Red Balloon Resources

"The Quiet Revolution in Open Learning By Kevin Carey In the late days of March 2010, Congressional negotiators dealt President Obama's community-college reform agenda what seemed like a fatal blow. A year later, it appears that, remarkably, the administration has fashioned the ashes of that defeat into one of the most innovative federal higher-education programs ever conceived. Hardly anyone has noticed. Obama originally called for $12-billion in new spending on community-college infrastructure and degree completion. The money was to come from eliminating public subsidies to for-profit banks that made student loans. But late in the process, some lawmakers insisted that savings that had already occurred, because of colleges' switching into the federal direct-loan program in anticipation of the new law, didn't count as savings. Billions were pulled off the table, and the community-college plan was shelved. Two days later, negotiators found $2-billion. But they could spend it only on a U.S. Department of Labor program restricted to workers who had lost their jobs because of shifts in global trade. The fit with the president's expansive agenda seemed awkward, and the amount was pennies on the original dollar. Cynical commentators called it a "consolation prize." Then, the Education and Labor Departments decided to do something highly uncharacteristic of large federal bureaucracies: They began to talk. To one another. Constructively. What they devised could change higher education for huge numbers of students, many of whom will never attend a community college at all. The concept is simple: Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials-videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more-available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license. The materials will become, to use the common term, open educational resources, or OER's. The open-resource movement has

"Continuing Debate Over Online Education July 16, 2010 Online education has become a hot topic recently, with more and more institutions wanting to expand offerings. And that makes studies of the quality of online education important -- and controversial. A new paper by the Community College Research Center re-examined and challenged the studies that the Department of Education used in a meta-analysis that stated "on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction" - a conclusion that received much attention and applause among advocates for online education. But the Education Department's analysis was flawed, according to Shanna Smith Jaggars, lead author of the CCRC paper and a senior research associate at the Columbia University center. Based on its review of the data, the CCRC concluded that online learning in higher education is no more effective than face-to-face learning. The Education Department study "continues to be cited frequently by people as evidence that online learning can be superior," Jaggars said. "We just wanted to make sure that we were injecting a note of caution into how people were interpreting what they were seeing.""

"Lumina Documents State and Local Role in Completion Agenda It may seem a daunting, if not impossible, task to get the United States to the widely heralded goal of a nearly 50 percent increase in the college attainment of its citizens -- but the Lumina Foundation for Education aims, in a new report, to break the job down into smaller pieces to show that it is attainable. In the report, published today, Lumina goes beyond reiterating its arguments for why the "big goal" it has set is essential for the United States economy and for individuals alike, though the study does that, too. But in providing state-by-state (and even county-by-county) data on how many graduates a particular area would need to produce if the national target is to be met, Lumina seeks to break the job down into practical, tangible goals. Even at that level, the data show just how far the country has to go, Lumina says: "If the current rate of increase remains, less than 47 percent of Americans will hold a two- or four-year degree by 2025. Economic experts say this is far below the level that can keep the nation competitive in the global, knowledge-based economy.""

July 22, 2010 The Four Quadrants of Administrative Effectiveness Leadership Careers Illustration By Rob Jenkins First, a confession: I ripped off the basic premise for this column from an essay called "The Right Kind of Nothing," by Michael C. Munger, a professor of political science and chair of the department at Duke University. Munger argued in that January column that the best administrators are those who accept a high degree of responsibility for what goes on in their territory but don't feel the need to control everything. They know, that is, when to do "the right kind of nothing." After 18 years as a midlevel administrator at three different community colleges, I heartily concur. And, having obtained Munger's gracious permission, I would like to expand on his ideas. In doing so here, I borrow also from Stephen R. Covey, who in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, designs a memorable matrix around the concepts of "important" and "urgent." By placing those two concepts on X and Y axes, he creates four quadrants: urgent but not important, important but not urgent, both urgent and important, and neither urgent nor important. Following Covey's model, I've placed Munger's concepts of responsibility and control on similar X and Y axes to create what I call the four quadrants of administrative effectiveness. Each one represents a certain type of administrator. High responsibility, low control. High responsibility, high control. Low responsibility, low control. Low responsibility, high control.

"July 1, 2011 As Costs of New Rule Are Felt, Colleges Rethink Online Course Offerings in Other States By Kelly Field Bismarck State College, a two-year institution located in the capital of North Dakota, offers something few colleges do: online degrees in power-plant technology. Utilities across the country send workers to the community college for specialized training in electric power, nuclear power, and other fields. "We're pretty darn unique," said Larry C. Skogen, the college's president. "I don't think we have any competition out there." Though other colleges offer similar programs on campus, "we deliver nationwide online," he said, with students in all 50 states. That could change soon. Under federal rules that take effect on July 1, Bismarck State will have to seek approval to operate in every state where it enrolls students, or forgo those students' federal aid. With some states charging thousands of dollars per application, the college is weighing whether it can afford to remain in states where the cost of doing business outweighs the benefits, in tuition terms. Though the college hasn't made any decisions yet, "the reality is that if we run into a state where we have few students and it's expensive [to get approval], it's probably not going to be cost-effective to continue," Mr. Skogen said. Such cost-benefit calculations are being conducted on campuses across the country, as college leaders struggle to make sense of a patchwork of state rules that were written in an era when "college" was synonymous with "campus" and online learning was in its infancy. Gregory Ferenbach, a lawyer who advises colleges on regulatory compliance, said he has heard from a "couple dozen" colleges, most of them nonprofits, that are considering withdrawing from some states because of the cost or burden of obtaining approval. Their decisions could have a significant effect on college access. If enough colleges steer clear of states with expensive approval processes, or s

"July 10, 2011 A College Education for All, Free and Online By Kevin Carey All around the world, people have been waiting for someone like Shai Reshef to come along. Reshef is the founder and president of the University of the People, a tuition-free online institution that enrolled its first class of students in 2009. UoPeople strives to serve the vast numbers of students who have no access to traditional higher education. Some can't afford it, or they live in countries where there are simply no good colleges to attend. Others live in rural areas, or identify with a culture, an ethnicity, or a gender that is excluded from public services. UoPeople students pay an application fee of between $10 and $50 and must have a high-school diploma and be proficient in English. There are also small fees for grading final exams. Otherwise, it's free. The university takes advantage of the growing body of free, open-access resources available online. Reshef made his fortune building for-profit higher-education businesses during the rise of the Internet, and he noticed a new culture of collaboration developing among young people who grew up in a wired world. So UoPeople relies heavily on peer-to-peer learning that takes place within a highly structured curriculum developed in part by volunteers. The university plans to award associate and bachelor's degrees, and it is now seeking American accreditation. Rather than deploy the most sophisticated and expensive technology, UoPeople keeps it simple-everything happens asynchronously, in text only. As long as students can connect their laptops or mobile devices to a telecommunications network, somewhere, they can study and learn. For most of humanity, this is the only viable way to get access to higher education. When the university polled students about why they had enrolled, the top answer was, "What other choice do I have?" Some observers have wondered how effective such an unorthodox learning model can be. But UoPeople's tw

I wonder how the University of the People will evolve compared to the fledgling Open Educational Resources University that is being founded by a few key institutions around the world. OERU has its business model roots in Web 2.0 as the foundation for collaboration. A group within OERU is also participating in Ray Schroeder's EduMOOC. For more info on OERU see http://wikieducator.org/images/c/c2/Report_OERU-Final-version.pdf

"Madison, Wis.-At a distance-education conference here, Wired Campus asked a half-dozen professors, technologists, and administrators to share the struggles of teaching online. Here's what they said. In the old days, you might have heard about the difficulty convincing professors of the value of online education. That can still be tough-some resisters, according to one online-training expert, fear they won't be able to display their expertise in online classes. But as acceptance of online education grows, with distance courses getting more popular and mainstream, colleges face new challenges. These run the gamut from coping with stress on student services to navigating the shift from developing courses alone to building them in teams. "

"Despite scandal, for-profit education offers valuable model By Steven Pearlstein Wednesday, August 11, 2010 Last week's revelations about the high prices, uneven performance and shady marketing practices of for-profit universities have now cast a dark cloud over what had been the fastest-growing segment of higher education. Giant companies that pay big bonuses and use high-pressure sales tactics to foist overpriced services on unsophisticated consumers who take on more debt than they can handle -- tell me if this doesn't sound like the educational equivalent of the subprime mortgage scandal. I have two reasons to care about this. The first is that one of the biggest for-profits, Kaplan University, is part of The Washington Post Co., to which it has provided the handsome profits that have helped to cover this newspaper's operating losses. Although we in the Post newsroom have nothing to do with Kaplan, we've all benefited from its financial success. The more important reason is that these revelations are a setback for the only serious challenge to a hidebound higher education establishment caught up in a self-destructive arms race for students, faculty, athletes, research funding and charitable gifts -- a competition that has driven up costs at twice the rate of everything else even as schools lag in meeting the educational needs of students and society. "

"August 8, 2010 Mass Video Courses May Free Up Professors for More Personalized Teaching By Marc Parry New York University plans to join the growing movement to publish academic material online as free, open courseware. But in addition to giving away content-something other colleges have done-NYU plans a more ambitious experiment. The university wants to explore ways to reprogram the roles of professors in large undergraduate classes, using technology to free them up for more personal instruction. This fall NYU will start publishing free online videos for every lecture in as many as 10 courses. They include classes on New York City history, the biology of the human body, introductory sociology, and statistics. Previous open-courseware projects tended to be text-based, with content like syllabi and lecture notes. NYU's site would expand the online library of academic videos available to the general public. What's more unusual, though, is the vision to build souped-up versions of the material for NYU students only. Freed from the copyright restrictions of publishing on the open Web, these video courses would have live links to sources discussed by professors in passing, as well as pop-up definitions and interactive quizzes."

"Bill Gates Predicts Technology Will Make 'Place-Based' Colleges Less Important in 5 Years By Jeff Young 'Place-based colleges' are good for parties, but are becoming less crucial for learning thanks to the Internet, said the Microsoft founder Bill Gates at a conference on Friday. "Five years from now on the Web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university," he argued at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif. "College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based." An attendee captured the remarks with a shaky hand-held camera and posted the clip on YouTube. "After all, what are we trying to do? We're trying to take education that today the tuition is, say, $50,000 a year so over four years-a $200,000 education-that is increasingly hard to get because there's less money for it because it's not there, and we're trying to provide it to every kid who wants it," Mr. Gates said. "And only technology can bring that down, not just to $20,000 but to $2,000. So yes, place-based activiy in that college thing will be five times less important than it is today.""

For decades IT has been a major driver of efficiency. In the future it may be a major driver of growth as well. That fundamental shift means that IT organizations will be central to change, but they also will undergo significant changes themselves. They will be called upon to innovate and experiment to drive incremental growth, to bridge intellectual resources in unusual ways and to facilitate broad-based changes that extend well beyond just IT.

"August 17, 2010, 06:00 PM ET Elite Institutions and Low-Income Students: A Story of Dismal Failure By Diane Auer Jones The hypocrisy in higher education is sometimes just astounding. I read Richard Kahlenberg's blog yesterday about the admirable efforts on the part of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to increase graduation rates among low income students who attend these institutions. In fact, Mr. Kahlenberg goes as far as to suggest that other universities should learn some valuable lessons from these institutions. Give me a break. Of course I applaud efforts to help those less fortunate succeed, but the idea that we should celebrate two highly selective, well-funded, elite universities that require even MORE funding to develop special programs to serve such a small, hand-picked population of students who, in the end, enjoy only slightly improved outcomes (at best), seems a bit outrageous to me. Instead, I would suggest that the stories of Wash U and UNC provide additional evidence to support what some of us have known for quite some time (and that academic researchers have concluded over and over again), which is that educating low income students requires a lot more than talented faculty and a rigorous curriculum - it requires a great deal of additional money at a time when there is precious little of that to go around."

"Gates Wikipedia University? June 10, 2011, 12:42 pm By Richard Vedder I received an e-mail from James Loynd recently, commenting favorably on an appearance I made on PBS's News Hour. Mr. Loynd asked, "What if the best professors in every department were to video tape their lectures? A student could them work his/her way towards a degree off campus. Even chat-room discussions with grad students could assist the students. Testing could be…not necessarily on campus, maybe even at your local YMCA." Of course, this is not the first time the idea has been suggested, but the question arises: Why are we not moving aggressively to do something like this? More specifically, why doesn't someone-say, the Gates Foundation-hire 100 or so stellar professors in 20 disciplines to offer perhaps 150 to 200 absolutely superb courses online, with testing administered by an outside agency (say, the ACT, SAT, or Underwriter's Laboratories)? Even paying each professor $100,000 per course and allowing for 100 percent overhead, this would cost $30- to $40-million. There would be some expenses for administration and a need to redo lectures every few years, but the whole thing is within the financial capacity of several foundations in the private sector. The upshot would be that a student taking about 32 of the courses would have the equivalent of a B.A. degree, and it could be offered to the student free (with modest per-student private or government subsidies) or at very modest cost. If someone proposed to do this, of course, there would be all sorts of objections. Some would argue you need more disciplines included, more courses, etc. And who would accredit the institution issuing the degree? Most such objections are trivial or bogus-for example, a college student does not have to be offered detailed study in every discipline in order to acquire a body of knowledge over roughly a four-year period that is the equivalent of a decent-quality bachelor's degree. Some fu

"September 5, 2010 Why Teaching Is Not Priority No. 1 By Robin Wilson With lavish recreation centers and sophisticated research laboratories, life on college campuses is drastically different from what it was 100 years ago. But one thing has stayed virtually the same: classroom teaching. Professors still design lessons, pick out the readings, and decide how to test-in many cases, in the same way they always have. In the last few years, however, a cottage industry has sprouted up in academe to measure whether students are actually learning and to reform classes that don't deliver. Accreditors now press colleges to show that they are teaching what students need to know. And as the Obama administration packs more money into student aid, it wants more evidence of educational quality. But a roadblock may emerge: faculty culture. Not because professors care little about quality or students-indeed, many care deeply-but because of what colleges tell them is important. "Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning," says Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. "I get promoted for writing lots of articles, not for demonstrating learning outcomes.""

"While an undergraduate at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Ark., Caitlin Getchell juggled 18 credit hours each semester. In an attempt to lighten her workload during the school year and still enjoy her summer vacation, Getchell turned to an online class one summer. Luckily for her, the American government class she selected mostly contained information she already knew, and she breezed through it. No research papers were required, and open book tests were allowed; there was also regular posting on a message board by students. But, Getchell says, if the class had been something different, she might not have done as well. "If it had been a subject I didn't know much about - Calculus or Chemistry for example - I think I would have really struggled," she says. Getchell, who received a bachelor's degree in history in 2007, adds that she was glad she took the class online. And she's not alone in finding the benefits of online learning irresistible. Enrollment in online courses is growing rapidly, and several universities are even offering degrees strictly online. In fall 2008, 4.6 million students at degree-granting higher institutions took at least one class online, a nearly 17 percent increase over fall 2007. Online enrollment accounted for 25 percent of total enrollment for fall 2007, according to the Sloan Consortium, which has conducted a survey of online education in the U.S. every year since 2002."

"July 25, 2010 Why Do You Think They're Called For-Profit Colleges? By Kevin Carey Michael Clifford believes that education is the only path to world peace. He never went to college, but sometimes he calls himself "Doctor." Jerry Falwell is one of his heroes. Clifford has made millions of dollars from government programs but doesn't seem to see the windfall that way. Improbably, he has come to symbolize the contradictions at the heart of the growing national debate over for-profit higher education. Until recently, for-profits were mostly mom-and-pop trade schools. Twenty years ago, a series of high-profile Congressional hearings, led by Senator Sam Nunn, revealed widespread fraud in the industry, and the resulting reforms almost wiped the schools out. But they hung on and returned with a vengeance in the form of publicly traded giants like the University of Phoenix."

"September 14, 2010 Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change By Karin Fischer Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization. Despite the global economic crisis, "large parts of the education sector have probably missed the opportunity for real change," Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Insead, a French business school, told the audience at a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More With Less." The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers, Mr. Dutta, who is also academic director of elab@INSEAD, a center for excellence in teaching and research in the digital economy, evoked the analogy of a frog: Place it in a pot of boiling water, and it will immediately jump out. Put the frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature-it won't react to change and will be cooked to death. Even with a "dose of hot water" caused by the recession, Mr. Dutta said, most universities have tinkered at the margins, freezing faculty recruitment and reducing administrative expenses, rather than taking a hard look at how they do business. "Have we really jumped, have we really changed?" he said. "I look around, and I see honestly very little change." To meet growing and diversifying worldwide demand for higher education, Mr. Dutta and his fellow panelists said, colleges must embrace new models, transforming how they deliver education. For one, they argued, both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society."

"Needed: More Olive Gardens Olive Garden Restaurant 1 Chuck Salter's Fast Company article "Why America is Addicted to Olive Garden" neither explains why America is addicted to Olive Garden nor even establishes that American is, in fact, addicted to Olive Garden. It is, however, a really excellent profile of the company, Darden, that owns Olive Garden along with a few other restaurant chains. To throw a couple of bold claims out there that probably nobody agrees with, brands, chains, standardization, and replication are some of the most underrated economic phenomena and single-establishment retail businesses among the most overrated. There's an association between multiple-establishment restaurants and low quality, but I think that if you take a broad view you'll see that this is both a contingent phenomenon and a waning trend. Darden's own Capitol Grille chain is excellent and Olive Garden is better than you care to admit. Besides which, all the legitimately first-rate chefs are branding and franchising these days, they're mostly just a bit hesitant to get entirely above-board about what they're doing."

"Holding Presidents Accountable for Learning September 23, 2010 In an uncommon strategy to improve graduation and retention rates, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia summoned the presidents of its 35 colleges and universities, one by one, to account for problems at their institutions and present three-year plans outlining how they hope to boost the measures of student success. The systemwide challenge was issued earlier this year by Willis J. Potts, Jr., the straight-talking chairman of the Board of Regents and retired paper industry executive. "We have a funding system here in Georgia that financially rewards institutions based on [enrollment] growth," Potts said. "Having been in manufacturing, I know the factor that needs to be studied is what kind of finished product is coming out the other end. Less than 60 percent of the students in our system graduate within a six-year period. I know of no other process that would achieve 60 percent [success] and go out and brag about it." Reflecting on this, Potts said, he and his colleagues were driven to find out what was holding the system's institutions back. So they went straight to the top - at each institution."

"February 6, 2011 Fast-Growing U. of Phoenix Calculates a More Careful Course By Goldie Blumenstyk In the fall of 2009, after closing the books on yet another banner year of enrollment growth, and with its parent company's stock climbing toward a five-year high of $90 per share, the University of Phoenix began to question fundamental pieces of the very formula that had fueled its years of success. Even as its executives celebrated, recalls one, they were uneasy. A feeling was building "in the pit of everyone's stomach: That felt too good." From that "moment of truth," as that executive, Robert W. Wrubel now describes it, Phoenix quietly began what it calls a major change of direction. Out of the public eye, North America's largest private university not only put in motion an overhaul of what had come to be seen as its grow-at-any-cost admissions practices. It also ended a compensation schedule tied to enrollment, began a required orientation program for inexperienced students, and instituted a host of other reforms in marketing and nearly every other important facet of this 438,000-student institution. The moves, orchestrated from its headquarters here, and from corporate outposts like San Francisco, where the university has assembled a team of Silicon Valley veterans and computer scientists to create a cutting-edge electronic course platform, are part of a top-down campaign led by a team of a half-dozen executives, all of whom have joined its $5-billion parent company within the past four years. excited about an education. "We are investing in academics like no other higher-education company can do," says Joseph L. D'Amico, who as president of Apollo Group Inc. oversees the campaign it calls "Reinventing education, again." The goal, he says, "is to take our business to a new level." Last month Apollo provided The Chronicle a behind-the-scenes (but by no means unfettered) look at some of the new recruiting techniques, educational moves, and marketing tactics