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

Right Brain Rising

This book has been out awhile, but I finally got around to reading Pink's "A Whole New Mind." His basic argument is an age of abundance with automation and outsourcing picking up many of the industrial-age left-brain tasks, right brain concerns (high concept, high touch) are more and more predominant. As a consequence, we need to emphasize things like design, story telling, symphony (connectedness), empathy, play, and meaning. Here's the Wikipedia summary - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Whole_New_Mind.

As a dedicated left-brain type, I found some of the argument overdone, especially as I read arguments on the other end of the spectrum about how understanding number crunching is more and more important in the modern world (see Supercrunchers, for example, www.supercrunchers.com). But there's clearly a lot of interesting material in Pink's book. For anyone doing design, to take one example, you can follow IDEO's "method card" approach (http://www.ideo.com/work/item/method-cards). The chapter on play is obviously dear to my heart, but the chapter on meaning seems particularly relevant to our JBU world. Each chapter has possible ways to improve your right brain skills. The author likes labyrinths, for example, which I've only done half a dozen times, but I'll be more conscious of in the future, as I will in a number of these right-brain areas.

Teaching Tips from Teach for America

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

One of the better articles I've read about teaching. A few snippets. (And here's the link to the forthcoming book - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0470432861/theatlanticmonthA/ref=nosim/).

"the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter."

"Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good schools—than among schools."

"First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness."

"Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls."

"one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake"

"In fact, for many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher’s absence.”

"What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record. . . . Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer. (Grit also predicts retention of cadets at West Point, Duckworth has found.)"

"But another trait seemed to matter even more. Teachers who scored high in “life satisfaction”—reporting that they were very content with their lives—were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues."

"In general, though, Teach for America’s staffers have discovered that past performance—especially the kind you can measure—is the best predictor of future performance. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers. And the two best metrics of previous success tend to be grade-point average and “leadership achievement”—a record of running something and showing tangible results. If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size, that’s promising."