The Chronicle of Higher Education article, “The View From the Top, What Presidents Think About Financial Sustainability, Student Outcomes, and the Future of Higher Education”, gives a great snapshot of the perceptions and concerns of 400 public and private college Presidents.
http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/21820/docs/WhatCollegePresidentsThink.pdf
Among their beliefs:
- Roughly one-half of all college courses will be delivered online by 2019
- 50% of recent graduates are underemployed
- Three-quarters of college leaders believe career prep is the job of the university
- Presidents agree the #1 criteria for school ratings should be completion
An extensive survey of college and university presidents, conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2015, EXECUTIVE SUMMARY found that two-thirds of them feel that American higher education is going in the wrong direction, with public college leaders worried about the decline of state financial support and leaders of private institutions most concerned with the intense competition for students.
Traditional colleges, particularly the many that are in the middle of the pack but charge high prices, will lose out to nimbler, cheaper competitors offering degrees on flexible timelines, either in hybrid format (in-person and online) or fully online.
private institutions see new graduate programs as potentially lucrative while public universities view online programs as a source for new cash.
Presidents remain optimistic about the value of a college degree, much more than employers do. A majority of college presidents believe the four- year bachelor’s degree is worth more in today’s job market than it was five years ago (see Figure 9). Meanwhile, surveys of employers by The Chronicle and other organizations in recent years have consistently found those who hire college graduates more neutral on the value of a degree. In a Chronicle survey of employers, for instance, 39 percent said a bachelor’s degree was worth the same as five years ago, and 26 percent said it was worth less.
College leaders and employers often don’t see eye-to-eye on what today’s graduates most need to succeed in the workplace. While companies seek recent college graduates with real-world experience, presidents continue to emphasize the value of academics over experience among their graduates. Indeed, compared to a similar survey of presidents conducted by The Chronicle in 2013, campus executives are even more in favor now of emphasizing academics over real-world experience (see Figure 10).
When it comes to getting students ready for the job market, presidents are not always in agreement with employers and parents on what role the institution should play in the process. A majority of college leaders believe it’s their job to offer experiential learning, such as internships, as part of the curriculum as well as offer career preparation in programs and offices across the campus, both in formal and informal settings. But presidents are more divided about whether colleges should provide a broad education or specific training, and one- third of them don’t want to be held accountable for the career outcomes of their students (see Figure 11).
Practical Tactics for Building Academic Grit
Effective interventions to build student resilience and grit.
earn how to identify specific resiliency challenges and offer practical solutions for students. Whether identifying campus resources or coaching students directly, you will leave this training better able to promote performance and persistence. Gain a number of effective interventions that you can start using immediately both in person and online to help students:
- Build self-efficacy in the classroom
- Improve faculty interaction skills
- Overcome life barriers
- Integrate into campus life and culture
Novelist teaches freshman writing, is shocked by students’ inability to construct basic sentences
Have we lost this essential skill and can it be recovered?
http://hechingerreport.org/novelist-teaches-freshman-writing-is-shocked-by-students-inability-to-construct-basic-sentences/
The First Year Writing program at my university stresses essay-writing skills: developing an arguable thesis, presenting strong supporting arguments, using quotations as evidence.
The prevailing opinion seems to be right: brief lessons don’t accomplish much. A few bright students will quickly absorb the new concepts; the others will fill out their worksheets on subject-verb agreement almost perfectly, and then write things like, The conflict between Sammy and Lengel are mainly about teenage rebellion.
Many of the writing instructors I spoke with shared my frustration. No one enjoys reading final papers that are just as awkwardly written as the first work of the semester. But none of them said what I’ve come to believe: that we should offer more help to students who reach for eloquence, only to trip over their own contorted clauses.
Could Rubric-Based Grading Be the Assessment of the Future?
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/10/14/could-rubric-based-grading-be-the-assessment-of-the-future/
I use rubrics and see the positive sides as well as appreciate the structure they bring in assessment. But this article makes me see also the danger of rubrics being applied as a harness, another debacle no different from NCLB and testings scores, which plague this nation’s education in the last two decades. The same “standardizing” as in Quality Matter, which can bring some clarity and structure, but also can stifle any creativity, which steers “out of the norm.” A walk on such path opens the door to another educational assembly line, where adjunct and hourly for-hire instructors will teach pre-done content and assess with the rubrics in a fast-food manner.
a consortium of 59 universities and community colleges in nine states is working to develop a rubric-based assessment system that would allow them to measure these crucial skills within ongoing coursework that students produce.
written communication, critical thinking and quantitative literacy. The faculty worked together to write rubrics (called Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education or VALUE rubrics) that laid out what a progression of these skills looks like.
“These rubrics are designed to be cross-disciplinary,” explained Bonnie Orcutt
Parents and teachers are pushing back against blunt assessment instruments like standardized tests, and are looking for a way to hold schools accountable that doesn’t mean taking time away from class work.
From: Zac Feit [mailto:zac@myschoolflow.com]
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2015 11:50 AM
To: Miltenoff, Plamen <pmiltenoff@stcloudstate.edu>
Subject: Hope to hear back
Plamen,
My name is Zachary Feit, and I am with Via Response. Awhile back we had spoken about our student response platform and you had expressed interest in taking a look at a better time. I was emailing to see if this was still something of interest.
Via Response provides a cloud-based student response platform that enables students to use any mobile devices instead of legacy clickers to interact with instructors during classes (including students participating from remote locations). Because we are cloud-based, Via Response is much easier to use for faculty because all questions, assessments, grade books and student data for all sections are stored in a single location that they can access from any browser. Via’s architecture also eliminates the FERPA compliance issues that are common with clicker devices that store student/grade data files on instructor computers or thumb drives.
I would be delighted to give you a 15 minute demo that goes over our system and its benefits to both teachers and student.
You can either email me back or call me at the number provided below. Thanks in advance and I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
Zachary Feit
Regional Account Director
Via Response (http://www.viaresponse.com)
407-477-4491
Center for Digital Education (CDE)
real-time impact on curriculum structure, instruction delivery and student learning, permitting change and improvement. It can also provide insight into important trends that affect present and future resource needs.
Big Data: Traditionally described as high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information.
Learning or Data Analytics: The measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.
Educational Data Mining: The techniques, tools and research designed for automatically extracting meaning from large repositories of data generated by or related to people’s learning activities in educational settings.
Predictive Analytics: Algorithms that help analysts predict behavior or events based on data.
Predictive Modeling: The process of creating, testing and validating a model to best predict the probability of an outcome.
Data analytics, or the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data, is driving decisionmaking in many institutions. However, because of the unique nature of each district’s or college’s data needs, many are building their own solutions.
For example, in 2014 the nonprofit company inBloom, Inc., backed by $100 million from the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, closed its doors amid controversy regarding its plan to store, clean and aggregate a range of student information for states and districts and then make the data available to district-approved third parties to develop tools and dashboards so the data could be used by classroom educators.22
Tips for Student Data Privacy
Know the Laws and Regulations
There are many regulations on the books intended to protect student privacy and safety: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
— as well as state, district and community laws. Because technology changes so rapidly, it is unlikely laws and regulations will keep pace with new data protection needs. Establish a committee to ascertain your institution’s level of understanding of and compliance with these laws, along with additional safeguard measures.
Make a Checklist Your institution’s privacy policies should cover security, user safety, communications, social media, access, identification rules, and intrusion detection and prevention.
Include Experts
To nail down compliance and stave off liability issues, consider tapping those who protect privacy for a living, such as your school attorney, IT professionals and security assessment vendors. Let them review your campus or district technologies as well as devices brought to campus by students, staff and instructors. Finally, a review of your privacy and security policies, terms of use and contract language is a good idea.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Students, staff, faculty and parents all need to know their rights and responsibilities regarding data privacy. Convey your technology plans, policies and requirements and then assess and re-communicate those throughout each year.
“Anything-as-a-Service” or “X-as-a-Service” solutions can help K-12 and higher education institutions cope with big data by offering storage, analytics capabilities and more. These include:
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Providers offer cloud-based storage, similar to a campus storage area network (SAN)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Opens up application platforms — as opposed to the applications themselves — so others can build their own applications
using underlying operating systems, data models and databases; pre-built application components and interfaces
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): The hosting of applications in the cloud
• Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS): Mix all the above together, upscale the amount of data involved by an enormous amount and you’ve got BDaaS
Suggestions:
Use accurate data correctly
Define goals and develop metrics
Eliminate silos, integrate data
Remember, intelligence is the goal
Maintain a robust, supportive enterprise infrastructure.
Prioritize student privacy
Develop bullet-proof data governance guidelines
Create a culture of collaboration and sharing, not compliance.
more on big data in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=big+data&submit=Search
Register for Wednesday’s Free AAEEBL Webinar with Darren Cambridge, one of the most influential members of the eportfolio field; 1 pm US EDT. The URL for the webinar will be displayed on your screen right after you complete registration. You do not need a password to login at that URL. Topic: “ePortfolio is a Genre.” Helen Chen and Trent Batson will moderate.
more on on eportfolio in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=eportfolio&submit=Search