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"A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube Are his 10-minute lectures the future? Salman Khan, a former financial analyst, has created 1,400 educational videos and posted them to YouTube. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he says. By Jeffrey R. Young The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet. This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon-and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently. The resulting videos don't look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short-about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates."

"Tenured Faculty in Nevada Lose Pay Protection The Nevada Board of Regents has changed its regulations so that if the state orders salary cuts of state employees, tenured faculty members are more likely to be included among those who lose some of their pay, The Reno Gazette-Journal reported. Current regulations require the board to declare a financial emergency before tenured faculty members can lose any of their salaries, and the board declined to do so during the last state-ordered pay cut. The shift means that any future cuts will affect tenured faculty and other employees consistently."

"A recent Inside Higher Ed article discussed the experimental work of Duke University's Cathy Davidson, involving students grading themselves. According to Davidson, when students are held responsible for assessing their own - and their peers' - writing performances and products, they learn to take more responsibility for their own learning, and consequently apply themselves much more energetically to their work. In response, Leonard Cassuto of Fordham University points to the fact that at least 15 of Davidson's 16 students in this experiment earned As for the course. Cassuto sees that as a problem and argues that professors need to be the ones saying "You did good work, but not the best in the class." I think I may have somewhat of a compromise when it comes to assessing student written work. I was in the same situation as many writing instructors for years. Students write, write, write. Then I would spend about five minutes per page supplying written commentary individually on each of their papers. But about a year ago I started doing things differently. And I don't plan on going back any time soon."

"The Solution They Won't Try June 4, 2010 By Bob Samuels If public universities are really committed to promoting access, affordability, and quality, they should consider increasing their funding by accepting more undergraduate students instead of raising tuition and restricting enrollments. While many would argue that higher education institutions are already unable to deal with the students they currently enroll, in reality, it costs most public research universities very little to educate each additional student, and the main reason why institutions claim that they do not get enough money from state funds and student dollars is that they make the students and the state pay for activities that are not directly related to instruction and research. To calculate how much public research universities spend on educating each undergraduate student, we can look at national statistics regarding faculty salaries and how much it costs a university to staff undergraduate courses. According to a recent study by the American Federation of Teachers, "Reversing Course," the average salary cost per class for a tenured professor at a public research university is $20,000 (4 classes at $80,000), and it costs $9,000 for a full-time non-tenure-track teacher and $4,500 for a part-time instructor to teach the same course."

The Rise of Crowd Science 2 David Klammer for The Chronicle Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, made a major astronomy discovery with a public Web site of telescope images. Today, data sharing in astronomy isn't just among professors. Amateurs are invited into the data sets through friendly Web interfaces, and a schoolteacher in Holland recently made a major discovery, of an unusual gas cloud that might help explain the life cycle of quasars-bright centers of distant galaxies-after spending part of her summer vacation gazing at the objects on her computer screen. Crowd Science, as it might be called, is taking hold in several other disciplines, such as biology, and is rising rapidly in oceanography and a range of environmental sciences. "Crowdsourcing is a natural solution to many of the problems that scientists are dealing with that involve massive amounts of data," says Haym Hirsh, director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Findings have just grown too voluminous and complex for traditional methods, which consisted of storing numbers in spreadsheets to be read by one person, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute. So vast data-storage warehouses, accessible to many researchers, are going up in several scholarly fields to try to keep track of the wealth of information."

"Mission Creep in Higher Education By Stan Katz I have been following an effort begun by three outstanding academic psychologists to think about the relationship between ethics and accomplishment in professional lives. The scholars involved are Howard Gardner (Harvard School of Education), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University), and William Damon (Stanford School of Education). They call their effort the "Good Work Project," and it has already resulted in several books, including Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon's Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books, 2001). A helpful descriptive paper can be found online here. Howard Gardner is currently editing a new volume of essays to be published in several months as Good Work: Theory and Practice. He has shared with me Bill Damon's piece "Mission Creep and Bad Work in Higher Places," which I think brilliantly exposes the tension that the Good Work Project is exploring between excellence and ethics, between professional accomplishments and professional goals. The title of this essay tells the reader where Damon is going. He argues that "mission creep" is capable of producing bad, rather than good, work, using two examples of professionalism gone astray. The first wayward profession is higher finance and the second is higher education. His account of "low times in high finance" is that the financial industry has abandoned its appropriate mission "to deploy capital so that enterprises can produce goods and services in a profitable manner." Over the past couple of decades the industry has "departed from its ethical moorings" by, among other things, producing new financial instruments (derivatives) that cannot be properly valued-and that their holders discovered had little value. The problem here Damon contends, is that the financial industry lost sight of its "traditional public mission" as its leaders "gambled away the investments that they were respons

"The Better-Mousetrap Problem By Kevin Carey Discussions of technology and higher education tend to veer from "This. Changes. Everything" techno-triumphalism to assertions that using the Internet to educate people is clearly a plot to turn higher education into a cheap corporate commodity on par with bulk packages of frozen french fries. As is often the case, the most interesting work in the field right now sits close to the equipoise between the two, as my colleague Ben Miller documents in his new report, The Course of Innovation, which you should read. The report focuses on the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), which has spent the last decade working with scores of colleges and universities to transform mostly introductory college courses with technology. NCAT's track record is impressive. To the extent that such things can be proven without elaborate randomized control trials, they've proven that thoughtful, faculty-driven course redesign can simultaneously improve student learning and reduce per-student costs. Not by a little, either: Many colleges have cut costs by over 50 percent and improved learning in the bargain. NCAT's suite of course transformation models have proved effective in a wide variety of subjects and settings, from rural community colleges to Research I universities, in courses ranging from math and foreign language to composition and women's studies. (I've written previously about NCAT success stories here and here.) Yet in many ways the most interesting part of the NCAT story isn't the colleges that have adopted these proven methods. It's the colleges that haven't-i.e., most colleges. NCAT has built a better mousetrap, but the world hasn't beaten a path to its door. This is despite the fact that the mousetrap in question improves student learning and cuts costs in a time when colleges are constantly being harangued by policy makers about learning and the economic environment has left many institutions desperately sear

"As scholars, we are always involved in one project or another. Whether it is a funded grant project, a writing project, development (as in web/game/interactive/software/etc), or even curriculum/teaching work, it often becomes quite a challenge to manage things (especially if many collaborators are involved). In situations such as these, many of us turn to tools that can keep our projects well managed and under control-some tools are online, some desktop, some tools are open source, and some are proprietary. All are different, with strengths and weaknesses which will ultimately determine their value to your particular scholarly project. Among the vast cornucopia of collaboratively inclined options, I would like to suggest that people have a look at Open Atrium. The brainchild of Development Seed, Open Atrium is essentially an intranet in a box. It allows for the creation of group/project spaces in which users can have conversations, preserve knowledge, track progress, and share files."

"High-Profile Trader's Harsh Critique of For-Profit Colleges Steven Eisman, the Wall Street trader who was mythologized in Michael Lewis's The Big Short as that rare person who saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming and made a killing as a result, thinks he has seen the next big explosive and exploitative financial industry -- for-profit higher education -- and he's making sure as many people as possible know it. In a speech Wednesday at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference, an exclusive gathering at which financial analysts who rarely share their insights publicly are encouraged to dish their "best investment ideas," Eisman started off with a broadside against Wall Street's college companies. "Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry," said Eisman, of FrontPoint Financial Services Fund. "I was wrong. The For-Profit Education Industry has proven equal to the task." Eisman's speech lays out his analysis of the sector's enormous profitability and its questionable quality, then argues that the colleges' business model is about to be radically transformed by the Obama administration's plan to hold the institutions accountable for the student-debt-to-income ratio of their graduates. "Under gainful employment, most of the companies still have high operating margins relative to other industries," Eisman said. "They are just less profitable and significantly overvalued. Downside risk could be as high as 50 percent. And let me add that I hope that gainful employment is just the beginning. Hopefully, the DOE will be looking into ways of improving accreditation and of ways to tighten rules on defaults." Stocks of the companies appeared to fall briefly in the last hour of trading Wednesday, after news of Eisman's speech made the rounds."

"ST. PAUL, MINN. -- Pockets of experimentation and potential change are cropping up all over the place in higher education. Here, it's the OpenCourseWare movement. There, colleges are adopting "just in time" remediation. And over here, some states are changing funding formulas to reward institutions for graduating students rather than merely enrolling them. But what do the individual innovations amount to? Do they point the way to the sort of transformative change that, given the likelihood of constrained budgets going forward, is probably necessary if higher education is to not only sustain the current level of postsecondary attainment in the country, but increase it in the way many policy experts believe is needed? Share This Story * Bookmark and Share * E-mail * Print Related Stories * Community Colleges' Unfunded Mandate May 17, 2010 * The Accountability/Improvement Paradox April 30, 2010 * Looking Before They Leap April 27, 2010 * Retention, From Beginning to End April 26, 2010 * What the Pledge Means April 21, 2010 FREE Daily News Alerts Advertisement Even longtime advocates of higher education appear to be coming around to the conclusion that the status quo won't suffice. But acknowledging that fact is a far cry from identifying a framework that might lead to such a transformed future. It was in recognition of the latter goal that an unusually diverse group of college administrators and professors, higher education analysts, state officials, and others gathered here last week to talk about how to use data to provoke change and improve performance in higher education"

"Last night, the PBS show Frontline tackled the business of college in a one-hour special on for-profit universities, which have carved a multi-billion-dollar niche for themselves in the higher education sector."

"The Obama administration is preparing to produce tougher regulations that could reduce the amount of federal financial aid flowing to for-profit colleges, cutting the companies' annual revenue growth by as much as a third. In response, the $29 billion industry and its supporters have enlisted top Washington lobbyists and are courting black and Hispanic legislators to fight the proposed rules, which could be released as early as this month. The companies draw students from low-income and minority communities. Federal aid to for-profit colleges has become an issue because it jumped from $4.6 billion in 2000 to $26.5 billion in 2009, according to the Education Department, prompting concern that these students are taking on too much debt. The tougher rules would require ITT Educational Services, Career Education, and Apollo Group's University of Phoenix to show that their graduates earn enough money to pay off their student loans. If for-profit colleges can't meet the standard, they could lose federal financial aid, which typically makes up three-quarters of their revenue."

This article appeared in Planning for Higher Education v.38 no.3 April-June 2010. It discusses planning for organizational change in the context of the use of the 2010 federal financial stimulus funds. It defines best practice as a balance in policy, procedure, and the relationship of key players.

"Higher education is a $400 billion industry fueled by taxpayer money. One of the fastest-growing--and most controversial--sectors of the industry is the for-profit colleges and universities. Unlike traditional colleges that raise money from wealthy alumni and other donors, many for-profit schools sell shares to investors on Wall Street. But what are students getting out of the deal? Critics say a worthless degree and a mountain of debt. Proponents insist they're innovators, widening access to education. FRONTLINE follows the money to uncover how for-profit universities are transforming the way we think about college in America. "

"The current state of student learning in American colleges and universities leaves much to be desired. To be sure, the evidence about whether students are learning is fragmentary, imperfect, and discouraging. Most distressing are the results of the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey and the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which show that average literacy levels among adults with bachelor's degrees have declined over time. That's on top of the fact that the overall level is low: On average, four-year college graduates have only an "intermediate" level of literacy, meaning that they are capable of doing only "moderately challenging literacy activities." Further, data collected from the National Survey of America's College Students-which used the literacy survey-show that "20 percent of U.S. college students completing four-year degrees-and 30 percent of students earning two-year degrees-have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies.""

The Princeton Review is entering the distance education market by teaming up with community colleges to offer fast-track allied health-care programs to students who are willing to pay higher tuition to bypass long waiting lists.

"Project Win-Win Project Win-Win involves 35 community colleges and colleges in six states-Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin-in finding former students, no longer enrolled anywhere and never awarded any degree, whose records qualify them for associate's degrees, and get those degrees awarded retroactively. Simultaneously, this effort will identify former students who are "academically short" of an associate's degree by no more than nine credits, find them, and seek to bring them back to complete their degree. Project Win-Win, undertaken in a partnership of IHEP and the State Higher Education Executive Officers, and funded by Lumina Foundation for Education, is a major expansion of a pilot program conducted in the fall and spring terms of 2009-10 in nine of the 35 institutions and under the sponsorship of the Education Trust. The pilot schools (six community colleges in Louisiana, New York, and Ohio and three four-year colleges in Louisiana that award associate's degrees) discovered that finding the students and awarding these degrees is neither a simple nor an instant matter. However, by the end of their seven-month pilot, these institutions had already awarded or certified for award nearly 600 associate's degrees, and had lined up almost 1,600 students who were short by nine or fewer credits, hence "potential" degree recipients. The pilot schools will continue in the expanded version of Project Win-Win for one year, by the end of which IHEP expects to see them award about 1,000 associate's degrees, and have at least 2,000 students in line to complete their degree in a timely manner. Projecting those numbers out across both U.S. community colleges and four-year colleges that award associate's degrees would yield, at a minimum, an expected 12 percent increase in the number of associate's degrees awarded. Adding in four-year colleges that do not award associate's degrees themselves but can target students who

"The Brand in the Classroom December 14, 2010, 12:19 pm By Mark Bauerlein An interesting survey by Harris Interactive came out this month, one that may have quirky implications for teachers, particularly at the secondary level. It's called the Youth EquiTrends Study, a poll of 5,077 8- to 24-year olds administered last August. The sample was drawn from 13- to 24-year-olds by online means, 8- to 12-year-olds through the parents. The researchers aimed to identify "brand equity" among the young, that is, a brand's overall strength as judged "by a calculation of Familiarity, Quality, and Purchase Consideration." Respondents were asked to rate between 98 and 125 popular brands of goods, relaying how well they know them, how high is their quality, and would they buy them. For 8- to 12-year-olds, the findings aren't surprising. It's all entertainment and junk food: 1. Nintendo Wii 2. Doritos 3. Oreo's 4. M&Ms 5. Disney Channel 6. Nickelodeon 7. Nintendo DS 8. McDonald's 9. Toys R Us 10. Cartoon Network Lots of screen time here, all for play and diversion. At least Nintendo gets them off the couch and burns some of those Oreo's calories. For the next age group, 13- to 17-year-olds, a different screen time emerges, along with a drop in junk food (although one of them still tops the list). 1. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups 2. iPod 3. Google 4. M&Ms 5. Oreo's 6. Subway 7. Hershey's Milk Chocolate 8. Target 9. Sprite 10. Microsoft Note the appearance of Google at Number 3. It isn't something you buy or eat or watch, really. It's not a show or a TV channel, and you don't shop for it in a store. It's something you do. Most importantly for teachers, Google is a central learning resource in and out of the classroom. For their homework, especially research assignments, students go to Google as their first resort. Is this the first time ever that young people have given brand loyalty to a tool so much a part of their schoolwork? The

"'Jaw-Dropping' Data on Black Male Student Achievement The Council of Great City Schools is today releasing what it calls "jaw-dropping" data on the achievement of black male students, The New York Times reported. While the data are primarily about K-12 achievement, they suggest strong links to subsequent gaps noted for black male students in college enrollment levels. The report argues that the achievement gaps start at young ages, noting that while 12 percent of black boys in the fourth grade are proficient in reading, 38 percent of white boys are proficient. In eighth grade, 12 percent of black boys and 44 percent of white boys are proficient in math. According to the report, poverty levels are only part of the equation because poor white boys (defined by eligibility for subsidized school lunches) are doing as well as black boys who do not live in poverty."

"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."