Inside Higher ED: Documenting Adjunct Work

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/27/adjuncts

September 27, 2010

The Coalition on the Academic Workforce -- a group of disciplinary and professional associations and faculty unions -- is undertaking a major effort to document the working conditions and needs of adjuncts.


The goal of the strategy is to advance efforts to improve adjunct pay and working conditions by showing the extent of the challenges faced by those off the tenure track. Many adjuncts and their tenure-track supporters have complained about being rebuffed by administrators who cite examples (which may well be real for individuals, but not reflective of the group at large) of adjuncts who love being adjuncts, or who aren't worried about health insurance or retirement benefits because they have other, full-time jobs.


In addition, many of the national databases on academic working conditions -- such as the American Association of University Professors' much-cited annual survey of faculty salaries -- focus on full-time, generally tenure-track professors and so do not yield much information about a group that is already the majority at many institutions.



A statement from Robert Townsend, assistant director of research and publications for the American Historical Association, one of the coalition members, explained the survey this way: "Although the majority of U.S. faculty are now off the tenure track, information about their working conditions is sorely lacking. Most of the limited data that exist on the working conditions of the contingent academic workforce are too generic to be of much use in really understanding how these professionals are being compensated and treated."


The survey, which will be open on the coalition's website from today until November 30, features questions on how much work adjuncts are doing, their career goals, and their compensation. The survey reflects the way many adjuncts work at multiple institutions with differing pay and benefits.


Some of the questions appear designed to quantify the proportion of adjuncts who do and don't rely on their college employers to put food on the table and to provide life essentials such as health insurance. Questions cover such topics as whether higher education is the "primary employment" for these individuals, and whether they are seeking or would accept tenure-track positions. Benefits questions cover health insurance, retirement benefits and any other benefits. Adjuncts are also asked about limits on the number of courses they may teach, and about whether they are members of unions. Questions about courses include the number of students per section and such factors as whether the course is in person, online or hybrid.


The new survey will be open to all who are teaching off the tenure track -- full-time, part-time and graduate students. A survey released in March by the American Federation of Teachers included only part-time adjuncts. That survey found that part-time faculty members are generally satisfied with their jobs, but that many have concerns about the lack of health insurance, the lack of job security and other issues.
— Scott Jaschik

Inside Higher ED: Documenting Adjunct Work

Inside Higher ED: Around Washington: College Prices, Student Data

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/28/washington

September 28, 2010

WASHINGTON -- In a conversation with student journalists aimed at trumpeting his administration's higher education accomplishments and persuading young people (roughly a month ahead of midterm elections) that he's fighting for their interests, President Obama also signaled to college leaders that he is closely watching their soaring prices.


The president spent most of his time on the conference call with editors at college student newspapers discussing financial aid increases and health care changes designed to help young Americans maneuver through increasingly difficult financial times, so that they don't become a "lost generation," as Colin Daileda, a Radford University senior, put it. "Do you think it will take a longer time than usual for our generation to get on our feet?"

Obama sought to be reassuring, saying: "First of all, I think your generation is going to be just fine. I mean, we’ve gone through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and so things are real tough for young people right now. But having said that, if you are getting a college degree, if you’ve got skills in math and science or good, sound communication skills, there are still jobs out there even in a tough environment. And 9 out of 10 people who are looking for work can still find work."



As he mixed political chatter (bashing Republicans for favoring tax cuts for the rich and implying that they would roll back increases in student aid) with sports small talk (discussing the results of Saturday's football games with several callers), the president was asked by Daniel Schonhaut of the University of California at Los Angeles to "address this concern that public higher education is becoming more of a strain on families?"


The president's answer managed, in about a minute, both to cogently summarize the factors that many experts credit (or blame) for rapidly increasing college tuitions and to make clear that continued escalation is unacceptable.


"If I keep on increasing Pell Grants and increasing student loan programs and making it more affordable, but ... higher education inflation keeps on going up at the pace that it’s going up right now, then we’re going to be right back where we started, putting more money in, but it’s all being absorbed by these higher costs," Obama said.


It aggravated college leaders no end that officials in the Bush administration often played down the extent to which state budget cuts contributed to rising college prices, and Obama has avoided that trap. "[S]tate budgets are being so hard pressed that they’re having to make severe cutbacks in the support they provide to public education," the president said Monday. "So one of the things that I can do to help is to make sure that the economy is growing, states then are taking in more tax revenue, and if states are taking in more tax revenue, then they don't have to try to pass on increased costs to students because they can maintain levels of support to institutions of higher learning."


But college and state leaders need to do their parts, too, Obama said, to "figure out what is driving all this huge inflation in the cost of higher education, because this is actually the only place where inflation is higher than health care inflation." While health insurance and other employee-related costs are "out of the control of the administrators at universities," the president said, "there are other aspects of this where, frankly, I think students as consumers, parents as consumers, and state legislators and governors are going to need to put more pressure on universities."


Sounding a bit like the grandfather who tells the teenagers that he used to walk a mile to school in the snow without boots, Obama said he has been struck on campus visits by "the athletic facilities that exist these days, or the food courts or the other things that have to do with the quality of life at universities. ...


"[I]t’s sure a lot nicer than it was when I was going to college. ... And part of what I think we’ve got to examine is are we designing our universities in a way that focuses on the primary thing, which is education. You’re not going to a university to join a spa; you’re going there to learn so that you can have a fulfilling career. And if all the amenities of a public university start jacking up the cost of tuition significantly, that’s a problem."


Obama touched (in a slightly self-contradictory way) on the tension over faculty workloads, "so that we’re making sure that the teaching loads at universities continue to emphasize research and continue to give professors the opportunity to engage in work outside the classroom that advances knowledge, but at the same time reminding faculties that their primary job is to teach, and so you’ve got to structure how universities operate to give students the best deal that they can -- that’s important, too."


The president said the administration will be "working with university presidents and college presidents to figure out how can we get control of costs generally and refocus our priorities and our attention on what the primary function of a university is, and that is to give students the knowledge and skills that they need to have a fulfilling career after they get out -- not to provide the best situation for the four years that they’re there."


Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said the higher education presidents' group would be "happy at any time" to work with the president on such a review. He called the president's analysis "incredibly detailed and amazingly insightful," especially for "somebody who is extraordinarily busy with matters of state."


GAO on State Student Records Systems
In the push to measure outcomes, states are moving to maintain longitudinal data systems linking educational and employment information for individual students, but concerns about maintaining student privacy and judging institutions fairly worry some state and institutional officials, reported the Government Accountability Office in a study released Monday.


Based on surveys conducted by the Lumina Foundation for Education and the State Higher Education Executive Officers, GAO counted 26 states that maintain longitudinal data systems that track employment and other outcomes of the graduates of postsecondary institutions, while 45 have at least one postsecondary data system.


GAO found that the U.S. Department of Education needs to offer more guidance on how state agencies can ensure compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act while still effectively keeping tabs on students. Several federal initiatives, including the department’s Grant Program for Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems, aim to encourage states to link education and workforce data, and could potentially violate FERPA.


In some states, GAO said, agencies use workforce data to promote economic development, offer feedback to institutions on where and how students were employed after earning certain degrees, and inform prospective students of their potential outcomes. GAO also suggested expanding direct state-to-state data sharing to better understand work force movement across state lines.


The report was authorized by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 and conducted between July 2009 and this month, and does in a sense weigh in on the current tug-of-war over the Education Department’s proposed regulations on “gainful employment," which would use average salaries calculated by the Social Security Administration as one part of a formula to measure student outcomes.


Some stakeholders interviewed, including officials from colleges, GAO said, “raised concerns that employment outcomes that are beyond a school’s control should not be used as a basis for assessing the quality of the education provided by the school or adequacy of preparing students for employment.”
— Doug Lederman and Jennifer Epstein

Inside Higher ED: Around Washington: College Prices, Student Data

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: The Official Blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation



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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: The Official Blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Inside Higher ED: Libraries Make it Personal

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/28/librarians

September 28, 2010

At a time when technology is said to be creating a gulf between librarians and students, a handful of libraries are trying to make their relationships with undergraduates a bit more personal.


Drexel University made headlines earlier this month with its new “personal librarian” program, which assigns each incoming undergraduate a specific member of the library staff to serve as a first point of contact.


Wesleyan University also started assigning students “personal librarians” this fall. Both institutions drew on the example of Yale University, which in 2008 began reaching out to undeclared undergraduates after providing the service to medical and law students for years. Libraries at University of Richmond and the University of Chicago started similar programs for undergrads about a decade ago.

There are small differences, but these programs share a basic template. The library contacts incoming students, usually a few weeks before orientation, with a personalized letter, along with a business card, from a specific librarian introducing them to the library. The librarians might e-mail their assigned students periodically, reminding them of what services the library offers.



The obligations are not nearly the same as those between academic advisers and advisees; in fact, students are not required to meet with their personal librarian, or even acknowledge them. The important thing for the library is that students know the library has not just books but also familiar-looking people who know their names and want to help them. The idea is that getting that name might make students more likely to schedule a sit-down meeting to learn how to use the library's various interfaces, collections, and specialists. Sit-downs, or even e-mail correspondence, are much more effective than group orientations, says Patricia Tully, the university librarian at Wesleyan.


If personal librarian programs are a trend, the trend is a recent one. Barbara Rockenbach, director of undergraduate and library research at Yale, frames the movement toward “personalization” as a foil to technological forces that have made the library seem more impersonal. With many libraries canceling subscriptions to printed journals, shuttling underused books off to remote storage, and making more of their resources available on the Web, students might increasingly view the library as a database they can use from a solitary dorm room rather than an actual place populated by helpful humans.


“We weren’t seeing students at the reference desk anymore,” Rockenbach says. “…It feels for us that technology is the driver.”


It was not, however, the driver at the University of Richmond, which was the first institution to assign personal librarians to undergraduates — at least as far as any of the recent practitioners can remember. According to Lucretia McCulley, director of outreach services at Richmond’s Boatwright Memorial Library, the motivation was simpler and had less to do with cultural tectonics.


“The bank I had at the time had personal banking,” McCulley says. “I had always really liked my personal banker, so I thought, ‘Why can't we do this for students?’ ”


The library building at Richmond still sees plenty of traffic, McCulley says. The personal librarian program was just another outreach effort. Same with Drexel and Wesleyan, officials there say. “We want to reach out to students who might feel a little intimidated — particularly students from small schools, or international students,” says Tully, of Wesleyan. Sending personalized letters with business cards to incoming students does not require a huge investment, notes Danuta Nitecki, dean of libraries at Drexel. It was not so much a question of “Why” as “Why not?”


At Chicago, where undergraduates share the library with the university’s considerable graduate population, putting a face to the building serves as a hedge against alienating the younger students, says Rebecca Starkey, a reference librarian there. Personal relationships with library staff generally are more common among graduate students, whose library use is frequent and well-defined, and undergraduate juniors and seniors, whose research interests have begun to narrow along the lines of a declared major, she says. First-year students are less likely to develop personal relationships with librarians.


“We’re a large research library — our undergraduates don’t always know who they need to talk to for the right things,” says Starkey. “This allows us to sort of cut through that.”


Still, the “personal librarian” service is curious in that it only works if it is low-impact. Depending on the university, librarians might be assigned 50 or 500 students to serve personally. In most cases, if all or even half of those students availed themselves of the service, the librarians would be swamped. Yale says only 10 percent of students actually contact their personal librarian; a higher yield, and the program would not work.


Meanwhile, the extent to which the program is actually bringing new students into the library is hard to pinpoint, since the students who take care to avail themselves of a personal librarian might have sought out the help of the library staff anyway, adoptive librarian or no.


But the general view among the librarians who have adopted the practice is that another step toward demystifying the library is a good thing, even if the effect of the personal librarian program turns out to be marginal. “There’s a lot of adjustment happening in that freshman year for students,” says Jim Rettig, the university librarian at Richmond. “And if we can make it a little easier for them, that [means] a better experience.”
— Steve Kolowich

Inside Higher ED: Libraries Make it Personal

Inside Higher Ed: Online Colleges as a Policy Bloc?

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/13/forum

October 13, 2010

WASHINGTON -- For-profit colleges in one camp and everyone else in another may be the prevailing theme of higher education policy this fall, but online institutions, regardless of their tax status, were all in one camp Tuesday at a discussion of the challenges they face in proving quality and value while offering a kind of learning that's very different from the hidebound practices of traditional colleges and universities.


The dominant concern coming from the leaders of online programs at the seventh meeting of the Presidents’ Forum -- a group of institutions that serve adult students primarily online -- was proving they offer quality and value as the U.S. Department of Education and Congress begin roundabout efforts to measure those things.

“We need to again use better data to make our case … to tell our story in credible ways,” said Margaret Spellings, who served as secretary of education during George W. Bush’s second term. She is now senior adviser to the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and consults for Education Management Corporation. “We’re seen as wild-eyed, often profit-making, the wild west of higher education, and often don’t get credit for what we do.”



The challenge of finding the right data to collect to get a better sense of what works and what doesn’t resurfaced throughout the daylong meeting, but there was little talk of exactly what those data should be. Gordon Freedman, vice president of global education strategy at Blackboard, suggested that analytic data from students’ interactions with his company’s products and other learning management systems could be a good place to start. Mark David Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also pointed to better use of the data gleaned by online learning as a means for identifying struggling students and measuring outcomes.


At the core of the push for more data are the bigger goals that foundations, the Obama administration and business leaders have set out for higher education, said John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, a private nonprofit New York institution that specializes in serving adult learners online. The forum and its members, he said, hope to take a leadership role to “try and address this issue of degree completion, as we try and address the issues of access, quality and accountability.”


During a panel on state regulation, some consensus emerged that states ought to do a better job collaborating and developing reciprocity agreements, both with one another and with accreditors. Some states, like Wisconsin, consider online institutions based in other states but serving their residents to fall under their regulatory purview, while others, like New York, require state oversight only of institutions with a physical presence there.


Regulators and online programs could make progress, said Byron Connell, associate in higher education at the New York State Education Department, by “trying to identify core information” that institutions need to gain state approval. “Each of us has our own set of information requirements, most of which are similar, and it ought to be possible to develop a multi-state common set of information requirements, so that if an institution needs to apply to a state individually it doesn’t have to fill out a unique set of forms.”


At another panel, Charles S. Lenth, vice president for policy analysis and academic affairs for the State Higher Education Executive Officers, said the challenge states face is even more basic than attempting to cooperate on program approval. “We can take some important steps just to set up mechanisms that provide, if not a welcome mat, at least a place to go for information about who at the state level does what and why,” he said. “And you might think that’s an unnecessary step. I happen to believe that it would be a first step toward resolving these issues.”


Simplifying the puzzle of 50 states with distinct sets of data requirements and regulatory frameworks has been one of the Presidents’ Forum’s key objectives since its founding. While still a priority -- more than a dozen states are working together with the help of a Lumina Foundation grant -- sorting out state regulation has taken a backseat to the federal government’s new efforts toward oversight of higher education.


“The feds, I think quite frankly, have lost faith in the triad” -- the regulatory triangle involving the federal government, the states, and accrediting agencies -- said David A. Longanecker, president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, who spent six years as the Clinton administration’s assistant secretary for postsecondary education. “While it still exists, they’re relying much less heavily on the states for consumer protection, the accreditors for quality assurance.”


The result, he said, is heightened scrutiny from Washington. “It’s not because they’ve gone nutso on regulation. I think they’ve just lost faith in their partners…. And it’s legitimate because we don’t have a reasonable standards-based system today.”


Not everyone was quite as enthusiastic about the push for greater oversight coming from the Obama administration and Congress. The Education Department’s proposed regulations on “gainful employment” -- due to be published in two parts, one by Nov. 1 and the other probably early next year, following meetings and hearings with stakeholders – came up several times throughout the day’s conversation.


The rules and the department’s general direction, said Spellings, are “really interesting and … the subject of some great cocktail party conversation in Washington these days.”


She added: “It does seem like it came from a place different from where every secretary of education, Republican and Democrat alike, had been with respect to that quasi-arcane part of the law,” referring to the “gainful employment” language in the Higher Education Act. “In my mind, this is a skirmish in the overall war. There will be other issues…. It’s the wrong issue at the wrong time, in my view.”


Instead, she and several others said, Washington’s focus ought to be on better facilitating access and completion.


“Gainful employment has gotten as far as it has because it is focused on the for-profit sector,” said Holly Kuzmich, vice president of Margaret Spellings and Company, who filled several roles in Spellings’ Education Department.


Jennifer Blum, a partner at the Washington law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath, said that with issues like the Education Department’s forthcoming regulations on credit hours, an institution’s tax status isn’t relevant. But Russell S. Kitchner, associate vice president for regulatory and governmental relations at the American Public University System, said her view was relevant only if politicians were excluded from the equation. “If a politician wants to make it relevant, it is. And there are very strong political movements in Congress to make irrelevant points relevant and I think we have to recognize that.”


And Ebersole, of Excelsior, expressed concern that online programs would be lumped in with the egregious examples highlighted by the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.


“We all, I think, have to agree there is some bias against for-profits,” he said. “I think that our coming together, talking together, working together -- profit, not-for-profit -- is one of the ways that perhaps we can soften [the conflict] because those of us who work alongside our for-profit brothers know that in fact there is much good work being done.”


He added: “We worry that [when] someone catch[es] a cold, we get the flu. So we care about how online learning is being perceived in the marketplace, regardless of the corporate structure of the institution providing it.”
— Jennifer Epstein

Inside Higher Ed: Online Colleges as a Policy Bloc?

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Delivering an Influx of Federal Dollars, Obama Administration Wants Results

October 13, 2010

http://chronicle.com/article/In-Return-for-Federal-Dollars/124861/ 

President Obama campaigned on a promise to provide billions more dollars to students and colleges, and he has delivered.


Since he took office, almost two years ago, spending on student aid has grown by nearly 50 percent, to $145-billion, while aid to colleges has exploded. Much of the new money has come with no strings attached, including $36-billion for Pell Grants in a student-loan bill he signed in March.


But the president has also sought to use federal funds as leverage, offering carrots to colleges and states that embrace his goals, and sticks to those that hinder them. More than any of his predecessors, he has demanded results in exchange for federal dollars, requiring grant applicants to set benchmarks for improvement and threatening to withhold aid from programs that fail to prepare students for jobs.


That approach has rankled some higher-education leaders, who accuse the administration of meddling in academic affairs, but it has won praise from advocates of greater accountability and assessment for colleges.


Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says the administration sees itself as a "partner" in a nationwide effort to improve schools and colleges. In a speech he gave a year ago, Mr. Duncan sought to reassure state education leaders that he was not seeking to seize control of the education agenda.


"Education reform starts locally, ... and my job is to help you succeed," he said. "I want to be a partner in your success, not the boss of it."


Still, he continued, "I'm not willing to be a silent partner who puts a stamp of approval on the status quo."


"I plan to be an active partner."


It's too soon to say whether the president's accountability agenda will succeed. Though Congress has embraced his ideas, his proposals have run into budget constraints. So far lawmakers have provided only a fraction of the money the president has sought for new incentive grants to states and community colleges.


He has also faced significant pushback on his plan to tie federal aid to graduates' debt levels and employment. While the administration is unlikely to abandon the proposal, it is under intense pressure from for-profit colleges to soften the so-called gainful-employment rule, and it recently postponed putting out the regulation until after the midterm elections.


An Ambitious Agenda
The president set ambitious goals for the nation's colleges early in his presidency, calling for the United States to lead the world in college-completion rates by 2020 and asking every American to obtain a "year or more" of higher education.


To make college more affordable for the millions of Americans without degrees, he proposed ending subsidies to student lenders and using the savings to significantly expand federal support to students, states, and colleges.


The president put community colleges at the center of his plan, asking Congress to give the institutions $12-billion over 10 years to educate five million more students. Much of the money would have come with conditions: To qualify for federal support, community colleges would have had to set goals tied to program completion, work-force preparation, and job placement. Grantees would have chosen their own benchmarks, but those would have had to be approved by the U.S. education secretary.


The proposal represented a significant shift in the way federal aid has been awarded to community colleges, requiring them to negotiate individual goals for the first time. It also broke from the tradition of distributing aid based on enrollments, instead tying awards to students' graduation.


The administration also sought to enlist governors in its goals, proposing a $2.5-billion College Access and Completion Fund to support states' efforts to improve college attendance and completion rates. The money, which was to be competitively awarded, would have rewarded states that embraced the administration's vision of reform, much like the new Race to the Top grants for elementary and secondary schools.


Both the community-college and state-grant proposals sought to change the incentive structure for higher education, encouraging colleges to focus on graduating students, not just enrolling them. As Mr. Arne Duncan explained to reporters in a 2009 briefing on the president's budget, "there have been very few incentives on the graduation side."


"There's been a lot of push to get students in the door, but not to graduate," he said. "We really have to change the status quo."


An 'Activist' President
Not surprisingly, the plans met with skepticism from colleges. Some community-college leaders worried that benchmarking could shift the balance of power from state and local governing boards to Washington, setting the stage for federal meddling in curricula. Private colleges, meanwhile, objected to the plan to funnel the Access and Completion grants through the states, arguing that it would be inefficient and could compromise their cherished independence. While public colleges must answer to state higher-education offices, private colleges are independently governed.


"We couldn't have states setting benchmarks for private colleges," said Sarah A. Flanagan, vice president for government relations and policy at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.


Colleges were also ambivalent about the president's plan to expand the Perkins Loan program and award a portion of the new aid to colleges that held down their tuition and did a good job graduating Pell Grant recipients. While college officials welcomed the money, they warned that the plan would penalize public colleges in states whose legislatures set tuition, often raising it to offset budget cuts.


Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said Mr. Obama has taken a more "activist" and "expansive" approach to higher education than his predecessors, "both in terms of investing in education and moving the industry in ways it wants it to go."


"The good news is that they think higher education is important," Mr. Hartle said. "The bad news is that they would like more say over it than any other administration has had."


So far, though, Mr. Obama has had limited success in advancing his accountability agenda. Though Democrats included the president's proposals in legislation that ended the bank-based student-loan system, they were forced to scale back many of the programs when the bill yielded less savings than expected.


In the end, the measure provided only $750-million of the $2.5-billion Mr. Obama had sought for grants to states that advance his agenda on college completion. It included just $2-billion of the $12-billion the president was seeking for community colleges, and nothing for the program that would have required recipients to set benchmarks for improvement.


A 'Free Pass' for Colleges?
The president got another opportunity to shape education policy with the passage of the economic-stimulus bill, a multibillion-dollar bailout for cash-strapped states. The bill, which doubled the size of the Department of Education's budget, gave Mr. Duncan more money than any previous education secretary and the power to distribute it as he saw fit.


Though much of the bill's education aid, some $48.6-billion, was distributed by formula, governors had to provide four "assurances" to receive awards, including having "national college and career-ready standards" and tracking students from pre-kindergarten through college and careers.


The goal, said MaryEllen McGuire, who served until recently as Mr. Obama's senior adviser for education, was to leverage federal dollars for reform and build state capacity in the process.


"We weren't just giving money away," she said. "We had assurances in place."


But it was the bill's Race to the Top fund that gave the administration the most influence over education policy. Though only $4.35-billion in size, the fund has driven significant change at the state level, prompting governors and state legislatures to adopt common standards in elementary and secondary education, lift caps on charter schools, and begin to evaluate teachers based on their students' performance. Secretary Duncan recently credited the program with driving a "quiet revolution" of education reform.


Critics of the Race to the Top program see it as an example of federal micromanagement of education.


"This is the federal government telling states that if you want this money, you have to make your priorities Washington's priorities," said Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Center for Educational Freedom, at the Cato Institute.


But supporters of the program say it's a model that should be extended to higher education. Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, and a frequent contributor to The Chronicle, says colleges got a "free pass" in the stimulus bill, receiving millions of dollars with virtually no strings attached.


He argues that colleges would be better off if they accepted more federal oversight in exchange for more federal aid.


"There should be a Race to the Top for colleges," Mr. Carey said. He suggests, among other things, that the money go only to states that are open about their colleges' graduation rates, provide evidence of student learning, and publicly report their job-placement rates.


Regulatory Changes
Meanwhile, the president has pursued an aggressive regulatory agenda, proposing a slew of rules aimed at safeguarding the federal student-aid program from fraud and abuse. The most controversial of these is the "gainful-employment rule," which would cut off federal student aid to programs whose graduates have high debt-to-income ratios and low loan-repayment rates.


While the rule is aimed at for-profit colleges, some nonprofit colleges fear it could set a precedent for evaluating all colleges based on their graduates' earnings. That could hurt programs in regions with high unemployment and discourage colleges from offering degrees in low-paying fields, lobbyists say. "They're fairly well crossing the Rubicon," said David S. Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges. "You're not that many steps away from forgetting about debt and just looking at earnings."


Other rules the Obama administration has proposed would apply to all institutions, including a plan to establish a federal definition of credit-hour and expand state-authorization requirements for colleges. Colleges say the proposals invite federal intrusion into academic and state affairs and would limit innovation in higher education.


With the first round of rules due out at the start of November, the Education Department is under intense pressure from colleges to soften its proposals.


But it's clear that President Obama hasn't given up on using federal dollars to push for change in higher education. In his budget for the 2010 fiscal year, the president proposed putting schools of education in direct competition with alternative-certification programs like Teach for America when seeking federal grants. And he's also expected to use $2-billion in grants to community colleges to reward programs that emphasize reform and innovation.


Mr. Carey, of Education Sector, sees signs that the days of free money to colleges are over.


"In the future, if colleges expect to get additional investments, they're going to have to make the case for what that money will buy," he said.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Delivering an Influx of Federal Dollars, Obama Administration Wants Results

CUR Council on Undergraduate Research: CUR Dialogues

February 24-26, 2011

Hamilton Crowne Plaza

Washington, DC

http://www.cur.org/cd.html  

CUR Dialogues is designed to bring faculty and administrators to Washington, D.C. to interact with federal agency program officers and other grant funders.


Workshops and Plenary Sessions will:
• tell participants about grant opportunities in research and education, both new and ongoing;
• assist faculty learn how to find new funding opportunities;
• assist faculty develop grant proposal writing skills.


Participants will:
• meet in small groups and talk with program officers and grants management officers -- NSF, NIH, NEH, NEA, Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Ed, and more;
• take the opportunity to communicate directly with program officers and grants administrators concerning grant requirements and funders’ priorities;
• share ideas with colleagues.


In addition, CUR Dialogues provides a setting for funders to learn of the interests, needs, and concerns of researchers and educators relative to funding opportunities. CUR Dialogues has spawned many ideas for grant programs, and have helped agencies to refine their program guidelines.


Who should attend: Faculty at all career stages; undergraduate research directors; grants administrators; development officers.

For more information visit: http://www.cur.org/cd.html  


Council on Undergraduate Research
734 15th St, NW, Suite 550
Washington, DC 20005
http://www.cur.org/
cur@cur.org
(202)783-4810
(202)783-4811 fax

CUR Council on Undergraduate Research: CUR Dialogues

"The Tomorrow's Professor Blog": Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning

http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/postings.php

1047 Teaching the Millennial Generation - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1047



1046 Why Are Students So Passive and What Can Teachers Do About it? - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1046


1045 Tips and Strategies for Effective Teamwork - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1045


1044 Team Teaching With Students - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1044


1043 The Link Between Research and Teaching.2. How to Strength Each Without Weakening the Other - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1043


1042 Lecture Capture: A Guide to Effective Use - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1042


1036 Arts and Humanities: For the Common Good - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1036


1034 Lost Arts of Teaching - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1034


1033 Sixteen Suggestions for Teaching with Classroom Response Systems - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1033


1031 Gaining Factual Knowledge - http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1031

"The Tomorrow's Professor Blog": Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning

Inside Higher Ed: Gaming as a Teaching Tool

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/15/games

October 15, 2010 ANAHEIM — All work and no play makes a dull syllabus.

That is what Sarah Smith-Robbins, director of emerging technologies at the Indiana University at Bloomington, told a somewhat wary audience here at the 2010 Educause conference on Thursday. “Games are absolutely the best way to learn,” she said. “They are superior to any other instructional model.”


Smith-Robbins prefaced her remarks by reminding the audience that she was taking an intentionally strong position in order to stoke debate. But she nevertheless argued that games — as simple as tag or as complex as World of Warcraft — can accomplish an array of teaching goals that more traditional pedagogy says it wants to achieve, but often does not.


“Fundamentally, school is already a game,” she said. “It’s just a really bad one. The rules are not clear. The system works better for some people than for others. Not everybody has the same resources at the beginning of the game. We don’t start on a level playing field or with a shared goal.”



Using games, whether within a single course or across a curriculum, helps iron out these inconsistencies and motivate students, argued Smith-Robbins. Compare a typical course — particularly one where assessment is subjective — to a game like Chutes and Ladders, she said. “When you land on one of those slides, you go down. Everybody sees you go down, you know exactly what happened, you know why it happened. There’s no, ‘This game hates me, it just doesn’t like my ideas.’ It’s simple.”


Further, students are more likely to learn from their mistakes in games, since the stakes are lower than they are with, say, exams. Gamers often get multiple opportunities to try similar challenges over again if they fail. This makes students more apt to reflect on feedback and work through mistakes, Smith-Robbins said. Like practice problems — only, you know, fun.


The point of Smith-Robbins’s presentation was not to prove that gaming is a superior method of learning, but rather that good course design and good game design are based on the same factors: fair rules, clear goals, fair rules, and strong incentives to learn from errors and develop the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful. Judging by how many students choose games over coursework, it would appear course designers might have something to learn from game designers.


But some were skeptical. “What about efficiency?” asked one audience member. How can professors, teach students everything they need to learn in 15 short weeks via low-stakes, presumably time-consuming games?


Smith-Robbins argued that a well-designed game should in fact allow students to move through lessons more quickly. Most courses, she said, are taught in chunks that only make sense to students in retrospect. In a game, the skills are learned in a context that makes them seem less discrete and more like intuitive steps toward an explicit goal. “So you don’t have to artificially put things in groups of common topics, or by chapters in a book,” she said. “You can break them up into an order than makes sense to the learner, so they can soak them up as quickly as they can.”


Another big concern was whether the rigid rules and objectives inherent to gaming might stifle creativity in the classroom. This was a challenge Smith-Robbins said she and her co-panelists faced when running a decidedly meta pre-conference session earlier in the week, in which they made a game of teaching others how to design classroom games. “One of the hardest things that we had to confront in designing that game was that we wanted to allow the players to be extremely creative, but because we couldn’t anticipate what they could do, we couldn’t figure out how to evaluate that within the games system,” she said. The experiment was a failure.


But what if creativity was the key to winning? There are plenty of games like that — such as Pictionary, or Charades — where there is a goal, but no prescribed path toward achieving it, Smith-Robbins said. A classroom-based game might be designed such that creativity is rewarded, not stifled, she said.


Not every student or course is ideal for gaming, Smith-Robbins said, but there are plenty of courses and curriculums out there that could benefit from games — or at least some of the principles that make games so appealing. “We could certainly do with a dose of play in school, period,” she said. “I hope games can do that. But if we can get the playfulness without the games, that would be an improvement in and of itself.”


For the latest technology news and opinion from Inside Higher Ed, follow @IHEtech on Twitter.
— Steve Kolowich

Inside Higher Ed: Gaming as a Teaching Tool

Learning Online Info: E-Learning and Educational Technologies News and Resources

How to Communicate With People Without Ever Meeting Them in Person

October 15, 2010 in Guest,Learning Technologies

http://learningonlineinfo.org/

This a guest post by Courtney Bishop. Courtney is a lover of all things creative, she likes to write and has an obsession with crossword puzzles. She recently started blogging and you can follow her on Twitter @cbishopBG.



You don’t have to have an official face-to-face meet-and-greet or get to know the people you’re talking to in order to have effective communication. As the world grows smaller and more businesses are going global, making changes in traditional ways of doing business has become necessary for many small and not so small businesses. These types of communications can also be applied to any situation where face-to-face interaction is the norm: such as the classroom.


Throughout it all, effective communication and the ability to coordinate on the go are critical for building business, encouraging teamwork, and collaborating on projects (school or otherwise) with people throughout the company, class, across the city, or even around the world. It’s not always possible to have those up close and personal meetings that are most effective but there are a few surprisingly effective options available.


What can you do to bridge the distance and still get your point across?


Email Communication
Today people exchange email the way phone numbers were exchanged in the not so distant past. In fact, a growing number of people today prefer communication via email rather than phone calls.


Emails are easily forwarded, can be shared among a large group, and provide written backup so that important information isn’t lost in the shuffle.


There is a bit of a downside to communication via email that should be considered. Sending emails to a large group of people can easily become cumbersome and unruly. It can even become difficult to keep up with exactly what’s being said and who is getting the message.


The major downside of email is that it isn’t instant communication. Different time zones, business hours, holidays, and down time for employees across the country and around the world make email a little difficult to rely on when quick communication is necessary.


Interactive Calendars
Whether using the calendar for the purpose of coordinating meeting times, in a global business this isn’t as simple of a proposition as one would like to believe, of for setting goals, establishing deadlines, and sharing vital, time sensitive information, interactive calendars that allow members to post public information as needed can prove incredibly useful. For online learning, interactive calendars are especially important.


There are quite a few great calendars available. Your greatest hardship may very well be deciding which one offers the features your business needs most. Most educational atmospheres offer standard versions of calendars on the institution’s website.


Conference Calls
Today’s businesses need something a little more impressive, and effective, than three-way calling to really compete on a global scale. There are quite a few reasons to consider conference calling. These are some of the best:


Free conference calling software makes it affordable to coordinate with business partners from around the world.


When everyone is on the line at once, it’s easier to make important points and ensure that everyone is on the same page for the project, business goals, and important upcoming deadlines.


Conference calls are a more affordable option than comparable video conferencing services without sacrificing much in the way of service or security.


It is not impossible to have effective communication with people around the world you have never met. The challenges of communicating over distances can be easily met with email, conference calls, interactive online calendars and other great tools that can be accessed easily online.

Learning Online Info: E-Learning and Educational Technologies News and Resources

Magna Online Seminar: 23 Practical Strategies to Help New Faculty Thrive

Event Date: 11/22/2010 Time: 12:00 pm Central

http://www.magnapubs.com/catalog/help-new-faculty-thrive/

New faculty members need practical help to achieve lasting classroom success.

The average college professor knows his or her subject matter very well, but receives very little training in how to teach effectively. That’s because most graduate programs provide minimal instruction on classroom pedagogy.

It’s not surprising that many new faculty members struggle when they are first asked to lead their own classes. Bad habits picked up early in a teaching career can become self-defeating in the long term.

Often, new faculty members try to do too much and wind up overextending themselves, which diminishes their enthusiasm. This can lead to frustration and ineffectiveness.

The best way to confront these problems is to provide new faculty members with practical guidance and seasoned advice early on.

In 23 Practical Strategies to Help New Faculty Thrive, award-winning professor and faculty mentor Dr. Ike Shibley of Penn State will share effective strategies for success in college teaching.

Drawing upon his fifteen years of teaching and mentoring experience, Professor Shibley will offer compelling and realistic advice on day-to-day teaching and improving student learning to guide new faculty members around predictable pitfalls and set them on the path to a rewarding teaching career.


This video online seminar will cover:
•Deliberate course design
•Writing a strong syllabus—and sticking to it
•Improving student ratings
•High vs. low-stakes grades
•Finding the right pacing
•The reality behind teaching “myths”
•How to start and end each class
•How and why to find a faculty mentor
•Strategies for working with colleagues
•Ways to increase classroom efficiency
•Maintaining psychological health
•The rewards of teaching
•And more!


This seminar also includes the opportunity to respond to polling questions, ask questions, and share comments and ideas with other attendees.


Who should attend?
This video online seminar is recommended for college professors who are just starting out, and for professors needing to recharge. It is also designed for administrators seeking ways to support new faculty. Others who will benefit from this seminar include:
•Instructors
•Course Developers
•Instructional Designers


Registration Cost
The cost to participate in this 90-minute video online seminar is $259, regardless of the number of attendees from a single location on your campus. This means that you may include all of your new faculty hires in this training opportunity without increasing your costs! To take full advantage of this per-site registration offer, make arrangements to sign on to this seminar from a large meeting room or conference center.


Your presenter
Dr. Ike Shibley is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Penn State Berks. He has won university-wide awards for his teaching and mentors new faculty members. His pedagogical research interests involve exploring strategies to facilitate cognitive development in college students and finding the most productive ways to enhance student learning. A frequent presenter, his pre-conference session for new teachers at The Teaching Professor Conference has been well attended for seven years.


Prepare your new faculty members for whatever college teaching can throw at them. Provide them with the tools for success by registering for this practical seminar today.

Magna Online Seminar: 23 Practical Strategies to Help New Faculty Thrive

Faculty Focus Special Report: Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction

http://www.facultyfocus.com/free-report/strategies-for-increasing-online-student-retention-and-satisfaction/?c=FF&t=F101015a

Despite the tremendous growth of distance education, retention remains its Achilles’ heel. Estimates of the failed retention rate for distance education undergraduates range from 20 to 50 percent. Distance education administrators believe the failed retention rate for online courses may be 10 to 20 percent higher than for face-to-face courses. Failure to address online course retention will have a significant impact on a program’s bottom line and ability to grow.

Faculty Focus Special Report: Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction

Faculty Focus: RateMyProfessors: Is There a Lesson to be Learned?

October 13, 2010 By: Maryellen Weimer in Trends in Higher Education

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/trends-in-higher-education/ratemyprofessors-is-there-a-lesson-to-be-learned/?c=FF&t=F101013a

RateMyProfessors.com needs no introduction to most instructors. The problems with the site are equally well known. There’s no guarantee that the students who select to evaluate and post the comments are a representative sample—and no guarantee that the assessments themselves are representative.

In fact, in the Kindred and Mohammed (reference below) analysis of evaluation for 626 professors, 41.5 percent had only one rating listed. The site does not prevent students from evaluating a given instructor more than once. It does not ensure that they have even taken the course they are evaluating. And there’s nothing that prevents an instructor from entering high scores and making nice comments.

Despite these problems, use of the site continues to grow. Brown, Baillie, and Fraser (reference below) report that in January 2009 the site boasted more than 6.8 million ratings for more than a million instructors from over 6,000 colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Wales. The numbers show just how interested students are in finding out as much as they can about a course before taking it—that was also one of the findings from the focus group interviews conducted by Kindred and Mohammed. Eighty-three percent of the students surveyed by Brown, Baillie, and Fraser reported that they had visited the site. They go there because most institutions do not give students access to end-of-course rating data.

Thirty-six percent of the students in Brown, Baillie, and Fraser’s sample said they had posted on the site. Students in Kindred and Mohammed’s focus groups said that students posted because they wanted to share information about the course with other students. They also indicated that students are especially motivated to offer assessments when a teacher is really good or really bad.

Kindred and Mohammed did a content analysis of 788 comments—just about 75 percent of students who rated professors made comments. “Approximately 42% of the ratings coded in the present sample (437 ratings) contained statements pertaining to the competence of the instructor.” About 30 percent of those comments were negative, with the remaining 70 percent positive. The researchers conclude, “While issues such as personality and appearance did enter into the postings, these were secondary motivators compared to more salient issues such as competence, knowledge, clarity and helpfulness.”


What do students think about the ratings and comments that appear on the site? In Brown, Baillie, and Fraser’s survey, 71 percent of the students said they avoided taking an instructor based on the ratings that appeared on the site. Interestingly, 58 percent of that sample said they thought students were more honest in the evaluations posted on the site than on the evaluations collected by the institution at the end of the course. However, in the focus group interviews conducted by Kindred and Mohammed, students said they trusted the opinions of their friends more than what they read on the RateMyProfessors site. They also reported that they took evaluations on the site less seriously if a lot of the comments contradicted each other. They said they could tell when a comment was just angry venting and took those comments with a grain of salt.

The RateMyProfessors site does not appear as though it is going away any time soon and its astounding popularity attests to how hungry students are for information about courses. Are there ways instructors could share this information about their courses? Doing so helps to ensure that students get accurate information about the course and its instructor.

References: Kindred, J. and Mohammed, S. N. (2005). “He will crush you like an academic ninja!”: Exploring teaching ratings on ratemyprofessors.com. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10 (3), article 9. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/kindred.html

Brown, M. J., Baillie, M., and Fraser, S. (2009). Rating ratemyprofessors.com: A comparison of online and official student evaluations of teaching. College Teaching, 57 (2), 89-92.

Excerpted from Despite Shortcomings Popularity of RateMyProfessors.com Grows, The Teaching Professor, vol. 23, no. 6, pg. 8.

Permalink: http://www.facultyfocus.com/?p=15727

Faculty Focus: RateMyProfessors: Is There a Lesson to be Learned?