Red Balloon Resources

The Chronicle of Higher Education Friday, January 7, 2011 January 6, 2011 When Leading a College in Tough Times, Getting Faculty Support Is Crucial By Scott Carlson Palm Springs, Calif. A session here at the Council of Independent Colleges' conference for presidents opened with the sort of joke that goes over well in a room full of top administrators: "How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb?" The punchline: "Change?" But, seriously, many of the colleges represented here are facing challenges that may require some major and even drastic changes. Faculty members, with their reputations for recalcitrance, are often seen as barriers to change. In the session, a scholar of higher education from Harvard University discussed the traits and motivations of the latest generation of faculty members, while two presidents talked about ways they had worked with faculty members to steer their colleges through crises. Cathy A. Trower, research director for the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard, argued that the oldest professors-those born as late as 1945, who are called "traditionalists"-have attitudes about their careers that are very different from the youngest academics', like the Millennials'. Traditionalists tend to be loyal to employers, for example, while Gen-Xers are skeptical. Baby boomers are seeking titles and recognition for their work, while Millennial employees are primarily interested in meaningful work. Ms. Trower said that new scholars primarily want the same things that older scholars want, but the world around all of them has changed, with new methods for distributing scholarly work (for example, digitally), longer work hours, a decline among scholarly presses and longer lead times for publication, and greater financial pressures on scholarly work and departments."

"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 (but not non-profits) 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. A week later, Shireman announced his impending departure. 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 o

"How Will Students Communicate? January 6, 2011 Thus spake Zuckerberg: "We don't think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail." The Facebook founder said so in November, when his company unveiled its new messaging platform: a system, sans subject lines, designed on the assumption that in the future most electronic communication will be brief, informal bursts. In December, Zuckerberg's prognostication was essentially certified by the New York Times, which ran an article suggesting that among young people who are in college or about to be, e-mail is quickly going out of style. Meanwhile, learning-management platforms - notably Blackboard, the market leader among nonprofit institutions - have been building more just-in-time messaging features with an eye to becoming the hub for student-to-student and professor-to-student communications around academic coursework. All this has left campus technologists to ponder the future of institutional e-mail systems, which are still by and large the standard medium connecting colleges with their students. If students are in fact moving away from e-mail in their personal lives, institutionally provided student e-mail accounts will probably diminish in popularity over the next few years, campus technologists say, and that could force colleges to rethink the most reliable ways to stay in touch with their students. At the same time, several technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed say that e-mail is unlikely to disappear, if only because it remains the most suitable medium for the sort of official communications routinely sent to students from non-peer, non-professor sources."

"January 2, 2011 6 Top Smartphone Apps to Improve Teaching, Research, and Your Life Academics describe going mobile to plan lectures, keep up with scholarship, and run classes "I used to use a piece of paper" for taking attendance in class, says David M. Reed, a computer-science professor at Capital U., but he kept losing the sheet. The smartphone app that he wrote to do the job has gained him about $20,000 on the iTunes store. By Jeffrey R. Young Not long ago, it seemed absurd for aca­demics to carry around a computer, camera, and GPS device every­where they went. Actually, it still seems absurd. But many professors (and administrators) now do just that in the form of all-in-one devices. Smartphones or tablet computers combine many functions in a hand-held gadget, and some users are discovering clever ways to teach and do research with the ubiquitous machines. For many on campus, checking e-mail on the go is the first killer app of the hand-held world. The downside: Having that ability can mean working more than ever-answering student e-mails while in line at the grocery store, responding to a journal editor during lunch. There can be benefits, though. Some professors say they find that carrying the Inter­net in their pocket helps them collaborate, teach, and collect data in new ways that include e-mail but go far beyond it. A handful of colleges are running expensive pilot projects in which they give out iPhones or iPads to students and professors to see what happens when everyone goes mobile. Some of the most innovative applications for hand-held devices, however, have come from professors working on their own. They find ways to adapt popular smartphone software to the classroom setting, or even write their own code. That's what I discovered when I put out a call on Twitter, as well as to a major e-mail list of college public-relations officers, asking about the areas in which professors and college officials are making the most of their mobile device

"Google to Dip Into Ed. App. Market By Katie Ash on January 4, 2011 5:53 PM | No comments | No recommendations An article on Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Google execs are currently in talks with education software companies about creating educational apps to be featured in Google Apps Marketplace, an online store that opened in March. Education software sales in K-12 and higher ed raked in about $4.6 billion in 2009, according to the article, and Google, which typically makes its profit from search advertising, is hoping to cash in on some of that revenue stream. Google already offers free apps, such as e-mail, word processing, and spreadsheets, to educators, so hooking up the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's 10 million users in schools with educational software apps could be a natural fit, says Google's business development manager for education, Obadiah Greenberg, in the article. For now, most of the software companies that create apps for the Google Apps Marketplace collect all the profit from sales through the site, but in the coming months, Google plans to begin taking about a 20 percent cut of the revenue, the article said."

"January 2, 2011 Academic Library Autopsy Report, 2050 By Brian T. Sullivan "Insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal." -Shakespeare The academic library has died. Despite early diagnosis, audacious denial in the face of its increasingly severe symptoms led to its deterioration and demise. The academic library died alone, largely neglected and forgotten by a world that once revered it as the heart of the university. On its deathbed, it could be heard mumbling curses against Google and something about a bygone library guru named Ranganathan. Although the causes of death are myriad, the following autopsy report highlights a few of the key factors. 1. Book collections became obsolete. Fully digitized collections of nearly every book in the world rendered physical book collections unnecessary. Individual students now pay for subscriptions to any of several major digital-book vendors for unlimited access. The books may be viewed online at any time or downloaded to a portable device. Some colleges have opted for institutional subscriptions to digital-book collections, managed by their information-technology departments. Most of these collections originated in physical libraries, which signed their own death warrants with deals to digitize their books. 2. Library instruction was no longer necessary. To compete with a new generation of search engines, database vendors were forced to create tools that were more user-friendly, or else risk fading into obscurity. As databases became more intuitive and simpler to use, library instruction in the use of archaic tools was no longer needed. Almost all remaining questions could be answered by faculty (see No. 3) or information-technology staff (see No. 4). It was largely the work of academic librarians that led to most of these advances in database technology. 3. Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum. As faculty incorporated information literacy into their teaching, it became part of the gener

"A New Model Community College January 4, 2011 When for-profit companies team up with traditional colleges to offer instruction, many academics object. The Princeton Review inked a deal to offer a nursing program for a Massachusetts community college last year, and faculty unions scoffed that the high price students must pay for the program violated the traditional community college mission of open access and public accountability. Critics said the same about Kaplan's failed deal to take on California students locked out of financially strapped community colleges. In contrast, there has been relatively little controversy over a different kind of partnership between a company and a private college: a joint effort of Tiffin University, a small private institution in northeast Ohio, and Altius Education, a for-profit company based in San Francisco. In 2008, Tiffin and Altius opened Ivy Bridge College, an online community college that offers a general studies associate degree program targeted at traditional-age students who wish to transfer to four-year institutions. Though tuition for an academic year of full-time study is $9,450, which is considerably more than a typical community college would cost, financial aid is available. Tiffin handles the academics - its accreditation extends to Ivy Bridge - and Altius handles the enrollment management."

"December 13, 2010 Higher-Education Groups Lay Out Strategies to Reach Obama's College-Completion Goal By Eric Kelderman President Obama's ambitious goal for the nation to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020 can be reached, says a new report by three higher-education organizations. But getting there, the groups say, will require a commitment to action by federal, state, and institutional leaders, and not just the arcane discussions of process that have so far dominated the response to the 2020 goal. "The collective effort to strengthen higher-education performance has yet to materialize," says the report, "Strengthening College Opportunity and Performance," which was produced by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability; the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems; and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. "Over the last year, instead of vigorous debate about strategies for increasing educational attainment," the report says, "we saw technical arguments among a few think tanks and foundations about how goals are set." The groups lay out a series of recommended policies and actions that should be taken to put the country on course to meet President Obama's objective. The federal government, the groups say, needs to define explicit goals for all states and make sure that policies and regulations contribute to meeting goals rather than inhibiting them. For example, the kinds of data that the government collects and reports are not helpful for determining how well states and institutions are really performing in higher education, the report says. States must have a full understanding of how many more degrees colleges should be producing, make sure that the colleges within their borders have clearly defined roles, and overhaul appropriations policies to make sure that institutions that will enroll the most students are getting an adequate amount of money a

"Half of Money Lent to Students at For-Profits Will End Up in Default, Government Predicts December 22, 2010, 1:09 pm The U.S. Education Department expects nearly half of the money lent to students attending for-profit colleges to enter default over a 20-year period, according to an estimate published on Tuesday. More broadly, the department projects that 16 percent of the dollars lent to all college students who entered repayment in 2008 will go into default. The department will use the estimates for budgetary purposes. The estimate echoes the findings of a Chronicle analysis last summer, which found that one out of five government loans that entered repayment in 1995 had gone into default, and that the default rate reached 40 percent for loans made to students at for-profit colleges."

"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. Skeptic: Listen. I do focus on my students. I assess their learning every week. It's called grading. I get the feeling that the dea

"Colleges to Confront Deep Cutbacks In states where new governors pledge no new taxes, higher-education budgets will suffer Higher Education Faces Deep Cuts Where New Governors Pledge No New Taxes Brian E. Sandoval of Nevada, like some other newly elected Republican governors, pledged to cut spending but hold down taxes despite an enormous budget shortfall. By Eric Kelderman The budget situation in Nevada is so dire that lawmakers there could cut more than twice the amount they spent on higher education last year and still not fill the state's projected $1.2-billion shortfall. Despite the gap, which equals nearly a third of the state's spending, the incoming governor, Brian E. Sandoval, a Republican, has pledged that he will not raise taxes to put the state's budget back into the black. Mr. Sandoval is one of a dozen Republicans who were swept into governors' offices in November promising to hold the line on taxes and rein in state spending. Half of those states-Maine, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin-face shortfalls so large that they nearly equal or even surpass the entire amount the state spends on higher education."

"Online Learning in the Virginia Community College System By: Shanna Smith Jaggars & Di Xu - September 2010. In January 2001, the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) released a distance learning strategic plan that endorsed taking a student-centered approach to online learning as well as providing support services to promote faculty development and student success. The current study was commissioned by VCCS to investigate student outcomes for the 2004 student cohort by examining: (1) patterns of online course taking among Virginia community college students; (2) college-ready and underprepared students' retention and performance in online versus face-to-face courses; and (3) subsequent educational outcomes for underprepared and college-ready students who participate in online learning. Results indicate that nearly half of Virginia community college students enrolled in an online course across the period of study, with online enrollments increasing dramatically over four years. However, few students enrolled in an entirely online curriculum in a given term, even by the time the study concluded in 2008. In general, students with stronger academic preparation were more likely to enroll in online courses. Regardless of their initial level of preparation, however, students were more likely to fail or withdraw from online courses than from face-to-face courses. In addition, students who took online coursework in early semesters were slightly less likely to return to school in subsequent semesters, and students who took a higher proportion of credits online were slightly less likely to attain an educational award or transfer to a four-year institution. Additional analyses with a new cohort of students entering in 2008 were consistent with the results of the 2004 cohort."

September / October 2009 College for $99 a Month The next generation of online education could be great for students-and catastrophic for universities. by Kevin Carey Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor's degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn't going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn't have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money. Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual-hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. "It sounds like a scam," Solvig thought-she'd run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk? Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed

"A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 3) December 16, 2010 'It Should Be Fine' Perhaps all of the back-and-forth about StraighterLine - the news stories, the blog posts, the assorted incidents of backlash, the endless tug-of-war over who awards credit for what - might be boiled down to two essential questions: Are StraighterLine's courses truly more or less equivalent to the courses that many college students are already taking? And, more broadly, at what point does any educational experience - specifically, in StraighterLine's case, an introductory-level general education class - become worthy of college credit? The former question addresses the level on which Burck Smith would like for his brainchild to be evaluated; the latter is an issue that he actively seeks to avoid. In a long series of emails over the course of several weeks, as well as one 90-minute telephone interview, Smith repeatedly and expressly urged me to "make sure to compare our courses to other colleges' general education courses with whatever evaluation standards they use rather than what they say they do or wish they did." "…[E]veryone else is doing the same thing," Smith said, "but they're allowed to be accredited and approved and sort of part of the club." If one accepts Smith's terms of debate, it is difficult to argue with him. Surely accredited institutions offer plenty of courses that are not of the utmost quality. And colleges and universities do turn a profit on many large, introductory-level courses - particularly courses that are taught by low-paid temporary instructors, or broadcast online to vast numbers of students - and that profit is used, as Carey's Washington Monthly article puts it, "to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else." How colleges pay their classical Chinese poetry experts is not Smith's concern; on the contrary, he views himself as something of a consumers' adv

"Special Report A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 2) December 16, 2010 Advising and Tutoring There are two basic ways that students can seek outside assistance. For administrative or customer service questions, they can contact their course adviser; for questions related to the actual course material, they have the allotted 10 hours of SmarThinking tutoring (minus five minutes per session for "processing"). I found that my course adviser -- who (along with Burck Smith and StraighterLine generally) had no knowledge of this article until after I finished the class -- was available and willing to assist me; I e-mailed him at least a half dozen times as I went through the course, and in each case he wrote back within a day, and often sooner (his replies tended to be very brief but -- more often than not -- helpful). The tutoring arrangement is less convenient. For those unfamiliar with the service, SmarThinking tutoring takes place in a sort of chat session; the interface is a large white browser window into which students can type questions and their tutors can type responses. My questions showed up in large red letters, while my tutor's replies were in large blue ones. This was helpful for distinguishing between my words and those of my tutor, although the format of the chat session is such that our words often overlapped and became illegible. When one "page" of type is filled up, the chat session opens a new, blank page, and my tutor and I frustrated one another - and wasted time - by inadvertently moving back and forth between pages. Special Report Inside Higher Ed's Serena Golden took StraighterLine's Economics 101 course this year. This article recounts her experiences and what they reveal about the much-discussed curricular experiment. Tutors have no access to the course materials or any of the work that students have done, so each question must be explained in the absence of any context - and unlike at a university tutoring center, where this m

"Speeding Toward a Slowdown? November 16, 2010 Online college enrollments grew by 21 percent to 5.6 million last fall, the biggest percentage increase in several years, according to a report released today by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group. At the same time, the authors say online growth might begin to slow down in the near future, as the biggest drivers of enrollment growth face budget challenges and stricter recruitment oversight from the federal government. Nearly one million more students took an online course in fall 2009 than in the previous year, according to the new survey, which drew responses from 2,583 academic leaders at both nonprofit and for-profit institutions across the country. That is the biggest numerical increase in the eight-year history of the report, and the largest proportional increase (21.1 percent) since 2005. Online enrollments have grown at more than nine times the rate of general enrollment since 2002. Almost a third of all college students in the country take at least one course online. The conventional wisdom has been that the economic crisis has spurred at least some of that growth, as adults looking to increase their job prospects have gone back to school for a new degree. Three-quarters of the institutions surveyed said the recession drove interest in their online programs. In the year since Sloan administered its survey, there has been more talk of online enrollment growth as a strategy for making up for shrinking state allocations at public university systems - especially in places like California, where some think a massive online expansion could lift the state university system out of financial ruin, and Minnesota, where possible Republican presidential challenger Gov. Tim Pawlenty has made the idea of less-expensive online public higher education one of his talking points. But Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and co-author of the new Sloan survey, says that shrinkin

"Explaining Gaps in Readiness for College-Level Math: The Role of High School Courses Issue/Topic: Curriculum--Mathematics; High School--College Readiness; Postsecondary Participation--Access Author(s): Long, Mark; Iatarola, Patrice; Conger, Dylan Organization(s): Evans School, University of Washington; Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, Florida State University; Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, George Washington University Publication: Education Finance and Policy Season: Winter 2009 Background: Despite substantial increases in high school graduation requirements, almost one-third of US college freshmen are unprepared for college-level math. Students who are low income, Hispanic and black are least likely to be prepared for college-level coursework, and females are slightly less likely to be ready than males. Little of the prior research in this area has focused on the contribution of high school courses to demographic and socioeconomic gaps in secondary and postsecondary success. Purpose: To estimate how much of the racial, socioeconomical and gender gaps in high school and postsecondary outcomes are determined by the courses that students take while in high school. Findings/Results: Less than half of the black and poor students and just over half of the Hispanic students in the sample were prepared for college-level math - far below the readiness rates for whites, Asian and nonpoor students. 1. The courses students take in high school contribute significantly to their college readiness, with the largest gains occurring at Algebra 2 (the minimum level of math required to graduate even with a college preparatory diploma in Florida is Algebra 1). 2. The slight male advantage in college math readiness is not explained by course-taking differentials because female students already take more advanced math courses than males. This finding is consistent with other work on gender disparities. 3. The results suggest

"The Great College-Degree Scam December 9, 2010, 2:32 pm By Richard Vedder With the help of a small army of researchers and associates (most importantly, Chris Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Chris Denhart) and starting with help from Douglas Himes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits. Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled-occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation's stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor's degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend). How did my crew of Whiz Kids arrive at this statistic? We found some obscure but highly useful BLS data for 1992 that provides occupational/educational attainment data for the entire labor force, and similar data for 2008 (reported, to much commentary, in this space and by CCAP earlier). We then took the ratio of the change in college graduates filling these less skilled jobs to the total increase in the number of college graduates. Note I use the word "increase." Enrollment expansion/increased access policy relates to the margin-to changes in enrollments/college graduates over time. To be sure, there are some issues of measurement, judgment, and data comparability. With this in mind, I had my associates calculate the incremental unskilled job to college graduate ratio using different assumptions about the

"Americans Blame Students and Parents for Poor Graduation Rates, Poll Finds December 9, 2010, 11:33 am Students and their parents are mostly to blame for poor college-graduation rates, according to a poll released today by the Associated Press and Stanford University. When asked about graduation rates at public four-year colleges, seven in 10 respondents to the survey said students shouldered either a great deal or a lot of responsibility for the rates, and 45 percent felt that way about parents. Other people involved in higher education got a pass. From 25 percent to 32 percent of those polled blamed college administrators, professors, teachers, unions, state education officials, and federal education officials."

"December 9, 2010 Key Senator Raises Concerns About Veterans Benefits Flowing to For-Profit Colleges By Kelly Field Washington After veterans and service members, for-profit colleges may be the biggest beneficiaries of the 2008 update to the GI Bill, according to a new report from the Senate education committee. In the first year the law was in effect, for-profits received $640-million, or 36 percent, of the $1.75-billion in total benefits paid by the Veterans Affairs Department, even though those institutions enroll fewer than 10 percent of all students in the United States. Sen. Tom Harkin, the committee's chairman, says those facts underscore the need for stricter federal oversight over for-profit colleges. In recent months, Mr. Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, has held a series of high-profile hearings criticizing for-profits for their high costs, aggressive recruiting tactics, and heavy dependence on taxpayer support. "I want to make sure these veterans are getting the education we promised them and that taxpayers know that their money is adequately safeguarded," he said Thursday in a conference call with reporters. But lobbyists for for-profit colleges say the disproportionate share of GI Bill benefits the institutions receive is a testament to the sector's dedication to educating service members and veterans."