France looks to the big league — from The Economist

Excerpt:

Plans to create a French Ivy League are part of the biggest shake-up in French higher education since students threw cobbled stones in les évènements of 1968. Championed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, the idea is to spend €7.7 billion ($10.6 billion) to produce a handful of world-class universities which can compete with the best that North America and the rest of Europe have to offer. The proposed “Sorbonne League” will require the country’s highly selective business and engineering schools, or grandes écoles, to work with universities and independent research organisations in return for financial support. They will also be expected to get closer to the business community.

Higher Ed’s Ultimate Guide To Cloud Computing — from edudemic.com

Topics include:

  • What is cloud computing?
  • Why use it?
  • The challenges of using cloud computing
  • What it means to higher ed
  • Educause’s 7 things you should know about cloud computing
  • Legal considerations
  • …and more

 

Also see:

Addendum on 11/2/11:

  • Diving Into the Cloud — from campustechnology.com by Rama Ramaswami, Dian Schaffhauser
    In a two-part series, CT provides IT administrators with an easy-to-understand primer to help them educate campus constituents about the cloud and what it can do for their institutions.

 

 

 

Thinking about innovation in higher education — from Tony Bates

Excerpt:

This article by Peter Stokes, an executive vice-president at Eduventures, has some interesting ideas about how to promote real innovation in the higher education system. In principle, he’s suggesting US Federal funding for a conventional public institution to set up a parallel organization to test alternative ways of organizing, delivering and assessing teaching and learning, but within the Federal regulatory environment to stop diploma mills benefiting from the funding.

Also see:

 

Addendums later on 10/28/11:

  • Where’s the Innovation: Part 1 (Dr. Peter Smith)
    In my next three blogs, I will discuss, with examples, the obstacles faced by existing institutions when they try to innovate, where innovation has already begun and where innovation will come from in the future.

    What makes this moment in time so compelling is that, just as we see the need for a vastly better educated citizenry, the tools to do just that have been revolutionized by the web. For the first time, the tools to drive change and improve learning lie beyond the scope and the control of the academy, in the community which surrounds it. So, for the first time in our history, colleges and universities do not control either the conversation or the drive to innovate. As a consequence, also for the first time, if they stand still, they will be left behind, bobbing in the wake of rapid change (emphasis DSC).
  • Where will innovation begin? — from the Chronicle by Jeff Selingo
    If there was any question that the current model for the vast majority of colleges is not sustainable for much longer, two pieces of news this past week should give the remaining skeptics yet more evidence (emphasis DSC).
    .
    First was the news from a survey of economists that Americans’ incomes, which have dropped some 7 percent since 2000, aren’t expected to even recover those losses until 2021. What’s more, a third of the respondents to the survey said today’s college grads would fare worse than their parents’ generation.
    .
    Then earlier this week we saw news reports of a previously published study on household debt by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which predicted that the total amount of student-loan debt would hit $1-trillion before the end of the year.

Ohio High School and Higher Education Alignment Initiative — from http://p-20matters.blogspot.com by Jennifer Dounay Zinth

Tagged with:  

Best idea for higher ed since about 2002  —  from HASTAC.org by Cathy Davidson

Excerpt:

I just learned about an amazing project (still in Beta) sponsored by the Australian Eight, the eight largest national universities in the country,  called “The Conversation.”  It may well be the most inspiring collaborative project I’ve heard about since about, oh, 2002-2003 (ie I’m joking of course–2002-2003 happens to be when HASTAC went from an “aha!” moment around a conference table to our first actual meeting as a collective; there are tons of other great ideas in higher ed, inc HASTAC’s founding!).   The Conversation translates the best scholarly research into lively journalism.   It makes a giant step towards public intellectualism, taking HASTAC-ish principles of an online network of education innovators learning together in a public and open forum, to their logical (if highly curated) conclusion. Unlike HASTAC, the Conversation’ has a team of professional editors, quite renowned in their collective experience.  They curate and select the best research from many fields produced by specialized academics and recasts it as journalism for the larger public as well as for academics in other fields.   They turn specialized scholarly research written originally for academic experts and peers into accessible, interesting, urgent, and sometimes even delightful fun and creative information for the public at large.

 

Also see:

The Conversation   BETA

Academic rigour, journalistic flair

Addendum later on 10/24/11:

  • Here’s an even BIGGER Idea for Higher Ed! —  from HASTAC.org by Cathy Davidson
    Well, after blogging and tweeting yesterday about the tremendous public aggregator of university research in Australia, an online publication called The Conversation, I heard today from lots of people that there is an even BIGGER version already here in the U.S.—and it includes top research from the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia too.  It’s called “Futurity,” and it is wonderful, and, yes, I should have known about it since Duke is one of the universities that cofounded  it, along with Rochester and Stanford.  But somehow I missed it so now take this opportunity to say how fabulous it is (check it out, it really is fabulous), and how now we have to make sure that HASTAC gets involved to make sure there is even more arts and humanities aggregated as part of its “Society and Culture” category.  Here’s the url for Futurity:  http://www.futurity.org/

Online students vs. traditional students — from onlinephdprograms.com; with thanks to Mr. Muhammad Saleem for this resource
 

Online Students vs. Traditional Students
Via: Online PhD Programs Blog

 

From DSC:
I’m not sure I would use the word versus here (or the abbreviation for it).   Students can be involved with taking both types of courses — face-to-face and online — at the same time.  So although some students might be taking most of their classes in a face-to-face manner, they might also be taking some of their coursework online (as the schools provide more online-based offerings and programs).

My advice to students new to online-based learning:

  • “Do an immediate assumptions and expectations reality check!  Don’t think that online learning is easier. It isn’t. It will require more discipline and time than your face-to-face courses. But you will learn a great deal and you will be preparing yourself for the workplace. Stay on top of things — don’t fall behind.”

 

 

 

Student loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion this year — from USAToday.com by Cauchon

Excerpts:

Students and workers seeking retraining are borrowing extraordinary amounts of money through federal loan programs, potentially putting a huge burden on the backs of young people looking for jobs and trying to start careers.

The amount of student loans taken out last year crossed the $100 billion mark for the first time and total loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion for the first time this year (emphasis DSC).  Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards, reports the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Students are borrowing twice what they did a decade ago after adjusting for inflation, the College Board reports.

“It’s going to create a generation of wage slavery,” says Nick Pardini, a Villanova University graduate student in finance (emphasis DSC) who has warned on a blog for investors that student loans are the next credit bubble — with borrowers, rather than lenders, as the losers.

 

From DSC:
Again, this speaks for the need for higher education to work hard on reinventing ourselves — innovating and thinking creatively to come up with significantly lower cost alternatives in offering a quality education to the youth of today. 

 

 

onlinecolleges.org

Building Learning Communities 2011 Keynote: Dr. Eric Mazur — from November Learning

Excerpt:

Today, we are officially relaunching our opening keynote from BLC11 with Dr. Eric Mazur. Dr. Mazur is the Area Dean of Applied Physics and Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

In his keynote, Dr. Mazur shares his vast research on teaching and learning. Students in Dr. Mazur’s class are moving far away from the traditional stand and deliver lectures given in many k-12 and university classrooms around the world, and they are gaining a much deeper understanding of the material being taught in the process.

As you watch this video, we invite you to take some time and respond to one or more of the following questions…

 

From DSC:
What I understood the key points to be:

  • Teaching and learning should not be about information transfer alone; that is, it’s not about simply having students “parrot back” the information.  That doesn’t lead to true learning and long-term retention.
  • The more a teacher is an expert in his/her content, the more difficulty this teacher has in understanding how a first time learner in this subject struggles
  • Rather we need to guide and use peer instruction/social learning/collaboration amongst students to construct learning and then be able to apply/transfer that learning to a different context
  • Lecturing is not an effective way to create a long term retention of information
  • Peer instruction/human interaction creates effective learning
  • “The plural of anecdotes is not data.”
  • Eric is seeking data and feedback to sharpen his theories of how to optimize learning
  • Technology serves pedagogy — technology should afford a new mode of learning
  • Towards that end, Eric and team working on “Peer instruction 2.0”
  • How do I design good questions?  Optimize the discussions? Manage time? Insure learning is taking place?
  • Eric is working with several other colleagues to create a system for building and using data analytics to give useful information to instructor about who’s “getting it” and who isn’t; about how we learn
  • Peer instruction not without issues — how people group themselves and who students choose to collaborate with can be problematical
  • Why not have the system do the pairing/grouping?
  • System uses algorithms, facial recognition, posture analysis; cameras, microphones
  • Surveys also used
  • The system is attempting to help Eric and his team learn about learning
  • The system being used at Harvard and by invitation only

Eric ended with a summary of the 2 key messages:

  1. Education is not about lecturing
  2. We can move way beyond the current technologies and use new methods and technologies to actively manage learning as it happens

 

From DSC:
After listening to this lecture, the graphic below captures a bit of what he’s getting at and reflects some of my thinking on this subject as well.  That is, we need diagnostic tools — along the lines of those a mechanic might use on our cars to ascertain where the problems/issues are:
 


 


 With Teachscape Reflect Video, educators can store, organize,
share, collaborate, and comment on classroom videos.

 

From DSC:
This could possibly be a very solid tool for:

  • Assessing oneself — watching yourself teach and analyzing it
  • Professional development — for use by teaching and learning centers across the country
  • Remote student teacher support
  • Education related courses

Also see:

 

Indiana U. helps shape economic terms of eText transition — from convergemag.com by Tanya Roscorla

Excerpts:

As course material shifts from print to digital, Indiana University advocates on behalf of students for lower prices, more choices and common software platforms.

Based on feedback from students and faculty, Courseload rewrote the platform in HTML5 this summer.

When the university asked students why they liked e-textbooks better, 69 percent cited instructor annotations, followed closely by sustainability, cost, weight of books and student annotations.

 

We’ll take it from here — from InsideHigherEd.com by Steve Kolowich

Excerpt:

Yet the contradiction highlights a problem familiar to many traditional universities: On the one hand, they want to compete in the global market of online higher education. Even before 2008, many lacked the cash or expertise to build an online infrastructure from scratch. As a result, some have ceded their online development and recruitment to outside companies. A cottage industry of online firms — Bisk Education, Embanet-Compass, Deltak, 2tor, Colloquy and others — has emerged to meet this need.

Saint Leo was one of the first to do this, 14 years ago. Now it may be at the front edge of another trend — that of universities that, having made the transition to online education, are dropping their for-profit partners and taking over themselves.

Also see:

Excerpt:

Along with the benefits, the phenomenal growth of online learning also presents an uncharted set of challenges for academic institutions, most of which are much more familiar with the traditional classroom setting. Additionally, it has spurred a new set of demands and expectations from a range of stakeholders including students, instructors, regulatory institutions and advocacy groups. Given these new challenges, several factors are proving to be instrumental in shaping the way higher education institutions implement and improve upon the state of online learning.

Technology is transforming education and its impact just continues to grow. By creating and embracing a solid framework for online learning and employing cutting-edge learning management systems, higher education institutions are in a position to significantly improve student outcomes today and into the future.

The University of Wherever — from The New York Times by Bill Keller

Excerpt:

The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”

Disrupt is right. It would be an earthquake for the majority of colleges that depend on tuition income rather than big endowments and research grants. Many could go the way of local newspapers. There would be huge audiences and paychecks for superstar teachers, but dimmer prospects for those who are less charismatic.

© 2024 | Daniel Christian