Topic: Educational Transformation
Blog Post
November 4, 2015
A New Frontier for Online Learning
Upper Level Humanities Courses at Small Colleges
As students and their families have become increasingly value-conscious, and competition has heated up, the presidents of small, independent colleges have had to find ways to reduce costs, increase enrollments, or both. These pressures have often meant curricular changes. The humanities have been hit hard by these trends. As the number of humanities majors has declined, small colleges have struggled to maintain a robust humanities course catalog—and, in particular, a set of needed upper-level courses—for the majors that remain. The…
Case Study
November 4, 2015
Leveraging Technology for the Liberal Arts
The Council of Independent Colleges Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction
The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), created in 1956, is a membership organization of nearly 700 independent, non-profit colleges and universities. The organization exists to support college and university leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance public understanding of private higher education’s contributions to society. To achieve these goals, CIC hosts and develops programs, seminars, and conferences that help institutions improve the quality of education, administrative and financial performance, and institutional visibility. Economic pressures have forced presidents of independent colleges to…
Blog Post
October 29, 2015
Valencia College’s Collaborative Re-design
“Culture” is often treated as a mystery ingredient in the recipe for promoting student success. A good culture catalyzes well-designed interventions and produces positives results. A bad culture impedes the take-up or spread of practices that should otherwise work, leading to disappointment. But like airborne yeast in a sourdough, an institution either has good culture or it doesn’t. But what if culture weren’t a background condition? What if, instead, it can be designed, intentionally? And if so, how? Valencia College,…
Case Study
October 29, 2015
Collaborating for Student Success at Valencia College
In recent years, a promising conversation about change at community colleges has emerged. Employing the language of redesign and reinvention, this conversation emphasizes comprehensive, broad-sweeping reform, and calls for a reorientation of community college missions around student learning and student success. Though it is hard to disagree that improving student outcomes is desirable, the traditional enrollment and funding models for community colleges make a true institutional “reset” difficult. Understanding how institutions have successfully gone about redesigning their operations and culture…
Blog Post
October 28, 2015
Is Self-Exploration in College an Outdated Concept?
Time and again, the concept of “self-exploration” as a crucial component of the college experience makes its way into discussions about restructuring undergraduate degree programs in the US. Proponents of such self-exploration argue that focused career-training programs and guided pathways programs are too regimented and narrow, denying students the precious gift of self-exploration and discovery that results from exposure to a vast array of courses of their choosing. Recent innovations in higher education may also limit certain exploratory experiences for…
Blog Post
October 21, 2015
CUNY’s ASAP Program Helps Students Graduate
Will It Scale?
Last week, Inside Higher Ed reported that the City University of New York plans to scale-up their Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, at six CUNY community colleges and three senior colleges that offer associate degrees. The most aggressive effort to expand ASAP will be at Bronx Community College, where all new full-time students will be automatically enrolled in the program. One goal of the plan is to increase Bronx Community College’s three-year graduation rate from 11 percent…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015
Can Online Courses Make Humanities Courses More Accessible in Small, Independent Colleges?
The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, established a Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction in 2014. Twenty-one colleges that constituted the consortium agreed to develop online or hybrid courses that could be shared by all participants in the consortium and had three major goals for this project: To provide an opportunity for CIC member institutions to build their capacity for online humanities instruction and share their successes with other liberal arts colleges. To…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015
Online Learning Markets: Inter-Institutional Challenges
In my last blog post, I described some of the challenges that must be addressed in the institutional context if online learning technologies are going to have maximum impact on the way registered students at existing institutions learn and on the costs associated with that instruction. The barriers described in that post are intra-institutional in nature: faculty concerns, addressing teaching specialization, governance, and cost management. In this post, I want to address important inter-institutional challenges to a robust “business-to-business”…
Research Report
October 20, 2015
CIC Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction
Evaluation Report for First Course Iteration
Summary of Findings This report provides our preliminary analysis of evidence generated from the planning period and first iteration of CIC Consortium courses. It includes a summary of our findings, followed by a description and presentation of a good portion of the data for those interested in delving deeper. It is important to note that these courses finished very recently, and we (like the faculty members involved) are still processing what we have learned. We have amassed a considerable mass…
Blog Post
October 16, 2015
Learning with MOOCs II
Conference Review (October 2-3, 2015)
A couple of weeks ago I attended “Learning with MOOCs: II,” a conference at Teacher’s College at Columbia University (the conference was the second of its type; the first, which I was unable to attend was held at MIT in October of 2014). In many ways, Learning with MOOCS II seemed a well-timed follow up to an Inside Higher Ed article written by Candace Thille, John Mitchell, and Mitchell Stevens published in late September. In this article, Thille,…
Blog Post
October 8, 2015
Should Higher Education be More Vocational?
On June 8, Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, sent a letter to the 86 national universities, asking them to take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities] departments or convert them to areas that would better meet society’s needs.” American educators have been both perplexed and critical of this mandate, some to the point of threatening to end exchange programs with Japanese universities. For those who love the humanities and social sciences, it…
Blog Post
October 1, 2015
Reducing the Pell Graduation Gap: What Works?
Two weeks ago, the New York Times published its second annual “College Access Index,” which measures socioeconomic diversity and accessibility at America’s highest performing colleges and universities. Adjusting its methodology from last year, the 2015 College Access Index incorporated each institution’s average Pell Grant recipient graduation rate into its score (a new addition), along with the institution’s Pell enrollment rate and net price for low income students (both of which were used in the index’s 2014 iteration). Last…
Blog Post
September 29, 2015
Testing the Impact of Proactive Advising
A growing body of research has attributed at least part of the gap in degree completion between low- and high-income undergraduates to low-income students’ difficulty navigating the terrain of academic choices in college. Deciding on a major, choosing courses, and recognizing a warning sign and knowing what to do about it are all more challenging for students who have less background familiarity with college. Ill-informed choices have real consequences: A student’s failure to register for even a…
Blog Post
September 21, 2015
Double Trouble
Sweet Briar College and Cooper Union
Lawrence S. Bacow, president emeritus of Tufts University and leader in residence at the Harvard Kennedy School, and William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and founding chairman of ITHAKA, have commented recently on the ill-fated interventions by state attorneys general into the operations of American colleges as they attempt to make strategic shifts to address imposing financial challenges. Today in our latest issue brief, Double Trouble: Sweet Briar College and Cooper Union, Bacow and Bowen share…
Blog Post
September 15, 2015
Online Learning Markets: Institutional Challenges
In late July I posted on the different markets that exist for technology enhanced teaching and learning in higher education. To summarize the assertion from that post: there are substantial differences between the activities and impact of courses delivered by online learning platforms directly to individuals and those delivered through institutions to students. The latter represents a “business-to-business” case that must overcome different obstacles for success than “direct-to-consumer” offerings like MOOCs. I promised in that post to highlight a…
Blog Post
September 10, 2015
Developing a Strategic Focus in North Carolina’s Community Colleges
With 58 schools that enroll more than 800,000 students annually, the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) is the third largest system of higher education in the nation. The prospect of getting such a large and complex system to align on anything would strike many as unrealistic. Yet, NCCCS’ efforts to establish a strategic focus on access, excellence, and success has permeated the priorities of both the System Office and institutions throughout the state. NCCCS has achieved more than mission-alignment,…
Case Study
September 10, 2015
Reshaping System Culture at the North Carolina Community College System
With 58 schools that enroll more than 800,000 students annually, the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) is the third largest system of higher education in the nation.[1] In 2010, NCCCS embarked on SuccessNC, a strategic initiative focused on sharing best practices, developing performance-based student success metrics, and testing system-wide policies to improve student access and success across all NCCCS schools. The SuccessNC initiative states that its ultimate target is increasing “the percentage of students who transfer, complete…
Blog Post
September 2, 2015
Assessing the Potential of Gamification in Higher Education
Last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article that profiled “Ball State Achievements,” a mobile application by the university that incentivizes participation among low-income students in campus activities, such as attending an organization’s event or going to the campus gym, by rewarding points to students (which can later be redeemed for campus currency), like you would to a player in a game. The underlying idea is that students who participate in activities outside the classroom are more…
Blog Post
August 31, 2015
The Birth of an Uber Learning Economy
Before the financial crisis of 2008, the typical answer to differentiating yourself in a job market crowded with bachelor’s degrees was to get yet more college by earning a master’s degree. But since the recession, enrollment in graduate school has been essentially flat as fewer students seem to want to take on the debt of going back to school or question the return on investment in a tough job market. A front-page article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this…
Blog Post
August 27, 2015
Fair Use and Online Learning
The world of online learning presents some unpleasant surprises when it comes to sharing materials. Recently, a university librarian from a selective private institution told me a story that put a nice point on this issue. One of the university’s schools had recently launched a collaborative online degree with peer institutions. Faculty members teaching in the program contacted the library to ask for help with making course materials available to the online students. When the librarians explained to them that…