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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
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  • 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"
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

Warming Up to MOOC's - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    Kind of what we began to discuss at the Oct. meeting. Use the MOOC to flip the class. Our faculty spend their time with students going deeper into the subject and let the MOOC handle the content.
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

Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Co... - 0 views

  • "From a pedagogical perspective, it was the best I could have done," he says. "It was a good class." Only it wasn't: For all of his efforts, Statistics 101 students were not any more engaged than any of Udacity's other students. "Nothing we had done had changed the drop-off curve," Thrun acknowledges.
  • Among those pupils who took remedial math during the pilot program, just 25% passed. And when the online class was compared with the in-person variety, the numbers were even more discouraging. A student taking college algebra in person was 52% more likely to pass than one taking a Udacity class,
  • "At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment," Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor. "If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?"
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  • Learning, after all, is about more than some concrete set of vocational skills. It is about thinking critically and asking questions, about finding ways to see the world from different points of view rather than one's own. These, I point out, are not skills easily acquired by YouTube video.
  • Thrun seems to enjoy this objection. He tells me he wasn't arguing that Udacity's current courses would replace a traditional education--only that it would augment it. "We're not doing anything as rich and powerful as what a traditional liberal-arts education would offer you," he says. He adds that the university system will most likely evolve to shorter-form courses that focus more on professional development. "The medium will change," he says.
  • "I wish to do away with the idea of spending one big chunk of time learning."
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    Some interesting thoughts on the impact of MOOCs and the relevance of Liberal Arts.
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