"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. :: Twenty-Five Institutions to Participate in ACE Alternative Credit Project ACE Excerpt:"ACE announced today that 25 colleges and universities are joining an alternative credit consortium as part of an innovative initiative to create a more flexible pathway toward a college degree for millions of nontraditional learners. The 25 institutions serving in this pilot project have agreed to accept all or most of the transfer credit sought by students who successfully complete courses that are part of a selected pool of about 100 low-cost or no-cost lower division general education online courses. These institutions also will help identify the sources, criteria and quality of the courses." :: Got Skills? Why Online Competency-Based Education Is the Disruptive Innovation for Higher Education Excerpt: "In the end, rather than a transcript that lists courses and letter grades, a portfolio of competencies enumerates precisely what a student can do: this student can evaluate web resources; this student can sift through various sources of information and create an ethical argument; this student can use data as evidence in a research-based argument; and so on." :: Valuing Elite Higher Education Claremont Port Side Excerpt: "In his July 2014 New Republic article entitled "Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League," writer William Deresiewicz comments that students today are "anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose." In the article, a reflection on points from his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life, Deresiewicz argues that the formulaic methodologies and value systems of elite colleges establish "success" such that it debases the true importance of a college education. This trains young people to pursue specific definitions success and excellence like sheep. "So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success," he writes. "The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them…The result is a violent aversion to risk." :: Technology Enhanced Education at Public Flagship Universities: Opportunities and Challenges Deanna Marcum, Christine Mulhern and Clara Samayoa (Ithaka S+R) Excerpt: "Administrators are hoping that technology-enhanced education might improve time-to-degree and completion rates, provide relief for space constraints, improve student learning, and fulfill their institution’s outreach mission. However, the universities we visited have not yet fundamentally re-engineered the production function for teaching and learning in order to achieve those aims, and many faculty remain unconvinced about the potential for technology-enhanced education to do so. "

As the end of the year nears, we’re  taking a look back!  Below I’ve recapped some of this year’s best blog posts about the evolving field of eLearning, data-driven courseware design, and learning analytics.  This has been an important first full year for our team, and we’re excited about the  milestones we’ve reached, and the one’s yet to come.  So here’s a recap of some of the best  posts from our resident thought leader, Dr. Keith Hampson posted to the Acrobatiq blog in 2014. 1.  Design is Crucial in Online Education When we shift the focus of higher education from the physical classroom to the digital environment, design becomes a much greater factor in creating successful student experiences.  Some of the factors influencing online courseware design include the increasing popularity of apps, the availability of design and learner data, and the competitive advantage of unique course design. 2.  New Learning Alternatives Flood the Industry More and more non-traditional learning options are being developed for non-traditional learners in continuing education programs.  As a result, it’s easier than ever to access online education, which is evolving quickly due to its rapid growth. 3.  Business Model Innovation in Higher Education The growing interest in business model innovation during the last five years is in response to challenging conditions facing a number of sectors, including higher education.  Read Dr. Keith Hampson’s excellent 2-part overview of how business model innovation is impacting higher education. 4.  Coherent vs. Incoherent Online Course Design is Explained  Effective online courses need to be well-organized and well-planned. As best practices emerge, experts argue that course materials should not be haphazardly combined from multiple sources. The best courses are consistent throughout to provide a coherent learning experience. 5.  The Lecture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction In a world where more and more of our experiences are web-based and disconnected from location and time, the idea that we would find it logical to get students to get together in a single location at a specific time to hear a presentation seems increasingly odd.  Read more about why we hang on to the lecture model. 6.  Universities Take Different Paths in Online Learning Each university’s approach to online learning is different, creating a gap in the availability and quality of online courses offered to college students. Differences emerge at the level of course design as larger schools or bigger supporters dedicate more resources to course creation and implementation, leaving other institutions lagging behind. 7.  The Gates Foundations chooses Acrobatiq as a Finalist in Courseware Challenge  While the inclusion of this post is a bit self-promoting, it underscores how much progress we’ve made this year in our quest to enable institutions to personalize learning for students at scale.  On September 30th, Acrobatiq was recognized as a winner in the Next Generation Courseware Challenge. Backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Challenge aims to spur educational technology innovation by awarding  $20M to a diverse portfolio of digital courseware and adaptive learning providers to design, develop, and scale best-in-class  courseware in a variety of general education disciplines. The "Big Goal" of the Challenge is for faculty and institutions to use the courseware to improve the learning outcomes  for  more than a million low-income students by 2018.  As a Gates Grant recipient, Acrobatiq will receive funding to expand our work in data-driven adaptive courseware grounded in learning science.  By the summer of 2015, seven new and enhanced courseware products will be released in beta, including a completely new courseware solution for Precalculus. To learn more about how personalized, adaptive learning is evolving, browse more posts on the Acrobatiq Blog.   To subscribe, sign up for our newsletter.

In one way or another all of us in higher education are working to make a dent in the iron triangle’s three points - access, cost, and quality. The challenge we face, nicely captured in Immerwahr et al, is to improve one of these three important objectives without diminishing one or both of the others. Can we, for example, increase access without reducing quality? Can we improve quality without increasing costs? Few initiatives take such direct aim at the iron triangle as the Next Generation Courseware Challenge. Another in a long line of education-related initiatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the project invited more than a hundred institutions and organizations to imagine new and better ways to build 100- and 200-level courses that improve learning outcomes, reduce costs for low-income students, and do it all at scale. This is familiar terrain for Acrobatiq. We were created to expressly expand upon the early successes of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. For more than a decade, the OLI project demonstrated that the right instructional methodology, informed by intelligent learning analytics, could help students learn far faster than students in conventional, classroom courses.   Partnership for Improved Learning Outcomes Our proposal to the Gates Foundation was nothing if not ambitious. It brings together a range of institutions, technologies, support services, and instructional strategies. It starts with the right partners: We know that substantially improving learning outcomes for low-income is no small feat; it requires putting together a range of services into a coherent, financially sustainable system. We sought out partners with a complementary mix of talent, history and ambition with whom we could launch a long-over due assault on the iron triangle. Our project partners represent a broad spectrum of higher education solutions: leaders in alternative pathways to credit (Straighterline), emergent instructional, such as competency-based learning  (Western Governors University, National Louis University), systemic innovation in two and four year institutions (Arizona State University, University System of Georgia, and Rio Salado College), innovative assessment models (CAE), and emerging accreditation (ACE). We will work with our partners to accelerate the development a number of critically important professional services and courseware products, including: Both enhance existing general education courseware, through the integration of dynamic media and scenario-based summative assessments, and develop new courseware for pilot implementation among our partner institutions; An enhanced Learning Dashboard (TM) that provides faculty with the ability customize the kinds of information about student learning they need to use their time effectively, and to imagine new and better ways to improve the quality of learning in their individual courses; A new student-facing Learning Dashboard (TM) with which they’ll be able to review their own learning progress, stimulate metacognition, make better use of their time, and develop an understanding of what instructional techniques and study habits work best for them; Accelerate the development of a new authoring platform that allows individual educators to create their own courses based on our research-backed instructional methodology; Extend significant introductory pricing models to both existing project partners, and new institutional partners interested in piloting courseware.  Our objective, using these tactics and others is, like the Gates Foundation, to see significant improvement in outcomes for low-income students. Working with our partners, we’ll share notes about our progress. Feel free to reach out to us if you’d like to learn more. References The Iron Triangle: College Presidents Talk about Costs, Access, and Quality. John Immerwahr, Jean Johnson, Paul Gasbarra. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and Public Agenda, 2008.  The Next Generation Courseware Challenge, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"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 Class Sizes ‘May Not Matter’ By Scott Jaschik We need more discussion about the impact of class size in online learning; we’re still working with frameworks that are no longer appropriate.  Excerpt: "Conventional wisdom (backed by many research studies) holds that students benefit from smaller classes. They receive more personal attention from instructors, who can spend more time evaluating each assignment turned in and can spend more time with each student. Many rankings systems reward colleges for small class sizes. Many potential undergraduates judge colleges on the availability of small classes. But a large national study presented this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association challenges that conventional wisdom. The study finds that increases in online class size have no impact on student grades, student persistence in the course or the likelihood of students enrolling in future courses." :: The Gates Courseware Challenge By Keith Hampson An introduction a major project we are launching with our partners, drawing on support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; a great opportunity to demonstrate the power of learning analytics and personalized learning in a variety of institutional contexts.  Excerpt: "Few initiatives take such direct aim at the iron triangle as the Next Generation Courseware Challenge. Another in a long line of education-related initiatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the project invited more than a hundred institutions and organizations to imagine new and better ways to build 100- and 200-level courses that improve learning outcomes, reduce costs for low-income students, and do it all at scale." :: A Longitudinal Study of Online Learners: Shoppers, Swirlers, Stoppers, and Succeeders as a Function of Demographic Characteristics By Melissa Layne, Wallace E. Boston and Phil Ice A useful discussion about the diversity of student life cycles. Learning data can dramatically improve our ability to track and predict student needs.  Excerpt: "During the past decade, the convenience of online learning has afforded postsecondary students of all ages the opportunity to attend and complete online programs—especially to those students who have full and/or part-time employment, dependents, and those maintaining busy schedules. The benefits of taking online courses include flexibility, convenience, and cost-effective educational opportunities anywhere and anytime. Despite these well-known affordances, postsecondary institutions offering online courses are also fully aware of the challenges concomitant with this learning environment—most notably, student retention. Numerous studies have approached the retention, progression, and completion issue from a variety of angles attempting to predict, classify, identify, and increase opportunities for students to reach their personal academic goals. Rather than repositioning and assuming a new angle, the authors of this study chose to fuse these well established-yet isolated angles. Therefore, the purpose of this study was (1) to identify significant student demographic predictors among students who dis-enroll ("stoppers"), reenroll ("swirlers" and/or "shoppers"), and/or complete their online program of study ("succeeders"), and (2) to calculate the variance among the significant predictors." :: Teaching the Many, Rather than the Few By Robert M. Fano Some misconceptions are remarkably sticky, as illustrated by this excerpt from a paper written in 1970.  Four decades before the MOOC, a 1970 essay anticipates the potential boon of an education by computer. Excerpted: "Computer-aided instruction is often misleadingly described as ‘replacing teachers with computers.’ This interpretation implies mechanizing, rather than personalizing, education. Instead, we should strive for an interaction between teacher and student through the medium of a computer system. The goal is to make it possible for a teacher to provide individual guidance to many students instead of a few. From "Computers in Human Society: For Good or Ill?" by MIT professor Robert M. Fano, from the March 1970 Technology Review.  

"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.  :: 5th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Conference We’ll’ be speaking and participating in this event in late March. Out topic: "Using Data to Enact Early Intervention Strategies and Deepen Instruction in Intro Psychology Courses" For more information, visit LAK15. :: Barriers to Innovation and Change in Higher Education By Dr. Lloyd Armstrong, USC Excerpt: Key Take-Aways Individuals generally are wary of changes that challenge old assumptions and require new skills to succeed. Organizations are collections of individuals, and thus relect individual concerns. People in very successful organizations often internalize key aspects of their business model as deining quality in their field; changes in these key aspects consequently imply lower quality. U.S. higher education has epitomized quality for more than a half century, leading to an exceptionally high level of internalization of business-model driven definitions of quality. Special characteristics of higher education that heighten the normal obstacles to change are the unusual dual roles of tenure line faculty as both managers and producers of the core educational product; the credence-good nature of higher education; and the multiple overlapping missions of learning, research, and social growth of students. The member-organization accreditation system naturally exhibits and supports the same obstacles to innovation and change as do its member organizations. :: American Higher Education in Crisis Review by Richard Azzizi Excerpt: "And while Blumenstyk comes down clearly on one side ("Yes," she writes, "Higher education is most assuredly in crisis"), she follows with an assurance that "It certainly does not … spell doom for the thousands of colleges that make up American higher education. But what is abundantly clear from her impressive and exhaustive marshaling of recent and relevant data is that higher education in America is at a crossroads." :: Opposing Views of the New "Free" Community College No. 1 The Genius of Obama’s Two-Year College Proposal By Richard Kahlenbergjan Excerpt: "Most commentators have focused on scrutinizing the plan’s strategy, questioning its feasibility and its failure to address the root problems plaguing higher education. But they’re overlooking the truly revolutionary possibility that it would make two-year institutions more economically and racially integrated—something that should be applauded." No. 2 There is No (Tuition-) Free Lunch By Arthur Hauptman Excerpt: "President Obama has jumped on the bandwagon, which started in Tennessee, of making community college tuition-free. This latest proposal is his most recent effort to increase the prominence of the federal government in higher education. While giving higher education more federal  visibility may be a good thing, making community colleges tuition-free is also the latest in a series of proposals in which the administration seems to have decided that sound bites trump sound policy." :: Average is Over: It’s Graduate Degree Holders Versus the Rest of Us By James Pethokoukis Excerpt: "Valletta points out that, beginning in 2000, the US labor market has increasingly favored workers with a graduate degree, while the "wage advantage" for four-year college grads has hardly changed (see featured chart). This divergence between those with college and graduate degrees "may be one manifestation of rising labor market polarization, which benefits those earning the highest and the lowest wages relatively more than those in the middle of the wage distribution."  

Founded in 2009, University of the People ("UoPeople") holds the distinction of being the first tuition-free, non-profit online university. To date, UoPeople has admitted more than 2000 students from over 150 countries, including the Sudan, Indonesia, and Haiti. Students enrol in either Business or Computer Science, for Associates or Bachelor’s programs. Most of the academic labour is supplied by volunteers, for which there is apparently no shortage. Open content is used and delivered using open source technology. Students rely heavily on peer-to-peer learning. In higher ed circles, discussions about of UoPeople typically frame the initiative in philanthropic terms: it’s grand and generous, but quite removed from higher education proper. Certainly, generosity came to mind when I spoke with Shai Reshef (pictured above); the Founder and sponsor is modest and plain-spoken, and clearly has a sincere desire to help students. But UoPeople can also be understood as a highly resourceful example of business model innovation. It has hallmarks of textbook disruptive innovation: it combines technology with a new business model to offer a stripped-down, feature-poor version of an existing service (higher education); it seeks to serve "non-consumers", rather than offer an alternative that attract students that have other, convenient and affordable options for getting a college education. It’s true that the UoPeople relies on volunteers, many of whom are only able to share their expertise freely because they have jobs with universities. (The Provost is from Columbia, a Dean from NYU.) But Reshef confirms that the operation is sustainable in its current form and, in time, the anticipated surplus of funds could be used to hire a certain percentage of staff at market rates. It’s also important to remember how relatively large the "free economy" is in the education sector. (For more on the "free economy" concept, see Chris Anderson’s original riff here). More than a philanthropic effort, the UoPeople may also be understood as an example of the different forms that higher education can take to meet the needs of increasingly global higher education system - particularly in the developing world. Learn more about the University of the People.

 "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. ::   New Gates report evaluates digital courseware’s impact on student learning By eCampus News After reviewing the major Postsecondary Success projects, several features were identified as having positive effects on student learning: Instructional designs or redesigns for entire courses produced significantly greater learning effects compared to less intensive approaches such as designs for supplemental resources. Learning effects from digital courseware implementation were greater in community colleges than in four-year colleges. Courses in mathematics produced more positive learning effects than courses in other subject areas such as science or the humanities. Course implementations using individualized pacing had more positive impacts than those with class-based or a mixed form of pacing. Online courses in which students’ dominant role was solving problems or answering questions had more positive effects than those where most of the students’ time was spent reading text or listening to lecture videos. Adaptive learning technologies demonstrated larger learning effects than non-adaptive technologies. Full report available here. :: Sharp drop in part-time student enrolment since fee rises By Brendan O’Malley Excerpt: "Part-time student enrolments in higher education fell by 22% in the two years since university tuition fees were allowed to triple, according to new figures released last Thursday by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, or HESA. Between 2012-13 and 2013-14, the number of part-time students fell by 2% overall. According to HESA the decline in total student numbers of nearly 41,000 was mainly because of a fall in undergraduate enrolments, down by 2%, and part-time student numbers, which fell sharply by 8%." :: Atlantic Article on Minerva Project Overstates University’s Future By Judith Shulevitz Few magazine editors—myself included—can resist a dash of apocalypse in a cover line, which is why I don’t fault writer Graeme Wood for the question on the front of this month’s Atlantic: "Is College Doomed?" I’ll answer that question anyway: no. The appetite for college is huge. A larger percentage of Americans are pursuing some sort of post-high-school degree than ever before—70 percent in 2009, compared to 45 percent in 1960—and that number keeps rising. Undergraduate education isn’t going away any time soon. :: University of the People: A Case of Disruptive Innovation? By Keith Hampson Excerpt: "In higher ed circles, discussions about of UoPeople typically frame the initiative in philanthropic terms: it’s grand and generous, but quite removed from higher education proper. Certainly, generosity came to mind when I spoke with Shai Reshef (pictured above); the Founder and sponsor is modest and plain-spoken, and clearly has a sincere desire to help students. But UoPeople can also be understood as a highly resourceful example of business model innovation. It has hallmarks of textbook disruptive innovation."  ::   Can online learning bend the higher education cost curve? By David J. Deming, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Noam Yuchtman, University of California, Berkeley Excerpt: "We find some evidence that colleges are charging lower prices for online coursework, suggesting that advances in online learning technology might be able to "bend the cost curve" in higher education." :: The 5 Real Reasons Textbooks are So Expensive By Elizabeth Weir Excerpt: "Let’s say that again- TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS. Let that number sink in. That is the average cost of an intro-level college textbook, with some in the sciences reaching or exceeding $300. To give it context think about this: The average family of four is spending $151 a week on groceries. Most who are paying attention to this problem know the stats: 82% increase in textbook costs between 1982 and 2012 , students are spending an average of $1200 a year on textbooks and materials, up to 65% of students are just opting out of buying materials entirely even when they know it could cause them to fail. Have you ever wondered why the books, and now digital materials, are so expensive? It all starts with the inherently broken market." :: The Student Loan Debt Crisis in 9 Charts By Maggie Severns Excerpt: "Got student loans? You are far from alone: More than 38 million Americans have outstanding student loan debt totaling nearly $1 trillion, and those numbers are rising fast. This month, Congress will consider proposals to keep the interest rates on direct federal student loans down. (If it doesn’t act by July 1, the rate for one kind of loan will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.) Regardless of what lawmakers do, many students and graduates will still have to take on large amounts of debt to pay for college."

Although testing is the standard way to measure student performance, tests are stressful for students to take and time-consuming for instructors to grade. So what if someone told you there’s an easier way to learn everything about a student’s progress—without any tests? There is, in fact, a faster and more detailed way to measure student performance through the Learning Dashboard. The dashboard is part of Acrobatiq’s adaptive courseware, an interactive learning platform that can supplement or replace traditional course materials like print textbooks. To see why the Learning Dashboard is so efficient, take a look at how it compares to traditional quizzing below. Traditional Quizzing Courseware with The Learning Dashboard™ Learning performance data is collected by giving and grading quizzes. Learning performance data is collected automatically. Student performance can be measured once the quiz is complete. Student performance is measured in real time. Quizzing reveals what students did or did not learn after studying a subject. The Learning Dashboard measures what students know and can do while while studying a topic. Summary graphs, tables and reports can be manually generated from learning performance data. Summary graphs, tables and reports are automatically generated from learning performance data. Quizzing measures what students know in a moment of time. The Learning Dashboard reveals what students did or did not learn, quantifies how well students have learned each skill, identifies consequential patterns in students’ learning behaviors, and measures effectiveness of instructional and design choices. Quizzes identify what students have learned, which students are struggling, and what the most challenging assignments were. The Learning Dashboard identifies what students have learned, which students are struggling, what the most challenging assignments were, which activities students have practiced the most, and who is participating the most. Learn more about the Learning Dashboard.

"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. Getting Credit for What You Know Excerpt: "IT (Information Technology) was among the industries that pioneered the new approach to credentialing. Some 20 years ago, employers in the tech sector came together and devised a process to identify the skill sets needed for the most common jobs in the field. It’s a complex, laborious process, and it has to be repeated every few years as new technology ripples through the industry. But the end result is invaluable: a set of industry standards for what a well-trained worker needs to know." 3 Things Academic Leaders Believe About Online Education Excerpt: "You can read this year’s report, based on a survey conducted in 2014, here. But if you don’t have the time, here are three things academic leaders believe about online education: 1. Online education has become mission-critical, even at small colleges. The percentage of academic leaders who agreed that online education is critical to the long-term strategy of their institutions crept up steadily until 2013, when it fell slightly, from 69 percent to 66 percent. In 2014, however, the percentage was back up to 71 percent, the highest rate yet. The most-drastic recent shift in the perceived importance of online education was at small colleges (i.e., those with fewer than 1,500 students). In 2012, 60 percent of academic leaders at small colleges said online education was strategically crucial. Now that number is 70 percent—nearly the same as at universities with more than 15,000 students. 2. "Hybrid" courses are at least as good as face-to-face courses. A majority of survey respondents said hybrid courses—which are held partly online, partly in the classroom—are equivalent to courses that are held entirely in person, but nearly 33 percent said they thought hybrid courses were superior. This is not a new belief: The percentage of academic leaders who believe in the superiority of hybrid courses has hovered around one-third since at least 2012. (The U.S. Education Department expressed a similar view way back in 2010.) In fact, the slim percentage of respondents who thought hybrids were worse than face-to-face courses actually went up in 2014, from 7.9 percent to 10.6 percent. 3. Most professors still don’t think online courses are legit. Some things never change. Back in 2002, Babson asked academic leaders if their faculty members "accept the value and legitimacy of online education." That year 28 percent said their professors thought online courses were legitimate. This year it was … 28 percent." Sharp Drop in Part-Time Student Enrolment Since Fee Rises  Excerpt: "Part-time student enrolments in higher education fell by 22% in the two years since university tuition fees were allowed to triple, according to new figures released last Thursday by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, or HESA. Between 2012-13 and 2013-14, the number of part-time students fell by 2% overall. According to HESA the decline in total student numbers of nearly 41,000 was mainly because of a fall in undergraduate enrolments, down by 2%, and part-time student numbers, which fell sharply by 8%." Pell Report on Access to Higher Ed Excerpt: "Nonetheless, as illustrated by the indicators in this report, higher education outcomes are highly inequitable across family income groups. Moreover, on many of these indicators, gaps in outcomes are larger now than in the past. The disinvestment of state funds for public colleges and universities occurring since the 1980s and the declining value of federal student grant aid have all aided in the creation of a higher education system that is stained with inequality. Once known for wide accessibility to and excellence within its higher education system, the U.S. now has an educational system that serves to sort students in ways related to later life chances based on their demographic characteristics rather than provide all youth with the opportunity to use their creative potential to realize the many benefits of higher education and advance the well-being and progress of the nation." What It Takes: Video Didn’t Kill the Radio Star (Equivalent to classroom and online higher ed?) Excerpt: "That argument is rubbish. In the late 70’s, the Buggles sang "Video Killed the Radio Star," but the reality is that a new medium didn’t kill the radio star or the theatre production or film or books or television shows. Lack of vision killed the second-rate versions of all of these, while the classics survived and the visionaries emerged."  

Pittsburgh, PA "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. :: The Community College/‘Real College’ Divide Community Colleges are becoming more central to US education policy. This may be simply due to the fact that they are so central to the desire (within the Obama administration, particularly) to increase the rate of post-secondary participation. Here, the New York Times highlights the way that community colleges are often seen as second-class. Excerpt: "I heard it again, another community college putdown. This one came from an educator explaining criteria for high school graduation. She followed her summary with these words to her audience of parents and incoming freshmen: "So that’s the minimum requirement. But here’s what you should take if you want to go to real college — you know, not community college." :: Babson Report 2014 Always interesting, the Babson Report for 2014 is now available. One of the results attracting attention is the significant divide between faculty belief (interest?) in online education and the importance of the online format to the university’s leadership. Worth a look. Excerpt: "Is Online Learning Strategic? Background: Previous reports in this series noted the proportion of institutions that believe that online education is a critical component of their long-term strategy has shown small but steady increases for a decade, followed by a retreat in 2013. The evidence: The proportion of academic leaders who report that online learning is critical to their institution’s long term strategy has grown from 48.8% in 2002 to 70.8% this year.
! The proportion of chief academic leaders that say online learning is critical to their long-term strategy is at an all-time high.
! For-profit institutions account for the change for 2014; for the first time ever they are reporting a higher rate than public institutions.
! The proportion of institutions reporting online education is not critical to their long-term strategy has dropped to a new low of 8.6%.
" :: NMC 2015 Report I don’t find the annual report from the New Media Consortium particularly useful. It’s forecasts of emerging technologies in education rarely surprise professionals that are paying attention. Nevertheless, readers may find the way that the new technologies are organized in the report useful. Excerpt: "There is an increasing interest in using new sources of data for personalizing the learning experience, for ongoing formative assessment of learning, and for performance measurement; this interest is spurring the development of a relatively new field — data-driven learning and assessment. A key element of this trend is learning analytics, the application of web analytics, a science used by businesses to analyze commercial activities that leverages big data to identify spending trends and predict consumer behavior. Education is embarking on a similar pursuit into data science with the aim of learner profiling, a process of gathering and analyzing large amounts of detail about individual student interactions in online learning activities. The goal is to build better pedagogies, empower students to take an active part in their learning, target at-risk student populations, and assess factors affecting completion and student success. For learners, educators, and researchers, learning analytics is already starting to provide crucial insights into student progress and interaction with online texts, courseware, and learning environments used to deliver instruction. Data-driven learning and assessment will build on those early efforts.
" :: APLU HBCU Conference APLU is presenting the HBCU Conference in June 2015. This is crucial time in the evolution of these institutions. We’ll be attending. Excerpt: " . . . over 250 HBCU senior level administrators, students, faculty and staff to learn about best practices and develop strategies for historically Black institutions to improve student success." The deadline for submitting proposals is March 15. More information available here.  :: Computer ‘Mines’ Facebook to Predict Personality File under "Technology: Wow." A study conducted at Stanford University suggests that computers can be remarkably accurate measurements of even the most human issues: personality traits. Excerpt: "Based on what you’ve "liked" on Facebook, computers can pin down your personality traits more accurately than your friends and colleagues can. In fact, artificial intelligence can draw inferences about a person as accurately as a spouse, according to Michal Kosinski, co-lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. A new study compares the ability of computers and people to make accurate judgments about our personalities. People’s judgments were based on their familiarity with the judged individual, while the computer used digital signals—Facebook "likes." According to Kosinski, the findings reveal that by mining a person’s Facebook "likes," a computer was able to predict a person’s personality more accurately than most of their friends and family. Only a person’s spouse came close to matching the computer’s results." :: Faculty’s Role in Higher Education Innovation As noted above, faculty attitudes about instructional technology have shifted little in the last decade. The Gates Foundation recently released a study they sponsored that looks squarely at what’s behind these attitudes. Excerpt: "To that end, we commissioned research from FTI Consulting to help us better understand how different factors influence faculty willingness to learn about and incorporate new ideas and approaches in their teaching, particularly approaches that personalize learning (such as courseware) in undergraduate education, and spread these new ideas to peers and campus leaders. The results are inspiring on a number of levels. Most notably, the report: Shows that a significant proportion of faculty is open to using courseware and other innovations to improve their students’ success; Demonstrates very specific obstacles that faculty face in evolving their practice; and Illuminates approaches that colleges and others can take to help reduce or overcome those obstacles.