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"Online Course Provider, StraighterLine, to Offer Critical-Thinking Tests to Students January 19, 2012, 12:29 pm By Jeff Selingo As alternatives to the college diploma have been bandied about recently, one question always seems to emerge: How do you validate badges or individual classes as a credential in the absence of a degree? One company that has been hailed by some as revolutionizing introductory courses might have an answer. The company, StraighterLine, announced on Thursday that beginning this fall it will offer students access to three leading critical-thinking tests, allowing them to take their results to employers or colleges to demonstrate their proficiency in certain academic areas. The tests-the Collegiate Learning Assessment, sponsored by the Council for Aid to Education, and the Proficiency Profile, from the Educational Testing Service-each measure critical thinking and writing, among other academic areas. The iSkills test, also from ETS, measures the ability of a student to navigate and critically evaluate information from digital technology. Until now, the tests were largely used by colleges to measure student learning, but students did not receive their scores. That's one reason that critics of the tests have questioned their effectiveness since students have little incentive to do well. Burck Smith, the founder and chief executive of StraighterLine, which offers online, self-paced introductory courses, said on Thursday that students would not need to take classes with StraighterLine in order to sit for the tests. But he hopes that, for students who do take both classes and tests, the scores on the test will help validate StraighterLine courses. StraighterLine doesn't grant degrees and so can't be accredited. It depends on accredited institutions to accept its credits, which has not always been an easy task for the company. "For students looking to get a leg up in the job market or getting into college," Mr. Smith said, "t

"December 31, 2011 Let's Improve Learning. OK, but How? By W. Robert Connor Does American higher education have a systematic way of thinking about how to improve student learning? It would certainly be useful, especially at a time when budgets are tight and the pressure is on to demonstrate better results. Oh, there's plenty of discussion-bright ideas, old certainties, and new approaches-and a rich discourse about innovation, reinvention, and transformation. But the most powerful ideas about improving learning are often unspoken. Amid all the talk about change, old assumptions exert their continuing grasp. For example, most of us assume that expanding the number of fields and specialties in the curriculum (and of faculty to teach them), providing more small classes, and lowering teaching loads (and, hence, lowering student-faculty ratios) are inherently good things. But while many of those ideas are plausible, few have been rigorously evaluated. So maybe it's time to stop relying on assumptions about improving learning and start finding out what really works best. A genuine theory of change, as such a systematic evaluation of effectiveness is sometimes called, would be grounded in knowledge about how students learn, and in the best way to put that knowledge to work. The theory should also be educationally robust; that is, it should not just help colleges expose students to certain subject matter, but also challenge institutions to help students develop the long-lasting survival skills needed in a time of radical and often unpredictable change. And it must also have its feet on the ground, with a sure footing in financial realities. Above all, those who would develop a truly systematic way of thinking about and creating change must be able to articulate their purpose. Given the great diversity of institutional types, student demographics, history, and mission among American colleges and universities, it's hard to discern a shared sense of purpose. But when f

"Cracking Open the Scientific Process Timothy Fadek for The New York Times A GLOBAL FORUM Ijad Madisch, 31, a virologist and computer scientist, founded ResearchGate, a Berlin-based social networking platform for scientists that has more than 1.3 million members. By THOMAS LIN Published: January 16, 2012 Recommend Twitter Linkedin comments (145) E-Mail Print Single Page Reprints Share The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others. Science Times Podcast Subscribe This week: Opening science and doing it yourself, plus the malaria medicine of Chairman Mao. Podcast: Science Times Related Wordplay Blog: Open Science, Numberplay style! (January 16, 2012) When Breakthroughs Begin at Home (January 17, 2012) RSS Feed RSS Get Science News From The New York Times » Enlarge This Image Timothy Fadek for The New York Times LIKE, FOLLOW, COLLABORATE A staff meeting at ResearchGate. The networking site, modeled after Silicon Valley startups, houses 350,000 papers. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (145) » For centuries, this is how science has operated - through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate. The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only "if you're stuck with

"A Disrupted Higher-Ed System January 26, 2012, 2:40 pm By Jeff Selingo The "disruption" of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard's Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players. What exactly those innovations will look like remains a matter of debate. One view from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, envisions a future in which every industry will be disrupted and "rebuilt with people at the center." In this recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg talked specifically about the gaming industry, which has been upended by the popularity of social-gaming venues, such as Words With Friends and Farmville. But what if we applied her people-centered vision to higher ed? While amenities and services on campuses have been redesigned in the last decade with students clearly at the center, the core of the academic experience for students today is almost exactly the same as it was for their parents decades ago. While other industries have been able to find productivity gains without sacrificing quality, on most college campuses we still have professors at the front of a room or at a table with an average of 16 students in front of them. We all know that's one of the key drivers of rising college costs. Higher ed is people intensive, and for many prospective students and their parents, the professor-centered academic experience is well worth the high price and will be for a long time. It's one reason why high-quality institutions really have little to worry about. But we also know that the traditional academic experience isn't for everyone these days. The students we used to call "nontraditional" are now a majority, yet we have way too many colleges chasing after high-achieving 18-to-24-year-olds

"Tue, Jan. 31, 2012, 3:01 AM Global contest will lead to help during heart attacks By Marie McCullough Inquirer Staff Writer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man´s life this month because he knew the location of an AED. MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man's life this month because he knew the location of an AED. Do you know where the nearest defibrillator is located? Yes No View results Post a comment RELATED STORIES Join the MyHeartMap challenge PHILLY.COM's TOP FIVE PICKS Mayor Nutter outraged at suspect's bail Media misled about whereabouts of Santorum daughter Parents: Disabled daughter's transplant could happen Where's the school choice, Chaput? Contest's 1st clue: Find the pig Around the world, the hunt is on for thousands of lifesaving portable medical devices that are hanging in public places - in Philadelphia. Why would someone in, say, Abu Dhabi care about finding devices in Philadelphia? Because a University of Pennsylvania project to map the locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout the city has mushroomed into a global "crowdsourcing" competition fueled by the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones - and the chance to win cash prizes up to $10,000. The ultimate prize, of course, will be saving the lives of cardiac-arrest victims. Penn plans to create an interactive online AED registry that will, for the first time, enable the city's 911 system, emergency responders - and any bystander with a phone - to quickly locate an AED. Beginning Tuesday, participants in Philadelphia will use a free app downloaded to their phones to transmit photos and locations of the city's estimated 5,000 AEDs. These backpack-size machines can assess a cardiac-arrest victim and, if appropriate, deliver an electric shock to restart the heart. Studies show even sixth graders can follow an AED's step-by-step audio directions. But in this age of cyber collaboration, the contest, called "

"The Single Most Important Experiment in Higher Education By Jordan Weissmann Jul 18 2012, 8:00 AM ET 130 Online education platform Coursera wants to drag elite education into the 21st century. Now, it's getting buy-in from the academy. 615_Harvard_Student_Online_Computers_Reuters.jpg (Reuters) As of yesterday, a year-old startup may well have become the most important experiment yet aimed at remaking higher education for the Internet age. At the very least, it became the biggest. A dozen major universities announced that they would begin providing content to Coursera, an innovative platform that makes interactive college classes available to the public free on the web. Next fall, it will offer at least 100 massive open online courses -- otherwise known as MOOCs*-- designed by professors from schools such as Princeton, CalTech, and Duke that will be capable of delivering lessons to more than 100,000 students at a time. Founded by Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera is one of a handful of efforts aimed at using the web's cost savings to bring Ivy League-quality courses to the masses. Its peers include the joint Harvard-MIT project edX and Udacity, a free online university created by Google executive and former Stanford professor Sebstian Thrun. (Another high-profile startup, Minerva, is attempting to create an actual "online Ivy" that students will pay to attend.) But the deals Coursera announced Tuesday may well prove to be an inflection point for online education, a sector that has traditionally been dominated by for-profit colleges known mostly for their noxious recruitment practices and poor results. That's because the new partnerships represent an embrace of web-based learning from across the top tier of U.S. universities. And where the elite colleges go, so goes the rest of academia. Coursera has previously teamed with Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan to offer 43 courses,

"July 19, 2012 Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses 1 Jim Wilson, The New York Times, Redux Andrew Ng, a co-founder of the company and a professor of computer science at Stanford U.: "We have a lot of white boards up around the office where these ideas are being written down and erased and written down and erased." Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young Coursera has been operating for only a few months, but the company has already persuaded some of the world's best-known universities to offer free courses through its online platform. Colleges that usually move at a glacial pace are rushing into deals with the upstart company. But what exactly have they signed up for? And if the courses are free, how will the company-and the universities involved-make money to sustain them? Some clues can be found in the contract the institutions signed. The Chronicle obtained the agreement between Coursera and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first public university to make such a deal, under a Freedom of Information Act request, and Coursera officials say that the arrangement is similar to those with the other partners. The contract reveals that even Coursera isn't yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled "Possible Company Monetization Strategies," lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses. That means students taking a free course from Stanford University may eventually be barraged by banner ads or promotional messages. But the universities have the opportunity to veto any revenue-generating idea on a course-by-course basis, so very little is set in stone. Andrew Ng, a co-founder of the company and a professor of computer science at Stanford, describes the list as an act of "brainstorming" rather than a set plan. "We have a lot of white boards up around the office where these ideas

"The Real Challenge for Higher Education July 15, 2010 By Garrison Walters America, once the world's most educated nation, is fast losing ground. Although we are still second in overall education levels, we are much weaker -- 11th -- in the proportion of younger people with a college degree. In a world where knowledge increasingly drives economic competitiveness, this is a very serious problem. The issue is more than abstract economics, it's also a moral concern: Since 1970, the benefits of higher education have been very unequally apportioned, with the top income quartile profiting hugely and the bottom hardly moving at all (despite starting from a very low level). America's education problem has been apparent for 30 years or so, and there have been a lot of suggestions for making us competitive again. Ideas on the K-12 side include: better trained and motivated teachers, more and better early childhood programs, better prepared school leaders, improved curriculums, higher standards, financial incentives, better data systems, and more rigorous and frequent assessments. On the higher education side, proposals include: motivating professors and administrators with formulas that reward success rather than enrollment, more use of technology, more data, improved administration, and (at least for general education) more testing. And, of course, better funding is relentlessly advocated for the entire educational spectrum. All of these approaches have at least some potential to foster improvement. Some have already demonstrated benefits while some are being seriously oversold (more on that in a separate essay). My fundamental belief, though, is that even if one takes a very optimistic view of the achievable potential of each of these strategies and adds them together, the net result will be significant but insufficient improvement to allow us to catch up in educational levels. If our scope of action is limited to the ideas advanced so far, we will actually contin

"September 14, 2010 Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change By Karin Fischer Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization. Despite the global economic crisis, "large parts of the education sector have probably missed the opportunity for real change," Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Insead, a French business school, told the audience at a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More With Less." The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers, Mr. Dutta, who is also academic director of elab@INSEAD, a center for excellence in teaching and research in the digital economy, evoked the analogy of a frog: Place it in a pot of boiling water, and it will immediately jump out. Put the frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature-it won't react to change and will be cooked to death. Even with a "dose of hot water" caused by the recession, Mr. Dutta said, most universities have tinkered at the margins, freezing faculty recruitment and reducing administrative expenses, rather than taking a hard look at how they do business. "Have we really jumped, have we really changed?" he said. "I look around, and I see honestly very little change." To meet growing and diversifying worldwide demand for higher education, Mr. Dutta and his fellow panelists said, colleges must embrace new models, transforming how they deliver education. For one, they argued, both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society."

"September 19, 2010 A Measure of Education Is Put to the Test Results of national exam will go public in 2012 By David Glenn You have 90 minutes to complete this test. Here is your scenario: You are the assistant to a provost who wants to measure the quality of your university's general-education program. Your boss is considering adopting the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a national test that asks students to demonstrate their ability to synthesize evidence and write persuasively. The CLA is used at more than 400 colleges. Since its debut a decade ago, it has been widely praised as a sophisticated alternative to multiple-choice tests. At some colleges, its use has helped spark sweeping changes in instruction and curriculum. And soon, many more of the scores will be made public. But skeptics say the test is too detached from the substantive knowledge that students are actually expected to acquire. Others say those who take the test have little motivation to do well, which makes it tough to draw conclusions from their performance."

"September 5, 2010 Why Teaching Is Not Priority No. 1 By Robin Wilson With lavish recreation centers and sophisticated research laboratories, life on college campuses is drastically different from what it was 100 years ago. But one thing has stayed virtually the same: classroom teaching. Professors still design lessons, pick out the readings, and decide how to test-in many cases, in the same way they always have. In the last few years, however, a cottage industry has sprouted up in academe to measure whether students are actually learning and to reform classes that don't deliver. Accreditors now press colleges to show that they are teaching what students need to know. And as the Obama administration packs more money into student aid, it wants more evidence of educational quality. But a roadblock may emerge: faculty culture. Not because professors care little about quality or students-indeed, many care deeply-but because of what colleges tell them is important. "Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning," says Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. "I get promoted for writing lots of articles, not for demonstrating learning outcomes.""

No Time to Waste A publication of the SREB 4 Imperatives for States: 1. Set statewide priority and direction, with specific goals, for increasing the numbers of degrees and certificates - including raising accountability for system and institutional leaders and setting measures to assess credential completion, among other actions. 2. Increase access and enrollment in postsecondary education even more, by improving college affordability, students' college readiness, and drawing more adults to postsecondary study. 3. Increase the numbers of credentials earned by students in all colleges and universities through targeted institutional actions- building campus cultures that make completion the first priority and institutionalizing a series of actions that guide students more directly to a credential. 4. Increase productivity and cost-efficiency in degree completion ─ by introducing strategies that reduce excess credits, streamline college-transfer systems, and expect timely degree completion at lower costs.

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

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.

"December 12, 2010 Is Your Psychology 102 Course Any Good? Here are 22 ways to measure quality - but some of these measures have quality issues of their own. By David Glenn In The Chronicle's "Measuring Stick" series this year, we have looked at debates about how to gauge the quality of departments or entire universities. In this final week, we are looking at the individual course, higher education's basic component. We have sketched 22 potentially useful ways to assess a course's quality. Some of them are commonplace, and some are just emerging. We focus on one section of Psychology 102 at an imaginary university. For each of the 22 measures, the table below explains why it might matter; how easy it typically is for the public to find this kind of information about a course; and the potential limits and pitfalls of using the method."

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

"The State of the Rankings November 11, 2010 By Philip G. Altbach With the arrival of the new academic year in much of the world, the rankings season must be under way. The major international rankings have appeared in recent months - the Academic Ranking of World Universities ([ARWU, the "Shanghai Rankings,"), the QS World University Rankings, and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE). Two important U.S. rankings have also been published - the U.S. News & World Report America's Best College Rankings, and the much-delayed National Research Council's Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs. These are but a few of the rankings available on national or regional postsecondary institutions. For example, the European Union is currently sponsoring a major rankings project. In Germany, the Center for Higher Education Development has formulated an innovative approach to rankings of German universities. The list can be extended. The Inevitability of Rankings If rankings did not exist, someone would invent them. They are an inevitable result of mass higher education, and of competition and commercialization in postsecondary education worldwide. Potential customers (students and their families) want to learn which of many higher education options to choose - the most relevant and most advantageous. Rankings provide some answers to these questions. It is not surprising that rankings became prominent first in the United States, the country that experienced massification earliest as a way of choosing among the growing numbers of institutional choices. Colleges and universities themselves wanted a way to benchmark against peer institutions. Rankings provided an easy, if highly imperfect, way of doing this. The most influential and most widely criticized general ranking is the U.S. News & World Report America's Best College Ranking, now in its 17th year. Numerous other rankings exist as well, focusing on a range of variables, from the "bes

"Globalization 101 November 4, 2010 ORLANDO, Fla. -- In an effort to deepen their understanding of how technology can help different cultures understand each other better, David L. Stoloff last year decided to give his students a taste of peer review -- and outsourcing. Presenting on Wednesday at the annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning, Stoloff, a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, described an experiment in which he used social media to teach students in a first-year course on educational technology a lesson about how they can use social media to change how they do amateur cross-cultural research on the Web. Stoloff divided the students into four groups, and assigned each to put together a PowerPoint presentation on one of four countries -- Taiwan, Algeria, Nepal and Russia -- using basic Web research. But instead of assessing the projects himself, he tapped more authoritative sources: university students in those countries. Using the learning-oriented social networking site ePals.com, which mostly focuses on K-12, Stoloff tracked down professors at 20 universities and asked them via e-mail if they would be interested in having their students evaluate his students' work. Four replied. "

"The Rise of the 'Edupunk' November 5, 2010 NEW YORK -- The "Edupunks" will inherit the Earth … or at least some attention. Those in higher education who continue hand-wringing over the relative merits of online learning and other technology-driven platforms will soon find themselves left in the dust of an up-and-coming generation of students who are seeking knowledge outside academe. Such was an emerging consensus view here Monday, as college leaders gathered for the TIAA-CREF Institute's 2010 Higher Education Leadership Conference. "We're still trying to fit the Web into our educational paradigm.… I just don't think that's going to work," said Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore. Today's students are "pretty bored with what we do," she added. In a notable acknowledgment of the tail wagging the dog, several panelists alluded here to the possibility that if colleges don't change the way they do business, then students will change the way colleges do business. College leaders don't yet know how to credential the knowledge students are gaining on their own, but they may soon have to, said Mark David Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We are not far from the day when a student, finding unsatisfactory reviews of a faculty member on ratemyprofessors.com, will choose to take a class through open courseware online and then ask his home institution to assess him, Milliron said. Colleges need to prepare for that reality, he said. While the concept of a self-educated citizenry circumventing the traditional system of higher education may have sounded far-fetched a decade ago, the fact that the likes of Spilde gave it more than lip service marks something of a shift. Indeed, there was more than a subtle suggestion across hours of sessions Monday that colleges are in for a new world, like it or not, where they may not be the winners."

"To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test By PAM BELLUCK Published: January 20, 2011 Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques. The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods. One of those methods - repeatedly studying the material - is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other - having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning - is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts. These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do. In the experiments, the students were asked to predict how much they would remember a week after using one of the methods to learn the material. Those who took the test after reading the passage predicted they would remember less than the other students predicted - but the results were just the opposite. "I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge," said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. "I think that we're tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.""