns that certain colleges are aggressively using "default management" tools to mask problematic rates of default. Education Department data released last month show that rates at nearly all institutions rose when measured for three rather than two years, as federal law will soon require. Yet at 243 colleges, or about 8 percent of the 3,168 degree-granting institutions The Chronicle examined, the three-year rate was at least 15 percentage points higher than the two-year rate, a substantial increase. Of those, 83 percent were for-profit colleges, including 27 institutions owned by Corinthian Colleges, 25 owned by ITT Educational Services, and 17 owned by Career Education Corporation, At five of Career Education's Cordon Bleu culinary colleges, the two-year rates hovered at 5 percent or below and the three-year rates exceeded 24 percent."

"June 12, 2011 In Follow-Up, 'Academically Adrift' Students Show Worrisome Levels of Debt and Joblessness, Author Says By Scott Carlson Some people have been talking about a bubble in higher education. Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, doesn't quite buy it. But he did tell a room of college administrators here that higher education was going through a sea change: Once upon a time, if you took the financial risk of getting a college degree, no matter your major, you would do extremely well in life, compared to someone with only a high-school degree. Times have changed, he said. "It's not that college degrees aren't worthwhile," but the returns are diminished, he said. "After 2008, "you can't be so sure that the college credential, waving that paper in the air, is enough to give you the job that is going to pay enough that it didn't matter how many loans you took out." Mr. Arum appeared here at the Summer Seminar, a conference put on by the Lawlor Group and Hardwick-Day, two higher-education consulting firms based in the Twin Cities, to discuss the book he wrote with Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011). By now, most academics are familiar with the book and its provocative thesis: Students, the authors contend, spend a great deal of time socializing and relatively less time studying effectively. As a result, they don't seem to be learning as much as we might like to think they are, despite the high grades many have. "They might not hand out A's on college campuses like they're candy," he said, "but we hand out B's like they are candy. You've got to really work today to get something below a B." The book represents the work the researchers did in tracking through their first two years of college 2,300 students who entered 24 representative four-year institutions in the fall of 2005. "By the time the book came out, we had data not just on the first tw

"March 27, 2011 Elite Colleges Fail to Gain More Students on Pell Grants By Beckie Supiano and Andrea Fuller During the past decade, the country's wealthiest and most elite colleges have faced heightened pressure to serve more low-income students. Many of the colleges responded by pouring millions of dollars into generous financial-aid policies and increasing their recruitment efforts. But those measures seem to have barely moved the needle. The share of undergraduates receiving federal Pell Grants, which go to financially needy students, at many of the nation's wealthiest institutions has remained relatively flat in the past five years, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from the Education Department. Just under 15 percent of the undergradu­ates at the country's 50 wealthiest colleges received Pell Grants in 2008-9, the most recent year for which national data are available. That percentage hasn't changed much from 2004-5, around the time that elite institutions focused their attention on the issue. And Pell Grant students are still signifi­cantly less represented at the wealthiest colleges than they are at public and nonprofit four-year colleges nation­wide, where grant recipients accounted for roughly 26 percent of students in 2008-9. Individual colleges among the wealthiest have made gains in enrolling Pell Grant students, who generally come from families with annual incomes of less than $40,000. But others have lost ground. It may be that these elite colleges are simply competing with one another for a small group of low-income students rather than increasing the number willing to consider selective colleges, says Christopher N. Avery, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, who is studying the college-selection process of students in Virginia. "The colleges are fishing in the same pool," he says. "The goal has to be expanding the pool of students who are applying, but that's very hard to do." Elite colleges ha

"May 2, 2011 Balance Your Budget by Cleaning House By Michael J. Bugeja As we approach the end of another academic term, some institutions are still living off of stimulus money that did little to inspire solutions to mammoth budget cuts looming for the 2012 academic year, which promises to be one of the most difficult in memory for higher education. I direct the journalism school at Iowa State University, a land-grant institution that strives to make education affordable in good or bad economic times. We've experienced layoffs, firings, and furloughs, and are still in the process of reorganizing within my college of liberal arts and sciences. My school is the largest academic program in the largest college at ISU, and our budget has been slashed by more than 20 percent in the past four years. Nevertheless, in the next academic year, we'll balance our budget without increasing workload for most professors, while graduating students sooner-thanks to streamlined curricula, enhanced by advising. To accomplish those goals, the journalism school and other units at the university have adopted or are in the process of adopting several of the methods below: 1. Curtail curricular expansion. Nothing is more responsible for the increasing cost of higher education than ever-expanding pedagogies. Too many professors want their course loads to harmonize with their research interests, and many create courses based on the latest technology. Others are unwilling to teach basic introductory courses, preferring to farm those out to underpaid adjuncts. Worse yet, administrators typically reward professors for new course creation. Expanding pedagogies are a part of our academic culture, but they must be curtailed. Early adopters should introduce new technology into existing classes, and hires should be made not on the promise of creating new curricula but on teaching within the existing ones. Promotion-and-tenure documents should be revised to reward innovation within the present c