Red Balloon Resources

"April 2, 2011 Colleges Scramble to Avoid Violating Federal-Aid Limit For-profits' tactics to comply with 90/10 rule raise questions By Goldie Blumenstyk Corinthian Colleges Inc.'s decision this winter to raise tuition at dozens of its Everest, Heald, and WyoTech campuses by an average of 12 percent, knowing that most of its students would have to go even further into debt, had nothing to do with rising costs or any improvements it was making in the curricula. With many of its students already receiving the maximum in federal grants and loans, the company said it was raising its prices to create a financial gap that students would have to cover with private loans or other funds besides those from the federal student-aid programs. Corinthian's move is just one of the latest-and some say one of the most cynical-strategies that some for-profit colleges are using to avoid violating the so-called 90/10 rule, so they can remain eligible for the billions of dollars in federal student aid that have fueled their growth. The rule requires them to receive at least 10 percent of their revenue from other sources. "They are making loans, just like the subprime lenders did, that they know their students will not be able to repay," said Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access & Success. Corinthian's decision to comply with the 90/10 rule in this manner, said Ms. Abernathy, even as it acknowledges that the company-sponsored loan program most of its students will use has a default rate of more than 50 percent, is "the height of cynicism." The 90/10 rule is also driving activities at other college companies. In recent months, Education Management Corporation, parent company of the Art Institutes, South University, and Brown Mackie College, announced it would increase its recruiting of foreign students. Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix created new colleges of "professional studies" so they could count more of their nontraditional-e

"Biology Professors Use Cloud Computing to Reach Students January 28, 2011, 2:00 pm By Tushar Rae To help reduce the number of dropouts in freshman biology courses, professors at the University at Buffalo have turned to the power of collaboration and cloud computing to build an online teaching tool designed to explain concepts better than a textbook can. The tool, called Pop!World, provides a visual way to map evolution. It's the work of Bina Ramaurthy, a research associate professor in the department of computer science and engineering; Jessica Poulin, a research assistant professor in the department of biological sciences; and Katharina Dittmar, an assistant professor of biological sciences. Cloud computing allows for different levels of network resources to be devoted to Pop!World based on the number of students using it, Ms. Ramaurthy says. The addition of Pop!World, which will serve as a lab component, is part of a redevelopment of the freshman biology curriculum that aims both to address attrition and to add mathematical rigor to the program, Ms. Poulin says. The hope is that it will visually engage students. "Teaching from a text gets boring to them," says Ms. Ramaurthy. Though Pop!World has been used for only one semester on the campus, which is part of the State University of New York, Ms. Poulin says she already sees the effects. On a survey of students who were retaking freshman biology during the fall semester, and thus had experienced the course with and without Pop!World, positive reviews of Pop!World, she says, were "off the charts.""

"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."

"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."

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?

"Can Students Learn to Learn? January 31, 2011 SAN FRANCISCO -- Why do some students in a course perform better than others of roughly equal ability? The answers, of course, are as varied as are students. Some spend more time studying, or study more efficiently; some have other priorities; some don't connect with the instructor. Some of these factors relate to metacognition, defined variously as knowing about knowing or being able to understand why we learn the way we do. A student with metacognition may realize after a disappointing test that she didn't study hard enough, and needs to devote more time to academics. The student operating without metacognition may respond to the same setback by trashing his instructor on RateMyProfessors.com. While some colleges have long taught study skills, some institutions are experimenting with efforts to teach much more than how to study: they are looking for ways to grow their students' metacognition. Many of these projects are still small and don't have years of data to report, but on Friday, several of those involved in the efforts shared their enthusiasm for the approach in a session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The projects discussed here were from members of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, which received support from the Teagle Foundation to coordinate the efforts. So how does this work? Kristin E. Bonnie, an assistant professor of psychology at Beloit College, said that on her tests, she has always let students pick a few questions on the multiple-choice portion (say 3 of 25) that won't be graded. It's a way to show students that she understands they may not grasp everything right away. In the past, she just let students cross out the questions they didn't want to answer. Now, she makes them answer all the questions -- and to exempt a question from grading, students must pick from a list she provides of the reasons they are selecting that question. Students

What drives many district and state technology leaders bonkers is being asked time and again by their school boards, superintendents, parents, and media: What does the research say about whether we should invest in iPads, tablets, and 1:1 laptops? What they really want to know is: does the new technology work?

Every other Monday, right before class ends, Muhammad Zaman, a Boston University biomedical engineering professor, hands out a one-page form asking students to anonymously rate him and the course on a scale of one to five. Enlarge This Image Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times Muhammad Zaman, who teaches biomedical engineering at Boston University, graphs the results of his evaluations and e-mails to explain how he will make changes. News, data and conversation about education in New York. Join us on Facebook » Follow us on Twitter » .It asks more, too: "How can the professor improve your learning of the material?" "Has he improved his teaching since the last evaluation? In particular, has he incorporated your suggestions?" "How can the material be altered to improve your understanding of the material?" "Anything else you would like to convey to the professor?" College learning assessments and professorial ratings come in many forms, with new ones popping up all the time. Ratemyprofessors.com has been going strong for years, and almost everywhere, colleges ask students to fill out end-of-term evaluations - and increasingly, midterm evaluations as well. Many professors with large lecture classes swear by clickers that help them keep tabs on how well their students are following the material. Some online courses include dashboards that let professors see which students are stuck, and where. And thousands of professors use some variation of K. Patricia Cross's "One-Minute Paper" approach, in which, at the end of each class, students write down the most important thing they learned that day - and the biggest question left unanswered. But even in an era when teacher evaluations and learning assessments are a hot topic in education, Dr. Zaman stands out in his constant re-engineering of his teaching: He graphs the results the day he collects them (an upward trend is visible), sends out an e-mail telling the class abo

"Survey Finds Frustration Among Faculty Leaders at Master's-Level Institutions January 24, 2011, 2:59 pm Faculty Senate leaders at master's-level institutions are more likely than those at doctoral-level universities to report that faculty morale at their institutions is low, according to the newly released results of a survey conducted by Ohio University's Center for Higher Education, in collaboration with the American Association of University Professors. Compared with Faculty Senate leaders at doctoral institutions, whose responses to the center's survey were released in November, those at master's institutions were less likely to report having a good working relationship with their institution's administration, more likely to report that requirements for tenure and promotion are increasing, and more likely to report that there were not enough tenure-track faculty members to support academic programs at their institutions. As is the case at doctoral institutions, the overwhelming majority of Faculty Senate leaders at master's institutions are white, the survey found."

"Peer Review by Twitter As social media tools are increasingly used to respond to scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, many researchers are frustrated, according to an article in Nature. "Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather than at small conferences or in private conversation," the article says. It goes on to quote many others who say that speedy response (even if of varying reliability) is actually a huge improvement over a system of waiting a long time for criticism of published articles."

"$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 recent bankruptcy declaration by Kodak, one of the nation's most trusted brands for consumers, which once held a market share in excess of 90 percent, is stunning. Kodak mistook America's century-long love affair with its products as a sign of market permanency, missing the fact that camera phones, flip cameras and online sharing would erode its brand and render it irrelevant.American higher education should take heed because it is facing a similar challenge, with implications far more important than the loss of a major corporation

"January 9, 2011 State of Washington to Offer Online Materials as Texts Money-saving effort at 2-year colleges faces vexing problems By Martha Ann Overland It's a question that students, and a growing number of their professors, are asking: Why require students to buy expensive textbooks every year, when the Internet is awash in information, much of it free? After all, the words of Plato have not changed in the past 2,000 years, nor has basic algebra. Washington State's financially strapped Legislature, which foots much of the textbook bill for community-college students on state financial aid, has wondered the same thing. With nearly half a million students taking classes at the state's 34 two-year colleges, why not assemble very inexpensive resources for the most popular classes and allow access to those materials online? And why not cap the cost of those course materials at $30? Calculating the savings, when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year, was an exercise in simple math, says Cable Green, director of e-learning and open education at the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. "We believe we can change the cost of attending higher education in this country and in the world," he says. "If we are all teaching the same 81 courses, why not?" So with a $750,000 matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the board has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges. For the Open Course Library, as the materials are known, teams of community-college instructors, librarians, and Web designers from around the state are creating ready-to-use digital course modules for the 81 highest-enrolled courses. The first 43 courses, which are as varied as "General Biology" and "Introduction to Literature 1," will be tested in classrooms beginning this month. The basic design requirements of the Open Course Library are simple enough. The material must be

Press Release from the Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Foundation will engage academic experts and students to improve public policy information on Wikipedia $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to support first initiative of its kind for Wikipedia SAN FRANCISCO May 11, 2010 -- The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, today announced a new project designed to improve the quality of public policy-related articles on Wikipedia. It is the first time the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a project designed to systematically increase the quality of articles in a particular topic area. The project will be funded via a $1.2 million grant from the US-based Stanton Foundation, a long-time funding partner of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Stanton Foundation is the beneficiary foundation created in the name of the US broadcasting industry leader and media innovator, Frank Stanton. Dr. Stanton's commitment to civic education and freedom of speech carries on through his philanthropic legacy, the Stanton Foundation. "Wikipedia is a key informational resource for hundreds of millions of people," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "The Stanton Foundation wants to increase people's understanding of public policy-related issues, and supporting quality on Wikipedia is a great way to accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is keen to experiment with techniques for encouraging subject-matter experts to work alongside our volunteers to improve quality. This funding will enable us to do that, and I am --as always-- very grateful to the Stanton Foundation for its support." Wikipedia is written by hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world, and that won't change with this project. The Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will recruit Wikipedia volunteers to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic areas for improvement, and work to make them better. Some of tha

"For Many, College Isn't Worth It January 20, 2011 By Richard Vedder In this space last Friday, Anthony Carnevale strongly and lengthily argued that "college is still worth it." He implicitly criticized those, including me, who rely on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data showing that the number of college graduates exceeds the number of available jobs that require a college degree. While he says many things, he has two main points. First, "There's just one problem with the official BLS statistics: they're wrong." Second, he notes that "the most persuasive evidence that the BLS numbers are wrong are earnings data which show employers across the country pay a 'wage premium' for college graduates…." I will argue that the BLS data are, in fact, pretty good, and that while Carnevale is factually correct about the earnings data, his interpretation of it is, at the minimum, misleading. Moreover, I will further argue that what is involved here is a classic application of what economists over the age of 50 call "Say's Law" (i.e., the theory suggesting that supply creates its own demand; economists under 50 are largely ignorant of it because they have no knowledge of the evolution of their own discipline, reflecting the general abandonment of thorough teaching of the history of economic thought). Furthermore, I will argue that diplomas are a highly expensive and inefficient screening device used by employers who are afraid to test potential employee skills owing to a most unfortunate Supreme Court decision and related legislation. Finally, I will assert that Carnevale and others who argue "college has a high payoff" are comparing apples with oranges -- i.e., they are making totally inappropriate comparisons that lead to skewed conclusions. An even-handed interpretation of the data is that college is "worth it" for some significant number of young people, but is a far more problematic investment for others. The call by President O

"The Invisible Computer Lab January 20, 2011 In the future, campus computer labs will be invisible, personal computers will be shapeshifters, and colleges will have to spend much less to make sure students have access to the software they need for certain courses. This according to technology officials at several colleges that have recently deployed "virtual computing labs" - Web-based hubs where students can go to use sophisticated programs from their personal computers without having to buy and install expensive software, or slog to a campus lab and pray for a vacant workstation. Essentially, the virtual "lab" is a protocol that takes programs running on college hardware and beams the images via the Web to any computer desktop, where students can create and save work as though the programs were running on their own hard drives. Since the performance of the software does not depend on the processing power of the computer - only on the strength of the Internet connection - even students with relatively clunky machines can use advanced software without difficulty, campus technologists say. And with many courses requiring that students do work in number-crunching programs such as Mathematica, or editing software from Adobe, or even basic tools such as the Microsoft Office suite, virtual computing labs could be a windfall for students who prefer to work from their own desks and cannot afford to purchase the software, which can cost hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. "Imagine you're a student and you say, 'I want my computer to look like this and [do] this particular piece of work,' and it does," says Art Vandenberg, a technologist at Georgia State University, which is moving its own virtual lab out of the beta phase this spring. "It's that magical." Described this way, virtual computing labs might seem a bit sci-fi - Vandenberg invoked Star Trek when discussing the technology with Inside Higher Ed, and the protean powers

"January 19, 2011 For Some Colleges, the Road to Growth Is to Go Hybrid By Goldie Blumenstyk Keiser University's announcement last week that it would convert from profit to nonprofit status is a reminder that ownership status doesn't necessarily define a college. Some for-profits operate like nonprofits and "there are nonprofits that look just like for-profits," says Arthur Keiser, the university's co-founder. Even more than that, the conversion is a reminder of the fluidity of the sector and the variety of new ownership models now popping up on the higher-education landscape. They include models like Ivy Bridge College, an online, associate-degree division of Tiffin University that is majority owned by private investors now operating under Tiffin's accreditation, Middlebury College's new language company created in partnership with a publicly traded technology company called K12, and the TCS Education System, an entrepreneurial consortium of both for-profit and nonprofit divisions that was formed last year by the fast-growing Chicago School of Professional Psychology. The sector hasn't yet hit the point at which it's hard to tell the for-profit colleges from the nonprofit ones without looking at their tax returns, but that day may not be all that far off. All of those arrangements are "part of the cutting edge" says Bernard Luskin, a longtime college administrator who is now working with the nonprofit Touro University to rebuild its online-education programs. (Touro sold its online division, TUI, to private-equity investors in 2007.) Public financing and philanthropic support are getting tighter and tighter, Mr. Luskin notes, and "that makes it pretty hard to grow" without these kinds of alternatives."

Designing and building things for the United States military is a notoriously slow-moving and costly endeavor. The time from idea to manufacturing for a new armored personnel carrier or a tank is typically 10 to 20 years. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to change that, and drastically so.It seeks to cut the design-to-production cycle to two to four years. So how are they going to do it? Crowdsourcing and prize contests are crucial ingredients in the speed-up recipe. The crowdsourcing effort will rely on a software initiative, called Vehicleforge.mil, which will be a Web portal for gathering, sharing and testing ideas.

"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

"What Does It Mean To Be an Academic? January 6, 2012, 4:21 pm By Nigel Thrift There is a fascinating moment when academics reflect upon their practices in ways that are not just emblematic but are clearly leading to real change in what the practice of being an academic actually means. I have been reminded of this fact twice recently as I have considered practices of teaching and research at a number of universities around the world. First, in the case of teaching, there was seeing some of the new educational technology which is coming into operation. I am not just talking about remarkable educational sites like the interactive simulation site for the physical sciences, PhET, which is used by so many science professors. As good as these undoubtedly can be at allowing students to reach a level of competence in particular problems before they come near a lecture, there is also the new software which allows real interaction in the classroom and the tracking of the reaction to that interaction in order to enable new rounds of inquiry. The consequences are only just being worked through but in time, I am now pretty sure, the lecture in its old form, understood as a direct oral presentation intended to present information or to teach students about a particular subject and delivered by a lecturer standing at the front of the room and giving out information and judgments, will become a minority teaching method. Instead, what were lectures will be recorded for students to consult-many universities have already produced a library of such presentations-and the time previously put by for lectures will be used as a surgery, as a time for problem-solving, clarification, and the like. This is a no less time-consuming method of teaching-indeed, it may involve more work. But I think it is likely to become the norm in many disciplines. Second, in the case of research, there has been reading Paul Rabinow's latest book, The Accompaniment, which includes a fascinating cha