"Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education that prefer to spend their reading wisely.  The War Between Universities and Disciplines Excerpt: "This attitude, which seems so normal to academics, provokes absolute bewilderment from the outside world (particularly governments and philanthropists), who believe universities are a single corporate entity.  But they’re not.  As ex-University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins said, universities are a collection of warring professional fiefdoms, connected by a common steam plant.  A more recent formulation, from the excellent New America Foundation analyst Kevin Carey, is that the modern university is just a holding company for a group of departments, which in turn are holding companies for a group of individual faculty research interests.  In other words, Yugoslavia." The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech Excerpt: "If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there’s a good reason: It’s true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female. It wasn’t always this way. Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming — but too often, that’s a part of history that even the smartest people don’t know." Grace Hopper originated electronic computer automatic programming for the Remington Rand Division of Sperry Rand Corp. Size and economies of scale in higher education and the implications for mergers Excerpt: "This paper carries out a meta regression analysis to estimate the optimal size of higher education institutions (HEI) and identify its implications for strategies of mergers in higher education. This study finds an optimal institutional size of 24,954 students. We find potential opportunities for merging different HEIs relative to their mean sample size: public universities by nearly 190 per cent, private universities by 131 per cent, small colleges by around 952 per cent, and non-US HEIs by about 118 per cent. However, if we compare with actual sizes of top ranked universities we find that in some parts of the world top ranked universities seem to be below optimal size, while in others they appear above optimal size. We urge caution in the interpretation of the findings due to the limited data. We recommend further research and that policymakers around the world refer to their own cost structures to determine the optimal size for efficiency." IDEO’S Online Education Beta Excerpt: "IDEO is developing an online school to unlock the creative potential in everyone. Our courses will help you learn to think like a designer and build the confidence to develop bold ideas and new possibilities. Later this year we’ll be launching the beta version." Untapped Potential: Making the Higher Education Market Work for Students and Taxpayers Excerpt: "Decades ago, policymakers built a student financial aid (quality-assurance) system around two pillars: 1) consumer choice and 2) hands-off regulation that relies largely on higher education accreditation. Unfortunately, flawed assumptions about how these mechanisms ought to operate have never been updated, leading to a status quo of increasing costs, subpar outcomes, and lack of innovation." Anyone Can Attend This Coding School That Meets in Coffee Shops Excerpt: "If you want to be a programmer, you pretty much have two choices: Take a class at a school or university, or learn on your own through books and online classes. But Ruben Abergel and Edward Lando wanna give you a third choice. That’s why they founded Hackvard, a web application dedicated to bridging the gap between offline and online education."

Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education that prefer to spend their reading wisely.  The Socialist Origins of Big Data. The Planning Machine: Project Cybersyn and the origins of the Big Data nation. By Evgeny Morozov Excerpt: "In Allende’s Chile, a futuristic op room was to bring socialism into the computer age. In June, 1972, Ángel Parra, Chile’s leading folksinger, wrote a song titled "Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born." Computers are like children, he sang, and Chilean bureaucrats must not abandon them. The song was prompted by a visit to Santiago from a British consultant who, with his ample beard and burly physique, reminded Parra of Santa Claus—a Santa bearing a "hidden gift, cybernetics." Why Colleges Should Stop Splurging on Buildings and Start Investing in Software By Donn Davis Excerpt: "For decades, America’s colleges and universities have been on a massive spending spree, building new dorms, student centers, sports complexes, and academic buildings. Despite all these expenditures, the key metrics are not much better. Graduation rates haven’t increased at the pace of much of Europe and Japan. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the percentage of young Americans who are less educated than their parents exceeds other leading nations. What if the leaders of our colleges and universities had channeled just a fraction of this edifice-complex capital into technology improvements instead?" Closing the Skills Gap: Companies and Colleges Collaborating for Change By Aisha Labi Excerpt: "Closing the skills gap: companies and colleges collaborating for change explores the role of partnerships between US industry and higher education to prepare students and employees for the modern workforce. It considers how their cooperation can address the current "skills gap"—a growing gulf between the skills workers possess today and the skills businesses say they need—and investigates what US companies are willing to do to narrow that gap." Is There a Way to Reduce Costs and Preserve Appropriate Student-Faculty Ratios? By Ry Rivard Excerpt: "It’s hard to raise much excitement over a chart, but a recent one that breaks down how colleges can reduce the number of sections they teach and reduce faculty time while educating the same number of students might be getting there. But not all the excitement is positive. The chart is part of a summary of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded studies by the Education Advisory Board, a business that produces research for colleges. The board looked at seven colleges, mostly regional public universities whose names have not been revealed, and tried to figure out what it costs to teach students. Analysts combed through 250 million rows of data to draw up reports that spelled out the costs of each student credit hour in each section in each department of each college."    

Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education that prefer to spend their reading wisely. Online Ed Skepticism and Self-Sufficiency: Survey of Faculty Views on Technology By Inside Higher E and Gallup Excerpt: "Virtually all faculty members and technology administrators say meaningful student-teacher interaction is a hallmark of a quality online education, and that it is missing from most online courses A majority of faculty members with online teaching experience still say those courses produce results inferior to in-person courses. Faculty members are overwhelmingly opposed to their institutions hiring outside "enablers" to manage any part of online course operation, even for marketing purposes. Humanities instructors are most likely to say they have benefited from the digital humanities — but also that those digital techniques have been oversold." How Bad Are the Colleges? By Christopher Beefy Excerpt: "What I saw at Yale I have continued to see at campuses around the country. Everybody looks extremely normal, and everybody looks the same. No hippies, no punks, no art school types or hipsters, no butch lesbians or gender queers, no black kids in dashikis. The geeks don’t look that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Everyone dresses as if they’re ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice. You’re young, I want to say to them. Take a chance with yourselves. Never mind "diversity." What we’re getting is thirty-two flavors of vanilla…. College used to be understood as a time to experiment with different selves, of whatever type." Universities Rethinking Their Use of Massive Online Courses From The New York Times Excerpt: "In Texas political circles, massive open online courses — commonly known as MOOCs — have enjoyed a resurgence. Officials have praised the typically free college classes, available to anyone with Internet access, as a crucial component in the future of higher education. Last month, Greg Abbott, the Republican candidate for governor, called on colleges to offer credit for such courses. Later, after a meeting of the House Higher Education Committee on the topic, State Representative Dan Branch, a Dallas Republican and the panel’s chairman, said he was "more convinced that high-quality online content will improve and ultimately reduce the cost of education." On the Question of Validity in Learning Analytics by Adam Cooper "I believe the move to large-scale adoption of learning analytics, with the attendant rise in institution-level decisions, should motivate us to spend some time thinking about how concepts such as validity and reliability apply in this practical setting. Motivation comes from: large scale adoption has "upped the stakes", and non-experts are now involved in decision-making. This article is a brief look at some of the issues with where we are now, and some of the potential pit-falls going forwards."

From "The Lifetime Learner: A Journey Through the Future of Post-Secondary Education" The Lifetime Learner A journey through the future of postsecondary education By John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Roy Mathew, Maggie Wooll & Wendy Tsu, Deloitte Inc. Excerpt: "A new business landscape is emerging wherein a multitude of small entities will bring products and services to market using the infrastructure and platforms of large, concentrated players. The forces driving this are putting new and mounting pressures on organizations and individuals while also opening up new opportunities. But traditional postsecondary educational institutions are not supporting individuals in successfully navigating this not-too-distant future, nor are the educational institutions immune to these forces." :: The Future of the Book The digital transformation of the way books are written, published and sold has just begun. By The Economist Excerpt: "Many are worried about what such technology means for books, with big bookshops closing, new devices spreading, novice authors flooding the market and an online behemoth known as Amazon growing ever more powerful. Their anxieties cannot simply be written off as predictable technophobia. The digital transition may well change the way books are written, sold and read more than any development in their history, and that will not be to everyone’s advantage. Veterans and revolutionaries alike may go bust; Gutenberg died almost penniless, having lost control of his press to Fust and other creditors.""But to see technology purely as a threat to books risks missing a key point. Books are not just "tree flakes encased in dead cow", as a scholar once wryly put it. They are a technology in their own right, one developed and used for the refinement and advancement of thought. And this technology is a powerful, long-lived and adaptable one." :: Can Design Save Newspapers By TED Talks (video) Excerpt: "Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save the newspaper? It just might." :: How Southern New Hampshire U Develops 650-Plus Online Courses Per Year Course development at the country’s fastest growing nonprofit online educator is a major endeavor. Here’s how SNHU manages the process. By David Raths, Campus Technology magazine Excerpt: "In the past two years, Southern New Hampshire University has increased its online course offerings by 67 percent and more than tripled its enrollment, making it the fastest growing not-for-profit online educator in the country. Just how has SNHU managed to create so many new programs and courses and hire enough instructors to deliver them?" :: Putin’s Friend Profits in Purge of Schoolbooks By Jo Becker and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times "I have never seen such a level of cynicism and chaos before," said Vladimir A. Peterson, who manages the publication of the math textbooks developed by his mother."The purge was the latest in a string of government maneuvers that have positioned Enlightenment, once the sole provider of school textbooks under Soviet rule, to dominate the textbook marketplace once again. Mr. Putin first directed that the state-owned company be sold into private hands, records show, in a deal that circumvented a requirement intended to ensure the highest prices for state assets. Then, having installed Mr. Rotenberg as chairman, Mr. Putin’s government knocked out much of Enlightenment’s competition."

  Part 2 of this document can be found here.  :: A chasm is beginning to appear between institutions of higher education that offer online programs. The divide is the result of the different strategies taken for designing, sourcing and managing online education programs. A small number of institutions in the U.S. have adopted methods for producing and supporting online courses that have the potential, if not the likelihood, to improve learning outcomes, increase the speed with the institution improves the quality of teaching and learning, increase value (quality/cost). If present trends continue, these institutions could reconfigure the deeply embedded hierarchy that organizes higher education. A couple of scenarios An acquaintance of mine, currently an Assistant Professor at a mid-size university, was asked in mid-July by her institution to create and deliver a new online course for the Fall (September) semester. In the time available, she had to define the new curriculum, determine the instructional tactics to be used, collect existing resources, and create new materials, including assessments. Throughout the process, she worked alone. Although an instructional designer was on-hand, the staff member had little time and offered not much more than a checklist of best practices. The Instructor’s budget for the course development? Nil. Her experience contrasts sharply with practices at a handful US universities. These institutions typically focus, sometimes exclusively, on online education, offer open-admissions, and have centralized management of teaching and learning. Consider this depiction; a composite of a few institutions I’ve had a chance to investigate: An academic department - after conducting a thorough, regularly scheduled review of learning outcomes - determines that a full rework of a key program is required. Starting what will be a twelve-month process, the department conducts a deeper analysis of the current program, consulting with student support staff, faculty, academic leadership, and industry advisors - to define the overarching set of objectives and instructional strategies for the revamped program. A team is assigned to the project, including specialists in learning analytics, subject matter experts, managers of assessment systems, faculty, teaching assistants, student support staff, and technology managers. The institution’s team identifies a number of things they want to offer their students that can be done more efficiently by forming partnerships other universities, consortia, and vendors, so as to complement internal strengths. The course development process ultimately involves more than a dozen people, three external organizations, and costs more than 100k per course, when including internal labour costs. Following the first year of the new programs’ delivery, a review is conducted to identify where refinements are needed. Not an inconsequential impact There are a number of issues of note: All things being equal, this handful of institutions will offer students higher quality education. By bringing the right mix of talent, resources, funds, and processes together, the institution has a much better chance of providing students with a well-conceived, thoughtfully-executed, and well-resourced learning experience. The institutions have considerably greater ability to scale-up learning to meet demand. They can build new courses and programs more quickly, and with greater assurance that each will meet institutional standards for quality. These institutions pay considerably more attention to the results of their instructional strategies. Internal reviews are common, and many are now turning to analytics to generate even more detailed and extensive insights into what’s working and what isn’t. This knowledge provides the basis for better decision-making, which in-turn can provide progressively better learning experiences for students. This last quality needs to be underlined. Knowledge about how to design and support learning in higher education held by individual faculty - whether online or not - is rarely systematically shared with the institution. Teaching is approached as individual pursuit. Indeed, faculty members can work in the same department as other academics for several years without ever seeing each other teach. Each Instructor operates individually. Strictly speaking, this isn’t by design: it’s a by-product of the traditional organizational structure of the institution and conventions of the academic occupation. But the effect of this characteristic is that it limits the flow of knowledge across the institution about effective teaching.  It fits nicely the centuries-old conventions of the occupation, it may ultimately limit the breadth and depth of the knowledge that is brought to bear on each course within the institution. These upstart universities see knowledge about teaching and learning as the domain of the institution. The institution, not the individual educator, captures, interprets and applies knowledge about how best to serve students.  Knowledge is applied on an institutional level, not on a course-by-course, instructor-by-instructor level. Of course, the downside of this approach is the potential to suppress the kinds of innovations that can arise from radical decentralization - letting a "hundred flowers bloom", if you will. But supporters of this more centralized approach contend that the benefits of a collective, institutional approach to knowledge building and sharing may be greater at this point in the evolution of online education. Higher quality learning, they argue, requires a more deliberate and disciplined approach. At times, I can appreciate this perspective: conference presentations about "how to teach online" offered in 2014 have striking resemblance to those we heard in 2001. We don’t seem to be making significant headway by placing the burden of course design and delivery primarily on the backs of under-resourced individual Instructors. Part 2 of this document can be found here.   :: Keith Hampson, PhD is Managing Director, Client Innovation at Acrobatiq LLC.

  Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education that prefer to spend their reading wisely. :: LACE. Learning Analytics Community Exchange Excerpt: "The Learning Analytics Community Exchange is an EU funded project in the 7th Framework Programme involving nine partners from across Europe. LACE partners are passionate about the opportunities afforded by current and future views of learning analytics (LA) and educational data mining (EDM) but we are concerned about missed opportunities and failing to realise value." "The 30 month project aims to integrate communities working on LA and EDM from schools, workplace and universities by sharing effective solutions to real problems." Objective 1 - Promote knowledge creation and exchange Objective 2 - Increase the evidence base Objective 3 - Contribute to the definition of future directions Objective 4 - Build consensus on interoperability and data sharing :: Adaptive Learning Technology: What It Is, Why It Matters by Eduventures Excerpt: "A 2008 study published by the Journal of Interactive Media in Higher education found no significant difference in exam scores for students enrolled in Open Learning Initiative’s introductory statistics course (which contains adaptive learning) compared to the traditional course. Furthermore, the study also found that the OLI students took 50% less time to learn all of the content and perform the same or better relative to the traditional students." :: On Their Watch By Ry Rivard Excerpt: "Inattentive college and university governing boards are putting American higher education at risk, according to a new set of guidelines for trustees issued today by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges." :: Learning Analytics in Higher Education: An Annotated Bibliography by Delta at NCSU (Annotated bibliography developed by Lauren A.S. Hirsh) Excerpt: "Just as big data has become big business in industries from marketing to medicine, so too has it found a place in higher education. Companies use the "data exhaust" we leave in our wake as we traverse the World Wide Web to generate advice and ads, recommend music and movies, and connect us to friends and colleagues on social networks." "This annotated bibliography, written by Lauren Hirsh, a graduate student working with DELTA, provides some resources for consideration and further exploration of learning analytics in higher education. It is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the literature; however a list of additional recommended articles and resources has been included at the end of this document."

This post is Part 2. Part 1 can be found here.  The Growing Chasm in the Online Higher Education Market (2 of 2) One of the key characteristics that distinguishes faster growing, more scalable, and increasingly high-quality online universities (described in "The Growing Chasm") is the systematic use of knowledge about what works in online instruction and what doesn’t. This handful of US institutions tend to capture more data about student learning, learn from it, and act on it. As simple as this process sounds, it’s difficult to implement in our traditional colleges and universities, where course design and development is typically a very decentralized activity. Instruction is determined on a course-by-course basis and there’s rarely a systematic, robust process in place for identifying and sharing knowledge about what drives student-learning outcomes most effectively. As a new faculty member, I remember being surprised to learn that my colleagues on the faculty had little to no knowledge of how their other colleagues in the department ran their courses, for example. This need not be the case, though. The required technology now exists and if used creatively in conjunction with basic change management practices, it is possible to increase the volume and quality of information sharing, even within the most decentralized institutions. Initiatives to drive instructional innovation are most likely to be led by central support units responsible supporting online courses and programs. It’s in these departments that the pressure to ensure quality and bring about change is felt greatest. Figure A: Learning Dashboard ™ The core elements include: Get buy-in Define the current state of affairs Make new approaches clear and easy to adopt Distribute tools to measure student learning A Few Details . . . Pitch it. Put together a clear and compelling description of your plan. Use it to get feedback and solicit buy-in. (It won’t hurt if you get buy-in from people with influence, but passion goes a long way, too.) Catalogue it. Take an inventory of the instructional practices currently being used. (Maintain full confidentiality of Instructors). Share this inventory, once organized for simple review, with all stakeholders. There will be some surprises. And many educators will benefit from this tactic, alone - given the current dearth of information. "What are others doing?" Package it. Ask a team consisting of representatives to select 8-10 interesting instructional strategies that they believe would be of value to others within the institution. Showcase these examples, using events, a dedicated website, external conferences, and other means available. Be an insufferable promoter. Reconfigure these 8-10 instructional strategies so that they can be easily understood and copied. Vagueness, here, is your enemy. Be clear, simple and above all, concrete. As Dan and Chip Heath suggest: If you want people to eat more healthy mix of foods, don’t tell them to "eat low fat foods", tell them to "buy skim milk." Assess it. Implement learning analytics that each instructor can use to measure student learning. If the goal is to have students learn more and more quickly, then the analytics must actually measure student learning, not merely track their behaviour; I call this "engagement analytics". The type information collected in engagement analytics often includes: Number of page views (per page) Contributions by students to discussion threads Which students (and what percentage of the total cohort) have completed the assignments Number of logins Engagement analytics do not necessarily measure learning, per se. What’s measured is student activity, which may or may not signal actual learning. For example, engagement analytics is often used to track student page views. The student’s presence on that particular page within the course site tells us that the student has been exposed to that part of the curriculum. But it doesn’t tell us whether the student understands the curriculum. In fact, it may be that the student inadvertently left the browser window open while searching the Internet. Learning analytics, on the other hand, measure the student’s actual learning state; what students know, what they don’t know, and why. It’s this kind of information that’s needed if individual educators are going to imagine new and better ways to stimulate learning. See figure A. Information that can be captured by learning analytics include: What aspects of the course did the student master? Which students are struggling, and with which concepts, topics and problems? What misconceptions about the curriculum are leading to poor performance? What topics require more attention or better presentation? Let us know which of these tactics you’ve tried and which has served you well.  

Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education that prefer to spend their reading wisely. :: Colleges’ Prestige Doesn’t Guarantee a Top-Flight Learning Experience By Dan Berrett Excerpt: "Fayetteville State University rarely crops up in the national conversation about educational quality. Described as a second-tier regional university by U.S. News & World Report, the institution accepts nearly two-thirds of its applicants and struggles to graduate most of them in six years. But the historically black college is also doing something right in the classroom, according to this year’s National Survey of Student Engagement, which was released today. Researchers for Nessie, as the survey is known, took a stab at identifying educational quality on the institutional level, an attribute that is as important to higher education as it is hard to define. The survey collected data from 355,000 freshmen and seniors from 622 institutions in the spring." :: Source: Edutechnica LMS Market Share 2014 From Edutechnica Excerpt: "In 2014, ANGEL usage shrinks in all countries, and Moodle usage grows in all countries. Blackboard Learn has shrunk the most in the UK. Canvas has not taken off overseas in the same way that it has in the US. Usage of Other LMSs has grown in the US and in Australia but has shrunk in Canada and the UK." :: Generation Z and the future of higher education by Northeastern News Excerpt: "The survey results indicated that Generation Z is highly self-directed, demonstrated by a strong desire to work for themselves, study entrepreneurship, and design their own programs of study in college. "What [Generation Z] is telling us is that they want to shape their own journey," Aoun said at a higher education summit in Washington, D.C., held in conjunction with the release of the survey findings. "We need to move from a teacher-centered curriculum to a learner-centered curriculum." See also Debt-Averse Teens from Inside Higher Ed. :: How Universities Can Renew America’s Cities From Brookings Institution Excerpt: "Over the past decade, businesses and research institutions that produce new discoveries and bring new products to market have, increasingly, moved into urban areas. This new geography of innovation, as I and my colleagues at the Brookings Institution call it, is coinciding with and benefitting from young workers shifting their residential preferences and revaluing city life." :: Lawsuits Against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill Urge an End to Race-Conscious Admissions From The Chronicle of Higher Education Excerpt: "Harvard and other academic institutions cannot and should not be trusted with the awesome and historically dangerous tool of racial classification," the lawsuit argues. "As in the past, they will use any leeway the Supreme Court grants them to use racial preferences in college admissions—under whatever rubric—to engage in racial stereotyping, discrimination against disfavored minorities, and quota setting to advance their social-engineering agenda."

Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education that prefer to spend their reading wisely. :: College Enrollment Peaked in 2011 By Wall Street Journal Excerpt: "Total college enrollment decreased by nearly a half-million students in 2013 from a year earlier, according to Census Bureau data released today, making this the second year with such a drop. Total enrollment, which includes undergraduate and graduate students, peaked in 2011, following a sharp increase during the recession. The decline hit public, private, full-time and part-time institutions and was divided equally among younger and older students. Much of the decline happened at two-year colleges. Enrollment at four-year colleges ticked up slightly." Source: Wall Street Journal (Select for more information)    :: Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Universities and Biotechnology By Arlen D Meyers and Sarika Pruthi Excerpt: "There are various definitions of an entrepreneurial university, yet there is a lack of agreement about its core components. This article defines the five key characteristics of an entrepreneurial university based on examples of successful bio-clusters in the United States and Europe, and suggests an agenda for stakeholders." :: Your Elite School Is Not Worth The Cost, Studies Say From Forbes Except: "The cost for a college education has risen to the astronomical, resulting in debt that haunts young people after graduation like a ghost bent on dragging them to a Dickensian poorhouse. It’s forcing us to ask, "Is it worth it?" Especially if the school of choice is an elite institution, is the gamble a card well played, or a sucker bet?" :: Choosing Between Competing Visions for Education Reform By Anthony DiMaggio Excerpt: "Considering how high the stakes are in the financing of higher ed, one must take care to evaluate competing "solutions" for how to address the crisis we face. Competing visions for higher education are being articulated, some far more thoughtful, humane, and progressive than others."  

  Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education that prefer to spend their reading wisely. Blowing Off Class? We Know By Goldie Blumenstyk An update on the evolving use of analytics to support higher education from its best journalists, Goldie Blumenstyk. Excerpt: "Tools developed in-house and by a slew of companies now give administrators digital dashboards that can code students red or green to highlight who may be in academic trouble. Handsome "heat maps" — some powered by apps that update four times a day — can alert professors to students who may be cramming rather than keeping up. As part of a broader effort to measure the "campus engagement" of its students, Ball State University in Indiana goes so far as to monitor whether students are swiping in with their ID cards to campus-sponsored parties at the student center on Saturday nights." :: Barriers to Innovation and Change in Higher Education By Lloyd Armstrong, Provost Emeritus, USC From one of the very best analysts of higher education, Lloyd Armstrong. Excerpt: "Wide-ranging research on institutional obstacles to innovation and change explains some of the reasons why higher education has moved slowly to meet new challenges. A business model perspective helps to identify key aspects of higher education that heighten some of the universal obstacles to innovation and change. These include American higher education’s worldwide reputation for excellence, which serves to reinforce the status quo—particularly among tenure line faculty who play a dual role by both producing the educational product and participating in institutional governance, thereby exerting unusual control over change. The business model lens also helps to identify ways in which these obstacles may eventually be lowered." See, also, this blog post by the same author. :: Mapping Australian Higher Education: 2014-2015 By Andrew Norton A very technical and highly quantitative analysis of higher ed in Australia. But if I want to truly want to understand the space, this is a good place to start (and with the recent proposal to significantly increase tuition, a good time to take a closer look.) :: Innovating Pedagogy 2014: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators nd policy makers By Martin Sharples, Anne Adams, Rebecca Ferguson, Mark Gaved, Patrick McAndrew, Bart Rienties, Marin Weller and Denise Whitelock. Excerpt: "This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This third report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education." :: Pointers to the Future By Schumpeter (The Economist) A provocative, smart (and short) article about how change unfolds in surprising ways. Excerpt: "Anyone looking for mis-prognostications about it will find an embarrassment of riches. The internet was supposed to destroy big companies; now big companies rule the internet. It was supposed to give everyone a cloak of anonymity: "On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog." Now Google and its like are surveillance machines that know not only that you’re a dog but whether you have fleas and which brand of meaty chunks you prefer. We can now add two more entries to the list of unreliable forecasts about the internet: that it would make location irrelevant and eliminate middlemen."