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Jon Breitenbucher

Liberal Arts and MOOCs | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    "Rather than think about how "MOOCs" will influence liberal arts education, perhaps it is time to flip the question. What does traditional liberal arts education have to offer "MOOCs"? The answer remains the enduring value of education that produces critical thinkers, life-long learners and economically and politically contributing members of society. But in order to accomplish that feat, liberal arts education may have to take a lesson from MOOCs on how to generate excitement for the deployment of technology in service of inter-institutional and even international classrooms, information competency and problem-solving based courses.""
Jon Breitenbucher

Should professors be replaced by a computer screen? - Changing Higher Education - 0 views

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    "My concern is that in most cases the online initiatives are not being done in a way that incorporates the online education into the educational mission of the institution - it is a financial, not educational advance."
Jon Breitenbucher

Are Colleges Ready to Adjust to a New Higher-Education Landscape? - Bottom Line - Blogs... - 0 views

  • Another respondent was acidic about the industry generally. “I’ve become a firm believer that most of our campus leaders are stuck in a ‘quick fix’ mentality when it comes to enrollment success,” he wrote. “I continue to see campuses make knee-jerk reactions and spend heavily to improve enrollment in the short run, only to see the cycle turn downward once the strategy is no longer viable, or their competition matches that strategy with one of their own. True campus-culture changes are the real creators of success, but most leaders are too afraid to upset the apple cart and deal with the inevitable groaning from faculty.”
  • “I am thinking, frankly, that we have to have productivity gains in higher education,” said John Curry, a former vice president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who now works for the Huron Consulting Group. “The big gains have to come out of the education-research sector because that is still on the order of 70 percent of the operating budget of universities.”
  • First, the possibility that higher-education institutions are unfocused. The “buffet model” of higher education—where students come to a college and choose from a vast array of majors and programs—is not financially sustainable, Mr. Staisloff said. “That points to a disconnect between the mission and market,” he said. More institutions should ask themselves: What are we good at? What can we offer that you can’t just get anywhere? And perhaps they should offer a more-limited palette of majors and programs.
Jon Breitenbucher

Essay on the nature of change in American higher education | Inside Higher Ed - 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. Higher education underwent this kind of evolution in the past as the United States shifted from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The classical agrarian college, imported from 17th-century England with a curriculum rooted in the Middle Ages, was established to educate a learned clergy to govern the colonies. This model held sway until the early 19th century."
Amyaz Moledina

Study casts doubt on idea that spending more per student leads to better educational ou... - 0 views

  • Research presented here by researchers from Wabash College -- and based on national data sets -- finds that there may be a minimal relationship between what colleges spend on education and the quality of the education students receive. Further, the research suggests that colleges that spend a fraction of what others do, and operate with much higher student-faculty ratios and greater use of part-time faculty members, may be succeeding educationally as well as their better-financed (and more prestigious) counterparts
  • 45 colleges and universities, most of them liberal arts colleges,
  • good teaching with high quality interactions with faculty," high expectations and academic challenge, interaction with ideas and people different from one's own, and "deep learning" through characteristics identified by the National Survey of Student Engagement.
    • Amyaz Moledina
       
      The outcomes variables are as per NSSE
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Blaich isolated 10 colleges (he said later that most but not all were liberal arts colleges) that had very similar scores on the good practices related to teaching. Their spending per student, however, ranged from $9,225 to $53,521 (with corresponding tuition rates). Others at the high end of per-student spending were at $44,429 and $34,172. Three other colleges, however, were achieving the same educational impact with spending per student of about $15,000
  • suggest that the quality of instruction from part-timers can be just as high as from full-timers, so maybe the issue is finding the best way to hire and retain them. (He suggested full-year contracts over course-by-course.)
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    survey shows that colleges (w.liberal arts in sample) that have more spending per students, part time faculty and higher faculty-student ratios, get similar results on the NSSE score. A NSEE variable is "good teaching with high quality interactions with faculty"
Amyaz Moledina

MOOCs and disruptive innovation: The challenge to HE business models - 0 views

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    All industries have to cope with the disruption of the unfolding digital revolution, and education is no exception. This multi-faceted disruption can be seen in the new wave of MOOCs. The arrival of 'massive open online courses' appears to be another tectonic shift in the evolution of higher education and HE internationalisation. MOOCs are free of charge, designed for large numbers of people to take them at once, encourage peer-to-peer learning, and award certificates rather than academic course credit. This article, the first of a short series on disruptive innovation in HE, describes three new start-ups - Coursera, edX and Udacity - and explores the challenges they pose to traditional models of delivery in higher education.
Jon Breitenbucher

Connected Learning Research Network: Researchers Recommend Core Changes in Education | ... - 0 views

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    "Close the gap between the no-frills learning that too often happens in-school and the interactive, hands-on learning that usually takes place out of school. Take advantage of the Internet's ability to help youth develop knowledge, expertise, skills and important new literacies. Use digital technology to combat the increasing reality of the haves and have-nots in education."
Jon Breitenbucher

Online Education May Make Top Colleges More Elite, Speakers Say - Technology - The Chro... - 0 views

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    "Professors might be surprised by what the data tell them. Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard, drew murmurs from the crowd-which mostly consisted of Harvard and MIT faculty members-when he showed research indicating that students at a lecture have brain activity roughly equivalent to when they watch television." - this doesn't seem to surprising. There are some other interesting ideas mentioned like "Maybe we could have 100 people register for a seminar," Mr. Rabkin said. The students could work through the first 12 weeks independently and online, "and that teacher can finish the seminar five different times in the course of a 15-week semester, spending the last three weeks with each of those groups of 20."
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    I agree with this brain activity finding. Students constantly come to me and say "I understand what you are saying in class but when you ask me questions outside of class I do not know what to do." They are not paying attention. Even when I teach to the test, the results from online questions are equivalent (I need to check this formally). This has forced me to rely more on solving open ended problems in groups and getting students to write their own answers. So my principles class is turning into a first year problem solving seminar!
Jon Breitenbucher

Online Education Is Replacing Physical Colleges At A Crazy Fast Pace | TechCrunch - 0 views

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    More relevant to the Massively Open Online Community courses (MOOCs) being piloted in higher education, a team of researchers from that replacing a physics teacher with lectures from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist nearly doubled test scores [PDF] http://www.um.es/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=c538d7e7-52a4-4f9a-93c7-92ac04c80b06&groupId=115466 
Jon Breitenbucher

CLAY CHRISTENSEN: Higher Education Is 'On The Edge Of The Crevasse' - Business Insider - 0 views

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    "I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don't feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble."
Amyaz Moledina

A book about education stuff, moods, etc - 0 views

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    xEducation is a book that George Siemens, Bonnie Stewart, and Dave Cormier have agreed (and been contracted) to write for Johns Hopkins University Press. We expect the book will be published in mid-2013. Our focus is on sidestepping the rather substantial hype around educational reform, particularly from the technological angle, and present a solid discussion of the scope and nature of higher education (HE) change.
Jon Breitenbucher

People who need people. | More or Less Bunk - 0 views

  • But who’s left to teach all those less-than-ideal students at San Jose State? Living, breathing professors. Any administration that’s seriously thinking about signing a license with a MOOC provider to automate the teaching of those students who need living, breathing professors the most will have to think about Thrun’s pivot before it lets the robots take over. If they have their own self interest at heart (let alone the interests of those students), they won’t do it. I think that is something to celebrate. It’s also worth noting the incredible irony here. MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses. However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer without the guidance that living, breathing professors provide to people negotiating its rocky shores for the first time. People need people. That means that the only way to open higher education to the masses is to hire more people to teach, either in person or online. Accept no austerity-inspired technological substitutes because bringing quality higher education to the world won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but it will be good for the world in the long run.
Jon Breitenbucher

Higher education: Not what it used to be | The Economist - 0 views

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    A pretty scathing look at the value of higher education.
Jon Breitenbucher

We're All to Blame for MOOCs - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    "The widespread abandonment of the title "college" in favor of "university" demonstrates the preference to be perceived as "universal" and research-oriented rather than as a "collegium" drawn to a unique scholastic endeavor rooted in place and history. Higher education is becoming increasingly monocultural as demands for geographic (and market) expansiveness take precedence." - I think this is something Wooster can try to use to its advantage. Maybe we embrace being a collegium.
Amyaz Moledina

The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Education | Most Innovative Companies 2... - 0 views

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    The tide is turing to student assessment.
Amyaz Moledina

The Coursera Effect - 0 views

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    The article discusses the online learning website Coursera, which was founded by Stanford University professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller in an attempt to provide free online courses. The services are offered to and taken by students from around world, and Ng and Koller believe that their method is changing traditional standards for lecturing by forcing students to be interactive and engaged during the lecture. Topics include how Coursera will ultimately earn revenue, the economic benefit of online education for top-level universities, and a list of other free online education programs, including EDX, the Minerva Project, and Udacity
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