The Learning Cloud

Convenience and quality

The article excerpted below about Thomas Edison State College reveals the attractive power of the convenience factor in instructional delivery. Students will use their virtual feet to rush to well-designed academic programs that reduce or eliminate the need for scheduled real-time interactions with fellow students, instructors, and other service providers. The nasty little secret about such programs comes from their faculties: online instruction can be as, or more, effective and engaging as traditional instruction, from the perspective of both instructors and students.

Enrollment growing at the state college no one attends
By Diane D'Amico, PressofAtlanticCity.com, January 23, 2006

No one really attends Thomas Edison State College. It has no dormitories, no athletic fields, no classrooms. Still, with more than 11,000 students and growing, Thomas Edison is the fourth-largest of New Jersey's state's nine state colleges. Founded in 1972, when distance learning meant driving a long way to class, its mission is “to create diverse and alternative methods of achieving a college education for mature adults.” Today the college offers a multitude of bachelor's and master's degree programs for people who don't even have to leave the house to learn. “Sometimes people do have a hard time figuring it out,” college President George A. Pruitt said. “But we develop programs based on client needs. It's hard to label us.” Pruitt was just named to a fourth term on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. It's an appropriate role for a man who since 1982 has headed a college that technologically has been far ahead of the times. Thomas Edison was one of the first colleges to use technology to serve students where they were, rather than expecting students to come to them. As more colleges begin to offer online courses and degrees, they are facing issues Pruitt has been addressing for years, such as how to monitor a class that never meets, or a professor students may never see. What other ways are there to find out what a student knows? “You can measure competencies,” Pruitt said. “But first you have to define what a student should know and be able to do to meet the requirements of the course.” Pruitt likes to call Thomas Edison students self-directed because the one thing the college can't do is make them study. Students have to be self-motivated to do the work, even if their best study time is in the middle of the night. The average age of the students is about 40, but that's a bit misleading. Students must be 21 to take classes, and the oldest graduate was 87. “These are very goal-oriented people,” Pruitt said. Almost all had started college before, but never got the chance the finish. Read more ...

Doing the same old thing seldom increases quality

The excerpt below reveals two truths:

• Students will flock to the convenience of web-based self-service.
• Students will avoid a service -- such as a real-time, "live" lecture -- when a service of identical value can be delivered more conveniently via the self-service web. The examples described in the excerpt suggest that students find that live lectures don't add enough value to their web-accessible clones to justify attending class.

When will we stop bolting technology onto traditional instructional practices and start using technology to redesign instruction to be not only more convenient, but also more effective and engaging and less expensive?

More undergrads playing hooky when class notes go online. Some profs pulling materials from Web By Stuart Silverstein, Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2006

Americ Azevedo taught an Introduction to Computers class at the University of California, Berkeley, last semester that featured some of the hotter options in educational technology. By visiting the course's Web sites, the 200 students could download audio recordings or watch digital videos of the lectures, as well as read the instructor's detailed lecture notes and participate in online discussions. But there was one big problem: So many of the undergraduates relied on the technology that, at times, only 20 or so actually showed up for class. "It was demoralizing," Azevedo said. "Getting students out of their media bubble to be here is getting progressively harder." Skipping classes, particularly big lectures where an absence is likely to go undetected, is a time-honored tradition among college undergraduates. These days, however, some professors are witnessing a spurt in absenteeism after adopting technologies that were envisioned as learning aids. As many academics embrace the electronic innovations, others are pushing back. To deter no-shows, they are reverting to lower-tech tactics such as giving more pop quizzes or slashing online offerings. "Too much online instruction is a bad thing," said Terre Allen, a communication studies scholar and director of a center that provides teaching advice to professors at California State University Long Beach. This last term, Allen experimented with posting extensive lecture notes online for her undergraduate course, Language and Behavior. One goal was to relieve students of the burden of furiously scribbling notes, freeing them to focus on the lectures' substance.  Read more ...

Substituting cyber infrastructure and services for physical infrastructure and traditional services

As a Professor Emeritus at UNC-Chapel Hill, I can attest that there are ongoing capital construction and maintenance needs on the campus and at other public institutions in the state -- as described in the article excerpted below.  I often wonder, however, why public institutions do not respond more innovatively to the structural financial conditions that will plague them for the foreseeable future. By using technology to redesign academic programs, student and administrative services, and even the semester-based academic model to give students more flexible options for completing their degree studies, institutions could avoid at least some of the new capital and operating costs implied by enrollment growth and adherence to the campus-based delivery model.

Building Pressure: Just five years after voters in North Carolina passed a huge bond issue, colleges say they need more money for construction and repairs
By Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 20, 2006

Visitors to the campus of the University of North Carolina here might be forgiven for thinking the Tar Heels had exchanged their trademark Carolina blue for orange. Brightly colored temporary fencing festoons nearly every corner of the campus, as construction crews kick up dust and dirt as part of an extraordinary building boom, fueled, in part, by $3.1-billion in bonds approved by North Carolina voters in 2000 for a backlog of repairs and new construction at the state's universities and community colleges. The $1.5-billion in building projects on this one campus amounts to constructing a medium-size research university in the middle of the 26,800-student campus. Despite the infusion of billions of dollars, financial support for repairs and maintenance has not kept pace, even with the state's own minimum requirements for upkeep. As a result, the deferred-maintenance bill for the 16-campus University of North Carolina system alone is approaching $1-billion. And as older buildings age and newer buildings come on line, that figure is likely to grow. So even as higher-education officials celebrate the success of the bond program, they increasingly voice concern that a failure to adequately maintain rundown buildings and brittle infrastructure could lead colleges to actually lose ground in their efforts to expand and improve their facilities. "If we are not careful, we will find ourselves in the same situation we were in before the bond," says J. Bradley Wilson, chairman of the university system's Board of Governors. Chronicle subscribers can read more ...

The convenience factor in spades

I've written in this blog that "convenience of access" is a performance pressure facing most institutions today, if not a performance obligation. The article excerpted below describes how convenient, online access to programs and services is not just a pressure for redesigning and delivering academic programs, but a competitive factor in a broader context that includes almost all aspects of on- and off-campus life.

America's Most Connected Campuses Coolest Campus Tech
Rachel Rosmarin, Forbes.com, January 20, 2006

For Valerie Douglas, an 18-year-old freshman at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., the Internet helped her get settled before she ever set foot on campus. It found her a roommate and friend. Before the term began in fall 2005, the school gave incoming freshmen the chance to meet and greet via a MySpace-style site called FYI (First Year Interface). After sharing profiles, photos, bedtimes and partying habits on the site, Wofford let students who hit it off become roommates. "I had heard so many scary stories about bad roommates," says Douglas. "Luckily, I found myself a great one through the site. It was extremely important to me to have a say in it." Feeling comfortable with the roommate situation is also a great way to minimize the stress that comes with moving away from home, notes Douglas. But social networking tools are only the beginning of the efforts schools are making to harness their students' willingness to live an always connected lifestyle. Cutting-edge tech services are a big draw in an increasingly competitive market for the best and brightest students. Read more ...

Accounting for previous learning

An often overlooked aspect of learning accountability is whether and how institutions account for a student's previous learning, especially through the transfer of credit process. The article excerpted below discusses the coherence and convenience -- or lack thereof -- of the credit-transfer process in California.

UC, Cal State need to help transfer students
By Matt Krupnick, CONTRA COSTA TIMES, January 17, 2006

California's public universities need to do a better job helping the state's 1.6 million community college students transfer to the four-year schools, the state legislative analyst said Tuesday. According to a report by Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill, several obstacles continue to hinder students transferring to the University of California and California State University systems. Universities have not done enough to help students at California's 109 two-year colleges figure out which classes they need to take in order to transfer, Hill's report said. Hill estimated that as few as 19 percent of community college students transfer to four-year schools, a problem due in large part to varying transfer requirements at university campuses. Read more ...

Is there a correlation between academic quality and state spending on higher ed?

A recent report from the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, A New Look at the Institutional Component of Higher Education Finance: A Guide for Evaluating Performance Relative to Financial Resources, notes that, “In response to the question of ‘how much funding is needed?’ the typical answer of ‘more’ or ‘as much as our peers’ leaves out all consideration of performance and affordability to students.” My blog takes the position that performance includes affordability, among several other "obligations," and, thus must include performance measures of expense such as per-credit-hour and per-FTE expense ratios and their trends over time. We commend the fearless pursuit of these issues by NCHEMS and its research  partners. The new report will surely raise some eyebrows and cause some indigestion among higher education leaders in many states, as they review the report's interpretations of the relationship between a state's spending on higher education and the performance of its colleges and universities.

A summary of the report is available at Inside Higher Ed.

Benchmarking performance in the community college sector

Excerpted below is the opening paragraph of a new report from the Lumina Foundation on benchmarking institutional performance, especially in the community college sector. The report is comprehensive and should be of great utility for any community college -- or other college or university -- committed to a culture of evidence or, as the report emphasizes, committed to transitioning to a "culture of inquiry."

Data Don’t Drive: Building a Practitioner-Driven Culture of Inquiry to Assess Community College Performance
Alicia C. Dowd, University of Massachusetts Boston, December 2005

A variety of formal benchmarking practices are being used in higher education today, and these efforts seem to be growing in sophistication. This report reviews those benchmarking practices, particularly those being used at community colleges, and introduces the concept of a “culture of inquiry” as a means for judging their potential value. Campus benchmarking activities share some basic traits: All seek to assess a college’s achievements, shortcomings and environments (often in comparison with peer institutions) and to identify strategies for improvement and innovation. This report classifies benchmarking efforts among three types — performance, diagnostic and process — and characterizes each by its typical use. The report also attempts to gauge the practical value of these various activities in order to judge their capacity to truly inform understanding of institutional productivity and effectiveness. Read more ...

Hope for a better deal from government, or seize the initiative?

The report nicely summarized in the article excerpted below is evidence that my comments in Warning! Absolute and percentage analyses of state higher ed funding may differ apply to community colleges, as well as to public universities. Even more pertinent is the recent call for increased productivity from the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, which reinforces the recurring productivity focus of this blog.  Even the community college sector, which surely deserves greater federal and state support than it receives, must become more productive by learning to use technology to improve and account for learning and service outcomes, increase the convenience of access for students, and simultaneously reduce per-FTE operational costs. Waiting for any level of government to allocate a greater share of its resources to any sector of public higher education is a risky strategy!

The Abandonment of Community Colleges
By Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, January 16, 2006

For at least a decade now, leaders of flagship state universities have been talking about the rapid decline in the state share of their budgets — a decline viewed by many as both historic and unfortunate. A new study — which has yet to be published but is being called a bombshell — suggests that there has been a similar, historic erosion of government support for community colleges in the last 20 years. Among its findings:

• In 1980-81, 16 states contributed at least 60 percent of the budgets of their community colleges. By 2000-1, none did so.
• In 1980-81, 22 states contributed at least half of the budgets for their community colleges, which enrolled 55 percent of all community college students in the country. By 2000-1, only 7 states — enrolling 8 percent of community college students — did so.

External pressure for performance improvements

The excerpted conclusion below from a recent research report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis underscores a persistent theme of this blog: the need for each college and university to improve and account for the quality of its mission outcomes, while improving the flexibility of its academic and administrative services and reducing its unit (per-FTE) expenses -- e.g., the need to increase its productivity. Another persistent theme of this blog is that technology is a necessary, but not sufficient, ingredient in any systemic effort to improve academic productivity. Many of the posts and resources available through this blog provide how-to advice to forward-looking higher ed leaders who are committed to leading such changes.

Stop Paying More for Less: Ways to Boost Productivity in Higher Education
By Thomas A. Garrett and William Poole, The Federal Reserve Board of Saint Louis, The Regional Economist, January 2006

.... Institutions of higher learning are increasing their costs while student quality is stagnant, at best. While a private sector enterprise could not survive in this environment, a relative lack of competition shields universities from productivity-improving pressures. This article outlined several strategies aimed at increasing productivity in higher education, all of which require the unbiased attention of administrators, parents and legislators. Unfortunately, some parties are likely to dismiss such ideas out of hand, and that attitude is part of the reason universities have a productivity problem. Universities that can deliver high quality education at an attractive price will make a difference—an enormous difference—to our society. Read more ...

Warning! Absolute and percentage analyses of state higher ed funding may differ

There have been several reports over the past couple of weeks about a broad based increase in state funding for higher education -- see the excerpted story below. These reports, however, are missing a key point. Tax revenues may be rebounding in a state as its economy recovers, allowing it to allocate more to higher education, but the percentage of the state's revenues flowing to higher are not necessarily increasing even as its absolute year-to-year contribution increases. The result can still be a shrinking percentage of institutional revenues coming from state allocations. Indeed, that has been the persistent pattern for many public institutions for some years now. I believe this is and will continue to be the pattern in most states: state allocations to higher ed will trend upward with time, while the percentage of state revenues flowing to higher ed will continue to trend downward. This means that many institutions will either remain strapped for revenue, find new sources of non-tuition revenue, or raise tuition beyond the affordability of many low- and middle-income students -- unless they use technology to reduce their per-FTE expenses by redesigning their academic and administrative services to improve quality and flexibility and reduce unit costs. Technology is no panacea for higher ed's financial woes, but it is the only tool available for systemically restructuring per-FTE operating expenses -- if we are to continue the traditional semester or quarter model of two- and four-year degree programs. 

A Good Year in the States
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, January 9, 2006

State appropriations for higher education will top $66 billion for the 2005-6 academic year, a 5.3 percent increase. Tight state budgets limited spending on public colleges and state student aid during the first part of this decade, and the latest figures suggest a significant turnaround. The data come from state higher education agencies, and are then collected by the Center for the Study of Education Policy, at Illinois State University. Read more ...