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Mathieu Plourde

China's new education reform: Reducing importance of test scores - 0 views

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    "China just began a major education reform effort that is aimed at reducing the importance of standardized testing in determining school quality and including factors such as student engagement, boredom, anxiety, and happiness. It also seeks to cut back on the amount of school work students are given. As scholar Yong Zhao notes in the following post, the approach is the opposite of the education reform path in the United States, which in recent years has increased the importance of test scores for accountability purposes."
Mathieu Plourde

Return on Educational Investment: 2014 - 0 views

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    school productivity has not become part of the reform conversation, and with this project, our hope is to shine a light on how productivity differs across districts, as well as to identify key areas of reform. Moreover, for the first time, we conducted a special analysis of educational fiscal practices, diving deep into state budgeting approaches. We believe that if our education system had a more robust way of tracking expenditures, it could do more to increase productivity. Together with this report, we have also released analysis by CAP Senior Policy Analyst Robert Hanna on twin districts. Hanna's analysis looks more closely at the programs and practices of more effective districts.
Mathieu Plourde

The Two Cultures of Educational Reform - 0 views

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    "Some of the essential aspects of academic institutions - in particular the quality of the education they provide - are largely intangible and their results are difficult to measure." Indeed, he adds, the "result is that much of what is important to the work of colleges and universities may be neglected, undervalued, or laid aside in the pursuit of more visible goals."
Mathieu Plourde

Reform Government Surveillance - 0 views

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    "We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight."
Mathieu Plourde

Sorry, Michelle Rhee, but our obsession with testing kids is all about money - Salon.com - 0 views

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    "By "standards … effectiveness … accountability," what Rhee means, of course, is more emphasis on her reform agenda of assessing schools, teachers and students with high-stakes test scores - not at all an agenda uniformly accepted by top-scoring nations. Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg corrected her on a blog site at the Washington Post, noting that Finland's PISA scores are routinely at or near the top, yet "the Finnish approach to educational policy has stood in direct opposition to the path embraced by the United States.""
Mathieu Plourde

The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform - 0 views

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    "this apparent lack of a need for a definition is exactly why we need to slow things down and figure out what the heck we're talking about."
Mathieu Plourde

7 Habits of Highly Effective Tech-leading Principals -- THE Journal - 1 views

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    The conventional wisdom in education is that any school reform--be it curriculum, instruction, assessment, or teacher professionalism--is most likely to take hold in schools that have strong leadership. The same holds true for technology. Any educator will tell you the most successful implementation of technology programs takes place in schools where the principal sees him or herself as a technology leader.
Mathieu Plourde

Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education | Association of College & Rese... - 0 views

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    "This Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (Framework) grows out of a belief that information literacy as an educational reform movement will realize its potential only through a richer, more complex set of core ideas. During the fifteen years since the publication of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,1 academic librarians and their partners in higher education associations have developed learning outcomes, tools, and resources that some institutions have deployed to infuse information literacy concepts and skills into their curricula. However, the rapidly changing higher education environment, along with the dynamic and often uncertain information ecosystem in which all of us work and live, require new attention to be focused on foundational ideas about that ecosystem. Students have a greater role and responsibility in creating new knowledge, in understanding the contours and the changing dynamics of the world of information, and in using information, data, and scholarship ethically. Teaching faculty have a greater responsibility in designing curricula and assignments that foster enhanced engagement with the core ideas about information and scholarship within their disciplines. Librarians have a greater responsibility in identifying core ideas within their own knowledge domain that can extend learning for students, in creating a new cohesive curriculum for information literacy, and in collaborating more extensively with faculty."
Mathieu Plourde

Minerva, The Future of College? - 1 views

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    ""My entire critique of higher education started with curricular reform at Penn," he says. "General education is nonexistent. It's effectively a buffet, and when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don't get educated. You get a random collection of information. Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.""
Mathieu Plourde

New faculty model at U. Denver could be prototype for reform @insidehighered - 1 views

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    ""You have to make the argument that this is going to cost us money up front, but it will create distinctiveness at the university that ultimately will aid us in the longer term," Jones said. "It guarantees our ability to be a player in this era of change.""
Mathieu Plourde

WGU, Competency Based Education, and Substantive Interaction - Ted Curran.net - 0 views

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    "hat we're witnessing is the changing role of faculty in Competency Based Education - I (and many ed. reformers) believe instructors SHOULD function more like tutors, coaches, and mentors than their roles have traditionally called for! The faculty role has been historically constructed as a "fount of knowledge", sage on a stage, the smartest person in the room - this was a historic necessity during the long era of information scarcity that we are transitioning away from. Now that information is abundant, infinitely reproducible, instantly accessible, subject matter experts need to share space with faculty who specialize in the interpersonal nuances of teaching students. In fact "regular and substantive interaction" is scarce in higher education, unless you count lecturing and note-taking as "interaction". Do you? Is this the standard that OIG is measuring WGU against?"
Mathieu Plourde

Why are textbooks so expensive? - 0 views

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    "Publishers claim that new technologies, like digital textbooks and Netflix-style subscription services, make textbooks more affordable for all. But affordability advocates say that if anyone is to blame for the fact that textbook costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s, it's the publishers - and, advocates claim, these new technologies are publishers' attempt to maintain their stranglehold on the industry while disguising it as reform."
Mathieu Plourde

Changing Gears 2012: re-thinking rigor - 0 views

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    "Here's a thought, if you are spending all of your time worrying about a term no one can define, its time to get a different hobby.Thus, step three in Changing Gears 2012 is to stop using the term rigor, and to start to actually define what you want from education for your students."
Mathieu Plourde

Delaware's Jack Markell Aims to Raise the Bar for Teachers - 0 views

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    First is the idea of raising expectations and raising standards. Another piece: data-driven instruction. Every teacher in our state now spends 90 minutes a week sitting down with five peers to just drill into what the data is telling them about student performance. There's research that says the most effective economic development that a state could make is in early childhood education. We're increasing over a five-year period from 20 to 80 the percentage of high-need kids who are enrolled in preschool. That's a game changer.
Mathieu Plourde

Why deMOOCification won't work - 0 views

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    "As much as I don't want to say this, I don't think there's a chance in hell that MOOCs will die on their own. I can't think of any trend which saved large institutitions money and trouble, then died a natural death. And faculty can't defend against them - we have been made powerless very slowly, over a long period of administrative takeover and public apathy (or even antipathy in our new era of anti-intellectualism). What happened at SJSU and Amherst is the exception  - an exception I applaud, but an exception. The public perceives faculty objections to MOOCs as an issue of job security rather than quality."
Mathieu Plourde

Essay on the nature of change in American higher education - 0 views

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    "America is shifting from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. Our social institutions, colleges and universities included, were created for the former. Today they all seem to be broken. They work less well than they once did. Through either repair or replacement - more likely a combination - they need to be refitted for a new age."
Mathieu Plourde

The promise of individualized learning and the faculty role - 0 views

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    Imagine how transformative it would be if we could combine self-paced, self-directed postsecondary learning (which has been around in one form or another for millennia) with online delivery of content that has embedded in it both the sophisticated assessment of learning and the ability to diagnose learning problems, sometimes even before the learner is aware of them, and provide just-in-time interventions that keep the learner on track. Add to that the opportunity for the learner to connect to and participate in groups of other learners, and, to link directly to the faculty member and receive individualized attention and mentoring. What you would have is the 21st-century version of do-it-yourself college, grounded in but well beyond the experienced reality of the thousands of previous DIYers such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Edison.
Mathieu Plourde

Who's running U.S. higher ed? Increasingly, foundations - 0 views

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    ""The emergence of 'advocacy philanthropy' has resulted in the unabashed use of foundation strategies to influence government action, policy, and legislation," the Claremont researchers concluded. That's a departure, they wrote, "from the established norms in higher education philanthropy, norms that generally created a distance between foundation activity and politics.""
Mathieu Plourde

The Devil's in the Performance-Based Details - 0 views

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    The White House has suggested that the amount of federal student aid that an institution receives should depend on how well it performs on certain key measures. I wholeheartedly agree with this in concept. The question is what those key measures should be. They should include rates of loan default, retention, and graduation. But not tuition.
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