Red Balloon Resources

As the private sector works faster and more boldly to churn out next-generation technology and embrace cutting-edge practices, the U.S. Department of Education and its partner federal agencies are ramping up their efforts to bring more spark and innovation into elementary and secondary schools.

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink January 6, 2011, 1:04 pm By Peter Wood The for-profit sector of higher education is in the political spotlight these days. Last year an Obama administration official launched an attack on the legitimacy of for-profit colleges and universities. Although that official subsequently resigned his position in the Department of Education, the measures he promoted took on a life of their own. Now the for-profits are faced with what could be an existential crisis. The legal challenges have driven down the stock prices of the publicly-traded institutions and a daunting new regulation is about to take effect. The story has been well-reported in the Chronicle. The former official who got the anti-for-profit ball rolling is Robert Shireman, who served as deputy undersecretary of education, until his resignation in July. Shireman jawboned the accrediting associations to be tougher on for-profits; called for a new system whereby each individual state in which an online university does business would have the right to regulate the enterprise; and pushed for the now notorious idea that for-profit colleges and universities would have to show high levels of "gainful employment" for their graduates in the fields they studied. His animus against the for-profits didn't seem to sit all that well with the rest of the Obama administration. On May 11, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to a policy forum held by the for-profit DeVry University and declared that the for-profits play a "vital role" in educating underserved populations. Shireman had played a key role in the Obama administration's successful effort to abolish the role of commercial lenders in making Title IV federally-guaranteed student loans and replacing that system with direct lending managed by the Department of Education. So his decision to head for the exit had more an air of victory than of forced departure. The Chronicle, however, ran an in-depth analysis pointing to a

"April 5, 2011 Governing Boards Turn to Technology to Reinvent the University By Jack Stripling Gathered for a national conference on college trusteeship here on Tuesday morning, board members from across the country said they are looking for cybersolutions to solve some of the most vexing problems their colleges face. If there was a recurring theme at the three-day conference of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, it was that a major rethinking of instruction through broader use of online learning is the only real hope for reinventing the business of higher education. Mark G. Yudof, who knows a thing or two about confronting diminished resources, suggested on Monday that it's a mistake to believe that small-scale changes in purchasing agreements or reduced course offerings will rescue the University of California system, where Mr. Yudof is president. Instead, colleges will need to aggressively alter the way they deliver courses, relying more heavily on online instruction, he said. It is a "myth" in higher education that "we can cut our way into survival," Mr. Yudof said. Enter Carol A. Twigg, who offered an alternative here on Tuesday. As president and chief executive of the National Center for Academic Transformation, Ms. Twigg has argued for more than a decade that, when used effectively, technology can both improve student achievement and reduce costs. "This is not rocket science," she said during a presentation. The center has redesigned courses on more than 100 college campuses, and Ms. Twigg points toward a body of evidence suggesting that course sections can be scaled up to serve many more students without sacrificing quality. While the course redesigns differ from campus to campus, they often involve the use of low-stakes online quizzes to promote student mastery of material. Such quizzes and other online tasks can replace the need for class time and reduce the number of professors required to teach a course, Ms. Twigg sa

"The Power of the Nudge March 10, 2011 Everyone needs to be pestered sometimes. A new study suggests that college students may be among those who most need to be nudged to stay on track. The study was a large-scale randomized analysis of the impact of a commercial service that provides individualized coaching to students on time management, academic goals and other subjects. The coaches call regularly and try in particular to link students' life goals with their academic goals -- and to use the former to motivate progress on the latter. The study -- by Eric P. Bettinger, an associate professor of education, and Rachel Baker, a doctoral student, both of Stanford University -- found that the services had a statistically significant impact on student persistence. The impact was greater for men than for women -- a potentially important finding, given the lower enrollment and graduation rates of men at many institutions."

"Documenting the Damage to Cal State Students at California State University at Northridge are being hit by worsening personal economic conditions, higher tuition rates and greater difficulty getting into courses, according to a report, "Squeezed From All Sides," being released today by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles. Researchers surveyed more than 2,000 students at Northridge, which like most of the Cal State campuses is ethnically diverse and includes many first generation college students. Among the findings: * Students' families have taken hard hits. More than 10 percent of students reported that at least one parent had lost a job since 2008, and 21 percent reported that at least one parent had lost income or hours of work. * Paying for college has become more difficult. Among students enrolled for at least two years, 57 percent said that paying had become "a little more difficult" and another 28 percent said that it had become "a lot more difficult." * Getting into courses has become more difficult, with 77 percent of students reporting that the inability to get into classes will result in longer time to degree."

Attorneys general from more than 20 states have joined forces to investigate for-profit colleges that too often saddle students with crippling debt while furnishing them valueless degrees. The investigations have just begun. But it is already clear from testimony before a Senate committee that Congress must do more to rein in the schools and protect students.

Kids don't put Harvard stickers on their rear windshields, parents do. But for how long? These schools have much to recommend them: impressive students, organic dining halls, presidential alumni. To maintain their reputations, however, elite colleges have long relied on limiting access-Harvard's class of 2015 is about 1,700 students, Yale's is 1,300-and that may be coming to an end. Revolutionaries outside the ivy walls are hammering their way not onto campus but straight into class. Enlarge Image CloseAlamy Elite schools have long relied on limiting access-but for how long? .It's a thrilling collegiate coup. Last fall, a couple of hundred Stanford students registered for Sebastian Thrun's class on artificial intelligence. He offered the course free online, too, through his new company Udacity, and 160,000 students signed up. For the written assignments and exams, both groups got identical questions-and 210 students got a perfect overall score. They all came from the online group. So if you bluffed your way into the Ivy League with plumped-up credentials or an essay edited by somebody else, it's time to start breaking a sweat. "I like to compare it to film," Mr. Thrun told me at a coffee shop between Stanford and Mountain View, Calif., where his day job is running Google X, the company's experimental lab. "Before film there was theater-small casting companies reaching 300 people at a time. Then celluloid was invented, and you could record something and replicate it. A good movie wouldn't reach 300 but 3,000, and soon 300,000 and soon three million. That changed the economics." It is education's time to change now. At the high-school level, interactive study sites are increasingly ingenious: Look at Piazza, Blackboard and Quizlet, founded by a 17-year-old. TED-Ed just launched a channel on You Tube, with three- to 10-minute lessons for kids. YouTube's EDU Portal has been viewed 22 billion times. Khan Academy, a favorite of Bill Gates

"More Than Bridgepoint on Trial March 11, 2011 WASHINGTON -- Given how the latest in U.S. Senator Tom Harkin's series of hearings on for-profit higher education unfolded on Thursday, Andrew S. Clark, CEO of Bridgepoint Education, Inc., had to be glad that he and his lawyers decided he shouldn't appear at the session, which focused on the exploits of his publicly traded company. Sylvia Manning, president of the regional agency that accredited Bridgepoint's Ashford University, probably wishes she too had found an excuse not to attend. The hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions was framed as a "case study" of how for-profit colleges have embraced online education to fuel explosive growth and drive large profits, and Bridgepoint (the case study, in absentia) and for-profit colleges in general took a lot of hits from Harkin. He at one point called Bridgepoint "a scam, an absolute scam." But while the career colleges were Harkin's primary targets, as they have been throughout his yearlong examination, accrediting agencies and, to a lesser degree, state and federal governments, absorbed plenty of collateral damage. Harkin, for one, made it clear that he believes many accreditors lack the expertise to keep tabs on the increasingly complex operations of the biggest for-profit colleges, and warned that "something has got to change" if the agencies -- as the federal government's subcontractor on assessing institutional quality -- are to continue to grant colleges access to federal financial aid. "Many of these for-profit education companies are becoming multi-state corporations, and their main focus is becoming their bottom line rather than their students," the Iowa senator said during an exchange with Manning. "The question I would ask is, in their current state, are our accreditation agencies equipped to oversee billion-dollar, multi-state corporations?" As is common on Capitol Hill, he didn't wait for her answer, providing

"Upstart Course-Management Provider Goes Open Source January 31, 2011, 10:27 pm By Josh Keller Instructure, a course-management software company that recently won a large contract in Utah, announced on Tuesday that it would make most of its software platform available for free under an open-source license. Instructure is one of a wave of new entrants into an increasingly competitive market for learning-management software in higher education. The company's year-old Canvas platform allows instructors and students to manage course materials, grades, and discussions online. In offering its basic software for free, the company could offer new competition for Moodle and Sakai, the two main existing open-source platforms. Like commercial arms of those platforms, Instructure intends to make money from colleges by supporting, hosting, and extending its software. In December, the company won a bid to provide software to a collection of Utah colleges that serve roughly 110,000 students, provoking a lawsuit from a competitor that lost that bid, Desire2Learn. The suit was quickly withdrawn. Instructure says it has signed contracts with a total of 25 colleges. Josh Coates, Instructure's chief executive, promoted the platform's ease of use and its integration with outside services like Facebook and Google Docs. "I don't consider what we've done at Instructure like rocket science," Mr. Coates said. "But it feels like it because we're sort of working in the context of the Stone Age.""

"January 30, 2011 Absent Students Want to Attend Traditional Classes via Webcam Professors already welcome their guest speakers using this same technology New Question for Professors: Should Students Be Allowed to Attend Classes Via Webcam? 1 Paul Jones takes frequent advantage of Skype videoconferencing to invite guest speakers to his mass-communications classes at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among them are (below) Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard U.'s Berkman Center for Internet and Society; Fred Turner, an associate professor of communication at Stanford U.; and Howard Rheingold, author of several books on virtual communities. By Jeffrey R. Young It was just 30 minutes before class when Thomas Nelson Laird, an assistant professor of higher education at Indiana University at Bloomington, got the e-mail from a student: "I can't make it to class. Can you beam me in by Webcam?" "I thought, I don't know if I can do that," the professor says. He looked at the clock and thought about the time it would take to rig up a link via Skype or some other video-chat system. He had used the technology before, though, so he figured, Why not? Professors across the country are facing similar questions. Webcams are ubiquitous, and students are accustomed to using popular services like Skype to make what are essentially video phone calls to friends and family. Recognizing the trend, this month Skype unveiled a service for educators to trade tips and tricks, called "Skype in the classroom." Professors also frequently bring in guest speakers using the technology, letting students interact with experts they otherwise would only read about in textbooks."

If you are a technology advocate, that is, someone who believes in his or her heart-of-hearts that new devices, new procedures, and new ways of using these devices will deliver better forms of teaching and learning, past and contemporary research findings are, to put it in a word-disappointing. How come?

"January 30, 2011 'Facebook of Science' Seeks to Reshape Peer Review By Colin Macilwain Vitek Tracz is a risk-taker. He put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot. "Everybody promised me that open access would not succeed," recalls the scientific publisher. "They said I would go bankrupt. I thought there was a very high chance of that, myself. But it now turns out to be significantly profitable." Two years ago he sold his BioMed Central publications-there are now about 200 of them-to Berlin-based Springer for an undisclosed sum, thought to be in the region of $50-million. Now, the man described by his colleagues as one of the most innovative and mercurial forces in publishing wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication. Mr. Tracz plans to turn his latest Internet experiment, a large network of leading scientists called the Faculty of 1000, into what some call "the Facebook of science" and a force that will change the nature of peer review. His vision is to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers."

January 18, 2011 'Trust Us' Won't Cut It Anymore By Kevin Carey "Trust us." That's the only answer colleges ever provide when asked how much their students learn. Sure, they acknowledge, it's hard for students to find out what material individual courses will cover. So most students choose their courses based on a paragraph in the catalog and whatever secondhand information they can gather. No, there's isn't an independent evaluation process. No standardized tests, no external audits, no publicly available learning evidence of any kind. Yes, there's been grade inflation. A-minus is the new C. Granted, faculty have every incentive to neglect their teaching duties while chasing tenure-if they're lucky enough to be in the chase at all. Meanwhile the steady adjunctification of the professoriate proceeds. Still, "trust us," they say: Everyone who walks across our graduation stage has completed a rigorous course of study. We don't need to systematically evaluate student learning. Indeed, that would violate the academic freedom of our highly trained faculty, each of whom embodies the proud scholarly traditions of this venerable institution. Now we know that those are lies."

"January 18, 2011 Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? By Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa Drawing on survey responses, transcript data, and results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (a standardized test taken by students in their first semester and at the end of their second year), Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa concluded that a significant percentage of undergraduates are failing to develop the broad-based skills and knowledge they should be expected to master. Here is an excerpt from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), their new book based on those findings. "With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants," Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. "We ask, 'How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?' With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, 'Is it safe to eat here?'" Our research suggests that for many students currently enrolled in higher education, the answer is: not particularly. Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college. [Further study has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years.] While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described

"January 18, 2011 New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges' Doorsteps By David Glenn A book released today makes a damning indictment of the American higher-education system: For many students, it says, four years of undergraduate classes make little difference in their ability to synthesize knowledge and put complex ideas on paper. The stark message from the authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press) is that more than a third of American college seniors are no better at crucial types of writing and reasoning tasks than they were in their first semester of college (see excerpt). The book is already drawing its share of critics, who say the analysis falls short in its assessments of certain teaching and learning methods. "We didn't know what to expect when we began this study," said Richard Arum, a professor of sociology at New York University who is one of the book's two authors. "We didn't walk into this with any axes to grind. But now that we've seen the data, we're very concerned about American higher education and the extent to which undergraduate learning seems to have been neglected." In the new book, Mr. Arum and his co-author-Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia-report on a study that has tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students who entered 24 four-year colleges in the fall of 2005. The scholars do not name those 24 institutions, but they say they are geographically and institutionally representative of the full range of American higher education. The sample includes large public flagship institutions, highly selective liberal-arts colleges, and historically black and Hispanic-serving colleges and universities."

""Old" Habits Meet a "New" Normal By Kristin Conklin January 16, 2011 11:07 pm EST Despite a slight rise in state revenues, the 2011 budget cycle is likely to be the most difficult yet of the states' ongoing fiscal crisis. That's because budget shortfalls are epic - $60 billion in budget shortfalls this year and another $50 billion in 2012. Whereas most state revenues will rebound to peak levels by 2013, revenue recovery is not likely in nine states until 2014. The National Association of State Budget Officers' A New Funding Paradigm for Higher Education says that while a slight rise in revenues will "mitigate the funding squeeze, the environment for state higher education support might be permanently and unalterably different from the past." What an understatement. Average annual spending growth is projected to be a weak 3 to 4 percent for the next 10-20 years. How governors navigate these "new normal" budget conditions will have a profound impact on the nation's economic future. An economic recovery cannot be achieved through cuts alone. Shrinking state budgets must be refocused to grow the economy. Higher education will be front and center in any growth strategy. According to estimates from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, if the U.S. could muster the capacity to better match skills with today's jobs, unemployment would be at 6.5 percent instead of 9.6 percent. That represents millions of good-paying jobs that lead to economic growth."

"As Wikipedia Turns 10, It Focuses on Ways to Improve Student Learning January 14, 2011, 6:48 pm By Tushar Rae As Wikipedia hits its 10th year of operation, it is making efforts to involve academics more closely in its process. The latest is a new plan to build an "open educational resource platform" that will gather tools about teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom. Rodney Dunican, education programs manager for Wikimedia, Wikipedia's parent company, is part of the team working to build the platform, which he said will highlight the ways in which Wikipedia can be used to improve student learning. "We don't want them to cite Wikipedia," he said of students. "What we really want them to do is understand how to use and critically evaluate the articles on Wikipedia and then learn how to contribute to make those articles better." Mr. Dunican recently visited Louisiana State University, whose "communication across the curriculum" effort seeks to generate teaching tools and content, and then take those to professors in various disciplines who might be interested in using them. "One of the things we are doing at LSU is looking at how we can institutionalize the curriculum around Wikipedia," Mr. Dunican said. For the 2010-11 academic year, Wikimedia also launched the national Public Policy Initiative to recruit professors who would like their students to add content to the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia as part of the curriculum. The project focused on improving and increasing the content in the area of public policy and developing a model for using Wikipedia as a teaching tool. "We have some very good results this last semester," Mr. Dunican said. "We have shown that it is possible to include Wikipedia in the classroom to engage students in the learning process.""

"January 16, 2011 Financial Outlook Is Brighter for Some Colleges, but Still Negative for Most By Scott Carlson Moody's Investors Service says the outlook for a relatively small number of well-managed, diversified colleges looks stable in 2011, an upgrade from the negative forecasts that the credit-rating agency has given higher education over the past couple of years. In its latest outlook report, however, Moody's maintains a negative outlook for the majority of higher-education institutions, which it says are too dependent on tuition, auxiliary income, and state support. The Moody's report, "2011 Outlook for U.S. Higher Education," which will be available from the company to its subscribers this week, highlights a widening gap between have and have-not colleges. "This outlook speaks to the fact that the strong continue to get stronger," said Kimberly Tuby, a vice president and senior analyst at Moody's who is the author of the report. Institutions that already have large, well-established research programs and strong philanthropic support are pulling through the economic downturn relatively well, she said. The strongest institutions are in top demand and have fingers in a number of business lines. Meanwhile, the weakest institutions-which draw students from a regional base and lack diversity in business lines-could still be endangered. Those institutions are generally small or mid-sized and do not have a robust fund-raising capacity. "We could see some of those merging or being absorbed by larger institutions, or even going out of business," Ms. Tuby said. The report points to three "critical credit factors" that drive the 2011 outlook for colleges: * "Weakened prospects for net tuition growth" because of a market preference for low-cost or high-reputation competitors. * "Differing degrees of pressure on nontuition revenues," such as philanthropy or research money. * A "need for stronger management of operating costs, balance-sheet risks, a

"The Campus Tsunami By DAVID BROOKS Published: May 3, 2012 Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007. But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures. This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, "There's a tsunami coming." What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web. Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading? If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost - gesture, mood, eye contact - when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students? The

"Ditching a Textbook: An Update January 10, 2011, 11:00 am By Amy Cavender Back in July, I wrote about an experiment I was planning in my two Political Issues sections. I'd opted to try this for a number of reasons: (1) I was dissatisfied with the standard readers available, as they tend to present issues in binary fashion, and real-world issues are seldom that simple. (2) I wanted to be able to take up much more recent issues than I could if I relied on textbooks (it takes too long for things to get into print). (3) I wanted students to help determine the topics for the course, and to develop their skills in locating good sources to help them develop their thinking on issues of interest to them. (4) I wanted to reduce costs for students. So, last semester, I used only one primary textbook: Glenn Tinder's Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions (the writing-intensive section also made use of Muriel G. Harris' Prentice Hall Reference Guide). I've yet to find a good substitute for that particular book; it frames the underlying questions of politics nicely, and I wanted my students to have that background as they thought about contemporary issues. For the contemporary issues themselves, though, I started off by selecting a few myself (e.g., technology and privacy, technology and civic discourse, immigration), and showing students the kinds of resources they might be able to find. Then, for the latter part of the course, they chose the issues, found sources, and shared them in the class Zotero library. Working in teams or as individuals (depending on which section they were in), they were then responsible for running a class session and assigning readings for that session. So, how did it work out? Well, I've got some tweaking to do. In the future, I need to provide more guidance on evaluating and using sources (bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of students in Political Issues are first-years). To accomplish that I may need to drop some of