Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Dillard University Emergency Contact Information - June 2010
Additionally, please take this opportunity to sign up for the university’s E2 Campus Emergency Alert System. Please click on this link to access and complete: e2Campus - Emergency Alerts.
This system will send notification of impending emergencies/crisis situations to all registered mobile devices (via SMS/text messaging), PDAs, email addresses, text pagers, and RSS feeds. The system can also send real-time messages to anyone using Google, My AOL, My Yahoo, or Windows Live. You may sign up at the link below.
Thanks,
Lori L. Knight
Director, Human Resources
Dillard University
2601 Gentilly Blvd, RH 307
New Orleans, LA 70122
P 504.816.4797
F 504.816.4187
lknight@dillard.edu
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Academic Leader: Renew Program-Level Learning Outcomes: Q&A with presenter Dr. Lisa Shibley
5 Steps to Renew Program-Level Learning Outcomes
Featured Higher Education Presenter: Lisa Shibley, Ph.D.
Date: Thursday, 07/22/10
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 PM CDT
Cost: $239 ($264 after 07/15/10)
Three easy ways to register!
Phone: 800-433-0499 / 608-246-3590
Email: support@magnapubs.com
Learning outcomes assessment is a critical part of a program’s success. It can affect a program’s reputation, enrollment, funding, and even its continued existence. Therefore, it’s essential to get useful assessment data without creating an overwhelming burden for busy faculty members. In an interview with Academic Leader, Lisa Shibley, assistant vice president for Institutional Assessment and Planning at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, discussed effective program-level assessment methods. On July 22 Dr. Shibley will lead the Magna Online Seminar 5 Steps to Renew Program-Level Learning Outcomes Assessment.
AL: What are some characteristics of effective program-level assessment?
Shibley: You need to do something with the results. Oftentimes, data is collected and reported, but what’s being done with it? So often assessment is focused on improving students’ learning, but there’s also an opportunity to showcase what a department or program is doing as well. It could be used to help improve the learning opportunities for students. It could also be used to promote the program to incoming students.
I think it’s important that faculty work collaboratively to define learning outcomes so that they’re all on the same page. And I think that’s a great faculty development opportunity. Sometimes with assessment initiatives, just having the conversation is valuable. Assessment helps faculty see how their course is connected to the overall program. At another level, it may help faculty help students understand why they might need a particular course as part of their program. Effective assessment needs to include direct evidence of student learning–what skills, abilities, knowledge, and attributes are they exhibiting as a result of participating in the program? Direct evidence could include embedded test questions, portfolios, or standardized tests. There can be a combination of direct and indirect evidence, which is typically measured by instruments such as surveys and exit interviews. I think you have to be realistic in terms of resources. I think one of the things that makes an assessment program successful is being cognizant of faculty members’ other responsibilities.
AL: How can programs coordinate their assessment efforts?
Shibley: One of the things that’s important is that there are opportunities for faculty to share information. If they’re not working together on a particular assessment initiative at the department level or they’ve divided it up depending on the research that is available, they need to share so that they’re aware of the implications of the assessment. I also think that just by having those conversations you might be able to help faculty understand that they’re doing assessment already and that all they need to do is formalize it and share it so that it benefits the program as a whole.
AL: Who should be in charge of assessment?
Shibley: The obvious answer is faculty, particularly a faculty member who has been participating in or who has expressed an interest in assessment. I think more and more departments are finding that new faculty coming in have some kind of assessment experience or they have knowledge of the scholarship of teaching and learning. So take advantage of that, but don’t burden the new faculty members with that as they go through the promotion and tenure process. You need to bring in other faculty who are tenured because when senior-level faculty support the initiative you gain respect for it.
Q&A
This seminar includes the opportunity to interact with the facilitator and other participants through polls and discussion questions, along with the opportunity to pose individual questions to the presenter.
Who should attend?
This is a topic of importance to many institutional representatives, including:
• Instructors and faculty
• Department chairs
• Teams of faculty involved in assessment within their department
• School deans
• Assessment coordinators
• Institutional research staff
• Administrators
Google Docs: Search Old Scanned Documents By Uploading Them To Google Docs (via Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land)
Jun 23, 2010 at 9:12am ET by Barry Schwartz
The Google Docs Blog announced you can now upload old scanned documents into Google Docs and Google will OCR the documents. OCR will convert the text scans from a picture into selectable and searchable text within Google Docs, which you can then export to a multitude of file types.
Back in October, Google would OCR web documents that were scans and make those searchable. But there was no easy way for a normal user to scan in their own document and have Google OCR it outside of using the Google API. Now anyone can go to Google Docs, click upload and have Google convert the scans to text for you.
Currently, the supported language for this method of OCR are English, French, Italian, German and Spanish but I am sure Google will continue to add more over time.
BCR: Bibliographical Center for Research Website - FREE Professional Development for Faculty Librarians & Library Paraprofessionals
Mission Statement
BCR's mission is to bring libraries together for greater success by expanding their knowledge, reach and power.
BCR's mission is to bring libraries together for greater success by expanding their knowledge, reach and power.
Strategic Priorities
•Increase national awareness of BCR among current and high-potential customers, collaborators, influencers and partners.
•Continue redefining and repositioning BCR as a nimble collaborative organization that meets the needs of libraries and other identified constituencies.
•Ensure BCR’s long-term sustainability by growing the collaborative and developing new business ventures that diversify and build on BCR’s core competencies.
•Continue repositioning BCR for the future by making strategic investments in both technology and human resources.
BCR (Bibliographical Center for Research) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit headquartered in Aurora, Colorado.
For more information contact them info@bcr.org.
FREE Continuing Education & Training Links!
Distance Education Report Online Seminar: Accommodating Students with Disabilities in Online Courses
Featured Higher Education Presenter: David Wood
Date: Thursday, 9/02/10
Time: 12:30-1:30 PM Central Daylight Time
Cost: $229 ($254 after 8/26/10)
Three easy ways to register!
Phone: 800-433-0499 / 608-246-3590
Email: support@magnapubs.com
One of the first steps in the process of making sure that you are meeting the needs of students with disabilities is to take a look at some of the most useful assistive technologies that are currently being used to access online courses. Accommodating Students with Disabilities in Online Courses covers all the bases and provides concrete steps to make sure online courses are meeting the needs of every type of student. In 90 minutes, it's possible to become familiar with assistive technologies and get the entire team up to speed.
Major topics:
• Course Design: Doing it right the first time
• Assistive Technologies: How disabled students navigate courses
• Contact Methods: Email, TTY
• Social Networking: The problems and opportunities
• Transcripts and Closed Captioning: The best and the rest
• Accessibility Committees: Forming an oversight team
As with any Magna Online Seminar, there’s plenty of interaction, including live question and answer, polling to help guide the discussion, and screenshots of handouts and programs. Each attendee will also take home checklists, templates and informational sheets to make implementation easy.
Must-have information for:
• Disability Service Coordinators
• Distance Learning Facilitators
• Developmental Lab Coordinators
• Faculty
• Administrators
• Course Designers
• And any member of the online education team.
Presenter
David Wood is a leader in online course design and accessibility issues. He serves as the IT Access Coordinator for the Dallas County Community College District, where he assists faculty in making online courses more accessible. Mr. Wood is also a regular contributor to online education conferences.
Stay on the cutting edge
In addition to the invaluable content and implementation tools, Magna Online Seminars allow you to pay just one fee and invite the whole team. No more outrageous travel expenses or conference registration fees. Our seminars are easily set up anywhere, from a small office to a large auditorium.
Inside Higher Ed: Mounting Congressional Scrutiny of For-Profit Colleges June 22 2010 & 'Bad Apples' or Something More? June 24 2010
Five Congressional Democrats on Monday asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to begin a study of for-profit higher education that would look at institutional quality and business practices. The request comes just days after a House of Representatives hearing on accreditation that included criticism on the sector, and on the same day that witnesses were announced for Thursday's Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on the for-profits. (The group scheduled to testify has a decided slant against the sector. The witnesses are Kathleen Tighe, the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general; Steven Eisman, an investor who has warned that the sector is "as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry"; Yasmine Issa, a former student at the for-profit Sanford Brown Institute; Margaret Reiter, a former California deputy attorney general and consumer advocate; and Sharon Thomas Parrott, chief compliance officer at DeVry, Inc.)
The request for a GAO review came from the chairs of the House and Senate education committees -- Rep. George Miller of California and Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa -- and three other influential members, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Reps. Timothy Bishop of New York and Ruben Hinojosa of Texas. Citing "recent press reports [that] have raised questions about the quality of proprietary institutions" in a letter to the GAO, the members requested information on the sector's recent growth, as well as data on program quality, student outcomes and the amount of corporate revenues that comes from the Title IV federal financial aid program and other government sources. They also asked for a consideration of whether the Education Department's regulations on Title IV program integrity (in the process of being revised) do enough to safeguard against waste and fraud.
Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, the sector's largest lobbying group, said he welcomes the review. "We have every expectation that the GAO, using facts and figures, will provide a full and fair review." He also asked that the Education Department hold off on issuing final regulations aimed at ensuring integrity in federal financial aid programs: "Secretary Duncan has said repeatedly he wants to get the regulatory changes right, and waiting for the GAO to conduct its study is one way to further that goal."
_____________________________________
'Bad Apples' or Something More? June 24, 2010
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/24/forprofit
WASHINGTON -- Two weeks ago, the hub of the federal government’s scrutiny of for-profit higher education was the U.S. Department of Education, where a team of staffers were putting the finishing touches on a set of proposed regulations aimed at reining in abuses of the federal financial aid program.
Abruptly, though, since the draft rules were released to reporters and Congressional staffers on June 15, the activity has moved to Capitol Hill -- a change in location that has been accompanied by an equally sudden and stark shift in the focus and tone of the debate about for-profit colleges and universities.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other Obama administration officials have often sought to characterize their probing of the for-profit sector as aimed at identifying "bad actors" and as part of a search for new measures of "value” for postsecondary institutions of all types, be they public, independent or corporate.
But the rhetoric and activity coming from Congress has thus far been harsher, suggesting skepticism among lawmakers in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle about the behavior of -- and appropriate role in higher education for -- private sector colleges. The intensity of the language and the assertions of systemic problems recall for some observers the last period of broad-based and aggressive scrutiny of for-profit higher education, a set of hearings that led to major revisions of the Higher Education Act in 1992
When the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee today holds the first in a series of oversight hearings examining for-profit colleges and the rapidly increasing federal education dollars that flow to them through students, the discourse is likely to be anything but friendly toward the sector.
Some of the best evidence of the probable tenor comes from the committee itself. In a written statement, the chairman, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), said the hearings would aim to “ensure that students are actually getting the knowledge and skills they need to pay off the debt” they accrue at for-profit institutions. “While for-profit colleges have a responsibility to their shareholders, they also have a responsibility to provide educational value to their students, and an obligation to ensure that the federal dollars they receive are well spent.”
Between 2000 and 2009, the amount of Title IV federal aid -- Pell grants, Stafford loans and all other aid administered by the Department of Education -- going to for-profit institutions grew $4.6 billion to $26.5 billion. Enrollments nearly tripled from 673,000 in 2000 to 1.8 million in 2008 (and even higher since then with the nationwide rise in unemployment). While students at the institutions make up about 10 percent of the postsecondary student population, their institutions receive 24 percent of Title IV funds.
While the Senate has initiated its head-on scrutiny of the sector, the House of Representatives at least began its examination a bit more circuitously.
Last week, the House Education and Labor Committee conducted a hearing billed as an examination of accreditors and the credit hour. But the committee’s chair, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), used discussion of a for-profit institution’s allocation of too much credit for some courses as a way into big-picture questioning of the sector. “Institutions now have requirements to shareholders, to profit margins, to the stock market and to others,” he said. “This is a matter of serious concern.”
After that hearing, Democratic staffers said, Miller and fellow House Democrats Timothy Bishop, of New York, and Ruben Hinojosa, of Texas, came together with Harkin and Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) to sign a request for the Government Accountability Office to a conduct a wide-reaching review examining the sector’s academic quality and use of federal funds.
On Monday, they sent a letter to Gene L. Dodaro, the office’s acting comptroller general, that cited “[r]ecent press reports [which] have raised questions about the quality of proprietary institutions” that “stem from the rapid growth of this industry over the last few years, reported aggressive recruitment of students by such institutions, increased variety in the delivery methods used to provide education to students, and the value of the education provided by such institutions.”
For-profit college officials and Congressional Republicans alike say they share a desire for more data. Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, said in a Monday statement that he welcomed the call for more information about the institutions and their performance. “It is time for analysis by anecdote to end,” he said. “We have every expectation that the GAO, using facts and figures, will provide a full and fair review…. Private sector colleges and universities, operating under the triad of regulation -- federal and state governments and federally approved accreditors -- are equipping men and women from all walks of life to be successful in a globally competitive workforce, and the GAO report will confirm that.”
A Republican Senate committee staffer said that members of his party would likely have signed onto the data request had they been asked. “We were never approached,” the staffer said. “As far as I know, no Republicans were asked to sign on to it.”
The aide stressed that Democrats seem to be establishing a partisan divide on the issue. “It’s unfortunate that Harkin is making this into a partisan issue because it’s not,” he said. “There certainly seem to be some problems in the for-profit sector that need to be addressed and anecdotal information isn’t really a smart way to make policy. We need a better, more comprehensive look.”
This spring, the staffer added, Sens. Mike Enzi, of Wyoming, and Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, who is also a former secretary of the Education Department, had asked Harkin to hold a hearing specifically discussing the department’s proposed regulations and their potential influence on for-profit colleges, but “the response was this general hearing.”
The Hearing
That hearing -- today's -- is the Senate's first in-depth examination of the sector since 1990, when the now-retired Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) held a series of drama-filled hearings that generated amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965 that ended up putting some career colleges out of business and forcing many others to change their student recruitment and employee compensation practices.
“Given the massive investment that we’ve made in federal aid, it’s the responsibility of the chairman to ask the right questions,” a Democratic committee aide said, elaborating on Harkin’s statement. “It’s hard to see everything that’s out there on student defaults, debt, questions around outcome measures and hear people basically suggesting that the federal aid programs are being used to the detriment of students and the taxpayers, and not do something.”
The hearing comes as concerns mount that the Pell grant maximum will need to be cut by $800 per student in fiscal year 2011 to make up for an $8 billion shortfall. As lawmakers look at the billions of dollars flowing to for-profits, they can't help but wonder whether some of that money could be better distributed to less expensive institutions. The proposed Title IV program integrity rules would start to decrease the amount of federal aid going to for-profit institutions, said Teddy Downey, an analyst at Washington Research Group, but a Congressional limit of some kind might go even further. "Democrats aren’t going to want to fight tooth and nail for a large increase in Pell grants if these hearings turn out to reveal that there is a lot of bad behavior throughout the industry."
Committee staffers wouldn’t confirm how many more hearings are to come, only promising that more will follow over a not-yet-determined period of time.
Set to testify first today is Kathleen S. Tighe, the Education Department’s inspector general, who in her prepared testimony identified several areas of “waste, fraud and abuse in the proprietary sector.” The Education Department’s proposed regulations, she said, would address many -- but not all -- of the problems and still need to go through a final round of public comment and revisions without being substantively changed to have the kind of effect she hopes to see.
Three others testifying are all outspoken critics of the sector: Steven Eisman, a Wall Street trader (known as a "short seller") who has begun calling for-profit loan debt the next subprime mortgage crisis; Yasmine Issa, a graduate of the for-profit Sanford-Brown Institute who is saddled with more than $20,000 in loan debt and says she can’t get a job in the field for which her training was intended to prepare her; and Margaret Reiter, a former California deputy attorney general and consumer advocate who is an unabashed foe of for-profit higher colleges. The only panelist representing the for-profit colleges is Sharon Thomas Parrott, senior vice president of government and regulatory affairs and chief compliance officer at DeVry, Inc.
Stacking the panel seemingly decisively in opposition to for-profit colleges naturally rubs the sector the wrong way. In a statement, the CCA said that because the witness list is “composed almost entirely of sector critics,” it “is unlikely to help the American people understand the important changes taking place in postsecondary education.”
Harris Miller, the group's president, has insisted that he welcomes the scrutiny -- something he's said in his statements on the GAO report and the Senate hearing -- but as Congress' rhetoric has ratcheted up, so too has the for-profit sector's.
After the witnesses for the first panel were announced on Monday, Miller issued his second statement of the day, saying he was “surprised that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan or one of his lieutenants is not the primary witness to give the committee a broad overview of higher education and our sector’s role in it.” Instead, that role seems to have been given to Eisman, who Miller described as “a Wall Street short-seller born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who got his first big paycheck the old-fashioned way, through his parents” and who stands to make money if for-profit higher education stocks fall as a result of hearing testimony.
Miller’s attack on Eisman went further on Wednesday, when he held an hourlong news conference questioning Eisman’s motives and attempting to discredit the investor’s paralleling of for-profit higher education to subprime mortgages. “Comparing the for-profit career college sector to the subprime mortgage banking industry is as silly as it is simplistic,” Miller said, before listing the many differences he sees.
Miller also used the conference as a chance to again assert his sector’s opposition to the Education Department’s use of a student debt-to-income ratio to determine whether a program prepares its graduates for “gainful employment."
Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, defends Eisman’s views of the sector. “If his diagnosis fit the mainstream position of the sell-side position, he’d take it,” Nassirian said. “I hope people understand how meaningful this is. This is a guy who when the same kind of orthodoxy reigned supreme on mortgages, he broke ranks -- housing is a good thing but giving people loans they can’t afford to pay is unsustainable. He’s making the same case vis-Ã -vis the for-profit higher education sector. What’s being peddled is not education.”
Democratic Senate staffers also defended the decision to include Eisman on the panel. “This guy predicted the last subprime crisis and now he’s saying Congress is sitting on a massive problem, there’s something pretty outrageous going on here,” one said. “When you start having criticisms of that high a level you have to confront them, look into them one way or another.”
Even if some lawmakers or observers are critical of Eisman’s potential financial stake in the outcome of any Washington action on for-profit higher education, Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access and Success, noted that Sharon Thomas Parrott, who is testifying on behalf of DeVry, also has a financial interest. “Eisman’s being transparent in his financial interests,” Abernathy said. “People can evaluate what he has to say and at least take in the facts.”
“Bad Apples” or a Rotten Orchard?
Since late January, when a negotiated rule-making process ended with representatives of for-profit and nonprofit institutions unable to agree on several key issues, Department of Education staff members have worked behind the scenes to complete revisions of a set of regulations aimed at guarding against abuse and waste in the Title IV federal financial aid program.
Throughout the spring, the CCA and the major for-profit higher education companies spent millions of dollars lobbying the department and Congress. At the same time, department officials, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, repeatedly said they were focused on identifying and eliminating the “bad apples” among the institutions. Again and again -- at least in interviews and speeches -- they stressed that they were not trying to root out the whole sector.
In training their sights on for-profit higher education, and especially in the rhetoric they have used in doing so, though, Congressional Democrats appear more willing to question the quality and performance of the entire sector in a dramatic way. They’re starting with an examination of the sector as a whole to determine whether the problems being reported are just at some institutions or are widespread.
Anthony Guida, senior vice president of regulatory affairs and strategic development at Education Management Company, said that it’s “not surprising considering the amount of federal funds that our sector receives that Congress wants to take a closer look” at where that money is going. “I would hope that as the hearings develop that the focus is really on are we delivering a quality education and are we serving students,” he said. “Hopefully the GAO assessment will allow the discussion to go from hyperbole and anecdotes about a small number of incidents and move into a fact-based discussion of the whole sector.”
Abernathy – whose organization was headed by Robert Shireman, the outgoing deputy under secretary of education, who has led the department's review of for-profit colleges -- said she considers bad actors and a full-on sector review to be one and the same. "When the industry talks about bad actors it’s a reason not to act," she said. "When Secretary Duncan talks about bad actors, it's the reason we need to act."
The current business model of for-profit colleges -- bolstered in large part by federal aid dollars -- "rewards companies based on new enrollments, which doesn't reward the good actors who actually guide students through to a degree," Abernathy said. "We need standards and rules so that good actors can succeed and become the norm."
But whether this series of hearings will be as dramatic and sector-changing as the Nunn hearings is up for debate.
“I think what you’re seeing on the Senate side is a replay of the Nunn hearings on steroids,” Nassirian said. “The fraud and abuse are on steroids. What the Nunn hearings uncovered were financially sort of incomparable to what’s going on now -- the scale of what’s going on here is so much greater. And the corporatization of the proprietary sector and their newfound connection to Wall Street and the advent of the publicly traded ‘school’ have put waste, fraud and abuse on steroids.”
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said he’s not sure. “The evidence of abuse was pretty apparent when the Nunn hearing began. It was not unheard-of to find default rates of 50 and 60 percent. For-profit school owners were convicted of crimes; one of the witnesses was brought into the Nunn hearings in handcuffs.”
Now, though, he said, “I think what you have are, frankly, a lot of questions.” Whether those questions yield answers that do dramatic damage to the sector -- or, perhaps, bring about significant improvements -- has yet to be seen.
— Jennifer Epstein
ICS Institute of Education Sciences Funding Opportunities Grant Webinars
http://ies.ed.gov/funding/webinars/index.asp
Research Funding Webinars Scheduled
The National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) and the National Center for Education Research (NCER) within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) will host a series of webinars related to research funding opportunities between May and August. The dates and topics for all of the webinars are listed below.
Research Funding Webinars Scheduled
The National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) and the National Center for Education Research (NCER) within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) will host a series of webinars related to research funding opportunities between May and August. The dates and topics for all of the webinars are listed below.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
U.S. News and World Report: 4 Reasons Why the Library Should Affect Your College Choice
The library is a home away from home for a lot of students, so get to know what it can do for you.
By Jeff Greer - Posted June 17, 2010
11 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Popular Google Products!
Henry Jones at Web Design Ledger provides 11 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Popular Google Products. Each one of these useful graphics maps out keyboard shortcuts for Google applications including:
• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Google Calculator
• Google Presentations
• Google Chrome
• Google Spreadsheets
• Google Reader
• Google Maps
• Google Documents
• Google Search Advanced Operators
IDEALS: Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
IDEALS collects, disseminates, and provides persistent and reliable access to the research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Faculty, staff, and graduate students can deposit their research and scholarship - unpublished and, in many cases, published - directly into IDEALS. Departments can use IDEALS to distribute their working papers, technical reports, or other research material. Contact Sarah Shreeves, IDEALS Coordinator, for more information.
LIS Research: Library and Information Science Research Coalition Website
The LIS Research Coalition was established on 2 March 2009 by its founding members.
The broad mission of the LIS Research Coalition is to facilitate a co-ordinated and strategic approach to LIS research across the UK. The Coalition aims to bring together information about LIS research opportunities and results; encourage dialogue between research funders; promote LIS practitioner research and the translation of research outcomes into practice; articulate a strategic approach to LIS research; and promote the development of research capacity in LIS. The Coalition will provide a formal structure to improve access to LIS research, and maximise its relevance and impact in the UK.
AIR: Association of Institutional Research Website
About AIR
MISSION: The mission of the Association for Institutional Research is to support quality data and decisions for higher education.
LEADERSHIP: AIR is governed by an 11-member volunteer Board of Directors elected by the membership. Terms are staggered for three years except for the Association Forum Chair whose term is two years.
INCORPORATION: Incorporated in Michigan in 1966 and doing business in Florida since 1974 as a 501(c)(3) Non-profit organization, Federal ID 36-6149972.
MEMBERSHIP: 4,200 members
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: $3.8 million
ANNUAL FORUM: AIR sponsors an annual four-day Forum each spring. The Forum brings together approximately 1,500 institutional research professionals to learn the newest methods of institutional research, exchange information and ideas about postsecondary educational institutions, and network with colleagues. The variety and depth of programming for the Forum are wide-ranging covering six tracks. Session formats include individual presentations, panels, and demonstrations. In addition, there are Pre-Forum Workshops offering the opportunity for professionals to acquire skills or develop an area of interest.
OTHER PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMS: AIR, with support from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), offers a National Summer Data Policy Institute as part of the Improving Institutional Research in Postsecondary Educational Institutions Grant Program. Attendance is based upon proposals submitted annually. There are also half- and full-day Pre-Forum Workshops and two to three Professional Development Institutes held during the summer around the country. In addition, AIR, through a grant from NCES, assists groups in coordinating data collecting methods for the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
AIR/NCES Postdoctoral Policy Fellows in Washington - A project funded by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Postdoctoral Fellow positions will be responsible for undertaking analysis that results in improvements to the quality, comparability, and usefulness of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
Fellows will be introduced to the Washington higher education policy community through meetings, seminars and conversations. It is expected that Fellows will be advanced graduate students completing dissertations, postdoctoral students, or institutional research professionals.
AIR/NCES Fellowships for Graduate Study: AIR, as part of its contract to improve the quality of institutional research in U.S. postsecondary education systems and hence, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), offers a national graduate fellowship program funded by the NCES.
Specific program goals are to have more people better trained in IR and completing advanced degrees thereby increasing the national level of expertise of institutional research officers and the data that they produce. Fellowships for up to $10,000 annually for up to three years will be competitively awarded for full- or part-time graduate study advancing or leading to careers in institutional research at accredited U.S. universities at the certificate, masters, or doctorate levels.
The proposal deadline is in the spring of each year. Awards will be announced in April.
ELECTRONIC SERVICES:
The Electronic AIR is a free online newsletter distributed monthly to anyone interested in institutional research. E-AIR includes topics of interest, changes in jobs and locations of members, IR employment opportunities, and calls for professional help.
AIR Alerts are Web-based briefings on emerging issues in higher education. Each AIR Alert has a summary of the issue, the status (and potential future developments), implications for IR, a timeline summarizing key historical developments and future deadlines, and resources related to the topic. AIR Alerts are distributed using the Electronic AIR list.
AIR Jobs page: A free Web-based listing of IR jobs across the United States and other countries.
Affiliated Groups: A comprehensive list of state, regional, international, and unified focus groups affiliated with AIR. AIR offers meeting space during the Forum and Web hosting services at no charge to Affiliated Groups.
Randy Swing, Ph.D.
Executive Director
1435 E. Piedmont Drive, Suite 211
Tallahassee, FL 32308
Phone: 850-385-4155 850-385-4155
Fax: 850-385-5180
E-Mail: rswing@airweb.org
Online Classroom: Online Group Work: Making It Meaningful and Manageable
Featured Higher Education Presenter:
Jean Mandernach, Ph.D.
Date: Thursday, 8/12/10
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM Central Daylight Time
Cost: $219($244 after 8/5/10)
Three easy ways to register!
Phone: 800-433-0499 / 608-246-3590
Academically their value is unmatched and employers demand the skills they develop, but many students continue to view group projects as an unnecessary chore. The power to change that attitude is now in your hands.
Online Group Work: Making It Meaningful and Manageable is designed to help instructors navigate the new and exciting world of online group assignments. Group projects of all types require a change in student perception. But unique to online group assignments is a need for customized projects, strong guidance and tools to encourage success.
Teaching students how to collaborate and showing them the best way to expend cognitive energy in a group setting is a key element, and the stakes are high. The work world demands the teamwork and Web 2.0 ability developed through group projects.
You'll learn how to:
• Create dynamic assignments that align with your existing online framework
• Attack and change negative student perception of group projects
• Structure assignments for maximum efficiency
• Increase student satisfaction and engagement
• Take advantage of new Web 2.0 tools
• Implement instructor and peer support systems
• Teach students how to work in groups through more efficient use of cognitive energy
The seminar includes handouts and other supporting materials to guide the implementation process.
Q&A session
Presenter Dr. Jean Mandernach will take questions and facilitate an open dialogue with attendees, including case study and Web 2.0 tool presentations and student centered project discussion.
Learn from the expert
Dr. Jean Madernach is a true innovator in online instruction. Her research and published work focuses on enhancing student learning through new assessment techniques and teaching frameworks. She currently serves as professor of Psychology and Online Learning at Park University.
A key seminar for…
• Faculty
• Course designers
• Instructional technologists
• Online administrators
• And others involved in the online course experience.
Faculty Focus: Helping Faculty to be Engaged and Productive
Academic leaders can have a tremendous effect on faculty satisfaction and productivity. Part of the responsibility of being an academic leader is to provide appropriate guidelines and support to foster faculty productivity throughout their careers, says Susan Robison, a psychology professor at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.
In an interview with Academic Leader, she offered the following advice on how to support faculty:
• Clearly articulate what it means to be a productive faculty member. Administrators have to solve the “productivity paradox,” embracing the need for clear guidelines without being too rigid. “Rigid criteria can get an institution into trouble because it’s hard to apply the same criteria across the curriculum. What operates in the field of English may not work very well in bioengineering, for example,” Robison says.
• Remind faculty that they are the institution’s most valuable resource. “Emphasize in whatever kind of PR materials they put out regarding faculty that the faculty are the greatest resource for the educational goals of the institution. … Faculty need to be honored and respected for being that resource. Sometimes administrators might presume that and not say it. It needs to be said, and the behaviors need to be matched to the words,” she says.
• Match faculty to the institution. “Job candidates are evaluated based on publications and letters of recommendation. Of course, these are worthy devices to evaluate them, but no one ever asks the candidate, ‘Do you match our culture?’ I think this is an important question in getting new faculty on board who are satisfied and engaged, and to prevent pre-tenured faculty from being denied tenure, prevent midcareer faculty from burning out, and prevent late-career faculty from becoming stale,” Robison says.
• Talk to faculty members about their shifting interests/career priorities. “As we grow in our positions, sometimes our interests change. I would put the responsibility on the chair to create an atmosphere where those kinds of conversations might be comfortable. Usually there’s some sort of annual performance evaluation at most places, either leading up to tenure or to a contract renewal at institutions that don’t have the tenure system. Oftentimes it’s the chair’s responsibility to have those conversations, and I think a good question would be, ‘To what degree are your strengths being utilized by our department, and is there any way we can make better use of your strengths?’ That might be an open-ended way to begin that conversation. It’s going to depend on the communication skills of the chair to be able to field that sort of conversation,” she says.
• Support professional and faculty development. “Depending on the mission and goals of the institution, [professional development] is going to be interpreted differently. A four-year college that emphasizes teaching may fund and support, emotionally as well as fiscally, faculty development to improve teaching, whereas a research institution might support grant-writing workshops and things like that, that fit those institutional priorities,” Robison says.
Excerpted from Helping Faculty to Be Engaged and Productive, Academic Leader, May 2009
Magna Campus Legal Briefing Online Seminar: Are You Setting Distance Ed Expectations in Faculty Contracts Yet?
Video Online Seminar • Wednesday, August 11, 2010 • 1:00 - 2:00 PM CDT
$279 - Register today and save! (Price increases to $304 after 8/04/10)
Nearly all colleges and universities now offer at least some courses in a distance education format. While these delivery methods have expanded rapidly, faculty attitudes towards teaching online have not always kept pace. Older faculty members may be resistant to eLearning, but even newer faculty members may be surprised when they are asked to teach an online course. If your faculty contracts and negotiated agreements do not yet include language covering distance education expectations, here is your opportunity to correct this oversight.To provide clarity for all parties, institutions need to incorporate distance education-specific terms in their collective bargaining agreements and in their institutional policies. In Setting Distance Ed Expectations in Faculty Contracts, experienced educator and attorney Dr. Stephanie Delaney will show participants how to review existing contracts and policies against a detailed checklist and make recommended improvements. This workshop will explain how to avoid misunderstandings, faculty disputes, and hard feelings and ensure that all major distance education issues are covered.
In this Video Online Seminar, you will learn:
• How to identify gaps in contracts and policies
• Where to find common ground between faculty and administration on key issues
• The language other institutions use in actual contracts
• Results of a nationwide study of collective bargaining agreements
• Suggested wording on compensation, intellectual property rights, definitions of distance education, and faculty load
• How to improve clarity by using Policy Analysis Frameworks
• Ways to adapt policies and contracts to your unique institutional culture
• How to prepare for upcoming contract negotiations
• Collective bargaining implications of distance education
Attendees will also have the opportunity to respond to survey questions regarding their college policies and contract terms.
Who should attend:
This seminar is important viewing for distance education administrators and campus legal representatives, including:
• Presidents
• Deans
• Provosts
• Academic Administrators
• Department Chairs
• Campus Legal Affairs
• Vice Presidents of Instruction
• Faculty Union Representatives
• Distance and Online Learning Directors
This seminar is particularly important for institutions facing upcoming contract negotiations.
Cost
The cost to attend this live, 60-minute video online seminar is $279. You may include multiple participants at a single log-in site for no additional charge. When you consider the incidental costs associated with traveling to an off-campus location for similar training (lodging, meals, transportation), this is a considerable value!
Your presenter
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniedelaney
Dr. Stephanie Delaney is an experienced community college educator, an attorney and an author. She is currently the Director of eLearning at Cascadia Community College, where she supports faculty in distance education pedagogy. She has taught law and environment courses for over ten years. She earned her PhD in Educational Leadership in Higher Education/Distance Education at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and she also holds a law degree from the University of San Diego School of Law.
Bring questions
Have a specific question about contract language and distance education expectations at your school? Bring it to this live session for the opportunity to pose it to our expert presenter. If you are concerned about faculty “buy in” regarding distance education programming at your institution, then this Video Online Seminar is for you. Reserve your seat today.
Inside Higher Ed: The Librarian's Crystal Ball - June 23, 2010
Welcome to the future -- or, rather, to a series of many of possible “futures” posted in a new study released this month by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
The association culled journal articles, blogs, newspapers, conference talks, and the expertise of its staff to develop 26 (not necessarily mutually exclusive) scenarios based on possible developments in higher education over the next 15 years. The association then surveyed 404 of its members to determine which scenarios library specialists thought would have the most impact, were most likely to happen, and were likely to happen most quickly.
The idea was to get some sort of consensus on how the higher education landscape is likely to change in the next decade and a half so that libraries could start figuring out now how to adjust.
The full report, called Futures Thinking For Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025, can be found online, but here is a sampling of what its members consider some of the more plausible scenarios:
•Breaking the textbook monopoly: Most states have passed legislation that requires textbook publishers to make textbooks affordable. Faculty members, sympathetic to their students, have embraced online open educational resources (OERs). More faculty create and share openly their course materials, modules, streaming videos, tests, software, and other tools. Although widely accepted seminal OERs exist for introductory courses, faculty create materials for advanced courses based on their own knowledge and interests, inviting student contributions.
•Bridging the scholar/practitioner divide: Open peer review becomes the norm for many fields, speeding application of discoveries. Online publications, by scholarly societies in partnership with trade organizations and professional associations, are open access. They support robust community-based dialogue on articles as soon as they are accepted via traditional editorial procedures. Scholars and practitioners alike discuss the findings, how the theory would apply in practice, and suggest additional research needed.
•Everyone is a "nontraditional" student: The interwoven nature of work/life/school is accepted in higher education as life spans increase and students are unable to fund tuition in one lump. Co-op education is widely embraced and faculty increasingly value students' life experience. Knowing what the work force wants, students are active in designing their own learning outcomes, and the personalized curriculum becomes the norm. Faculty members evaluate students on demonstrations of learning -- such as policy documents, marketing plans, or online tutorials -- rather than old measures based on “seat time” and “credit hours.”
•Meet the new freshman class: With laptops in their hands since the age of 18 months old, students who are privileged socially and economically are completely fluent in digital media. For many others, the digital divide, parental unemployment, and the disruption of moving about during the foreclosure crisis of their formative years means they never became tech savvy. “Remedial” computer and information literacy classes are now de rigueur.
•Right here with me: Students “talk” through homework with their handheld devices, which issue alerts when passing a bookstore with material they need to cite. Scanning the title page, this information is instantly embedded in proper citation style with an added endnote. Checking in on location-based services, students locate study team members and hold impromptu meetings without the need for study rooms. Their devices have whiteboards and can share notes with absent members.
David W. Lewis, dean of the library at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, who has also done extensive research into the future of libraries, has a prediction of his own: the report will not be very useful to libraries planning for the future.“All in all, the report is an interesting effort that I suspect will not be widely used because the scenarios are too abstract and beyond what most academic libraries can control or influence,” Lewis told Inside Higher Ed. A more useful report would have focused more narrowly on the shift from print to electronic collections, and how libraries might consider modifying how they purchase, manage and deliver electronic content, Lewis says, rather than on “broad future trends in the academy.”
The ACRL did recently release another future-oriented document that falls along those lines: the 2010 edition of its perennial list of top ten trends in academic libraries. The items on that list are a tad less sensational, although it did highlight certain themes -- such as the disaggregation of library resources, the rise of mobile technology, and growing pressure on libraries to demonstrate their value in the face of shrinking budgets -- that the “futures” report followed to logical extremes.
— Steve Kolowich
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