The Learning Cloud

Innovative Regis consortium

Regis University has one of the most successful online learning programs in the country. The School of Professional Studies, led by Dean Bill Husson, has for years provided high quality distance learning opportunities for adults. Now the school is making its online courses and programs available to other private institutions. The article excerpted below explains the innovative consortium assembled by Regis to help other institutions serve adult students. 

New Online Option for Private Colleges
By Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, December 29, 2005

Regis University last week announced the creation of a new consortium — already with 39 members and growing — to allow private colleges to essentially trade courses online. While there are already numerous alliances offering distance education and universities offering entire degrees online, the new consortium is designed for smaller private colleges — a sector of higher education that has been relatively slow (in many cases intentionally) to embrace distance education. The group aims to let colleges that have little or no distance presence begin to offer courses, while maintaining curricular control and holding on to current students who desire to have some of their education online. Member institutions will be able to designate any distance course offered by any other member of the consortium as their own, so students need not worry about transfer credit. Because institutions can decide course by course which offerings to make their own, college faculties maintain control of their curriculums and can decide how much distance education they want available to their students. Financially, the arrangement is very simple — members pay a small fee to join (currently $2,500, but likely to go up a bit in March). Students pay the same per-credit tuition they would if the course had been created at their own institution, but the home institution and the college that created the course split — roughly equally — that tuition revenue. The institution offering the course is responsible for all costs, from faculty salaries to staffing a helpdesk. The institution where the student is formally enrolled collects the tuition and awards the credit. There is a key limit also placed on the program: All courses offered will be aimed at adults with at least three years of work experience. Read more ...

The old versus the new literacies?

I recently wrote about "New ways of 'knowing'." The article excerpted below offers new ways of knowing -- the new literacies -- as one of several possible explanations for the decline among college graduates in proficiencies in traditional literacies, such as reading and numerical proficiencies. 

Literacy of College Graduates Is on Decline. Survey's Finding of a Drop in Reading Proficiency Is Inexplicable, Experts Say.
By Lois Romano, Washington Post, December 25, 2005

Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation. "It's appalling -- it's really astounding," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at California State University at Fresno. "Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not saying much for the remainder." While more Americans are graduating from college, and more than ever are applying for admission, far fewer are leaving higher education with the skills needed to comprehend routine data, such as reading a table about the relationship between blood pressure and physical activity, according to the federal study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. Experts could not definitively explain the drop. "The declining impact of education on our adult population was the biggest surprise for us, and we just don't have a good explanation," said Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of education statistics. "It may be that institutions have not yet figured out how to teach a whole generation of students who learned to read on the computer and who watch more TV. It's a different kind of literacy." "What's disturbing is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels," he added. Read more ...

Accountability, or else!

Comments at its most recent meeting make it clear that the new Commission on the Future of Higher Education Commission expects higher education to account for its performance. Failure to do so may alter an institution's access to federal funding. One example is the failure to benchmark learning via standardized testing.

I've argued elsewhere in this blog that "standardization" could still permit choice of instruments and should apply only to the "common courses" taught around more or less the same content to large numbers of students at almost all institutions -- in a handful of high-enrollment required and elective introductory  general education and professional courses.  For such courses, there are a number of options for externally prepared and assessed exams that can be used for comparisons among peer institutions.

Also noted elsewhere in this blog is the remarkable omission from the recommendations of The Association of American Colleges and Universities' recently released report, Liberal Education Outcomes: A Preliminary Report on Student Achievement in College, of a recommendation placing standardized tests at the center of its solution.  It is such omissions from within higher education that fuels the aggressive posture of the new federal commission.  After all, the AACU report states in its Preface that, "The central finding of this report is that the most important outcomes of college study -- outcomes widely regarded as key to economic opportunity and democratic citizenship -- have been insufficiently addressed in reliable, cumulative assessments of students' gains from their college studies. For all the value society places on the kinds of learning addressed in this report, we still lack persuasive evidence about how well today's students are actually doing."

Federal Panel on Higher Education Appears Likely to Call for Testing of College Students
By Kelly Field, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 9, 2005

America's colleges and universities will not remain the best in the world if they do not become more efficient, more accessible, and more accountable to parents, students, and taxpayers. That was the message out of the second meeting of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which began on Thursday in Nashville and continues today. From the start of Thursday's five-hour session, it was clear that the commission would not be satisfied with the status quo. Invited speakers and commission members were unsparing in their criticism of academe, calling colleges complacent, resistant to change, and sometimes downright lazy. As the commission's chairman, Charles Miller, put it, "We would not be here if there were not a lot of things to question." Chronicle subscribers can read more ...

The social costs of spiraling tuition increses

The article excerpted below adds additional evidence of the high social cost of tuition increasing at a rate in excess of the rate of inflation. We need to use technology, as it is being used in almost all other sectors of the economy, to improve both the effectiveness and the unit-cost structure of services -- in order to stabilize unit price (tuition) in higher education.

College divide threatens to keep poor in poverty. Even with aid, expense often keeps needy away
Doug Guthrie / The Detroit News, December 4, 2005

"When you are worried about what you are going to eat, the stress causes a chain reaction," says Alicia Coleman, 25, who attends Wayne State and receives a Pell Grant and merit scholarship and has loans. When she enrolled in a highly ranked small liberal arts college near Austin, Texas, Alicia Coleman thought her future was assured. As a Pell Grant recipient, the largest federal program designed to help children from the nation's neediest families, she qualified for maximum student aid. "It wasn't nearly enough," said the 25-year-old Houston native who is starting over again six years later as a student at Wayne State University. "You learn a lot the second time around. When you are worried about what you are going to eat, the stress causes a chain reaction. Your grades go down. It affects everything." Coleman quit college after one semester to get a job to help her parents, who have three other children. Her story is common among needy students. Her parents continue to pay a $6,000 loan they obtained to fill the funding gap for their daughter's failed first attempt. The divide between the wealthy and poor in college threatens to perpetuate the cycle of poverty for thousands of working poor families. Read more ...

New ways of "knowing"

We've all read about and even experienced the new communication and transaction expectations of today's younger college students who are frequently labeled the "digital generation." The story excerpted below paints a vivid picture of how these young people communicate and interact. I'm reasonably certain that research reveals, or soon will reveal, that these students know in new ways that are foreign even to the generation that preceded them. Because learning depends strongly on human communication and discourse centered on content, issues, and concepts, we need to learn to incorporate these new ways of knowing into instruction -- into the learning environments and processes that we design for our courses and academic programs. It's increasingly important to use technology not only to redesign academic and administrative services to improve convenience of access and reduce cost structures, but also to align learning environments and activities with the way that the new generation knows and learns -- in order to improve learning outcomes.

The MySpace Generation. They live online. They buy online. They play online. Their power is growing
By Jessi Hempel, with Paula Lehman, BusinessWeek online, December 12, 2005

The Toadies broke up. It was four years ago, when Amanda Adams was 16. She drove into Dallas from suburban Plano, Tex., on a school night to hear the final two-hour set of the local rock band, which had gone national with a hit 1995 album. "Tears were streaming down my face," she recalls, a slight Texas lilt to her voice. During the long summer that followed, Adams turned to the Web in search of solace, plugging the lead singer's name into Google repeatedly until finally his new band popped up. She found it on Buzz-Oven.com, a social networking Web site for Dallas teens. Advertisement Adams jumped onto the Buzz-Oven network, posting an online self-portrait (dark hair tied back, tongue out, goofy eyes for the cam) and listing her favorite music so she could connect with other Toadies fans. Soon she was heading off to biweekly meetings at Buzz-Oven's airy loft in downtown Dallas and helping other "Buzzers" judge their favorite groups in marathon battle-of-the-bands sessions. (Buzz-0ven.com promotes the winners.) At her school, Frisco High -- and at malls and concerts -- she passed out free Buzz-Oven sampler CDs plastered with a large logo from Coca-Cola Inc., (KO ) which backs the site in the hope of reaching more teens on their home turf. Adams also brought dozens of friends to the concerts Buzz-Oven sponsored every few months. "It was cool, something I could brag about," says Adams, now 20 and still an active Buzzer. Now that Adams is a junior at the University of North Texas at Denton, she's online more than ever. It's 7 p.m. on a recent Saturday, and she has just sweated her way through an online quiz for her advertising management class. (The quiz was "totally out of control," write classmates on a school message board minutes later.) She checks a friend's blog entry on MySpace.com to find out where a party will be that night. Then she starts an Instant Messenger (IM) conversation about the evening's plans with a few pals. ......

You have just entered the world of what you might call Generation @. Being online, being a Buzzer, is a way of life for Adams and 3,000-odd Dallas-area youth, just as it is for millions of young Americans across the country. And increasingly, social networks are their medium. As the first cohort to grow up fully wired and technologically fluent, today's teens and twentysomethings are flocking to Web sites like Buzz-Oven as a way to establish their social identities. Here you can get a fast pass to the hip music scene, which carries a hefty amount of social currency offline. It's where you go when you need a friend to nurse you through a breakup, a mentor to tutor you on your calculus homework, an address for the party everyone is going to. For a giant brand like Coke, these networks also offer a direct pipeline to the thirsty but fickle youth market. Preeminent among these virtual hangouts is MySpace.com, whose membership has nearly quadrupled since January alone, to 40 million members. Youngsters log on so obsessively that MySpace ranked No. 15 on the entire U.S. Internet in terms of page hits in October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Millions also hang out at other up-and-coming networks such as Facebook.com, which connects college students, and Xanga.com, an agglomeration of shared blogs. A second tier of some 300 smaller sites, such as Buzz-Oven, Classface.com, and Photobucket.com, operate under -- and often inside or next to -- the larger ones. Although networks are still in their infancy, experts think they're already creating new forms of social behavior that blur the distinctions between online and real-world interactions. In fact, today's young generation largely ignores the difference. Most adults see the Web as a supplement to their daily lives. They tap into information, buy books or send flowers, exchange apartments, or link up with others who share passions for dogs, say, or opera. But for the most part, their social lives remain rooted in the traditional phone call and face-to-face interaction. The MySpace generation, by contrast, lives comfortably in both worlds at once. Increasingly, America's middle- and upper-class youth use social networks as virtual community centers, a place to go and sit for a while (sometimes hours). While older folks come and go for a task, Adams and her social circle are just as likely to socialize online as off. This is partly a function of how much more comfortable young people are on the Web: Fully 87% of 12- to 17-year-olds use the Internet, vs. two-thirds of adults, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Read more ...

What drives policy makers

Although the article excerpted below offers an explanation for weak graduation rate in the public two- and four-year institutions in Nevada, the fact remains that policy makers in Nevada (and other states) expect a greater return on their state's investment in higher education. It is such concerns that are driving the current national policy focus on improving institutional performance in higher education.

Nevada universities' graduation rate less than 50 percent
ASSOCIATED PRESS LAS VEGAS (AP), December 2, 2005

Nevada's two public universities have a graduation rate lower than 50 percent, and the state's community college students graduate at the lowest rate in the West, according to a report from the Nevada System of Higher Education. The graduation rates are based on a six-year period. Only 45 percent of the universities' freshman classes in 1998 graduated by spring 2004. That number has increased since the freshman class of 1992, in which only 38 percent of university students were able to graduate within six years. Read more ...

No matter how you measure it, tuition is rising too fast

The article excerpted below nicely summarizes a recent federal report that addresses the claim of many higher education leaders that net tuition and fees are the best measure of the price of attending college.  That's a logical assertion, but what the report makes clear is that even net price is increasing on the average at a rate in excess of the rate of inflation. 

Net Price vs. Sticker Price
Doug Lederman. Inside Higher Ed, November 29,2005

For several years, some experts on college financial aid have sought to change the conversation about college prices, arguing that sky-is-falling rhetoric about skyrocketing tuition exaggerates the extent of the problem. To understand the real pain for students and families, they have argued, “net price” (what colleges charge students to attend minus the amount of financial aid the students receive) provides a clearer picture of what a higher education actually costs — and tends to make the situation look less dire. The argument can seem self-serving when it comes from college officials themselves. But a report released Monday by the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics generally endorses the view that policy makers should use net prices, not just sticker prices, in assessing students’ higher education costs — and shows that the median net price paid by first-time freshmen from 1999 to 2002 rose at a significantly slower pace than did the median price of attendance for students at all types of institutions. But that doesn’t mean celebration is in order: Even the increases in net prices outpaced inflation during that period, and the picture for students is likely to have worsened in the last few years because the amount of available grant aid has grown at a slower pace than it had previously. Read more ...

Size versus quality

The in-depth article excerpted briefly below is worth reading.  It reveals that the leadership of some flagship public universities may be confusing their institutions' capacity for access with classroom capacity and other capacities for providing a nurturing residential experience to traditional-age students who are seeking that experience.  The wise use of proven IT-enabled strategies not only can improve the learning and maturing results of a residential learning experience and the capacity to provide it (by cutting back on course contact hours), but can also extend access to students who are not interested in, or unable to participate in, a residential program. Size need not compromise quality and human interaction in the Internet era of communication and convenience.

Filled to the Brim
David Epstein, Inside Higher Ed, November 16, 2005

Officials at some of the nation’s largest campuses say they’re glad to be popular, but not looking to grow. In fact, they said, like an elephant hiding behind a pole, a large campus has to find ways to seem a bit smaller, especially for incoming freshmen. Read more ...

Budget cuts and reductions in unit cost

The article excerpted below underscores that higher education leaders are typically unwilling to differentiate "budget cuts" from reductions in unit costs.  Admittedly, Missouri's worst-case scenario budget cuts would be difficult for higher education to make up in the short term through a systemic effort aimed at reducing the unit expense of delivering a credit hour of instruction while doing no harm to, even improving, the quality of the outcomes of instruction -- student learning.  Still, there are successful examples of such efforts derived from proven IT-enabled strategies -- the common course redesign and flex program and service redesign strategies that are described elsewhere in this bog and in many other sources.

It's time for higher education to come to grips with the difference between budget cuts and improved academic productivity -- reductions in unit cost -- because improved academic productivity can preserve the affordability of access while increasing the capacity for and convenience of access.

Universities respond to possible deep cuts. But worst-case scenario seems unlikely
By Mara Rose Williams, The Kansas City Star, December 10, 2005

If state aid to Missouri colleges and universities were cut by $100 million, it would mean staff reductions, program eliminations and tuition increases. For now, slashing 10 to 12 percent from higher-education institutions for the 2007 fiscal year is just a hypothetical scenario thrown out by state budget administrators. Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields, a St. Joseph Republican, said cuts so drastic are “highly unlikely.” But on the off chance that such deep cuts in higher education would be necessary, university and college presidents this week are looking at the impact they would have on their schools. Elson Floyd, president of the four-campus University of Missouri system, said the kind of reductions institutions have been asked to consider would cause “drastic and dire consequences” for the entire state higher-education system. Floyd said the cuts probably would mean layoffs and tuition increases. At the direction of the Missouri Office of Administration’s Division of Budget and Planning, Higher Education Commissioner Greg Fitch asked presidents to tell him how their institutions would handle cuts he called “dramatic.” Once he hears from all of them, Fitch will compile a report to go to state budget administrators. Reade more ...

Ultimate learning accountability

The excerpt below from a recent AP article addresses the growing concern with the learning efficacy of U.S. higher education at the ultimate level of graduation.  In the absence of external, independently provided assessments of what people know, the college degree is the best available indicator of how well non-profit institutions are fulfilling their obligations to deliver effective learning services and account for the results. The article points out that the trend data on graduation rates are not encouraging.

U.S. college drop-out rate sparks concern. Educators turn attention to getting students all the way to graduation
Associated Press, Nov. 15, 2005

For decades, getting more students into college has been the top priority of America’s higher education leaders. But what’s the point, a growing number of experts are wondering, when so few who go to school finish a degree? Just 54 percent of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 had a degree six years later — and even fewer Hispanics and blacks did, according to some of the latest government figures. After borrowing for school but failing to graduate, many of those students may be worse off than if they had never attended college at all. Now the question of what to do about the country’s unimpressive and stagnate graduation rates is on the agenda, from college presidents’ offices to state houses. The latest sign of the trend comes Wednesday, when former Princeton President William Bowen lays out an ambitious research agenda on the question during a speech in New York. Read more ...