More on the direction of higher education?

This from an Eduventures report. Even more reason why private higher education has to focus on its distinctive Christian mission and its "engaged learning" educational philosophy.

https://www1.vtrenz.net/imarkownerfiles/ownerassets/884/Eduventures%202009%20Annual%20Report%20Summary.pdf

In a very simple sense, a college or university is three things in combination: curriculum, faculty, and credentials. Students, for the most part, attend these institutions in order to study subjects with experienced teachers to earn degrees. Together, these three elements comprise a “value chain,” or set of interlocking
services and products that in combination are transacted in such a ways as to provide more value than they might independently. Recent, disruptive innovations within higher education, however, suggest that new forms of value might be emerging that could undo the traditional higher education value chain. Take, for example,
MIT’s Open Courseware initiative, nearly a decade old now, which allows individuals from around the world to view digital materials associated with nearly all of the courses delivered by the institution. Consider also the growing interest in competency-based credentials such as those offered by Western Governors University.
And fi nally, look at StraighterLine, a recently launched subscription service that offers self-paced, online general education courses at $99 a month. Through its relationship with the American Council on Education’s Transcript Services, StraighterLine offers its customers access to college credits at a fraction of the cost of traditional colleges and universities. Interestingly, StraighterLine emerged as a standalone enterprise after being incubated within the online tutoring company Smarthinking – suggesting that the establishment of a curriculum company was a natural outgrowth from what is essentially a teaching organization.

Now imagine a scenario where an individual (the “student”) somewhere in the world hires a tutor (the “faculty”) somewhere else in the world to guide her through freely available course materials (the “curriculum”), which might be available anywhere in the world, before taking a competency-based exam (the “credential”) that has recognized market value in one or another profession. Would there even be a
need for universities anymore?

The effectiveness of "awe"?

This article offered an interesting explanation for why I so frequently forward articles to people around JBU and around the world (i.e. I'm really looking for emotional bonding?).


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?em

The "Future of the Library" Debate?

There have been a lot of these types of pieces recently regarding whether the library will increasingly go virtual or, more accurately, how fast the library will go virtual and in what form. As this article suggests, I tend to think it will happen more slowly with incremental gains over a couple of decades.

"Taken together, these studies point to twin conclusions: The sooner professors and students embrace e-books, the sooner their libraries can start saving money -- but that might not happen for a while."

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/10/libraries

Attention and learning

Basically, most scholars think multi-tasking is bad for learning, even to the point of banning people from taking notes (let alone having any electronic devices) in class. A small cadre, however, thinks that we should be leveraging our students’ “hyper-attentive” proclivities instead of trying to reroute them into “deep attention.” But the bottom line is that those who think they are good multi-taskers probably aren’t. They’re just getting a buzz from juggling all of these balls at the same time.

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Losing the faith at college?

This study says similar things to what I’ve seen for other studies on faith-based institutions. If people lose their faith, they tend to go down that path in their teens and twenties. They are most likely to lose their faith, however, if they never attend college. Fewer lose their faith if they attend any college, even a secular institution. Even fewer lose their faith if they attend a faith-based institution. What I believe has the Cardinal Newman society upset is not just the loss of faith by some at Catholic colleges but that the type of faith students come out of college with tends to skew more to the political left than it did when students come into those institutions. Again, that’s fairly typical of people in their teens and twenties, but perhaps it’s even more so the case in our contemporary academic culture. (I’m reminded of Churchill’s self-serving quotation that “if you’re young and conservative, you have no heart, but if you’re old and liberal, you have no mind.”)

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/01/catholic

And to confirm the point that people who go to college tend to be more liberal (whether there's causation or just correlation here is another question), there's this recent study from ISI, a study which also shows that colleges don't appear to foster much in the way of civics education.

http://chronicle.com/article/College-Makes-Students-More/64040/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en