Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Campus Technology: 6 Easy Steps to Online Success
By Richard Rose
10/24/11
Against his better instincts, an educator at West Texas A&M University shares his school's recipe for developing a successful online learning program. MORE
University Business: In College, Working Hard to Learn High School Material
In June, Desiree Smith was graduated from Murry Bergtraum High. Her grades were in the 90s, she said, and she had passed the four state Regents exams. Since enrolling last month at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, Ms. Smith, 19, has come to realize that graduating from a New York City public high school is not the same as learning.
She failed all three placement tests for LaGuardia and is now taking remediation in reading, writing and math. So are Nikita Thomas, of Bedford Stuyvesant Prep; Sade Washington, of the Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem; Stacey Sumulong, of Queens Vocational and Technical; Lucrecia Woolford of John Adams High; and Juan Rodriguez of Grover Cleveland High. “Passing the Regents don’t mean nothing,” Ms. Thomas said. “The main focus in high school is to get you to graduate; it makes the school look good. They get you in and get you out.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made the rising graduation rate — to 61 percent in June, from 46.5 percent in 2005 — the No. 1 symbol of his educational accomplishments. But that rate is less impressive when paired with the percentage of graduates who need remediation in all three subjects when they enter LaGuardia or other City University of New York community colleges: 22.6 percent in 2010 (2,812 students), up from 15.4 percent in 2005 (1,085).
“A few years ago, we noticed the numbers really jump,” said John Mogulescu, the senior university dean for CUNY. Over all, 74 percent of city high school graduates enrolled at the system’s six community colleges take remediation in at least one subject, but those needing all three are at the highest risk of dropping out. So in 2008, CUNY started a program with a few dozen students to see if an intensive semester focused on just the three subjects — five hours a day, five days a week — could make a difference. The program, known as Start, has since expanded.
The New York Times
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Inside Higher Ed: Far From Honorable
October 25, 2011 - 3:00am
By Steve Kolowich
Researchers at Ohio University suggest that honor codes
are not as effective for deterring cheating in fully online courses.
Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of social belonging among online students might help universities fight another problem: cheating.
In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place primarily in a classroom.
“The more distant students are, the more disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.
While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus, said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social connections.”
Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs has given rise to a cottage industry of remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of online students as a rule.)
But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so, then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in the online environment.
They experimented with the effectiveness of honor codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students, mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14 multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of them.
The second trial involved another fully online introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code -- posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported cheating between the two groups.
In a third trial, the professors repeated the experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20 percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in which they were not.
This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference: Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.
LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest to police.
“The bottom line is that if there are opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be contained.”
The Ohio researchers suggested that follow-up research should explore the extent to which greater social engagement may increase the effectiveness of honor codes in online courses.
For the latest technology news and opinion from Inside Higher Ed, follow @IHEtech on Twitter.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/25/online-students-might-feel-less-accountable-honor-codes#ixzz1bueMW7By
Solving Mobile's Challenges - How Schools are Really Providing Anytime/Anywhere Access
November 16, 2011
2:00 PM EDT / 11:00 AM PDT
Duration: 60 minutes
Duration: 60 minutes
Today’s students are hungry for technology. As mobile devices become more ubiquitous, increasingly it is not a matter of deciding if schools should allow these devices in the classroom, but of when and how. However, there is no one-size fits all solution. Bring your own devices (BYOD), school provided 1-to-1 initiatives, etc. - how do you select the best mobile model for your school? How do you overcome the technical, economic and policy hurdles?
This complimentary webinar will feature education technologists who are using mobile devices for instruction and will highlight how they are overcoming barriers to adoption such as:
• Funding for devices and infrastructure
• Setting District Policies
• Safety/ Content Filtering
• Compliance
• Bandwidth
• Parent and Teacher Concerns
Join us on November 16th to learn about new and revolutionary delivery models to help bridge the digital divide and provide mobile learning anywhere/anytime.
Moderator:
John Halpin
Vice President
Strategy and Programs
Center for Digital Education
Speakers:
Marie Bjerede
Director, Learning Un-Limited
Founder, e-Mergents, LLC
Lenny Schad
Chief Information Officer
Katy ISD
Katy, TX
Michael Flood
Vice President, Education Markets
Kajeet for Education
TeachHub.com: News, Recommendations and Resources By Teachers, For Teachers
Find Free Lessons & Video Writing Prompts for all grades, Online Learning Activities, Field Trip Tips & more!
Campus Technology and Sonic Foundry Free On-Demand Webinar: Lecture Capture Systems in the Cloud: Why New York Law School Outsourced Hosting for Campus-Wide Capture
After a thorough analysis, New York Law School decided to host all of their lecture capture content—now more than 5,700 class recordings—outside their network. They determined placing the Mediasite server back-end in the cloud:
• Saved time and money
• Scaled faster without losing any features
• Avoided burdening their own network infrastructure
Learn how to weigh the pros and cons of building an on-premises lecture capture infrastructure vs. hosting, particularly in terms of time, budget, hardware, staffing and scalability.
Presented by: Michael DeMeo, director of academic media services, New York Law School
Shreveport Times: Southern University Trims Class Week
Chancellor James Llorens says the university is making the switch to save on utility costs in buildings and to free up more time on Friday for student advising and faculty office hours.
The decision would make Southern the first public university in Louisiana to condense classes to four days year round.
Some universities in the state though do have 4-day schedules with no classes after noon on Friday.
The change is made by lengthening classes on Mondays and Wednesdays. Those 50-minute classes will be extended to one hour and 20 minutes each, which is the same as how most classes operate on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Inside Higher Ed Audio Conference: Students and the "Digital Shoreline"
Technology and demographics are both leading to dramatic changes in higher education.
On Wednesday, November 16, at 1 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present an audio conference on how these forces are pressuring colleges to change. Roger McHaney, author of The New Digital Shoreline: How Web 2.0 and Millennials Are Revolutionizing Higher Education, will review the specific changes in technology that have the greatest impact on college education today, as well as the impact for colleges of enrolling students who are more tech-savvy than ever before.
Among the topics he will cover:
• What today’s students know well (and what they don’t) with regard to technology
• The technologies most important to students.
• How to tell the difference between today’s fad and a significant shift in student behavior and expectations.
• The impact of social media.
• The challenges and potential of teaching in the new environment.
• The way institutions can examine whether their educational and extracurricular programming is appropriately designed for this new era.
The program will feature a 30-minute presentation and a 30-minute question-and-answer period. The entire program will last one hour.
The program is ideal for:
• Academic affairs
• Student affairs
• Academic computing
• Admissions
• Deans and department chairs
• Faculty members
This audio conference, "Students and the 'Digital Shoreline'," costs $199 for a single telephone line; listen yourself or with a group around a conference table. (Institutions wishing to have multiple people participate from separate locations will need to purchase additional lines.) Register early -- through Monday, October 31 -- and the cost is only $149. Upon registering, you'll be e-mailed a receipt and information about how to dial in. The day before the conference, we'll send you a PowerPoint that you can use to follow along with the presentation. This is an audio-only conference; you will not need to be connected to the Internet to participate.
University Business: Educators Aim To Eliminate Need For Remedial College Work
Currently, 41 percent of students who graduate from a public high school in Ohio take at least one remedial course when they enroll in one of the state's two- or four-year public institutions, according to the Ohio Board of Regents. The courses cost the same as general college classes but don't count toward a degree.
"Remedial education is not only expensive but it is a big discouragement to the student," said Kim Norris, spokeswoman for the Ohio Board of Regents. Only 26 percent of students who take a remedial course get an associate's or bachelor's degree, the regents said.
A new statewide initiative is aimed at aligning the high school curriculum with what students are expected to know by the time they reach college. Public high schools and colleges will work together on the Ohio High School and Higher Education Alignment Initiative, created by the Regents and the Ohio Department of Education.
The Plain Dealer
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