Great description of the new digital generation and the problems of an old model of education

Most colleges want to do more with less. The University of Southern Maine had to. The institution has been facing dual crises: a deficit and a six-year graduation rate of 34 percent for first-time, full-time students, compared with 56 percent nationally. "We're hemorrhaging students each year," said Selma Botman, president of Southern Maine. So the university took a hard look at support for its almost 8,000 undergraduates. "We found that we had lots of stuff, but not much of it was coordinated in any way," said Susan M. Campbell, associate vice president for academic affairs. She led a major reorganization. On its three campuses, the university eliminated offices of academic advising, career services, and early student success, and laid off 21 employees. At the same time, it created a student-success center on each campus, in Gorham, Lewiston, and Portland, rehiring 11 people to run the one-stop shops. "The question was, Can we achieve savings through an integrated model?" Ms. Campbell said. The short answer: yes. The university has saved almost $370,000 in base salaries over all. But that move had another price: six age-discrimination complaints, still pending, from former employees who were not rehired.

Gardner Campbell of Baylor examining technology literacy from different vantage points. Argues that everyone needs to be a visual artist. Reflects the frustrations of faculty at learning new technologies.

"Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out-often awkwardly-nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback. Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. "Our graders were great," she says, "but they were not experts in providing feedback." That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia."

"the Princeton University Policy Research Institute for the Region co-sponsored a forum on state-supported higher education with the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities. I attended, along with one other Princeton faculty colleague (though others may have escaped my notice), but most of the audience was composed of officials of New Jersey's state colleges. The topic was "How to Fix a Broken System: Funding Public Higher Education and Making it More Productive." The speakers and panelists were well chosen and quite helpful. They included Rich Novak (Association of Governing Boards), John Cavanaugh (chancellor, Pennsylvania State system), Dennis Jones (president, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems), David Carter (chancellor, Connecticut State University system), Jane Wellman (Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability), and the presidents or chancellors of three of New Jersey's best state colleges. The focus was on the plight of the public four-year colleges of New Jersey, although the speakers made clear the extent to which our state problems mirrored those of most other states. The picture that was drawn for us Friday was not pretty, and it is not likely that we will see a prettier picture for many years. Everyone agreed that the next few years will be worse than the past couple of years-the federal stimulus money will be spent, state budget deficits will continue to grow, the easiest savings from cost-cutting will have already been taken."

"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."

"Peter P. Smith's career in and out of higher education has not followed the straight and narrow. Amid forays into politics (as a member of Congress and lieutenant governor of Vermont) and international affairs (at UNESCO), Smith has been a higher education innovator, helping to found the statewide Community College of Vermont in 1970 and serving for 10 years as founding president of California State University's Monterey Bay campus, beginning in 1995. In those jobs and his current one, as senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, Smith has pushed existing colleges and universities to better serve the adults and other students who have been least well served by traditional higher education. In his new book, Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass), he argues that the country needs to reach deeper into its population than it historically has to produce a sufficient number of educated and skilled workers, and that the thousands of current colleges cannot do that job. "

"Here's the pitch: "Can you really GO TO COLLEGE for LESS THAN the cost of your monthly CELL PHONE BILL? The point we're trying to make is that taking general education, required college courses just became A LOT more affordable." How affordable? $99 for a course. And if you take the courses offered by StraighterLine -- in composition, economics, algebra, pre-calculus, and accounting -- you don't need to worry that the company isn't itself a college. StraighterLine has partnerships with five colleges that will award credit for the courses. Three are for-profit institutions and one is a nontraditional state university for adult students. But one college among the five is more typical of the kinds of colleges most students attend. It is Fort Hays State University, an institution of 10,000 students in Kansas."

"Is the "bundled" model of higher education outdated? Some higher-ed futurists think so. Choosing the academic program at a single university, they say, is a relic of a time before online education made it possible for a student in Oregon to take courses at a university in Florida if she wants. Since the online-education boom, the notion that students could cobble together a curriculum that includes courses designed and delivered by a variety of different institutions - including for-profit ones - has gained traction in some circles."

Bill Graves writes about the "Learning Assurance Commons" (LAC). It draws on his recent monograph (published online in conjunction with the "future-of-higher-education" Jan./Feb. 2010 EDUCAUSE Review). The paper proposes a construct that he now call the "learning assurance commons" (LAC). The paper describes more clearly what the LAC is and how it might become a means to balance rights and responsibilities among education providers and their external investors - students, families, donors, employers, and governments. A key leverage point for such rebalancing would be government vouchers earned by students. The vouchers would flow to students who earn them via assessments and then to the education providers who, along with those students, have agreed to a set of accountability protocols governed by the LAC. The paper extends the idea of the interoperability of the technologies used in education to the interoperability of inter-institution educational processes, such as transfer of credits.

"A highly engaged set of respondents that included 895 technology stakeholders and critics participated in the online, opt-in survey. In this canvassing of a diverse number of experts, 72% agreed with the statement: "By 2020, innovative forms of online cooperation will result in significantly more efficient and responsive governments, business, non-profits, and other mainstream institutions.""

"we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created."

These curricular developments (at Chicago, Harvard and Stanford) are harbingers of a third way in liberal education. This new way bypasses the old battleground of the culture wars - the canon - by recognizing the privileged place that certain works and events occupy in past and present societies, without dictating which of these must absolutely pass before every student's eyes. As opposed to the more common "general education requirements," moreover, the courses in this model also provide students with an intellectual meta-narrative, that is, a synoptic perspective linking different periods, cultures, and even (ideally) disciplines. Finally, this model can offer scholars, administrators and policy makers a new language with which to define the goals and ideals of liberal education, and to help define criteria for their evaluation.

Gates-funded project, 26 teachers across the country who have had uncommon success in helping remedial students. Goal of the project is to identify successful teaching strategies to achieve 80% success rates with remedial students.

Hilary Pennington, at the ACE Annual Meeting in March 2010, argues that we're moving toward a circumstance where wealthy and middle class students will attend public institutions, and increasingly poor students will attend higher priced for-profit institutions.

"Kotkin (The City) offers a well-researched-and very sunny-forecast for the American economy, arguing that despite its daunting current difficulties, the U.S. will emerge by midcentury as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history."

Liz Coleman (Oct 2007) describes the new curriculum, a series of design labs. It's a terrific paper on core values.

In a recent survey by Pat Callan's group, more than half of Americans voiced the belief three years ago that colleges and universities are more interested in their bottom lines than in providing a good education for students. We have been even more surprised -- and dismayed -- to see that figure jump almost 10 percentage points in just three years.

Texas tech will offer a three (3) year medical degree for family practice doctors

Hilary Pennington, at the ACE Annual Meeting in March 2010, argues that we're moving toward a circumstance where wealthy and middle class students will attend public institutions, and increasingly poor students will attend higher priced for-profit institutions.