Red Balloon Resources

"Prior-Learning Assessment Confers a Semester's Worth of Credits, Study Finds September 7, 2011, 4:36 pm Students who earned academic credit based on assessments of prior learning outside of college received an average of 17.6 credits, according to a research brief released on Wednesday by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. The brief, which draws on data for 62,475 adult students at 48 colleges and universities, described students who received credits for prior learning as being 2½ times as likely to graduate as those who did not earn such credits. Students typically earn prior-learning-assessment credits for on-the-job training, as well as work, volunteer, and military experience."

"Get Out While You Can August 19, 2011 By James D. Miller Tenure won't save us from a higher education collapse. Start making alternative career contingency plans now because this collapse could be sudden and catastrophic."

"Technology Is at Least 3 Years Away From Improving Student Success January 13, 2012, 7:34 am By Josh Fischman Las Vegas-At the very start of the Higher Ed Tech Summit here this week, James Applegate threw out a challenge. Mr. Applegate, vice president for program development at the Lumina Foundation, told an overflow crowd that the United States needed 60 percent of its adults to hold high-quality degrees and credentials by the year 2025. During the rest of the day, technology executives described programs that could improve graduation rates and learning, but won't be able to do so for several years. They collect many points of data on what professors and students do, but can't yet say what results in better grades and graduation rates. "We're beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don't have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that," said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker. "These are really early days," agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard. There's lots of technology out there that's outcome-related. For instance, at the meeting, which is part of the international Consumer Electronics Show, the interactive textbook publisher Kno announced a suite of new features. One of them, a performance gauge callled Kno Me, gives students information about how much time they spend on different sections of a book, the results of quizzes, and the kinds of notes they took. "With thousands of students using these books, we can show them which of these variables are related to students-anonymous, of course-who get A's, or B's, or C's, so students learn what kind of activity leads to the best results," said Osman Rashid, the company's chief ex

"Do Cities Need Universities to Survive? Nate Berg Jan 13, 2012 3 Comments Do Cities Need Universities to Survive? Courtesy: UCLA Share Print Email The so-called "town and gown" relationship between cities and universities has become increasingly important in recent years. As universities contribute more and more to the local economy through research, reputation and building, they're seen not only as educational and cultural institutions, but economic development tools. But how much should cities rely on universities? This essentially was the question posed to four university professors at a panel discussion in Los Angeles. Hosted by Zocalo Public Square and moderated by The Chronicle for Higher Education editor Jeff Selingo, the event asked whether universities can save cities. "We really can't believe that universities can save cities," said Gene Block, chancellor at the University of California Los Angeles. He argues that even though universities contribute to a city's culture and economy, they can't be fully relied upon to solve major foundational problems should they arise. And so far they haven't, according to Rice University President David Leebron. "I don't really see it so much as a question of whether universities can save cities. Cities generically aren't really in any danger," Leebron said. "The real question, I think, is can universities make our cities more competitive, and more competitive on a global scale?" Leebron said universities can play a major role in helping cities provide jobs and education that attract people and businesses from all over the world. "That's both in terms of what they can contribute to the economic advancement of the city, but also importantly what the universities contribute to the quality of life in the city and the quality of governance in the city," Leebron said. Arizona State University President Michael Crow said that universities will continue to be a part of ensurin

"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'

"January 17, 2012 Investors Backed by Publishing Giant Team Up With Calif. University to Start a Bilingual College By Goldie Blumenstyk A $100-million investment fund backed by the German publishing and media giant Bertelsmann and the endowment for two Texas public university systems is jumping into higher education with two ventures aimed key markets. One is a new bilingual college aimed at Hispanic students, in partnership with an affiliate of Chapman University. The other is a new London-based distance-education company that will assist European universities in creating, marketing, and managing online courses and degree programs. For the yet-to-be-named Hispanic-serving college, the new fund, called University Ventures, will form a partnership with Brandman University, an 11,000-student nonprofit institution now known for serving working adult students at its 25 campuses in California (plus one in Washington State) through online and face-to-face courses. Once known as Chapman University College, it was separately accredited from Chapman three years ago and renamed for a benefactor, the Brandman Foundation, in April. Gary Brahm, Brandman's chancellor, said his institution has a good record in serving and graduating Hispanic students, who make up more than a quarter of Brandman's enrollment. (It claims a six-year graduation rate for students, all of whom now enter with at least 12 credits, of 68 percent.) The new partnership with University Ventures presents a chance "to do something very significant in higher education and to do something very significant in California," he said in an interview on Monday. The program will be aimed at the many students from Spanish-speaking homes who have learned enough English to graduate from high school but either are too intimidated or too inadequately prepared to get through traditional college programs taught fully in English. "This has the opportunity to significantly improve their success," he said. Together, Unive

"University Ventures Letter Volume II, #2 Announcing University Ventures Thirty years ago America was an economic basket case. The official unemployment rate in 1982 exceeded 10%, but apples-to-apples unemployment (counting it the way we do today) was over 16%. Inflation was north of 6% and the prime interest rate reached 21.5% in June 1982. Things weren't much better in the UK where deindustrialization had resulted in unemployment over 20% in many regions, and where the 'workshop of the world' became a net importer of goods for the first time ever. It's always darkest before the dawn. So few recognized we were on the verge of a revolution in information technology that would drive productivity increases across almost all industries and create new ones over the next two decades. If there's any consensus at all in today's debate about how to rekindle economic growth, it's the importance of education, and particularly higher education. We need more educated workers to innovate and increase productivity. Not coincidentally, the largest industry that has not seen much in the way of productivity improvements since 1982 is education. All but a handful of the 170 million students currently enrolled at tertiary institutions around the world are learning the way their parents and grandparents learned (often learning virtually the same curriculum). The 'sage on a stage' model remains unchanged, and the well over $1 trillion in annual spending on higher education continues to be directed to the same functions. And so the stage (if not the sage) is set for the world to focus on higher education as it never has before, and for dramatic changes in programs, delivery models, costs and learning outcomes. While the private sector will play a key role in this next revolution, it cannot succeed alone. Traditional universities and colleges - public and private -- will be the crucibles of change, in partnership with entrepreneurs and companies. The

"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

"January 23, 2012 State Support for Colleges Falls 7.6% in 2012 Fiscal Year By Eric Kelderman Higher education's oracles and prognosticators began warning of a "cliff" in state appropriations shortlyafter the $767-billion federal economic-recovery act passed, in 2009. Now data show just how high that cliff was. Total state support for higher education declined 7.6 percent from the 2011 to the 2012 fiscal years, according to an annual report from the Grapevine Project, at Illinois State University, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers. As a whole, state spending on higher educa­tion­-after being supported by the recovery-act money for three budget years-is now nearly 4 percent lower than it was in the 2007 fiscal year. Twenty-nine states appropriated less for colleges this year than they did five years ago. The current year's large decline was due in part to the expiration of about $40-billion in federal money given to the states to prop up spending on education. While a number of states are now seeing improvements in their economic forecasts, their economies had not recovered enough by July to allow officials to replace the lost federal dollars. Factoring out the federal stimulus money, state support for colleges declined a little more than 4 percent from 2011 to 2012. The overall decline is also a result of the big drop in higher-education spending in Cali­fornia, accounting for more than a quarter of the total decrease in state support. Related Content States Push Even Further to Cut Spending on Colleges Calif. Governor Goes After For-Profits With Limits on Cal Grants California's impact underscores the wide variations in support for higher education across the states. Not including the federal stimulus, state spending for higher education fell more than 13 percent in California, and New Hampshire slashed more than 41 percent from its higher-education budget in 2012-the largest percentage decline in the nation. But Montana ra

"Public Holds Mixed Views of Higher Ed A majority of Americans (57 percent) believe that the higher education system in the country fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend, according to a survey released Sunday by the Pew Research Center. Three-quarters of those polled said that college is too expensive for most Americans. But among Americans who are college graduates, 86 percent said that college had been a good investment for them personally. Pew also released a survey, in conjunction with The Chronicle of Higher Education, of college presidents. (Inside Higher Ed released a survey of college presidents in March.) The Pew survey is the latest to find public ambivalence about higher education -- with majorities seeing the importance of a college education, but much skepticism about college pricing and access. A survey by Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education last year found that a majority of Americans believe that colleges mainly care about their own bottom lines instead of making sure that students have a good educational experience. But the survey also found that a majority of Americans believe a college education is essential for success."

"January 22, 2012 MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency James Yang for The Chronicle By Kevin Carey The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things-radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained. MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations-more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far. Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together-free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­-and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something-you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it. The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputat

"College Students Lead in Internet Use and Tech Gadgets, Study Finds July 19, 2011, 12:39 pm By Jie Jenny Zou A study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project confirms the idea that young adults-particularly undergraduate and graduate students-are more likely to use the Internet and own tech devices than is the rest of the general population. But nonstudents ages 18 to 24 were more active on social networks than were college students, sending more updates to Facebook and Twitter. The study was compiled using data collected from the Pew Internet Project surveys throughout 2010, and it featured a sample size of nearly 10,000 respondents. Regardless of educational background, young adults ages 18 to 24 were generally much more likely to be Internet users, to engage in social media, and to own Web-enabled devices like laptops and smartphones. Undergraduate and graduate students were the most likely to have speedy Internet connections, with 93 percent to 95 percent citing home access to broadband. Community-college students showed a slight edge in mobile Internet use over undergraduates and graduate students, which Aaron W. Smith, a Pew senior research specialist who compiled the study, attributed to a trend among lower socioeconomic groups to use mobile phones as their primary mode of Internet access, a finding of a previous Pew report. The researchers were surprised by how ubiquitous the Internet has become for young people, said Mr. Smith. Nearly 100 percent of college students and 92 percent of nonstudents in the 18-24 age range were Internet users. By comparison, only 75 percent of adults nationally report using the Internet."

"January 22, 2012 States Push Even Further to Cut Spending on Colleges By Eric Kelderman For nearly four years, governors and state legislators have focused on little else in higher education but cutting budgets to deal with historic gaps in revenue. Now, with higher-education support at a 25-year low, lawmakers are considering some policy changes that have been off-limits in the past, such as consolidating campuses and eliminating governing boards. Such proposals reflect the reality that, in most states, money for higher education will be constrained for the foreseeable future. Systems in Georgia and New York have already taken the unusual step of combining campuses under a single president. Other states, such as Ohio, are talking about giving institutions more freedom from state regulations, although for college administrators there's a trade-off: They would get more flexibility but even less state money. On the agenda in many statehouses this year will be bills that would tie higher-education appropriations to the completion rates of students at public colleges. Such performance-based models, which have had a mixed record in recent decades, are again popular with lawmakers trying to squeeze the most out of every tax dollar and to reward colleges that are more efficient at producing graduates. Related Content State Support For Higher Education Falls 7.6% in 2012 Fiscal Year Calif. Governor Goes After For-Profits With Limits on Cal Grants Legislators aren't demanding that colleges be more cost-efficient just to reduce spending on higher education, says Travis J. Reindl, a higher-education researcher for the bipartisan National Governors Association. They also want to keep colleges affordable for students. "We'll still be talking about money, money, money," Mr. Reindl says of the legislative sessions ahead. "Governors are increasingly interested in how the money is being spent by higher education ... and how much of that money is going to come out of

"January 24, 2012 Colleges Can Take 4 Steps to Assure Quality, Group Says By Dan Berrett Increasing the percentage of college graduates in the United States has become a collective aspiration of policy makers, advocates for higher education, and President Obama. But this push for quantity will mean little if colleges cannot demonstrate the quality of the degrees they confer, says an advocacy group. The group, the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, released today a set of guidelines it says will help colleges assess and improve student achievement and, in the process, better demonstrate the quality of their offerings. The guidelines are being presented at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation's annual meeting in Washington, with endorsements from 27 organizations, chiefly accreditors and associations. The guidelines stake out four broad principles of assessment and accountability for a college to follow: setting ambitious goals for the outcomes of undergraduate education; gathering evidence about how the institution is faring in pursuit of those outcomes; using that evidence to improve learning; and sharing the results. The essential idea is to clearly articulate and make intentional the objectives that guide student learning, said David C. Paris, executive director of the alliance. "That's our goal," he said, "an evidence-based profession." The alliance was started in 2009 by several higher-education leaders and foundations to respond to growing calls for accountability in the sector. The assumption was that colleges needed to define how they would substantiate student learning-or lawmakers would do it for them. The new guidelines expand on the alliance's previous efforts, including a statement of principles to guide student learning, which were released in 2008, and a pledge by more than 100 college presidents to take steps at their institutions that are largely identical to the ones set out in the new guidelines. O

"Apollo Buys Company Known for Remedial Ed Tools The Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, on Tuesday announced that it was purchasing Carnegie Learning, which has created adaptive learning tools that have been particularly successful in teaching remedial mathematics. The company is a spinoff of research conducted at Carnegie Mellon University. Apollo will pay $75 million to buy the company and another $21 million to Carnegie Mellon for related technology rights that it still owns. "

"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

"January 1, 2012 Tenure's Dirty Little Secret Tenure's Dirty Little Secret 1 Tim Foley for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Milton Greenberg It seems that tenure is always in the news. Long an article of faith for most faculty members, tenure is being put on the defensive almost everywhere, including within the academy itself. During the past decade, the numbers of tenured and tenure-track professors have sharply declined from nearly one-half of the faculty to about one-third. Most courses in four-year colleges and universities as well as community colleges are now taught by contingent faculty, including part-time adjuncts, graduate students, and holders of full-time nontenure-track positions. Does anyone care? Tenure is rooted in the American Association of University Professors statement on academic freedom and tenure that for many faculty members has become tantamount to religious dogma, impervious to forces of change, regardless of source. The dogma is that the common good is served by the free pursuit of truth under the principles of academic freedom, buttressed by the lifetime job security of tenure. While an individual's tenure may be revoked for cause, this rarely used action is protected by extraordinary and lengthy procedural requirements equivalent to a trial. If tenure is so vital, why is it on the defensive and, in fact, seriously losing ground? Where is the public outrage? There is none outside the confines of higher education, and even there it is hardly universal. Three factors are in play. First, the large expansion of higher education in the United States during the past 50 years has stripped the academy of its mystery as a cloistered monastery. The curtain has been opened, revealing the meaning and consequences of the tenure system. As with any dogma, religious or secular, once its status as truth is questioned and its claims considered dubious, true believers are left with a leap of faith. Second, colleges-public and private-are firmly e

"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

"Letting Go of Lecture December 23, 2011 - 3:00am By Paul Fain ROCKVILLE, Md. -- The remedial math class at Montgomery College thrums with the sounds of clicking keyboards and low murmurs. Students pack the room and stare intently at computer terminals. Missing, however, is the voice of a professor lecturing to the class. This modular classroom is a computer lab, not a lecture hall. There is no podium or other central spot for a professor. Several instructors are here, however, hovering around the room and helping students one at a time. Their role looks more like that of tutors than professors. Welcome to the "emporium" approach to remedial mathematics, a major change in teaching style. Remedial math is perhaps the biggest stumbling block in higher education. Roughly 60 percent of incoming community college students are unprepared for college-level work, typically in math and English, and place into developmental courses (the preferred term among academics). Success rates are the worst for math, and only a small portion of remedial math students ever complete a single college-level math course. Many get frustrated at their lack of progress and drop out, a major impediment in the push to get more Americans into and out of higher education with a credential. "The issue of remedial math is the key for the completion agenda," says Louis Soares, director of the postsecondary education program at the Center for American Progress. The problem was severe even at Montgomery College, which is widely considered to be a top two-year institution. Prior to the college's developmental math redesign, which went into effect this year, about half of the students who needed remedial math placed into the lowest levels of the developmental program. Of that group, just 15 percent successfully completed a college-level math course within 3.5 years of entry, according to college officials. Those numbers are hardly unusual in higher education, experts say. They may even be

"Open-Textbook Idea Is Gaining Steam December 19, 2011, 4:01 pm By Alexandra Rice Colleges across the country took note when Washington State announced its Open Course Library initiative in October, offering community-college students affordable online resources for some of the most popular courses. Now other states and colleges are exploring similar options. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst awarded 10 teaching faculty $1,000 grants this spring as a part of its Open Education Initiative. The faculty members submitted proposals for developing free or low-cost digital resources as an alternative to students purchasing commercial textbooks. The university estimates the effort will save 700 students $72,000 over the 2011-12 academic year. On the West Coast, Darrell Steinberg, the leader of California's Senate, proposed a bill to establish the online California Digital Open Source Library, MindShift's Tina Barseghian reported. If passed, the bill will allocate $25-million in state funds to create 50 free online college textbooks. If you've heard of any other similar projects, tell us about them in the comments below."