Campus Technology: How to Use New Technology to Maximize Student Engagement
Monday, July 11, 2011
Diverse Issues in Higher Education: How to Succeed in a Tenure-Tracked Faculty Position
June 14, 2011 By Dr. Marybeth Gasman
I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of third-year doctoral students of color this past week at Howard University’s Preparing Future Faculty Institute. Standing up in front of these future leaders made me incredibly happy. The faculty pipeline seems to be bright and talented. My talk to them focused on success and how to achieve it as a faculty member. Here is what I told the future faculty members:
Immediately upon securing a tenure-track faculty position, inquire about the expectations for tenure at the institution. If your chairman, dean and other faculty members talk “around” the expectations, gently push for more specificity. It is vitally important to get as much information as possible about institutional and departmental norms to ensure your success.
If at a research institution, don’t get lulled into thinking that you’ll get tenure on teaching and service. You can be the best teacher and academic citizen in the world, but it won’t secure you tenure. Research institutions award tenure based on research productivity—both quality and quantity. They care about teaching and service but, without strong research productivity, you won’t get tenure. If you are at a liberal arts institution, you need to focus on teaching and research. Teaching will play a more substantial role at a liberal arts college but research will still be valued and expected.
Learn to be efficient about your teaching. Prepare your individual classes ahead of time—during the summer and winter breaks if possible. Advanced planning will ensure that you have more time to focus on your research. And, if you have a teaching assistant, learn to use his or her talents productively. Have the teaching assistant field questions from students. You’ll save an immense amount of time.
Don’t isolate yourself. Reach out to other faculty members—this is especially important for faculty of color. Find mentors of all types, including those of different genders, races, ethnicities and ages. Attend school-wide and university-wide events. You want to demonstrate your investment in the institution and give people an opportunity to get to know you.
Find mentors outside your institution as well as inside. You’ll need someone to talk to about research, teaching, academic politics and many other issues, and that someone should not be involved directly in the happenings of your institution. You need an outside confidant.
Work as hard as you can during the first four years of your tenure-track period. Given the turnaround time at journals and academic presses, you have to produce a lot during your early years in order to have enough published by the year you go up for tenure. Tap your dissertation for material and start a new project. You want to show colleagues that you are worth the investment. And, make sure you feel passionate about the work you are doing. Passion will sustain your energy.
Speak out on issues about which you care deeply, but not on everything. Pick your battles. You don’t want to be known as the person who has a beef with everything. Be judicious.
Ask for feedback in writing about your performance. If you have an in-person meeting, follow up with an e-mail to your chairman or dean confirming what you heard in terms of critique and suggestions. You want to make sure to gain clarity about your performance so you can improve.
Be a good citizen to others. Be generous and share your success. Share success with colleagues and students. Don’t hoard it for yourself. Generosity is admired.
Strive for balance. Work hard but also take “brain breaks.” Your brain needs time to rejuvenate and generate new ideas. Reward yourself with mini-vacations and breaks each week.
When you achieve tenure, use it. Be brave. Don’t waste your power. You earned it. Use it to make positive change and to empower others.
In addition to these steps, which are directed toward new faculty members, current faculty members need to be supportive of new faculty of color. We need to ensure their success. It is the right thing to do.
A professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Marybeth Gasman is the author of “Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and lead editor of “Understanding Minority Serving Institutions” (SUNY Press, 2008).
Campus Technology: The Problem of 'Pedagogy' in a Web 2.0 Era
In a time of knowledge stability, teach; in a time of rapid change in knowledge, learn…
Clearly, we have left the time of knowledge stability and entered a time of incredibly rapid change. Web 2.0, a term coined in 2004, is a description of the new Web architecture, but is also a historical marker between the era of comfortable stability and the era of unsettling change. Many in higher education say we have accordingly turned to learning and away from teaching, but in fact we haven’t. Most educators I talk with are unaware of the degree of change necessary today or of the degree to which deep change will continue over the coming decades. And so, the dominant emphasis on teaching remains.
There is no requirement that faculty in higher education understand learning theory. Even saying that, and knowing it is true, seems astonishing. How is it possible to make the turn from teaching to learning without knowing what that means? This is the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room. Faculty members in higher education are researchers. The focus of their research has traditionally been on disciplinary knowledge and not on how humans learn. To make the turn from teaching to learning become a reality and not just a phrase, the first step should be toward a faculty development effort across the board to dramatically increase awareness of the basic research in learning theory of the past 30 years. Those who have been teaching for years without this awareness may find astonishing discoveries: “Oh, that’s why that innovation worked that I tried three years ago,” or “Okay, now I see why problem-based learning can work so well if designed correctly.”
Such discoveries can be epiphanies. Having a theoretical construct within which to work and grow is so much easier than reactivity or conformity without knowing why.
When we in higher education do talk about learning, we use the word “pedagogy.” Pedagogy, the word itself, refers to studying teaching. It is about teaching, about being, well, “ped-antic.” At its root, the word pedagogy also refers to “leading children,” which is, again, misleading in a time when undergraduate students, on the one hand, must get ready for an adult world that is less forgiving than ever, and on the other they often have children of their own, as the average age of undergraduates continues to climb. We need to understand how adults learn and design the undergraduate experience accordingly.
Faculty in higher education have been nibbling around the edges of learning research for decades, and have dealt daily with the issues of learning. They may find it actually refreshing to become more firmly grounded in learning theory. One research thread that seemed to lead to a rich lode of ideas about learning started with a Google search of the term “situated cognition”. Situated cognition, and related research threads, seems to me a useful concept for beginning to understand the tendencies of information technology for teaching and learning.
Reading the body of research about learning is important right now. Most of us are still at the point of not knowing even the basic theoretical terminology to use so we can better understand the changes underfoot now and make informed decisions about changes. And this is after decades of the movement called “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” (see http://www.issotl.org/--and note, the next ISSOTL conference is in Milwaukee October 20-22, 2011). The Association of American Colleges and Universities as well offers sessions and conversations related to the turn to learning--the next AAC&U conference is in Washington, DC, January 25-28, 2012.
My own association, The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning, also addresses new ways to think about the teaching-learning relationship and the changing roles of both teachers and students. The next AAEEBL (“able”) conference is in Boston, July 25-28, co-located with Campus Technology's annual summer conference.
There is movement underfoot. This is not about technology, despite the crucial need to deploy and use technology in the best ways, but about how humans use our new technology.
With this issue of Web 2.0, we end the run of this newsletter. The newsletter has run for three-and-a-half years and has been a great pleasure for me to write. I will continue to write regularly in The Batson Blog at http://www.aaeebl.org/tbb . Please join me there; we can continue the conversation. Meanwhile, continue your good work.
[Editor’s note: This is the final issue of the Web 2.0 newsletter. The overall topic of Web 2.0 continues to be important to Campus Technology, and it will be reflected in newsletters and other Campus Technology coverage going forward. Campus Technology would like to express its sincere appreciation for Trent Batson’s enormous contributions to the Web 2.0 newsletter and plans to feature Batson’s unique insights in future contributed articles in its other publications.]
About the Author
Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is executive director of The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning ( AAEEBL, http://www.aaeebl.org/ ), a new professional association for the ePortfolio community. He is the former Chair of the Board of the Open Source Portfolio Initiative, and Senior Contributing Editor for Campus Technology's Web 2.0 e-newsletter. batsontr@mit.edu
the advocate.com: Jindal names four new SU board members
The Southern University Board of Supervisors has four new board members, including former Tulane University President Eamon Kelly.
The other new board members appointed Thursday by Gov. Bobby Jindal are Republican Simsboro Mayor Willie Hendricks, Natchitoches car dealership president Calvin Braxton and Lake Charles pas-tor Samuel Tolbert, who briefly served on the board in 2007 and 2008.
None of them are Southern graduates.
Jindal reappointed New Orleans board member Richard Caiton, who recently became a maximum Jindal campaign contributor.
The Southern Board members who did not get reap-pointed are Walter Guidry of Lake Charles, Lea Polk Montgomery of Baton Rouge, Achilles Williams of Bastrop and Murphy Nash of Shreveport.
The appointments could strengthen Jindal's influence over the Southern Board. Earlier, this year Jindal proposed merging Southern University at New Orleans with the University of New Orleans, but that measure was defeated.
Southern University System President Ronald Mason Jr. said he is looking forward to getting to know the new board members, although he already knows Kelly well.
Kelly first hired Mason at Tulane nearly 30 years ago, jump-starting his career in higher education.
Mason and Caiton though have butted heads some during recent board meetings.
"I thought they (the departing board members) were all fine members of the board," Mason said, "but I got to know Walter Guidry especially well."
Guidry and Tolbert seem to be playing musical chairs on the Southern Board.
Former Gov. Kathleen Blanco in 2007 took Guidry off the Southern Board and she appointed Tolbert, who is a former Lake Charles council-man and the current pastor for Greater St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church.
When Jindal took office in 2008, he would not submit Tolbert for Senate confirmation, which took him off the board. Then Jindal reappointed Guidry.
Now, Jindal is putting Tolbert back on the board in place of Guidry.
Tolbert is not a Southern alumnus, but he is still a life members of the Southern University Alumni Federation.
Hendricks, a former Seattle resident who moved to Louisiana less than 10 years ago, is the senior vice president of Centric Federal Credit Union. But he also has become the mayor of small Simsboro, which is near Ruston.
Braxton is president and CEO of the Braxton Land Company and president of Natchitoches Ford-Lincoln-Mercury.
Inside Higher Ed: Pressing Beyond E-Books
Campus Technology: 9 Worst Campus Safety Grant-Writing Mistakes
Register Today for the ELI 2011 Online Fall Focus Session
Join us September 14 and 15 for "Open Educational Content: Addressing Challenges and Seizing Opportunities," the ELI 2011 Online Fall Focus Session, where we will engage the teaching and learning community in exploring initial questions around open educational content. Tour institutional examples of high-quality content development, maintenance models, and delivery and organizational options that support adoption.
Registration is now open. Full program details will be availabe in mid-July, so check back soon on the event page for additional information.
The Black Congressional Monitor (BCMONITOR) May 31st 2011
The Black Congressional Monitor (BCMONITOR) is an online newsletter covering legislative initiatives in the US Congress. More specifically, each issue of this twice-monthly online publication covers the following:
0 - All Public Laws Signed by President Barack Obama during that specific reporting period.
0 – Legislative Initiatives (actions on Bills, Resolutions, And Amendments) of the 43 Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)
Xavier University News: XU Signs Cooperation Agreement with China's Hebei University
New Orleans LA – Xavier University of Louisiana and Hebei Normal University of Science and Technology (HNUST) have signed a cooperation agreement to promote Mandarin instruction at Xavier and support faculty and student exchanges between the two institutions.
The agreement is an important milestone in the university’s efforts to establish a Confucius Institute at Xavier.
The two universities formalized the agreement upon the conclusion of a three-day campus visit by a small delegation of HNUST administrators, during which the delegation toured campus facilities and departments that are specifically targeted for Xavier’s CI programming, including the Department of Languages, the Division of Education, the College of Pharmacy and the Art Department.
XU will start offering Mandarin courses in the spring of 2012 concurrent with the anticipated official opening of the Confucius Institute at Xavier.
“HNUST and Xavier share the same vision for a Confucius Institute at Xavier,” said Professor Qianfeng Shi, Chairman of the HNUST University Administration Committee. “The campus has been impressive and your hospitality is as warm as the weather.”
“We are pleased to have this opportunity to partner with Hebei Normal University of Science and Technology and to share with our students China’s remarkable language, history, and culture,” said Dr. Loren Blanchard, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Xavier. “We are confident that this exchange will be beneficial to both institutions as we strive to foster greater mutual understanding between these two nations.”
XU has begun its preparations to send a six-member delegation to HNUST in the first week of July. With 24,000 students, HUNST is among the smaller universities in China and was selected to partner with Xavier due to its size and similar academic programs which include five research centers and 19 schools or departments. HNUST has also partnered with Troy University in Alabama and established Confucius Institute there in 2007.
During the upcoming visit to China, a delegation of Xavier and HNUST representatives will attend meetings at Hanban, the Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing where they intend to solicit approval for the joint application.
Upon the approval of its application, Xavier is positioned to be the first Confucius Institute at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) and the first in the State of Louisiana. There a more than 300 Confucius Institutes worldwide, including 87 in the United States.
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Innovative Educators Webinar: Reaching Adult Learners: Marketing Strategies That Work
Registration includes institutional access to the live webinar and the recording for 1 year!
Effectively Recruiting & Retaining Adult Students
Recruiting 38 Million Adult Students: Converting Credits To Degrees
Serving the Adult Degree Completion Market: Strategies That Work
Overview of Webinar Series
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The market of adults with some college and no degree is large and still growing. Join us for a powerful webinar series focused on strategies that will help you reach the adult degree completion market and the programs and services insitutions should offer to help them succeed. Our expert presenters will share ideas and tips on how to develop smart marketing campaigns with limited resources. Participants will also learn which services they should be offering that will ensure the success of this growing student population.
Webinar 1
Recruiting 38 Million Adult Students: Converting Credits To Degrees
There are 38 million working age Americans (22 percent) who have some college credits but no degree, currently placing the U.S. in 10th ranking in the numbers of its citizens earning two- and four-year degrees. At the same time, 60 percent of jobs in the U.S. will require a college degree by 2025. The pipeline of young college graduates will not meet workforce skills demands. The goal of this webinar is to present data and information on who these adults are, what the prospects are for attracting them back to college to finish what they began, and what steps colleges and universities must take to shape their marketing, programs, and services to do so. In this webinar, Carol Aslanian will present the findings and implications from several regional studies focusing on understanding the demands and preferences of adult students with some college credit but no degree. Participants will be able to apply the demographic profile and preference data to their marketing and outreach efforts to this market pool and advocate for adjustments to programs and services to better meet adult student demand.
Presenter: Carol Aslanian
Webinar 2
Serving the Adult Degree Completion Market: Strategies That Work
The adult degree completion market has become a competitive one and strategies for effectively serving these students are emerging. What are these strategies, which institutions have effectively deployed them and what should an institution targeting returning adults do? These questions and others will be addressed during this 90-minute interactive seminar that will include steps in undertaking or expanding institutional efforts, strategies that institutions need to implementation and how to effectively serve returning adults.
Presenter: Dr. Bruce Chaloux
Webinar 3
Reaching Adult Learners: Marketing Strategies That Work
The market of adults with some college and no degree is large and still growing. Getting your programmatic house in order is a key step in serving adults. How do you reach them and get them to return to complete degrees? How well do you know this market? Are you "adult friendly"? Are you ready to compete? What strategies and techniques have worked? How do you do this on a limited budget and compete against institutions with multi-million dollar campaigns? Join us to learn the answers to these questions and more. Participants will take away strategies they can begin implementing immediately, tips on how to assess readiness and ideas for how to develop smart campaigns with limited resources.
Presenter: Dr. Bruce Chaloux
Who Are the Speakers?
Carol Aslanian's is known nationally as an authority on adult higher education. She has created market studies and institutional audits for colleges, and has developed partnerships between them and employers.
Carol served as director of the Office of Adult Learning Services at the College Board for more than 20 years, and also helped the Board enhance its services to community colleges. As principal of the Aslanian Group, founded in 2000, she worked with learners, corporate partners, and institutions to identify new educational options. Her market research studies have helped hundreds of colleges and educational consortia expand their programs to meet the educational needs of working adults.
The author of a number of landmark reports and professional papers on adult learning, Carol has received several national awards for her contributions to the fields of community service and continuing education. She has served on the boards or committees of such groups as the American Marketing Association, the Nontraditional Students Report Board of Advisors, and Elderhostel.
Carol Aslanian holds degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University.
Dr. Bruce Chaloux is Director of Student Access Programs and Services at the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) in Atlanta, Georgia. In this role, he oversees a number of programs designed to help students start or continue their education, from the Academic Common Market and Regional Contract Program for Health Professions to Adult Learning and degree-completion programs. He founded and continues to direct SREB's 16-state Electronic Campus (electroniccampus.org) initiative. The Electronic Campus, the South's "electronic marketplace" for distance learning courses, programs and services, has grown to include more than 30,000 credit courses and 1,000 degree programs from 300 colleges and universities in the region. He led SREB's efforts to establish an integrated regional learning portal incorporating the Electronic Campus, launched in early 2004 and later the first "vertical" in the regional portal, TheTeacherCenter.org. He also directs SREB's Distance Learning Policy Laboratory, which addresses policy "barriers" in distance learning. He has worked closely with several SREB states to develop programs and services designed to reach adults. His latest project, also supported by a Lumina grant, will create a regional, and then national, Adult Degree Completion portal (TheAdultLearner.org)
He has published numerous articles and chapters in professional journals and books and has contributed to numerous reports on technology, quality assurance and distance learning. He has made over 750 presentations on these and related topics both in the U.S. and abroad. He has served as a consultant to some 20 states, to numerous colleges and universities, and has worked internationally with agencies or institutions in Canada, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.
NorthStar News: HBCU’s Technology Frontier
NorthStar News June 24, 2011
While answering the telephone calls of donors during the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) telethon in the early 1980’s, Justine Brown thought she could do more to support historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU). Using her marketing expertise, she thought an opportunity existed to showcase HBCU’s and market the institutions to prospective students. Her interest evolved into the Black College Bus Tours in 1984, a “road trip” of sorts to bring young people to Black colleges along the eastern seaboard. In 2000, the bus tour was named after Charlie Parrish, a retired Coca Cola executive who was committed to HBCU’s, and several years later the venture was co-branded the Parrish-Brown Black College Bus Tour, adding the name of its founder, Ms. Brown.
The Black College bus tour legacy is now continued by Ms. Brown’s son, Alvin Hartley, who is seeking innovative ways to market HBCU’s beyond transporting prospective students to the campuses of these institutions. The bus tours are now part of a larger initiative – HBCU Linkup – that uses social media to connect prospective students, parents and teachers to Black colleges. Sensing that “eventually all HBCU campuses have to be wired,” Hartley parlayed his interest in technology into a chance conversation with Don Knezek, the executive director of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). After becoming aware of the organization and a placing cold call to Knezek’s office, the connection was made. From there, a relationship began to flourish and Hartley extended Knezek an invitation to a reception during a conference of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. From there, the two men began to explore avenues for collaboration as there was mutual agreement between them that HBCU’s must elevate their technology profiles.
The outcome is a special panel discussion on the technology needs of HBCU’s at ISTE’s annual conference in Philadelphia. The theme of the conference is "Unlocking Potential," an appropriate focus for many of the nation's historically Black colleges. The event slated for next week will bring together some 18,000 education professionals and technology vendors to discuss several issues: school improvement, technology infrastructure, professional learning, digital age teaching and learning, and virtual schooling/e-learning. The conference, true to its focus, will use a variety of technology platforms to deliver information during the four days of the event, scheduled June 26 to June 29 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in the “City of Brotherly Love. “
Hartley’s aim is to get the leadership of HBCU’s to focus on their technology needs, and to begin the process of building relationships with tech firms. The HBCU Linkup workshop, titled “Using Social Networking for College Prep,” is scheduled for June 28 at 3:45 p.m. The session will assist high school educators better understand HBCU’s and suggest tools for educators to connect their students with Black colleges. Later that evening a special, invitation-only, reception will be held. Hartley’s objective is to create relationships to begin increasing the technology capacity of HBCU’s. Following the conference, he intends to continue working to level the technology playing field for Black colleges and strengthen ties between campuses and the technology sector.
Meanwhile the buses will continue to roll on the HBCU bus tours, with a turnkey program targeting trips from ten different cities. One new initiative on the planning board is a tour specifically for educators, teachers, administrators and Board of Education officials, to visit the college campuses. Since its founding, the tours have visited one-third of the nation’s Black colleges from New York to Florida and Alabama.
Campus Technology: LMS, Tear Down This Wall!
For the LMS to remain relevant in higher education, it must move beyond the classroom and integrate seamlessly with the learning opportunities presented by the web.
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By Gary Brown 06/29/11
Tennessee State University Newsroom: The Facts About Recent Reorganization of Academic Programs at TSU
The recent reorganization of academic programs at Tennessee State University was initiated by the downturn in the overall economy of the nation and the ensuing general reduction of higher-education support in Tennessee as well as in other states. Other state institutions-including the University of Tennessee-Knoxville-have had to reorganize and reduce program offerings.
The program actions at TSU resulted from careful study by various committees that included members of the faculty and Faculty Senate. President Shields invited the faculty to discuss proposed changes with her and to make suggestions related to the changes. Many of these suggestions were accepted and acted upon.
A budget analysis of the final program reorganization showed an annual cost savings of over $700,000. In order to protect programs and faculty positions, these savings were reallocated from non-producing areas to revenue-generating areas.
The facts are:
No faculty jobs were eliminated.
Two vice-presidential positions were eliminated.
While degree programs were cut, the revenue-generating elements of those programs were not. For example, the highly enrolled course offerings in Africana Studies were retained, and Africana Studies was re-designated as a minor. Only the major degree-the low-producing element of the program-was eliminated.
The reorganization relocated programs into units with financial support for those programs. For example, Biology was relocated to the College of Agriculture and Consumer Science, where Land Grant and other research funding is available.
External reports, as well as institutional data, have indicated that the university simply cannot support 67 degree programs with our current enrollment. Quality costs money, and underfunding all of our programs threatens the quality of those programs.
Retaining programs with few students and even fewer graduates puts the university at considerable risk under the new funding model required by the Complete College Tennessee Act.
As TBR Chancellor John Morgan has written in a letter to one of our faculty members, "Appropriate paper work was submitted from TSU and the proposed reorganization of departments and name changes of academic units were all approved by the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs in accordance with TBR policy."
Change is frequently hard. But the data-driven deliberated changes being made at TSU serve to protect the university, the students, the faculty and the staff from catastrophic change that would surely result from hasty, ill-considered, and mis-informed actions.
Academic Impressions Conference: Retaining Students in Online Education
September 28 - 30, 2011 :: Philadelphia, PA
Learn proven methods for preventing online student attrition.
In order to improve online student retention, especially during these difficult economic times, institutions need methods to track students, document progress, and put specific practices in place to ensure success.
Join us for a highly interactive conference that will give you the opportunity to directly apply the content of the program immediately to your institution and receive feedback from our instructors as you develop your own institutional action plan.
Topics covered include:
• Student retention as a life cycle
• The unique characteristics of online students and their needs
• Developing dashboards to identify, track, trend, and correct problems
• How certain academic variables can predict student success
• Critical student support services needed to improve persistence
• Ways to deliver support services in an online format
• Early engagement through online first-year experience programs
• The role of faculty and academic advisers in online retention
There is also an optional pre-conference workshop titled "Online Student Retention for Community Colleges" and an optional post-conference workshop titled "Measuring and Benchmarking Your Retention Success." See the complete agenda for details.
WHAT PAST PARTICIPANTS SAID ABOUT THIS EVENT
• "The presenters gave us tools we could take back to our campus and immediately apply to provide support for students and faculty"
• "This conference not only had great content, but was rich in relationship-building with everyone involved. This was the best opportunity I've ever had to truly network and share at any conference."
BRING YOUR TEAM, REGISTER TODAY
Register for this event online or call 720.488.6800 today. Register three people from your institution and the fourth can attend for free. Questions? Call us to determine if this event is right for you.
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