Red Balloon Resources

"Annals of Higher Education Get Rich U. There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be? by Ken Auletta April 30, 2012 Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university's focus on interdisciplinary education. Photograph by Aaron Huey. inShare214 Print E-Mail Single Page Related Links Audio: Ken Auletta on Silicon Valley and Stanford University. Keywords Stanford University; Silicon Valley; John Hennessy; Education; Entrepreneurs; Distance Learning; Technology Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it's as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Stanford duck syndrome": students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley. Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late twe

"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

The Chronicle of Higher Education Friday, January 7, 2011 January 6, 2011 When Leading a College in Tough Times, Getting Faculty Support Is Crucial By Scott Carlson Palm Springs, Calif. A session here at the Council of Independent Colleges' conference for presidents opened with the sort of joke that goes over well in a room full of top administrators: "How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb?" The punchline: "Change?" But, seriously, many of the colleges represented here are facing challenges that may require some major and even drastic changes. Faculty members, with their reputations for recalcitrance, are often seen as barriers to change. In the session, a scholar of higher education from Harvard University discussed the traits and motivations of the latest generation of faculty members, while two presidents talked about ways they had worked with faculty members to steer their colleges through crises. Cathy A. Trower, research director for the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard, argued that the oldest professors-those born as late as 1945, who are called "traditionalists"-have attitudes about their careers that are very different from the youngest academics', like the Millennials'. Traditionalists tend to be loyal to employers, for example, while Gen-Xers are skeptical. Baby boomers are seeking titles and recognition for their work, while Millennial employees are primarily interested in meaningful work. Ms. Trower said that new scholars primarily want the same things that older scholars want, but the world around all of them has changed, with new methods for distributing scholarly work (for example, digitally), longer work hours, a decline among scholarly presses and longer lead times for publication, and greater financial pressures on scholarly work and departments."

"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,

"How Will Students Communicate? January 6, 2011 Thus spake Zuckerberg: "We don't think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail." The Facebook founder said so in November, when his company unveiled its new messaging platform: a system, sans subject lines, designed on the assumption that in the future most electronic communication will be brief, informal bursts. In December, Zuckerberg's prognostication was essentially certified by the New York Times, which ran an article suggesting that among young people who are in college or about to be, e-mail is quickly going out of style. Meanwhile, learning-management platforms - notably Blackboard, the market leader among nonprofit institutions - have been building more just-in-time messaging features with an eye to becoming the hub for student-to-student and professor-to-student communications around academic coursework. All this has left campus technologists to ponder the future of institutional e-mail systems, which are still by and large the standard medium connecting colleges with their students. If students are in fact moving away from e-mail in their personal lives, institutionally provided student e-mail accounts will probably diminish in popularity over the next few years, campus technologists say, and that could force colleges to rethink the most reliable ways to stay in touch with their students. At the same time, several technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed say that e-mail is unlikely to disappear, if only because it remains the most suitable medium for the sort of official communications routinely sent to students from non-peer, non-professor sources."

"January 2, 2011 Academic Library Autopsy Report, 2050 By Brian T. Sullivan "Insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal." -Shakespeare The academic library has died. Despite early diagnosis, audacious denial in the face of its increasingly severe symptoms led to its deterioration and demise. The academic library died alone, largely neglected and forgotten by a world that once revered it as the heart of the university. On its deathbed, it could be heard mumbling curses against Google and something about a bygone library guru named Ranganathan. Although the causes of death are myriad, the following autopsy report highlights a few of the key factors. 1. Book collections became obsolete. Fully digitized collections of nearly every book in the world rendered physical book collections unnecessary. Individual students now pay for subscriptions to any of several major digital-book vendors for unlimited access. The books may be viewed online at any time or downloaded to a portable device. Some colleges have opted for institutional subscriptions to digital-book collections, managed by their information-technology departments. Most of these collections originated in physical libraries, which signed their own death warrants with deals to digitize their books. 2. Library instruction was no longer necessary. To compete with a new generation of search engines, database vendors were forced to create tools that were more user-friendly, or else risk fading into obscurity. As databases became more intuitive and simpler to use, library instruction in the use of archaic tools was no longer needed. Almost all remaining questions could be answered by faculty (see No. 3) or information-technology staff (see No. 4). It was largely the work of academic librarians that led to most of these advances in database technology. 3. Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum. As faculty incorporated information literacy into their teaching, it became part of the gener

Designing and building things for the United States military is a notoriously slow-moving and costly endeavor. The time from idea to manufacturing for a new armored personnel carrier or a tank is typically 10 to 20 years. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to change that, and drastically so.It seeks to cut the design-to-production cycle to two to four years. So how are they going to do it? Crowdsourcing and prize contests are crucial ingredients in the speed-up recipe. The crowdsourcing effort will rely on a software initiative, called Vehicleforge.mil, which will be a Web portal for gathering, sharing and testing ideas.

"January 19, 2011 For Some Colleges, the Road to Growth Is to Go Hybrid By Goldie Blumenstyk Keiser University's announcement last week that it would convert from profit to nonprofit status is a reminder that ownership status doesn't necessarily define a college. Some for-profits operate like nonprofits and "there are nonprofits that look just like for-profits," says Arthur Keiser, the university's co-founder. Even more than that, the conversion is a reminder of the fluidity of the sector and the variety of new ownership models now popping up on the higher-education landscape. They include models like Ivy Bridge College, an online, associate-degree division of Tiffin University that is majority owned by private investors now operating under Tiffin's accreditation, Middlebury College's new language company created in partnership with a publicly traded technology company called K12, and the TCS Education System, an entrepreneurial consortium of both for-profit and nonprofit divisions that was formed last year by the fast-growing Chicago School of Professional Psychology. The sector hasn't yet hit the point at which it's hard to tell the for-profit colleges from the nonprofit ones without looking at their tax returns, but that day may not be all that far off. All of those arrangements are "part of the cutting edge" says Bernard Luskin, a longtime college administrator who is now working with the nonprofit Touro University to rebuild its online-education programs. (Touro sold its online division, TUI, to private-equity investors in 2007.) Public financing and philanthropic support are getting tighter and tighter, Mr. Luskin notes, and "that makes it pretty hard to grow" without these kinds of alternatives."

What drives many district and state technology leaders bonkers is being asked time and again by their school boards, superintendents, parents, and media: What does the research say about whether we should invest in iPads, tablets, and 1:1 laptops? What they really want to know is: does the new technology work?

"Biology Professors Use Cloud Computing to Reach Students January 28, 2011, 2:00 pm By Tushar Rae To help reduce the number of dropouts in freshman biology courses, professors at the University at Buffalo have turned to the power of collaboration and cloud computing to build an online teaching tool designed to explain concepts better than a textbook can. The tool, called Pop!World, provides a visual way to map evolution. It's the work of Bina Ramaurthy, a research associate professor in the department of computer science and engineering; Jessica Poulin, a research assistant professor in the department of biological sciences; and Katharina Dittmar, an assistant professor of biological sciences. Cloud computing allows for different levels of network resources to be devoted to Pop!World based on the number of students using it, Ms. Ramaurthy says. The addition of Pop!World, which will serve as a lab component, is part of a redevelopment of the freshman biology curriculum that aims both to address attrition and to add mathematical rigor to the program, Ms. Poulin says. The hope is that it will visually engage students. "Teaching from a text gets boring to them," says Ms. Ramaurthy. Though Pop!World has been used for only one semester on the campus, which is part of the State University of New York, Ms. Poulin says she already sees the effects. On a survey of students who were retaking freshman biology during the fall semester, and thus had experienced the course with and without Pop!World, positive reviews of Pop!World, she says, were "off the charts.""

"Can Students Learn to Learn? January 31, 2011 SAN FRANCISCO -- Why do some students in a course perform better than others of roughly equal ability? The answers, of course, are as varied as are students. Some spend more time studying, or study more efficiently; some have other priorities; some don't connect with the instructor. Some of these factors relate to metacognition, defined variously as knowing about knowing or being able to understand why we learn the way we do. A student with metacognition may realize after a disappointing test that she didn't study hard enough, and needs to devote more time to academics. The student operating without metacognition may respond to the same setback by trashing his instructor on RateMyProfessors.com. While some colleges have long taught study skills, some institutions are experimenting with efforts to teach much more than how to study: they are looking for ways to grow their students' metacognition. Many of these projects are still small and don't have years of data to report, but on Friday, several of those involved in the efforts shared their enthusiasm for the approach in a session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The projects discussed here were from members of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, which received support from the Teagle Foundation to coordinate the efforts. So how does this work? Kristin E. Bonnie, an assistant professor of psychology at Beloit College, said that on her tests, she has always let students pick a few questions on the multiple-choice portion (say 3 of 25) that won't be graded. It's a way to show students that she understands they may not grasp everything right away. In the past, she just let students cross out the questions they didn't want to answer. Now, she makes them answer all the questions -- and to exempt a question from grading, students must pick from a list she provides of the reasons they are selecting that question. Students

"Is Increasing Teaching Loads a Wise Idea? March 24, 2011, 11:00 am By Richard Vedder The Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, faced with a massive looming budget deficit ($8-billion), has come forth with a budget that is, by staid Ohio standards, rather innovative, calling for selling assets (e.g., prisons), radically restructuring nursing home care for the elderly, etc. His higher-education budget amounts, while down from previous years, were not down as much as university presidents feared (unlike in neighboring Pennsylvania, faced with similar budgetary woes, where university operating subsidies are proposed to be reduced over 50 percent). But one proposal is bound to raise a ruckus: The governor has asked that all full-time faculty members teach one more course every two years. This probably means an increase in teaching load that averages roughly 10 percent for full-time faculty, more for senior research-oriented professors. Like most in higher education, I prefer it when legislators and governors say "cut expenses by X percent-by whatever means is best given your academic mission," then when they say "increase teaching loads by X in order to reduce instructional costs in the long run." Even if a teaching load increase is going to be mandated, it is better done at an institutional level-University X must have its existing staff teaching Y percent more courses-than at the level of the individual instructor. That approach allows universities to raise teaching loads a good deal for some, but not at all for persons who are, for example, highly productive researchers who should be spending time in the laboratory rather than the classroom. Also, many faculty are actually paying their own way via federal or other research grants, and besides being foolhardy to increase their teaching loads, it might even violate those grants to take on additional teaching responsibilities. Having said all of that, however, I understand where John Kasich is coming from, a

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

"Survey Finds Frustration Among Faculty Leaders at Master's-Level Institutions January 24, 2011, 2:59 pm Faculty Senate leaders at master's-level institutions are more likely than those at doctoral-level universities to report that faculty morale at their institutions is low, according to the newly released results of a survey conducted by Ohio University's Center for Higher Education, in collaboration with the American Association of University Professors. Compared with Faculty Senate leaders at doctoral institutions, whose responses to the center's survey were released in November, those at master's institutions were less likely to report having a good working relationship with their institution's administration, more likely to report that requirements for tenure and promotion are increasing, and more likely to report that there were not enough tenure-track faculty members to support academic programs at their institutions. As is the case at doctoral institutions, the overwhelming majority of Faculty Senate leaders at master's institutions are white, the survey found."

"Peer Review by Twitter As social media tools are increasingly used to respond to scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, many researchers are frustrated, according to an article in Nature. "Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather than at small conferences or in private conversation," the article says. It goes on to quote many others who say that speedy response (even if of varying reliability) is actually a huge improvement over a system of waiting a long time for criticism of published articles."

"$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

The recent bankruptcy declaration by Kodak, one of the nation's most trusted brands for consumers, which once held a market share in excess of 90 percent, is stunning. Kodak mistook America's century-long love affair with its products as a sign of market permanency, missing the fact that camera phones, flip cameras and online sharing would erode its brand and render it irrelevant.American higher education should take heed because it is facing a similar challenge, with implications far more important than the loss of a major corporation

"A Program Is Not a Plan January 13, 2011 By John N. Gardner and Andrew K. Koch One of the main thrusts of what has come to be called "the undergraduate student success movement" is misguided. Yes, we did mean to use the term "misguided." A strong word and a strong assertion, but we have equally strong evidence. Simply stated, higher education institutions in the United States focus heavily on student success programs, but rarely do they have a comprehensive plan to guide those programs. In the absence of a plan, redundancies and gaps occur, and retention stagnates. In short, a program or programs do not a successful plan make. Of course, making this assertion means that John Gardner, one of this essay's authors and a key architect in the national student success movement, has to admit that over the years he may not have given the best advice to all people at all times. For about three decades, Gardner has gone around the country telling college educators that their institutions need to adopt or adapt one form of student success program or another. Drawing from his experiences, the recommended program was often a first-year seminar -- a contemporary staple in the American college curriculum that dates back to the 1880s. And, in fact, research does correlate participation in first-year seminars with positive differences in student retention and graduation rates. At the same time that Gardner was advocating for first-year seminars in particular, he was also advocating for a broader philosophical approach to the first year. He coined the term, "the first-year experience," and meant it to encompass a total campus approach to the first year, not a single program. Upon reflection, it seems that speaking about one program extensively while at the same time advocating for a collective approach may have fostered a bit of confusion. And today the "first-year experience" can mean anything from a single course to a full-fledged coordinated effort to improve the fir

"January 9, 2011 State of Washington to Offer Online Materials as Texts Money-saving effort at 2-year colleges faces vexing problems By Martha Ann Overland It's a question that students, and a growing number of their professors, are asking: Why require students to buy expensive textbooks every year, when the Internet is awash in information, much of it free? After all, the words of Plato have not changed in the past 2,000 years, nor has basic algebra. Washington State's financially strapped Legislature, which foots much of the textbook bill for community-college students on state financial aid, has wondered the same thing. With nearly half a million students taking classes at the state's 34 two-year colleges, why not assemble very inexpensive resources for the most popular classes and allow access to those materials online? And why not cap the cost of those course materials at $30? Calculating the savings, when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year, was an exercise in simple math, says Cable Green, director of e-learning and open education at the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. "We believe we can change the cost of attending higher education in this country and in the world," he says. "If we are all teaching the same 81 courses, why not?" So with a $750,000 matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the board has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges. For the Open Course Library, as the materials are known, teams of community-college instructors, librarians, and Web designers from around the state are creating ready-to-use digital course modules for the 81 highest-enrolled courses. The first 43 courses, which are as varied as "General Biology" and "Introduction to Literature 1," will be tested in classrooms beginning this month. The basic design requirements of the Open Course Library are simple enough. The material must be

Press Release from the Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Foundation will engage academic experts and students to improve public policy information on Wikipedia $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to support first initiative of its kind for Wikipedia SAN FRANCISCO May 11, 2010 -- The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, today announced a new project designed to improve the quality of public policy-related articles on Wikipedia. It is the first time the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a project designed to systematically increase the quality of articles in a particular topic area. The project will be funded via a $1.2 million grant from the US-based Stanton Foundation, a long-time funding partner of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Stanton Foundation is the beneficiary foundation created in the name of the US broadcasting industry leader and media innovator, Frank Stanton. Dr. Stanton's commitment to civic education and freedom of speech carries on through his philanthropic legacy, the Stanton Foundation. "Wikipedia is a key informational resource for hundreds of millions of people," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "The Stanton Foundation wants to increase people's understanding of public policy-related issues, and supporting quality on Wikipedia is a great way to accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is keen to experiment with techniques for encouraging subject-matter experts to work alongside our volunteers to improve quality. This funding will enable us to do that, and I am --as always-- very grateful to the Stanton Foundation for its support." Wikipedia is written by hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world, and that won't change with this project. The Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will recruit Wikipedia volunteers to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic areas for improvement, and work to make them better. Some of tha