Red Balloon Resources

"Easing their way into awarding four-year degrees, some community colleges around the country have begun offering applied baccalaureate degrees with a technical, workforce-ready focus. Two-year colleges in Wisconsin, however, are lobbying the state system to let them offer a different kind of applied baccalaureate - one with a liberal arts focus and aimed at rural, place-bound adults. In June, the University of Wisconsin Colleges, the state's 13 associate-degree awarding institutions, plan to present a comprehensive proposal to the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents to introduce the bachelor of applied arts and sciences (B.A.A.S.) degree. If the proposal is approved by the board, the new degree program would be offered on a pilot basis, starting in the fall of 2011, at six of the system's two-year colleges in cooperation with six of the system's comprehensive universities. "

"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."

"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."

"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

'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."

"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. "

"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?"

"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. "

"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. "

"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."

"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."

Great description of the new digital generation and the problems of an old model of education

"A different kind of university for a different kind of future" Kaplan University ad Kaplan University is dedicated to helping anyone with talent develop it. It's why we're a different kind of university. It's how we're rewriting the rules of education to put an end to wasted talent. Our campaign is a rallying cry for all people with talent. It's an invitation to join the conversation about America's educational system. It's our time to say ... it's your time. To view the TV commercials and print ads, click the images below."

"Fixing the Broken Financing Model October 4, 2010 By Darryl G. Greer and Michael W. Klein In the title of a recent paper, David Breneman, a regarded higher education economist, asks: "Is the Business Model of Higher Education Broken?" While he objectively weighs the pros and cons of his question, we answer emphatically, yes! Put simply, the way in which America finances public colleges and universities, which serve over 70 percent of college students nationally, is severely and irreparably broken and needs to be changed. Without a new model, public higher education will fail its principal purpose of providing broad college opportunity, especially to low- and middle-income students and an emerging population of new Americans. Moreover, without a new funding rationale that has transparency and predictability for all funding partners, these colleges will lose the public trust - a critical element in sustaining the American democratic experience through education. Public colleges can achieve the dual goals of public and private benefits only by demonstrating equity and fairness regarding who goes to college; legitimacy for who pays and how; and responsibility for how colleges account for educational outcomes and sustaining the public trust. The solution as we see it should include a new public service corporation model that creates private partnerships; produces new revenue to replace lost public financing; protects and enhances the core educational enterprise; and, thereby, generates greater transparency, accountability and public trust that will support a sustained investment in public colleges. The Problem There is widespread evidence, in addition to opinion, that the longstanding model for financing public colleges that has seemed to work so well in many states for decades, now seems, even with an expected economic recovery, to need radical change. (See the soon-to-be-published "A New Model of Financing Public Colleges and Universities," in On the H

"$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 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."

Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability By Julie Thompson Klein AAC&U is pleased to copublish an important new book by Julie Thompson Klein, Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for Strength and Sustainability. With a foreword by AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider, the book provides a systematic approach to interdisciplinarity on campus, grounded in a conceptual framework, and also presents a portfolio of pragmatic strategies. Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures gives administrators and faculty the tools they need to craft persuasive arguments, make informed decisions anchored in the literature, and devise changes in policy and procedures that will foster successful and sustainable interdisciplinary research and education.

Professor: System has failed...I have failed. Kaplan Ad

"January 13, 2011 Scientists Fault Universities as Favoring Research Over Teaching By Paul Basken The United States' educational and research pre-eminence is being undermined, and some of the chief underminers are universities themselves, according to articles this week in Science and Nature magazines. Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles. "It's a Ponzi scheme," said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. "Eventually you'll have a situation where you're not even producing the feedstock into the system." A group of researchers, led by two biology professors, Diane K. O'Dowd of the University of California at Irvine and Richard M. Losick of Harvard University, made a similar point in a commentary in Science. Teaching is suffering at universities because the institutions prize research success above all other factors in promotions, they said. The job of educating students offers little reward, and instead "often carries the derogatory label 'teaching load,'" they wrote. Those faculty members raise the issue at a time of growing anxiety for universities and their research enterprises. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives this month, after party leaders promised during last year's election campaign to cut nondiscretionary federal spending to 2008 levels. That is likely to mean deep budget cuts at the federal science-financing agencies. The National Institutes of Health, the largest nonmilitary provider of research money to universities, could see its budget fall 9 percent below its anticipated 2011 level of $31.3-billion. And universities have been seeing even more dire budget scenarios at the state level, the traditional foundation of their governmental support. Tho