Red Balloon Resources

"The Measuring Stick Finale: a Hawk and a Skeptic Walk Into a Bar … December 21, 2010, 12:38 pm By David Glenn As promised, this blog will expire with the calendar year (cue violins). In this last post, I've tried to distill some fundamental arguments about assessment and accountability in higher education. I've borrowed liberally from comments that readers have left here and elsewhere on The Chronicle's site. Many thanks to all of you for reading and arguing. Of course there are more than two sides to these debates. In that respect, what follows is pathetically reductive. But I've tried not to put my thumb on the scale on behalf of either of these characters. I've tried to convey the strongest cases on each side of an admittedly-crudely-drawn line. (If I've failed to do that, you should of course call me out in the comments.) The scene: Friday, 7:45 p.m. A bar on the outskirts of a moderately selective public university. The décor and the jukebox appeal to disillusioned 36-year-old faculty members and a few graduate students. The fraternities leave this place alone. Accountability Skeptic: Did you see that memo from the dean today? He's hired some consultant to teach us how to "design learning outcomes" for our students. I can't imagine a bigger waste of time and money. And I don't think the dean even believes in this stuff himself. I think he's just trying to keep the accreditors off his back. Accountability Hawk: Don't be so cynical. Tuition and fees here have gone up by more than 50 percent since 2000. Students are taking on miserable levels of debt to be in our classrooms. They deserve to have faculty members who are focused on their learning-and that means that we need some kind of common understandings in our departments about the knowledge and skills students are supposed to be picking up."

'Academically Adrift' January 18, 2011 If the purpose of a college education is for students to learn, academe is failing, according to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book being released today by University of Chicago Press. The book cites data from student surveys and transcript analysis to show that many college students have minimal classwork expectations -- and then it tracks the academic gains (or stagnation) of 2,300 students of traditional college age enrolled at a range of four-year colleges and universities. The students took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (which is designed to measure gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other "higher level" skills taught at college) at various points before and during their college educations, and the results are not encouraging: * 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college. * 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college. * Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements. Students improved on average only 0.18 standard deviations over the first two years of college and 0.47 over four years. What this means is that a student who entered college in the 50th percentile of students in his or her cohort would move up to the 68th percentile four years later -- but that's the 68th percentile of a new group of freshmen who haven't experienced any college learning. "How much are students actually learning in contemporary higher education? The answer for many undergraduates, we have concluded, is not much," write the authors, Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. For many undergraduates, they write, "drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose is readily apparent."

"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

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

"American academic leaders are casting a wary eye on developments in higher education in the rest of the world. Will the Bologna Process give Europe an edge? Will the development of research universities in countries outside the West stop the best talent from coming to the United States? What does it mean when American colleges and universities open up campuses thousands of miles away from their home base? Ben Wildavsky argues that these and many other changes are indeed significant and are bringing about a "globalization" of higher education. But while some observers fear these developments could hurt American higher education, Wildavsky argues that the changes have the potential to be a win-win for all involved (and that these and other forms of globalization are now inevitable). He makes his case in a new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton University Press). Wildavsky, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, answered questions about the themes of the book."

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

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

"$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

"Six years ago, there were almost three times as many students enrolled in private nonprofit colleges as there were at for-profit institutions. By 2008-9, that ratio had slipped to about 2 to 1. That is just one of many indicators, in data released by the U.S. Education Department Tuesday, of the boom in the sector of higher education alternatively called for-profit/private sector/corporate. The report from the National Center for Education Statistics, "Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2008; Graduation Rates, 2002 and 2005 Cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2008," also provides an initial peek (from a point relatively early in the recession) at how the continuing economic downturn has begun to reshape the enrollment and financial picture of higher education. "

"July 22, 2010, 06:01 AM ET A National Look at College Completion By Eric Hoover If you like data, then today's your day. The College Board has released two reports, both full of data pertaining to college completion. The first, The College Completion Agenda: 2010 Progress Report, comes from the College Board's Commission on Access, Admissions and Success in Higher Education, which measures state-by-state progress on 10 recommendations for raising the percentage of adults with an associate degree or higher to 55 percent by 2025. One of those recommendations is to "clarify and simplify the admission process," a task that sounds easy, but isn't. What's simple for one applicant is complicated for another; it all depends on many variables, such as family income, that define admissions know-how. Technology has helped "streamline" the admissions process, the report says. As of 2008, 73.4 percent of four-year colleges allow students to apply online, up from 38 percent in 2001. In the 2008-9 academic year, 20.4 percent of four-year colleges participated in a "national" application system, such as the Common Application, that allows students to apply to multiple colleges. "Perhaps the greatest issue is that of access to information and resources," the report says, "knowing that the above options exist, having the ability to pay application fees or the knowledge to seek fee waivers, and subsequently having access to the technology with which to complete one of the above options." The College Board and the National Conference of State Legislatures also released the College Completion Agenda: State Policy Guide on Wednesday."

"October 31, 2010 Tomorrow's College The classroom of the future features face-to-face, online, and hybrid learning. And the future is here. By Marc Parry Orlando, Fla. Jennifer Black isn't a fan of technology. Until college, she didn't know much about online classes. If the stereotypical online student is a career-minded adult working full time, she's the opposite-a dorm-dwelling, ballet-dancing, sorority-joining 20-year-old who throws herself into campus life here at the University of Central Florida. Yet in the past year, the junior hospitality major has taken classes online, face to face, and in a blended format featuring elements of both. This isn't unusual: More than half of the university's 56,000 students will take an online or blended class this year, and nearly 2,700 are taking all three modes at once. As online education goes mainstream, it's no longer just about access for distant learners who never set foot in the student union. Web courses are rewiring what it means to be a "traditional" student at places like Central Florida, one of the country's largest public universities. And UCF's story raises a question for other colleges: Will this mash-up of online and offline learning become the new normal elsewhere, too?"

"CHICAGO -- If you closed your eyes and listened to the various highlighted speakers at the Higher Learning Commission's annual meeting here this week, you might have thought that Margaret Spellings and her outcomes-focused colleagues were still running the U.S. Education Department. Virtually all of the national higher education leaders who spoke to the country's largest accrediting group sent a version of the same message: The federal government is dead serious about holding colleges and universities accountable for their performance, and can be counted on to impose undesirable requirements if higher education officials don't make meaningful changes themselves. "

"Obama Proposes Education Technology Agency Modeled After DARPA by Jeffrey Mervis on 4 February 2011 The Obama Administration has proposed a new agency within the Department of Education that will fund the development of new education technologies and promote their use in the classroom. In an updated version of its 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, the White House announced today that the president's 2012 budget request will call for the creation of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education (ARPA-ED). The name is a deliberate takeoff on the Sputnik-era DARPA within the Department of Defense that funded what became the Internet and the much newer Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) that hopes to lead the country into a clean-energy future. ARPA-ED will seek to correct what an Administration official calls the country's massive "underinvestment" in educational technologies that could improve student learning. "We know that information and communications technologies are having a transformative impact on other sectors. But that's not the case in K-12 education." The official cited studies showing that less than 0.1% of the $600 billion spent each year on elementary and secondary school education goes for research on how students learn. "There are a number of good ideas and promising early results about the use of education technology that have led the Administration to be interested in doing more in this area," the official noted. (See a special issue of Science from 2 January 2009 on education and technology.) The goal of ARPA-ED, according to the official, will be to "advance the state of the art and increase demand" for successful technologies that teachers and students can use, such as a digital tutor that can bring students and experts together to enhance learning. Federal agencies now fund only a relative handful of projects in this area, the official added, and most local districts don't have the money to purchase those found to be effec

"Financial crises cause public colleges to do funny things. Driven by enrollment limits, Bristol Community College in Massachusetts and Penn Foster University have come to an agreement allowing community college students to pay more to take Bristol classes delivered by Penn Foster. This deal comes upon the heels of the California Community College system announcing a deal that lets its students matriculate to Kaplan University, instead of the capacity-constrained California State University System, at a tuition level significantly steeper than Cal State's though less expensive than Kaplan's. Also in California, the College of the Sequoias, like many other colleges, is dipping into its rainy day fund and increasing class sizes while keeping tuition the same for now and likely higher in the future. At Bristol and through Kaplan, students pay more for the same. At College of the Sequoias, they pay the same for less."

"Humans: Why They Triumphed How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity. By Matt Ridley By MATT RIDLEY [EVOLUTION] Masterfile Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years-the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success-tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language-seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly-bang!-culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there? The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before. The more scientists discover, the bigger the evolution puzzle has become. Tool-making itself

Delivering courses in cyberclassrooms has gained broad acceptance among top college leaders, but the general public is far less convinced of online education's quality, according to new survey data released this week by the Pew Research Center, in association with The Chronicle. Just over half of the 1,055 college presidents queried believe that online courses offer a value to students that equals a traditional classroom's. By contrast, only 29 percent of 2,142 adult Americans thought online education measured up to traditional teaching. The presidents' survey included leaders of two-year and four-year private, public, and for-profit colleges and was conducted online. The public survey was conducted by telephone. The gauge of differing perceptions comes at a critical moment for online education. Just 10 years ago, few colleges took teaching onto the Internet, and skepticism about the practice was the norm among professors and university leaders.

"U.S. goes from leading to lagging in young college graduates By Daniel de Vise Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 22, 2010; 6:07 AM The United States has fallen from first to 12th in the share of adults ages 25 to 34 with postsecondary degrees, according to a new report from the College Board. Canada is now the global leader in higher education among young adults, with 55.8 percent of that population holding an associate degree or better as of 2007, the year of the latest international ranking. The United States sits 11 places back, with 40.4 percent of young adults holding postsecondary credentials. The report, to be presented Thursday to Capitol Hill policymakers, is backed by a commission of highly placed educators who have set a goal for the United States to reclaim world leadership in college completion -- and attain a 55 percent completion rate -- by 2025. "

After noting that two major sources of support for postsecondary institutions - state appropriations and university endowments - are down, the report goes on to point out that the demand for public higher education is growing as more people seek skills needed for today's workforce. The report also finds while higher education generally saw declining state support in FY 2009, funds made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) allowed certain states to slightly increase spending on higher education in FY 2010. Even with ARRA funds, 23 states spent less on higher education in FY 2010 than FY 2009. State policy developments in response to revenue declines highlighted by NCSL include California's efforts to decrease enrollment, Florida's decision to tighten residency requirements, and the reduction or elimination of programs in North Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah. The report concludes with a table summarizing the significant higher education funding developments in the states over the past two years.

"July 23, 2010 Education Department Takes Aim at For-Profits With Student-Debt Rule By Kelly Field After a five-week delay, the Education Department will release a rule Friday that would penalize for-profit colleges that saddle students with unmanageable amounts of debt. The proposed "gainful employment" rule, which has been anticipated by for-profit colleges and short-sellers alike, would cut off federal aid to programs whose students have the highest debt burdens and lowest loan-repayment rates, while limiting enrollment growth at hundreds of other programs. For-profit lobbyists are calling the rule "unwise and unnecessary." In a conference call with reporters, the Education Department said it was seeking to protect students and taxpayers from the high costs of student-loan defaults. "While career colleges play a vital role in training our work force to be globally competitive, some of them are saddling students with debt they cannot afford in exchange for degrees and certificates they cannot use," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a written statement. Department officials estimated that 5 percent of programs would become ineligible for student aid under the rule, while 55 percent would be subject to growth restrictions and required to warn consumers and current students about the dangers of excessive borrowing."

May 15, 2011 Crisis of Confidence Threatens Colleges By Karin Fischer The American higher-education system has long been seen as a leader in the world, but confidence in its future and its enduring value may be beginning to crack along economic lines, according to two major surveys of the American public and college presidents conducted this spring. Public anxiety over college costs is at an all-time high. And low-income college graduates or those burdened by student-loan debt are questioning the value of their degrees, or saying the cost of college has delayed other life decisions. Among college presidents, the rising price of college is not the only worry. They're concerned about growing international competition and declining student quality, with presidents from the least selective, and thus sometimes the least financially stable institutions, the most pessimistic. But perhaps the most troublesome finding from the surveys is this: More than a third of presidents think the industry they lead is heading in the wrong direction. Related Content It's More Than Just the Degree, Graduates Say Presidents Don't Agree on What Signifies Quality Most Presidents Prefer No Tenure for Majority of Faculty Commentary: College Presidents Are Too Complacent Data and Complete Results of the Surveys Without a change in course, presidents fear, American higher education's standing around the globe could erode. Although seven in 10 college chief executives rated the American system today as the best or one of the best in the world, barely half predicted that a decade from now the United States would be among the top globally. "We should be worried," said Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York system. "We are in a flat world. We are going to have to evolve." American higher education has never been a monolith, of course, but the findings of the survey of more than 1,000 presidents, conducted March 10 to April 25 by the Pew Research