education reform

Attention, college shoppers. These schools are slashing their prices. [Anderson]

On 01/22/2019, in business side of he, colleges, cost of getting a degree, education reform, higher education, ideas, parents, reinvent, society, student-related, United States, universities, Walmart of Education --> New Amazon.com of Higher Education, youth, by Daniel Christian

Attention, college shoppers. These schools are slashing their prices. — from washingtonpost.com by Nick Anderson

Excerpt:

As soaring tuition scares off many families, a growing number of private colleges have embraced a marketing tactic associated more with selling airline tickets or flat-screen televisions than higher education: a price cut.

St. John’s College slashed tuition from $52,734 in this school year to $35,000 in the next.

The liberal arts school, with campuses in Maryland and New Mexico, joined more than 20 others nationwide that have reduced prices in the past three years.

The movement exposes a reality of higher education long hidden in plain sight: The difference between sticker prices and what the average student actually pays is often vast.

“Is that tenable? Is that right? Is that who we are?” asked Panayiotis Kanelos, president of the campus in Annapolis, Md. “Is it right for us to expect families to bear that burden?”

“Every time you raise the tuition, the screw gets tighter and tighter on families in the middle,” Kanelos said. “Something is broken in tuition pricing. We want to fix it now.”

The Lesson You Never Got Taught in School: How to Learn! — from bigthink.com by Simon Oxenham (from 2/15/13)
Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions.

Excerpts:

Practice Testing (Rating = High)
This is where things get interesting; testing is often seen as a necessary evil of education. Traditionally, testing consists of rare but massively important ‘high stakes’ assessments. There is however, an extensive literature demonstrating the benefits of testing for learning – but importantly, it does not seem necessary that testing is in the format of ‘high stakes’ assessments. All testing including ‘low stakes’ practice testing seems to result in benefits. Unlike many of the other techniques mentioned, the benefits of practice testing are not modest – studies have found that a practice test can double free recall!

Distributed Practice (Rating = High)
Have you ever wondered whether it is best to do your studying in large chunks or divide your studying over a period of time? Research has found that the optimal level of distribution of sessions for learning is 10-20% of the length of time that something needs to be remembered. So if you want to remember something for a year you should study at least every month, if you want to remember something for five years you should space your learning every six to twelve months. If you want to remember something for a week you should space your learning 12-24 hours apart. It does seem however that the distributed-practice effect may work best when processing information deeply – so for best results you might want to try a distributed practice and self-testing combo.

Also see:

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology
John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, Daniel T. Willingham
First Published January 8, 2013 | Research Article
https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Study smart — from apa.org by Lea Winerman; as recommended by Daniel Willingham here
Make the most of your study time with these drawn-from-the-research tips.

Per Willingham (emphasis DSC):

Rereading is a terribly ineffective strategy. The best strategy–by far — is to self-test — which is the 9th most popular strategy out of 11 in this study. Self-testing leads to better memory even compared to concept mapping (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011).

Three Takeaways from Becoming An Effective Learner:

Boser says that the idea that people have different learning styles, such as visual learning or verbal learning, has little scientific evidence to support it.
According to Boser, teachers and parents should praise their kids’ ability and effort, instead of telling them they’re smart. “When we tell people they are smart, we give them… a ‘fixed mindset,’” says Boser.
If you are learning piano – or anything, really – the best way to learn is to practice different composers’ work. “Mixing up your practices is far more effective,” says Boser.

Cumulative exams aren’t the same as spacing and interleaving. Here’s why. — from retrievalpractice.org

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Our recommendations to make cumulative exams more powerful with small tweaks for you and your students:

Cumulative exams are good, but encourage even more spacing and discourage cramming with cumulative mini-quizzes throughout the semester, not just as an end-of-semester exam.
Be sure that cumulative mini-quizzes, activities, and exams include similar concepts that require careful discrimination from students, not simply related topics.
Make sure you are using spacing and interleaving as learning strategies and instructional strategies throughout the semester, not simply as part of assessments and cumulative exams.

Bottom line: Just because an exam is cumulative does not mean it automatically involves spacing or interleaving. Be mindful of relationships across exam content, as well as whether students are spacing their study throughout the semester or simply cramming before an exam – cumulative or otherwise.

From DSC:
We, like The Learning Scientists encourages us to do and even provides their own posters, should have posters with these tips on them throughout every single school and library in the country. The posters each have a different practice such as:

Spaced practice
Retrieval practice
Elaboration
Interleaving
Concrete examples
Dual coding

That said, I could see how all of that information could/would be overwhelming to some students and/or the more technical terms could bore them or fly over their heads. So perhaps we could boil down the information to feature excerpts from the top sections only that put the concepts into easier to digest words such as:

Practice bringing information to mind
Switch between ideas while you study
Combine words and visuals
Etc.

Training the workforce of the future [Bauman]

On 01/11/2019, in 21st century, 3D, adjunct faculty, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning, business, career development, change, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, colleges, community colleges, content development, corporate / business world, curriculum, dangers of the status quo, data mining, education, education reform, emerging technologies, engineering, faculty, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, heutagogy, higher education, ideas, internet, Law Schools, Lifelong learning, mathematics, professional development, reinvent, robotics, science, society, staying relevant, STEAM-related, student-related, surviving, technology (general), training / L&D, trends, UK, United States, universities, virtual reality / worlds / learning, wearables, workplace, XR - extended reality, youth, by Daniel Christian

Training the workforce of the future: Education in America will need to adapt to prepare students for the next generation of jobs – including ‘data trash engineer’ and ‘head of machine personality design’ –– from dailymail.co.uk by Valerie Bauman

Excerpts:

Careers that used to safely dodge the high-tech bullet will soon require at least a basic grasp of things like web design, computer programming and robotics – presenting a new challenge for colleges and universities
A projected 85 percent of the jobs that today’s college students will have in 2030 haven’t been invented yet
The coming high-tech changes are expected to touch a wider variety of career paths than ever before
Many experts say American universities aren’t ready for the change because the high-tech skills most workers will need are currently focused just on people specializing in science, technology, engineering and math

.

Cut the curriculum — from willrichardson.com by Will Richardson

Excerpt:

Here’s an idea: A Minimal Viable Curriculum (MVC). That’s what Christian Talbot over at Basecamp is proposing, and I have to say, I love the idea.

He writes: “What if we were to design MVCs: Minimum Viable Curricula centered on just enough content to empower learners to examine questions or pursue challenges with rigor? Then, as learners go deeper into a question or challenge, they update their MVC…which is pretty much how learning happens in the real world.”

The key there to me is that THEY update their MVC. That resonates so deeply; it feels like that’s what I’m doing with my learning each day as I read about and work with school leaders who are thinking deeply about change.

When we pursue questions that matter to us, rigor is baked in.

From DSC:
I love the idea of giving students — as they can handle it — more choice, more control. So anytime around 8th-12th grade, I say we turn much more control over to the students, and let them make more choices on what they want to learn about. We should at least try some experiments along these lines.

As everyone in the workforce is now required to be a lifelong learner, our quality of life goes much higher if we actually enjoy learning. As I think about it, I have often heard an adult (especially middle age and older) say something like, “I hated school, but now, I love to learn.”

Plus, I can easily imagine greater engagement with the materials that students choose for themselves, as well as increased attention spans and higher motivation levels.

Also, here’s a major shout out to Will Richardson, Bruce Dixon, Missy Emler and Lyn Hilt for the work they are doing at ModernLearners.com.

Reflections on “The world is changing. Here’s how companies must adapt.” [Kaeser]

On 01/03/2019, in 21st century, adult learning, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning, Asia, Australia, bots, business, Canada, career development, change, changing business models, collaboration, colleges, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, computer science, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education, education reform, emerging technologies, engineering, entrepreneurship, ethics, Europe, future, game-changing environment, generational differences, global / globalization, heutagogy, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, India, innovation, intelligent systems, internet, Law Schools, learning, learning ecosystem, legislatures / government / legal, Lifelong learning, machine-to-machine communications, MBA, new business models, online learning, organizational change, pace of change, platforms, policy, political science, reinvent, society, staying relevant, strategy, student-related, surviving, Technologies for your home, technology (general), telecommunications, the downsides of technology, tools, training / L&D, trends, UK, United States, universities, vendors, vision, Walmart of Education --> New Amazon.com of Higher Education, web-based collaboration, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

The world is changing. Here’s how companies must adapt. — from weforum.org by Joe Kaeser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens AG

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Although we have only seen the beginning, one thing is already clear: the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the greatest transformation human civilization has ever known. As far-reaching as the previous industrial revolutions were, they never set free such enormous transformative power.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming practically every human activity...its scope, speed and reach are unprecedented.
…
Enormous power (Insert from DSC: What I was trying to get at here) entails enormous risk. Yes, the stakes are high.

“And make no mistake about it: we are now writing the code that will shape our collective future.” CEO of Siemens AG

…

Contrary to Milton Friedman’s maxim, the business of business should not just be business. Shareholder value alone should not be the yardstick. Instead, we should make stakeholder value, or better yet, social value, the benchmark for a company’s performance.

Today, stakeholders…rightfully expect companies to assume greater social responsibility, for example, by protecting the climate, fighting for social justice, aiding refugees, and training and educating workers. The business of business should be to create value for society.

…

This seamless integration of the virtual and the physical worlds in so-called cyber-physical systems – that is the giant leap we see today. It eclipses everything that has happened in industry so far. As in previous industrial revolutions but on a much larger scale, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will eliminate millions of jobs and create millions of new jobs.

“…because the Fourth Industrial Revolution runs on knowledge, we need a concurrent revolution in training and education.
…
If the workforce doesn’t keep up with advances in knowledge throughout their lives, how will the millions of new jobs be filled?”

Joe Kaeser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens AG

From DSC:
At least three critically important things jump out at me here:

We are quickly approaching a time when people will need to be able to reinvent themselves quickly and cost-effectively, especially those with families and who are working in their (still existing) jobs. (Or have we already entered this period of time…?)
There is a need to help people identify which jobs are safe to reinvent themselves to — at least for the next 5-10 years.
Citizens across the globe — and their relevant legislatures, governments, and law schools — need to help close the gap between emerging technologies and whether those technologies should even be rolled out, and if so, how and with which features.

What freedoms and rights should individuals have in the digital age?

Joe Kaeser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens AG

The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2018

On 12/18/2018, in accessibility, education, education reform, ideas, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, memory, policy, society, special needs, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, youth, by Daniel Christian

The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2018 — from educationnext.org

Excerpt:

Every December, Education Next releases a list of the most popular articles we published over the course of the year based on readership.

The article that generated the most interest this year was one that looked at the policy of inclusion, or mainstreaming, in special education. A response to that article was our third most popular article of the year.

Some other popular articles were studies finding that teachers’ impact on non-cognitive skills is 10 times more predictive of students’ longer-term success than teachers’ impact on test scores; an analysis of the effectiveness of instructional coaching for teachers instead of regular professional development; and a look at whether teacher preparation programs can be evaluated based on the learning gains of their graduates’ students.

Other articles collected data on public support for higher teacher pay and greater school spending, the decline in private school attendance by middle school families, and whether states are lowering their proficiency standards.

Here’s the list of 2018’s Top 20 articles…

Modern Learners 2018 Provocation of the Year [Dixon]

On 12/15/2018, in assessment, education, education reform, K-12 related, learning, online learning, pedagogy, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, by Daniel Christian

Modern Learners 2018 Provocation of the Year — from modernlearners.com by Bruce Dixon

Excerpt:

In this context, provocation is therefore about deconstructing meanings and hidden agendas, challenging assumptions and seeking new ways of thinking not just about what we do, or how we do it, but most importantly, why we do what we do.

It is in this context that the choice for our 2018 Provocation of the Year came down to a single word… assessment.

“Indeed as one of the most prolific writers on the topic, Alfie Kohn suggested, ‘assessment should be an unobtrusive servant of teaching and learning.’ Now there’s a provocation to really start a vibrant conversation.“

From DSC:
First of all, an excerpt from an email from RetrievalPractice.org:

Last week, we talked about an activity we call Flash Forward. Simply ask your students these questions:

“Now that you’ve taken this class, what is one thing you want to remember 10 years from now (and why)?”

“How will you remember that one thing? What will you do to make sure you don’t forget?”

Second of all, the topic of remembering something 10 years from now (from some current learning) made me think about obtaining a long-term return on investment (ROI) from that learning.

In the online-based course that I’ve been teaching for a while now, I’m all about helping the students in my classes obtain long-term benefits from taking the class. Grades aren’t the key. The learning is the key!

The class is entitled, “Foundations of Information Technology” and I want them to be using the tools, technologies, services, and concepts (that we learned about) loooooong after they graduate from college! We work on things like RSS feeds, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, building their network, building their personal brand, HTML/web design, Microsoft Excel, the Internet of Things and much more. I want them to be practicing those things, leveraging those tools, pulse-checking their surroundings, networking with others, serving others with their gifts, and building on the foundations that they put into place waaaay back in 201__.

Personal reflections on “Teachers urged to instill assignments with ‘choice and relevancy’” [Schaffhauser]

On 11/28/2018, in Daniel S. Christian, education, education reform, ideas, K-12 related, more choice more control, youth, by Daniel Christian

Teachers urged to instill assignments with ‘choice and relevancy’ — from thejournal.com by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

A new report from the Education Trust looks at the role of two “powerful levers” — choice and relevancy — in motivating and engaging students. This national nonprofit works on issues that disproportionately affect students from low-income families and students of color. In its new paper the organization offered guidance to help educators bring relevancy to their assignments and give students “authentic choices.”

As they concluded, “When teachers consistently offer assignments that include choice in content, product or process, students will find the learning ownership needed to stay engaged and achieve at high levels.”

From DSC:
At this stage in life, my wife and I have one of our kids in high school…our son, who is now in his junior year. He is a very intelligent young man who wants to go into acting/drama/the theater. But he is a game player. He knows how the game is played and he plays it (most of the time). He can’t wait until the next phase of life because he views so much of his current education as being forced down his throat. Many of the topics that his courses deal with are things that he doesn’t care anything about. He would much rather study topics that HE wants to learn about.

He shared two recent examples with me:

In his acting class, his acting teacher gave some of his own personal background and how he came to be where he is today; every eye and ear were open my son said…it was completely quiet in the room
In his econ class, the teacher shared about the value of time on investing and gave some examples involving the growth of some investments over time; again, every eye and ear was open according to my son.

These were items of extreme relevance to those classes/audiences. And the students were paying attention, big time.

Also, when given more choice, students are apt to be much more engaged in their learning — even, perhaps, developing more of an actual enjoyment of learning.

Funny (but not really) how many times we hear of adults who later on went on to love learning…but they hated school.

Frey: “…by 2030 the largest company on the internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet.”

On 11/14/2018, in 21st century, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning, bots, colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education, education reform, education technology, emerging technologies, face-to-face, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, learning, Learning Agents, learning ecosystem, learning from the living [class] room, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, more choice more control, online learning, online tutoring, personalized/customized learning, platforms, universities, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
I agree with futurist Thomas Frey:

“I’ve been predicting that by 2030 the largest company on the internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet.”

(source)

Along these lines, see what Arizona State University is up to:

We think of this as a transformation away from a mass-production model to a mass-personalization model. For us, that’s the big win in this whole process. When we move away from the large lectures in that mass-production model that we’ve used for the last 170 years and get into something that reflects each of the individual learners’ needs and can personalize their learning path through the instructional resources, we will have successfully moved the education industry to the new frontier in the learning process. We think that mass personalization has already permeated every aspect of our lives, from navigation to entertainment; and education is really the next big frontier.

(source)

From DSC:
Each year the vision I outlined here gets closer and closer and closer and closer. With the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), change is on the horizon…big time. Mass personalization. More choice. More control.

Learning Ecosystems

Frey: “…by 2030 the largest company on the internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet.”

Categories

Tags

Looking for something?

Visit our friends!

Archives