Dillard University Athletics Update January 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
iModerate Research Technologies: New Study Shows How Ebooks Have Changed the Reading Landscape
Denver, CO January 27, 2011 - In a recent study to understand how portable, multi-function devices or MFDs (e.g., iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android devices, etc) are changing consumer book reading habits, consumers who utilized these devices expressed a tremendous affinity for them, struggling to come up with any significant shortcomings to reading ebooks on them. These consumers also revealed their specific preference for MFDs, usage occasions and their ebook purchasing habits.
The two-part study with over 300 MFD owners who have read an ebook in the past 6 months, was conducted by online qualitative research firm iModerate Research Technologies and research and publishing consultancy, Brock Associates. A summary of the results were presented at Digital Book World 2011 in New York City.
The study found that the top three reasons MFD users prefer reading on their device as opposed to a hard copy book are the convenience it offers (80%), the ease of purchasing ebooks (61%) and the backlit screen (41%). Moreover, the three most common occasions for reading on MFDs are: while traveling (72%), while waiting for an appointment (72%) and while relaxing (70%).
“I think we can expect to see growth in ebook consumption in the coming year because consumers suggest that reading books on a multi-function device is such a convenience to them,” says Laurie Brock, President of Brock Associates. “As long as they have their device with them 24/7, they are going to read on it – especially if the price for an ebook remains reasonable.”
Qualitatively, consumers provided the reasoning behind why their reading habits have increased, and the story surrounding the benefits that MFDs and ebooks offer:
Increased Reading
Respondents indicated they are “time-filling reading” primarily on a MFD. Because respondents nearly always have these devices with them, they use them to read ebooks during otherwise “dead” pockets of time, such as when waiting at the doctor’s office or while their kids play on the playground.
“When we're going somewhere in the car and my husband is driving, I'll read some. If my kid is playing on the playground or something, I'll sit and read while she's playing. It's just convenient to pull out if I have a few minutes that I'm not doing anything.” Female 25-34
Convenience
The greatest benefit of the ebook experience stems from the tremendous convenience of storing books on devices that respondents nearly always have on hand. Rather than lugging heavy paper books or being stuck with just one or two titles, an ereader (whether multi-function or dedicated) allows users the luxury of having an entire library at their fingertips.
“I like being able to have many books that I can choose from to read all in one place… All I have to do is download whatever books I want to read to my devices and I can read one book for a while or switch to another book if my mood changes and I want to read something else.” Male 25-34
Digital Format
The digital format provides a variety of secondary benefits that enhance the ebook experience. These include the ability to adjust text size, make notes or highlight text, bookmark pages, search within a text and read easily in the dark.
“I also like that I can easily highlight them without ''ruining'' them… It lets me easily reference things in the future. It's like being able to put unlimited bookmarks in a book without having them stick out all over the place.” male, 25-34
About the Study
The two-part study began with a purely qualitative research exercise where 30 respondents participated in live, online one-on-one interview sessions. Phase two utilized a hybrid market research approach where 60 one-on-one sessions were incorporated into an online survey which netted 304 completes. In both phases, respondents were men and women aged 18+, who own and use a multi-function electronic device and have read at least one ebook on this device in the past six months. Readers were defined as Heavy Readers if they had read 6 or more books/ebooks in the last 6 months, Medium Readers if they had read 3 to 5 books/ebooks in the last 6 months or as Light Readers if they had read 1 or 2 books/ebooks in the last 6 months.
Summary slides of the study are available as a free download from iModerate Research Technologies.
About iModerate Research Technologies
iModerate Research Technologies listens, connects and digs deeper with consumers online to provide the market research story organizations need to win in the marketplace. Years of research and development by veteran field experts, as well as analytical specialists, produced the concept, methodology and software that have allowed iModerate to help Fortune 500 companies, large and boutique research firms and prominent organizations strengthen their research results. Focused on providing customized qualitative research solutions, iModerate is broadening online research capabilities by delivering essential qualitative insight. iModerate is based in Denver, Colorado. For more information please visit www.imoderate.com
About Brock Associates
Laurie Brock, President of Brock Associates, has been involved in the information and publishing industries for over thirty-five years. She has extensive experience in market research and the development of both print and electronic publications.
Media Contacts:
iModerate
Adam Rossow
303-928-8406
arossow@imoderate.com
Brock Associates
Laurie Brock
303-830-8307
laurie@brock-associates.com
The two-part study with over 300 MFD owners who have read an ebook in the past 6 months, was conducted by online qualitative research firm iModerate Research Technologies and research and publishing consultancy, Brock Associates. A summary of the results were presented at Digital Book World 2011 in New York City.
The study found that the top three reasons MFD users prefer reading on their device as opposed to a hard copy book are the convenience it offers (80%), the ease of purchasing ebooks (61%) and the backlit screen (41%). Moreover, the three most common occasions for reading on MFDs are: while traveling (72%), while waiting for an appointment (72%) and while relaxing (70%).
“I think we can expect to see growth in ebook consumption in the coming year because consumers suggest that reading books on a multi-function device is such a convenience to them,” says Laurie Brock, President of Brock Associates. “As long as they have their device with them 24/7, they are going to read on it – especially if the price for an ebook remains reasonable.”
Qualitatively, consumers provided the reasoning behind why their reading habits have increased, and the story surrounding the benefits that MFDs and ebooks offer:
Increased Reading
Respondents indicated they are “time-filling reading” primarily on a MFD. Because respondents nearly always have these devices with them, they use them to read ebooks during otherwise “dead” pockets of time, such as when waiting at the doctor’s office or while their kids play on the playground.
“When we're going somewhere in the car and my husband is driving, I'll read some. If my kid is playing on the playground or something, I'll sit and read while she's playing. It's just convenient to pull out if I have a few minutes that I'm not doing anything.” Female 25-34
Convenience
The greatest benefit of the ebook experience stems from the tremendous convenience of storing books on devices that respondents nearly always have on hand. Rather than lugging heavy paper books or being stuck with just one or two titles, an ereader (whether multi-function or dedicated) allows users the luxury of having an entire library at their fingertips.
“I like being able to have many books that I can choose from to read all in one place… All I have to do is download whatever books I want to read to my devices and I can read one book for a while or switch to another book if my mood changes and I want to read something else.” Male 25-34
Digital Format
The digital format provides a variety of secondary benefits that enhance the ebook experience. These include the ability to adjust text size, make notes or highlight text, bookmark pages, search within a text and read easily in the dark.
“I also like that I can easily highlight them without ''ruining'' them… It lets me easily reference things in the future. It's like being able to put unlimited bookmarks in a book without having them stick out all over the place.” male, 25-34
About the Study
The two-part study began with a purely qualitative research exercise where 30 respondents participated in live, online one-on-one interview sessions. Phase two utilized a hybrid market research approach where 60 one-on-one sessions were incorporated into an online survey which netted 304 completes. In both phases, respondents were men and women aged 18+, who own and use a multi-function electronic device and have read at least one ebook on this device in the past six months. Readers were defined as Heavy Readers if they had read 6 or more books/ebooks in the last 6 months, Medium Readers if they had read 3 to 5 books/ebooks in the last 6 months or as Light Readers if they had read 1 or 2 books/ebooks in the last 6 months.
Summary slides of the study are available as a free download from iModerate Research Technologies.
About iModerate Research Technologies
iModerate Research Technologies listens, connects and digs deeper with consumers online to provide the market research story organizations need to win in the marketplace. Years of research and development by veteran field experts, as well as analytical specialists, produced the concept, methodology and software that have allowed iModerate to help Fortune 500 companies, large and boutique research firms and prominent organizations strengthen their research results. Focused on providing customized qualitative research solutions, iModerate is broadening online research capabilities by delivering essential qualitative insight. iModerate is based in Denver, Colorado. For more information please visit www.imoderate.com
About Brock Associates
Laurie Brock, President of Brock Associates, has been involved in the information and publishing industries for over thirty-five years. She has extensive experience in market research and the development of both print and electronic publications.
Media Contacts:
iModerate
Adam Rossow
303-928-8406
arossow@imoderate.com
Brock Associates
Laurie Brock
303-830-8307
laurie@brock-associates.com
The New York Times: The Perils of Literary Profiling
By GEOFF NICHOLSON
Published: January 28, 2011
It’s probably time to update the list on my Facebook profile for the books I “like.” If you think that “liking” a book is a fairly nebulous and meaningless concept, you’ll get no argument from me. I made the list a couple of years back and jotted down the first few titles that came into my head (“Gravity’s Rainbow,” “The Big Sleep,” “More Pricks Than Kicks” and “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” if you must know). They weren’t selected entirely at random — they’re all books I think are great — but I didn’t spend much time pondering the selection, and on another day I might well have chosen four completely different titles.
Looking at the list now, however, I can see that it contains elements of the pretentious littérateur and the moody loner, both of which are obviously to be avoided. And if the horror of the Arizona shooting has taught us anything, it’s that some place a high value on what can be gleaned from a man’s reading habits, whether actual or simply professed. I have no idea if Jared Lee Loughner was really a great reader of Plato, Lewis Carroll, “The Will to Power” or “The Communist Manifesto,” as he claimed, but he wanted the world to think he was. And perhaps you really can judge a man by the books he displays on his bookshelf (or keeps on his Kindle).
In which case I pray that no F.B.I. agent, criminal profiler or (worst of all) news pundit ever gets a look at my bookshelves. There, alongside Swift, Plato, Lewis Carroll and Marx, you’d find the Marquis de Sade, Mickey Spillane, Hitler and Ann Coulter. Books are acquired for all kinds of reasons, including curiosity, irony, guilty pleasure and the desire to understand the enemy (not to mention free review copies), but you try telling that to a G-man. It seems perfectly obvious to me that owning a copy of “Mein Kampf” doesn’t mean you’re a Nazi, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Thanks to Timothy W. Ryback’s “Hitler’s Private Library,” we now know that Hitler read “Don Quixote,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” and considered them “among the great works of world literature,” in Ryback’s words. This is problematic enough, since a taste for great literature is supposed to make us more humane and empathetic, isn’t it? But then Ryback tells us that Hitler had “mastered” the writings of Karl May, an ultraprolific German author of cowboy novels featuring the characters Old Surehand and Old Shatterhand. Hitler’s fondness for tales of the Old West may mean something, but if you’re trying to understand Hitler there are more obvious places to start.
Reading habits would seem to be relevant enough to someone’s biography, especially if that person is a writer. In his study “Built of Books,” Thomas Wright attempts to reconstruct the contents of Oscar Wilde’s library, which was dispersed and auctioned off between his imprisonment and trial. It’s worth knowing (though hardly surprising) that Wilde read the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, Hegel and some French pornography, but difficulties arise when Wright tries, in a self-described moment of “quixotic madness,” to make the book a partial autobiography, in the belief that if he read everything Wilde had read, Wilde would become a “Socratic mentor, who would help me give birth to a new self.”
Forging a deep link between criminals and their books can be even more quixotic. Ed Sanders, in “The Family,” tells us that one of Charles Manson’s favorite books was Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” but we’re also told that Manson was barely literate. Both John Hinckley Jr. (Reagan’s would-be assassin) and Mark David Chapman (the murderer of John Lennon) have been connected to “The Catcher in the Rye,” Hinckley by having a copy in his hotel room, Chapman by calmly reading the book outside the Dakota apartment building while waiting for the police to arrive after he shot Lennon. But it’s hardly surprising that a book that has sold well over 35 million copies has occasionally fallen into the hands of criminals.
The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham got things about as wrong as can be when he argued, in “Seduction of the Innocent” (1954), that the fact that prisoners and juvenile delinquents read “crime comics” meant that comics were causing, or at least stoking, their criminal tendencies. Current evidence suggests that if criminals read at all — and let’s not forget how many prisoners are functionally illiterate — then they read much the same books as the rest of us, business and self-help books included. This, anyway, was the conclusion reached by Glennor Shirley, who in 2003 conducted a survey of prison librarians for the American Library Association and learned that prisoners’ favorite writers included Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Danielle Steel and “all authors of westerns.” Admittedly, she is referring to their reading habits in prison rather than outside. (Here I might add that when I learned one of my short stories had appeared in an anthology used in a prison literacy program, I was relieved to know I was part of the solution, not part of the problem.)
The self-help nature of some prison reading can be disturbing. Scandal arose in Britain two years ago when it was revealed that prisoners were being allowed to read “inappropriate” books, including the memoirs of other, more successful criminals, stories of prison escapes and, inevitably, “Mein Kampf.” (More cheeringly, Avi Steinberg, the author of the recent memoir “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” reports a vogue for Anne Frank’s diary among some female prisoners he worked with.)
For my part, I can say that the presence of Mickey Spillane’s books on my shelves hasn’t persuaded me that I need to start packing heat, nor has ownership of an Ann Coulter volume moved me to denounce Arabs. Such explorations of the dark side notwithstanding, most of us read books that reinforce the opinions and tendencies we already have. And yet and yet . . . the fact is, books really do have the power to influence and change people. That’s why some of us like them so much. A generation of European students (not to mention Russian revolutionaries) read “The Communist Manifesto” and thought it made a great deal of sense. Right now somebody is reading Jack Kerouac and deciding to go on the road, or reading William Burroughs and thinking it might be a lark to become a gentleman junkie.
So, if you actually did examine my bookshelves you could probably reach some reasonably accurate conclusions about my age, class, nationality, sexuality and so on. You would see that I’m not some dangerous, volatile, politically extreme nut job. Rather, you would decide that I’m a bookish, cosmopolitan sophisticate, with broad, quirky and unpredictable interests, a taste for literary experimentation, a sense of history, a serious man with a sense of humor and a wide range of sympathies. At any rate, that’s what I’d like you to think.
Published: January 28, 2011
It’s probably time to update the list on my Facebook profile for the books I “like.” If you think that “liking” a book is a fairly nebulous and meaningless concept, you’ll get no argument from me. I made the list a couple of years back and jotted down the first few titles that came into my head (“Gravity’s Rainbow,” “The Big Sleep,” “More Pricks Than Kicks” and “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” if you must know). They weren’t selected entirely at random — they’re all books I think are great — but I didn’t spend much time pondering the selection, and on another day I might well have chosen four completely different titles.
Looking at the list now, however, I can see that it contains elements of the pretentious littérateur and the moody loner, both of which are obviously to be avoided. And if the horror of the Arizona shooting has taught us anything, it’s that some place a high value on what can be gleaned from a man’s reading habits, whether actual or simply professed. I have no idea if Jared Lee Loughner was really a great reader of Plato, Lewis Carroll, “The Will to Power” or “The Communist Manifesto,” as he claimed, but he wanted the world to think he was. And perhaps you really can judge a man by the books he displays on his bookshelf (or keeps on his Kindle).
In which case I pray that no F.B.I. agent, criminal profiler or (worst of all) news pundit ever gets a look at my bookshelves. There, alongside Swift, Plato, Lewis Carroll and Marx, you’d find the Marquis de Sade, Mickey Spillane, Hitler and Ann Coulter. Books are acquired for all kinds of reasons, including curiosity, irony, guilty pleasure and the desire to understand the enemy (not to mention free review copies), but you try telling that to a G-man. It seems perfectly obvious to me that owning a copy of “Mein Kampf” doesn’t mean you’re a Nazi, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Thanks to Timothy W. Ryback’s “Hitler’s Private Library,” we now know that Hitler read “Don Quixote,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” and considered them “among the great works of world literature,” in Ryback’s words. This is problematic enough, since a taste for great literature is supposed to make us more humane and empathetic, isn’t it? But then Ryback tells us that Hitler had “mastered” the writings of Karl May, an ultraprolific German author of cowboy novels featuring the characters Old Surehand and Old Shatterhand. Hitler’s fondness for tales of the Old West may mean something, but if you’re trying to understand Hitler there are more obvious places to start.
Reading habits would seem to be relevant enough to someone’s biography, especially if that person is a writer. In his study “Built of Books,” Thomas Wright attempts to reconstruct the contents of Oscar Wilde’s library, which was dispersed and auctioned off between his imprisonment and trial. It’s worth knowing (though hardly surprising) that Wilde read the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, Hegel and some French pornography, but difficulties arise when Wright tries, in a self-described moment of “quixotic madness,” to make the book a partial autobiography, in the belief that if he read everything Wilde had read, Wilde would become a “Socratic mentor, who would help me give birth to a new self.”
Forging a deep link between criminals and their books can be even more quixotic. Ed Sanders, in “The Family,” tells us that one of Charles Manson’s favorite books was Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” but we’re also told that Manson was barely literate. Both John Hinckley Jr. (Reagan’s would-be assassin) and Mark David Chapman (the murderer of John Lennon) have been connected to “The Catcher in the Rye,” Hinckley by having a copy in his hotel room, Chapman by calmly reading the book outside the Dakota apartment building while waiting for the police to arrive after he shot Lennon. But it’s hardly surprising that a book that has sold well over 35 million copies has occasionally fallen into the hands of criminals.
The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham got things about as wrong as can be when he argued, in “Seduction of the Innocent” (1954), that the fact that prisoners and juvenile delinquents read “crime comics” meant that comics were causing, or at least stoking, their criminal tendencies. Current evidence suggests that if criminals read at all — and let’s not forget how many prisoners are functionally illiterate — then they read much the same books as the rest of us, business and self-help books included. This, anyway, was the conclusion reached by Glennor Shirley, who in 2003 conducted a survey of prison librarians for the American Library Association and learned that prisoners’ favorite writers included Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Danielle Steel and “all authors of westerns.” Admittedly, she is referring to their reading habits in prison rather than outside. (Here I might add that when I learned one of my short stories had appeared in an anthology used in a prison literacy program, I was relieved to know I was part of the solution, not part of the problem.)
The self-help nature of some prison reading can be disturbing. Scandal arose in Britain two years ago when it was revealed that prisoners were being allowed to read “inappropriate” books, including the memoirs of other, more successful criminals, stories of prison escapes and, inevitably, “Mein Kampf.” (More cheeringly, Avi Steinberg, the author of the recent memoir “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” reports a vogue for Anne Frank’s diary among some female prisoners he worked with.)
For my part, I can say that the presence of Mickey Spillane’s books on my shelves hasn’t persuaded me that I need to start packing heat, nor has ownership of an Ann Coulter volume moved me to denounce Arabs. Such explorations of the dark side notwithstanding, most of us read books that reinforce the opinions and tendencies we already have. And yet and yet . . . the fact is, books really do have the power to influence and change people. That’s why some of us like them so much. A generation of European students (not to mention Russian revolutionaries) read “The Communist Manifesto” and thought it made a great deal of sense. Right now somebody is reading Jack Kerouac and deciding to go on the road, or reading William Burroughs and thinking it might be a lark to become a gentleman junkie.
So, if you actually did examine my bookshelves you could probably reach some reasonably accurate conclusions about my age, class, nationality, sexuality and so on. You would see that I’m not some dangerous, volatile, politically extreme nut job. Rather, you would decide that I’m a bookish, cosmopolitan sophisticate, with broad, quirky and unpredictable interests, a taste for literary experimentation, a sense of history, a serious man with a sense of humor and a wide range of sympathies. At any rate, that’s what I’d like you to think.
Inside Higher Education: What Degrees Should Mean
January 26, 2011
What should a college graduate know and be able to do? There are as many views on that as there are colleges (thousands), if not individual professors and students (many more).
The diversity of opinions about what a college education means has long been seen as a strength of American higher education. But in recent years, many employers and policy makers have argued that the lack of a common definition of what students should know and be able to do -- and a dearth of adequate methods of gauging whether they know it and can do it -- has contributed to a decline in the quality of higher education and to the awarding of more degrees, but of lesser value.
The push to set such standards at a national (and even federal) level has, in turn, led many college and faculty leaders to complain that a one-size-fits-all approach to defining student learning would result in greatly oversimplified definitions of learning.
To try to provide a shared understanding of what degrees mean -- but without, its designers insist, turning that into a government or other mandate -- the Lumina Foundation for Education is today releasing a draft of its Degree Qualifications Profile, created by four leading higher education researchers and policy experts (more on them later).
The profile, around which Lumina officials plan to begin a several-year discussion in which colleges, accreditors and other groups will test and refine it, is intended to establish, in more specific ways than has historically been the case, what the recipients of associate, bachelor's and master's degrees (regardless of discipline) should know and be able to do.
"There is no generally accepted understanding of what quality represents in American higher education," says Jamie P. Merisotis, Lumina's president and chief executive officer. "Our view is that the absence of that shared understanding of what quality means has resulted in employers being dissatisfied with what higher education produces; policy makers being unsure of their investment; and students and families having a lack of clarity about choice of institutions and the relative value of their degrees."
The degree framework, he says, is designed to help develop that shared understanding across majors, programs and institutions. Paired with the foundation's other major student learning project, known as "tuning" -- which focuses on what degree holders should know within specific disciplines -- the qualifications profile could help create a common definition of what a college credential should represent, he said, so that better tools (portfolios, projects, and tests) can be developed to measure how well students are actually accumulating the requisite knowledge and skills.
Lumina officials describe the qualifications profile -- loosely modeled on the degree frameworks that the European Union and other countries have adopted -- as potentially "transformational" for American higher education, but they acknowledge that a great deal would need to happen for it to have anywhere near that effect. Several outside experts that Inside Higher Ed asked to assess the standards saw significant hurdles to its adoption by colleges -- especially overcoming the faculty skepticism about any effort that seems to be dropped from on high and that can be seen as substituting national standards for institutionally based ones.
"A learning framework that really promotes student success has to be developed at the local level and has to be led by front-line faculty and staff," Larry Gold, higher education director for the American Federation of Teachers, said via e-mail. "Nothing is less likely to help students succeed than an overly standardized curriculum and assessment regime imposed from the outside. So the Degree Profile can make a contribution if the efforts coming out of it are developed and driven by front-line faculty and staff at the institution and if these efforts receive the kind of continuing support that makes them sustainable -- particularly investment in the faculty and staff charged with making the program succeed."
The Genesis
Lumina first began floating the idea of developing a qualifications framework about 18 months ago, in a series of behind-the-scenes meetings with higher education leaders and policy makers. Foundation officials portrayed a commonly agreed-upon understanding of what a college degree means as an important tool to knocking down some of the barriers that inhibit college completion, which has been at the center of Lumina's agenda for the last several years. Those barriers include the difficulty of transferring academic credit from one institution to another, and the failure to recognize the value of learning that takes place outside traditional classroom settings, which often goes unrecognized in a system in which the "credit hour" is the coin of the realm.
But Lumina's leaders also saw the profile as key to ensuring that not only are more degrees awarded, "but that those must be of high quality," said Holiday Hart McKiernan, senior vice president and general counsel at Lumina.
The foundation assembled four longtime experts on assessment and student learning -- Clifford Adelman of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, Peter Ewell of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, Paul Gaston of Kent State University, and Carol Geary Schneider of the American Association of Colleges & Universities -- to "reduce to writing, without worrying about implementation, what would be the core competencies" for recipients of various degrees. The four researchers spent months poring over the comments of outside reviewers and, not surprisingly to those who know the four of them, debating intensely among themselves.
Their final product divides the desired skills and knowledge into five basic areas -- specialized knowledge; broad, integrative knowledge; intellectual skills; applied learning; and civic learning -- and lists within each the key learning outcomes in which a student should be competent, with the expectations for students increasing as they move up the three degree levels. For specialized knowledge -- knowledge acquired in a specialized field of study, for instance -- the profile lists the following outcomes at different levels:
The associate degree holder:
* Describes the scope and principal features of the field of study, citing core theories and practices, and offers a similar explication of a related field.
* Illustrates the field’s current terminology.
* Generates substantially error-free products, exhibits, or performances in the field.
The bachelor's degree holder:
* Defines and explains the boundaries, divisions, styles and practices of the field.
* Defines and properly uses the principal terms in the field, both historical and contemporaneous.
* Demonstrates fluency in the use of tools, technologies and methods in the field.
* Evaluates, clarifies and frames a complex question or challenge using perspectives and scholarship from the student’s major field and at least one other.
* Constructs a project related to a familiar but complex problem in the field of study by assembling, arranging and reformulating ideas, concepts, designs or techniques.
* Constructs a summative project, paper or practice-based performance that draws on current research, scholarship and/or techniques in the field.
The master's degree holder:
* Elucidates the major theories, research methods and approaches to inquiry, and/or schools of practice in the field; articulates relevant sources; and illustrates their relationship to allied fields.
* Assesses the contributions of major figures and organizations in the field; describes its major methodologies and practices; and implements at least two such methodologies and practices through projects, papers, exhibits or performances.
* Articulates major challenges involved in practicing the field, elucidates its leading edges, and delineates its current limits with respect to theory, knowledge and practice.
* Initiates, assembles, arranges and reformulates ideas, concepts, designs and techniques in carrying out a project directed at a challenge in the field beyond conventional boundaries.
Lumina officials and the authors say they went out of their way to fill the degree profile with "concrete, illustrative student learning outcome statements" that use "active verbs that tell all parties -- students, faculty, employers, policymakers and the general public -- what students actually should do to demonstrate their mastery."
That may be true compared to other documents of its kind, but even some of the outside reviewers -- many of whom were higher education researchers -- described the profile as "abstract." Lumina officials admit that the document is complex, and that the full impact of the degree profile won't be felt unless and until college leaders and their faculties begin discussing whether and how the qualifications laid out in the profile apply to their own students, and how they might go about documenting that the students to whom they award degrees have accumulated the knowledge and skills in question.
Most of the outside experts with whom Inside Higher Ed shared the degree profile said they found little to argue with in the qualifications and outcomes put forward by the four authors. "This is a very good document that shows where higher education should end up," said Michael Poliakoff, policy director at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. "It is very strong in stressing the fact that this needs to be an institutionwide conversation, and ensures that there is thorough integration of these learning elements" across academic programs.
But like others interviewed, Poliakoff stressed that without a clear sense of how (and whether) it can be implemented on campuses, the profile will make little difference. "Without getting it down to the level of requirements and assessment, it will fall short of its full impact," he said.
Richard Arum, whose new book, Academically Adrift, gives observers of higher education new ammunition with which to question how much learning is taking place on campuses, said that he and his co-author, Josipa Roksa, were impressed on first review of the Lumina document. "It draws attention to what students know, rather than to the general 'let's count course credits and assume they've gotten something out of it' approach to students," he said. "If colleges and universities did this, it would shift things in a positive way."
Arum described himself as "skeptical," however, about "where the incentives are to get the colleges and universities to do this, to decide 'this is a useful framework to us.' "
Like Gold of the AFT, Arum argued that "the only way [that higher education can successfully] focus on improving student learning is with the faculty at the center of it," but added that "learning has been pushed to the periphery of higher education, just the way faculty have been pushed to the margins."
If the degree profile provides a "common vocabulary about what students can do" around which trustees, administrators and instructors can ultimately have a discussion about what they want students on their individual campuses to know and be able to do, it could have the sort of "transformative impact" that Lumina envisions, Arum said. "You could imagine trustees or regents, using this framework or something like it, saying to administrators, 'What are you doing to ensure that our students can do these things? Show me the plan you have for making sure they do, and show me the evidence that you're accomplishing this.' If that leads campuses to use what's out there and identify better ways to measure higher-order skills, this could be a useful tool."
The Lumina Strategy
Lumina officials, who have in the past been accused of pushing initiatives on colleges (and especially the foot-draggers on campuses) rather than collaborating with them, say they know that the degree qualifications profile project will work only if institutions (and their faculties) buy in. "We do not think this is something that should be imposed on [faculty members], ... but they do bear the brunt of failure if [higher education] does not deliver on defining quality," said Merisotis. "We had a really good faculty-level conversation about this, and we think we have a good plan for involving them. Are we expecting universal harmony about this? Heck no. But I think we’ll be very transparent about what it is, and help people digest it."
The foundation plans to enlist several groups to help it test and refine the degree profile, including, to start, two accrediting agencies (the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' senior college commission and the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools) and the Council of Independent Colleges.
Ralph Wolff, executive director of the Western accreditor, said in an interview Monday that the association had created a panel that will decide whether and how the agency might incorporate the qualifications profile into its standard aimed at ensuring that institutions have clearly defined graduation requirements and levels of achievement for degrees. "Whether it becomes just a suggested framework or is actually incorporated into the standards is very premature," Wolff said.
"For some people, this could raise a series of concerns about homogenizing curriculums and setting outcomes for institutions, and all those issues will be fair game in our discussions," Wolff said. "But the authors seem to have struck a balance between writing [the learning outcomes] with enough specificity and clarity that they have meaning, yet enough diversity and flexibility so that different institutions can adapt it to fit their kind of education. We see the idea having enough potential to explore further."
Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, said he and his group have come around after some early skepticism about the Lumina project, which he said he found "really unappealing" from early discussions with Lumina. In those planning meetings, he said, Lumina officials described the project as designed to "ensure comparability" of American degrees with those in the European Union (which has embraced its own qualifications framework through the Bologna accords). And Lumina was also, he said, "talking about working hand in hand with the [Obama] administration," foreboding the kind of federal involvement in curricular and other matters that private colleges like Ekman's members tend to loathe.
But Lumina's language has changed, Ekman said. "They're now talking about these frameworks as a way of working toward higher quality across a variety of American colleges and universities in a voluntary way, and contributing toward this ubiquitous discussion without putting it in the context of standards that are in the control of the government. This is now a concept that I believe is worth our exploring."
Ekman said that teams of presidents, faculty leaders and assessment experts from roughly 25 campuses will work on the CIC project, with the ultimate goal of "finding language that might work for a broad group of our institutions." That could be a challenge, he acknowledged, because the group's members include small institutions that do nothing but liberal arts and other institutions with more professional orientations.
"I think the general categories are fine, but the test will be making them fit what colleges actually do," Ekman said. "I made it clear I wasn't buying into it 100 percent, but that I did think it was concept worth exploring. I'm pleased that Lumina is willing to take a flyer on us."
Is Commonality the Goal?
In releasing the profile, Merisotis and others at Lumina have emphasized that one of its goals is in creating a "shared understanding of what a degree represents in terms of learning," as he put it. But how common must a common framework be to be valuable?
Perhaps the biggest tension in the last few years' debates over higher education accountability has been the pressure on the part of some policy makers to insist on outcomes and measures that are comparable across programs and institutions, on the theory that to make decisions among colleges, consumers need the same information from all of them. But that, critics argue, leads to reductionism that helps no one.
Adelman, the former Education Department researcher who is among the profile's authors, says he envisions colleges engaging in an "iterative process" that leaves lots of room for individual institutions, or groups of them, to go their own way in crafting degree profiles that work for them.
Imagine the degree profile, he says, as the outline of Alfred Hitchcock that came to be an iconic representation of the filmmaker. Then imagine provosts, deans and professors at a lot of individual colleges, or associations of them, discussing which learning outcomes in the profile work for them just as-is, which they'd jettison, a few they'd add.
"College X's portrait might look like a Gauguin, another's might be a Dürer," he said. "Three years from now, you might find 24 different versions, but they'd have the same reference point. They'd have the same form, and be based on the same palette -- the Hitchcock outline."
That result isn't neat and clean, perhaps, but it stands independently of government, and "it's a heck of a lot better than what we have now," Adelman said -- a situation in which politicians perceive colleges to pay too little attention to learning and constantly threaten to wade in and fix the problem.
And they will, Adelman warned, if colleges (and accreditors, whom he sees playing a key role) don't confront their perceived failings themselves. That may be difficult, he acknowledged, but the Lumina project offers a pathway toward doing so. "If higher education runs away from this challenge, it will lose all its claims to sanctity" on questions of student learning.
—Doug Lederman
What should a college graduate know and be able to do? There are as many views on that as there are colleges (thousands), if not individual professors and students (many more).
The diversity of opinions about what a college education means has long been seen as a strength of American higher education. But in recent years, many employers and policy makers have argued that the lack of a common definition of what students should know and be able to do -- and a dearth of adequate methods of gauging whether they know it and can do it -- has contributed to a decline in the quality of higher education and to the awarding of more degrees, but of lesser value.
The push to set such standards at a national (and even federal) level has, in turn, led many college and faculty leaders to complain that a one-size-fits-all approach to defining student learning would result in greatly oversimplified definitions of learning.
To try to provide a shared understanding of what degrees mean -- but without, its designers insist, turning that into a government or other mandate -- the Lumina Foundation for Education is today releasing a draft of its Degree Qualifications Profile, created by four leading higher education researchers and policy experts (more on them later).
The profile, around which Lumina officials plan to begin a several-year discussion in which colleges, accreditors and other groups will test and refine it, is intended to establish, in more specific ways than has historically been the case, what the recipients of associate, bachelor's and master's degrees (regardless of discipline) should know and be able to do.
"There is no generally accepted understanding of what quality represents in American higher education," says Jamie P. Merisotis, Lumina's president and chief executive officer. "Our view is that the absence of that shared understanding of what quality means has resulted in employers being dissatisfied with what higher education produces; policy makers being unsure of their investment; and students and families having a lack of clarity about choice of institutions and the relative value of their degrees."
The degree framework, he says, is designed to help develop that shared understanding across majors, programs and institutions. Paired with the foundation's other major student learning project, known as "tuning" -- which focuses on what degree holders should know within specific disciplines -- the qualifications profile could help create a common definition of what a college credential should represent, he said, so that better tools (portfolios, projects, and tests) can be developed to measure how well students are actually accumulating the requisite knowledge and skills.
Lumina officials describe the qualifications profile -- loosely modeled on the degree frameworks that the European Union and other countries have adopted -- as potentially "transformational" for American higher education, but they acknowledge that a great deal would need to happen for it to have anywhere near that effect. Several outside experts that Inside Higher Ed asked to assess the standards saw significant hurdles to its adoption by colleges -- especially overcoming the faculty skepticism about any effort that seems to be dropped from on high and that can be seen as substituting national standards for institutionally based ones.
"A learning framework that really promotes student success has to be developed at the local level and has to be led by front-line faculty and staff," Larry Gold, higher education director for the American Federation of Teachers, said via e-mail. "Nothing is less likely to help students succeed than an overly standardized curriculum and assessment regime imposed from the outside. So the Degree Profile can make a contribution if the efforts coming out of it are developed and driven by front-line faculty and staff at the institution and if these efforts receive the kind of continuing support that makes them sustainable -- particularly investment in the faculty and staff charged with making the program succeed."
The Genesis
Lumina first began floating the idea of developing a qualifications framework about 18 months ago, in a series of behind-the-scenes meetings with higher education leaders and policy makers. Foundation officials portrayed a commonly agreed-upon understanding of what a college degree means as an important tool to knocking down some of the barriers that inhibit college completion, which has been at the center of Lumina's agenda for the last several years. Those barriers include the difficulty of transferring academic credit from one institution to another, and the failure to recognize the value of learning that takes place outside traditional classroom settings, which often goes unrecognized in a system in which the "credit hour" is the coin of the realm.
But Lumina's leaders also saw the profile as key to ensuring that not only are more degrees awarded, "but that those must be of high quality," said Holiday Hart McKiernan, senior vice president and general counsel at Lumina.
The foundation assembled four longtime experts on assessment and student learning -- Clifford Adelman of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, Peter Ewell of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, Paul Gaston of Kent State University, and Carol Geary Schneider of the American Association of Colleges & Universities -- to "reduce to writing, without worrying about implementation, what would be the core competencies" for recipients of various degrees. The four researchers spent months poring over the comments of outside reviewers and, not surprisingly to those who know the four of them, debating intensely among themselves.
Their final product divides the desired skills and knowledge into five basic areas -- specialized knowledge; broad, integrative knowledge; intellectual skills; applied learning; and civic learning -- and lists within each the key learning outcomes in which a student should be competent, with the expectations for students increasing as they move up the three degree levels. For specialized knowledge -- knowledge acquired in a specialized field of study, for instance -- the profile lists the following outcomes at different levels:
The associate degree holder:
* Describes the scope and principal features of the field of study, citing core theories and practices, and offers a similar explication of a related field.
* Illustrates the field’s current terminology.
* Generates substantially error-free products, exhibits, or performances in the field.
The bachelor's degree holder:
* Defines and explains the boundaries, divisions, styles and practices of the field.
* Defines and properly uses the principal terms in the field, both historical and contemporaneous.
* Demonstrates fluency in the use of tools, technologies and methods in the field.
* Evaluates, clarifies and frames a complex question or challenge using perspectives and scholarship from the student’s major field and at least one other.
* Constructs a project related to a familiar but complex problem in the field of study by assembling, arranging and reformulating ideas, concepts, designs or techniques.
* Constructs a summative project, paper or practice-based performance that draws on current research, scholarship and/or techniques in the field.
The master's degree holder:
* Elucidates the major theories, research methods and approaches to inquiry, and/or schools of practice in the field; articulates relevant sources; and illustrates their relationship to allied fields.
* Assesses the contributions of major figures and organizations in the field; describes its major methodologies and practices; and implements at least two such methodologies and practices through projects, papers, exhibits or performances.
* Articulates major challenges involved in practicing the field, elucidates its leading edges, and delineates its current limits with respect to theory, knowledge and practice.
* Initiates, assembles, arranges and reformulates ideas, concepts, designs and techniques in carrying out a project directed at a challenge in the field beyond conventional boundaries.
Lumina officials and the authors say they went out of their way to fill the degree profile with "concrete, illustrative student learning outcome statements" that use "active verbs that tell all parties -- students, faculty, employers, policymakers and the general public -- what students actually should do to demonstrate their mastery."
That may be true compared to other documents of its kind, but even some of the outside reviewers -- many of whom were higher education researchers -- described the profile as "abstract." Lumina officials admit that the document is complex, and that the full impact of the degree profile won't be felt unless and until college leaders and their faculties begin discussing whether and how the qualifications laid out in the profile apply to their own students, and how they might go about documenting that the students to whom they award degrees have accumulated the knowledge and skills in question.
Most of the outside experts with whom Inside Higher Ed shared the degree profile said they found little to argue with in the qualifications and outcomes put forward by the four authors. "This is a very good document that shows where higher education should end up," said Michael Poliakoff, policy director at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. "It is very strong in stressing the fact that this needs to be an institutionwide conversation, and ensures that there is thorough integration of these learning elements" across academic programs.
But like others interviewed, Poliakoff stressed that without a clear sense of how (and whether) it can be implemented on campuses, the profile will make little difference. "Without getting it down to the level of requirements and assessment, it will fall short of its full impact," he said.
Richard Arum, whose new book, Academically Adrift, gives observers of higher education new ammunition with which to question how much learning is taking place on campuses, said that he and his co-author, Josipa Roksa, were impressed on first review of the Lumina document. "It draws attention to what students know, rather than to the general 'let's count course credits and assume they've gotten something out of it' approach to students," he said. "If colleges and universities did this, it would shift things in a positive way."
Arum described himself as "skeptical," however, about "where the incentives are to get the colleges and universities to do this, to decide 'this is a useful framework to us.' "
Like Gold of the AFT, Arum argued that "the only way [that higher education can successfully] focus on improving student learning is with the faculty at the center of it," but added that "learning has been pushed to the periphery of higher education, just the way faculty have been pushed to the margins."
If the degree profile provides a "common vocabulary about what students can do" around which trustees, administrators and instructors can ultimately have a discussion about what they want students on their individual campuses to know and be able to do, it could have the sort of "transformative impact" that Lumina envisions, Arum said. "You could imagine trustees or regents, using this framework or something like it, saying to administrators, 'What are you doing to ensure that our students can do these things? Show me the plan you have for making sure they do, and show me the evidence that you're accomplishing this.' If that leads campuses to use what's out there and identify better ways to measure higher-order skills, this could be a useful tool."
The Lumina Strategy
Lumina officials, who have in the past been accused of pushing initiatives on colleges (and especially the foot-draggers on campuses) rather than collaborating with them, say they know that the degree qualifications profile project will work only if institutions (and their faculties) buy in. "We do not think this is something that should be imposed on [faculty members], ... but they do bear the brunt of failure if [higher education] does not deliver on defining quality," said Merisotis. "We had a really good faculty-level conversation about this, and we think we have a good plan for involving them. Are we expecting universal harmony about this? Heck no. But I think we’ll be very transparent about what it is, and help people digest it."
The foundation plans to enlist several groups to help it test and refine the degree profile, including, to start, two accrediting agencies (the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' senior college commission and the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools) and the Council of Independent Colleges.
Ralph Wolff, executive director of the Western accreditor, said in an interview Monday that the association had created a panel that will decide whether and how the agency might incorporate the qualifications profile into its standard aimed at ensuring that institutions have clearly defined graduation requirements and levels of achievement for degrees. "Whether it becomes just a suggested framework or is actually incorporated into the standards is very premature," Wolff said.
"For some people, this could raise a series of concerns about homogenizing curriculums and setting outcomes for institutions, and all those issues will be fair game in our discussions," Wolff said. "But the authors seem to have struck a balance between writing [the learning outcomes] with enough specificity and clarity that they have meaning, yet enough diversity and flexibility so that different institutions can adapt it to fit their kind of education. We see the idea having enough potential to explore further."
Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, said he and his group have come around after some early skepticism about the Lumina project, which he said he found "really unappealing" from early discussions with Lumina. In those planning meetings, he said, Lumina officials described the project as designed to "ensure comparability" of American degrees with those in the European Union (which has embraced its own qualifications framework through the Bologna accords). And Lumina was also, he said, "talking about working hand in hand with the [Obama] administration," foreboding the kind of federal involvement in curricular and other matters that private colleges like Ekman's members tend to loathe.
But Lumina's language has changed, Ekman said. "They're now talking about these frameworks as a way of working toward higher quality across a variety of American colleges and universities in a voluntary way, and contributing toward this ubiquitous discussion without putting it in the context of standards that are in the control of the government. This is now a concept that I believe is worth our exploring."
Ekman said that teams of presidents, faculty leaders and assessment experts from roughly 25 campuses will work on the CIC project, with the ultimate goal of "finding language that might work for a broad group of our institutions." That could be a challenge, he acknowledged, because the group's members include small institutions that do nothing but liberal arts and other institutions with more professional orientations.
"I think the general categories are fine, but the test will be making them fit what colleges actually do," Ekman said. "I made it clear I wasn't buying into it 100 percent, but that I did think it was concept worth exploring. I'm pleased that Lumina is willing to take a flyer on us."
Is Commonality the Goal?
In releasing the profile, Merisotis and others at Lumina have emphasized that one of its goals is in creating a "shared understanding of what a degree represents in terms of learning," as he put it. But how common must a common framework be to be valuable?
Perhaps the biggest tension in the last few years' debates over higher education accountability has been the pressure on the part of some policy makers to insist on outcomes and measures that are comparable across programs and institutions, on the theory that to make decisions among colleges, consumers need the same information from all of them. But that, critics argue, leads to reductionism that helps no one.
Adelman, the former Education Department researcher who is among the profile's authors, says he envisions colleges engaging in an "iterative process" that leaves lots of room for individual institutions, or groups of them, to go their own way in crafting degree profiles that work for them.
Imagine the degree profile, he says, as the outline of Alfred Hitchcock that came to be an iconic representation of the filmmaker. Then imagine provosts, deans and professors at a lot of individual colleges, or associations of them, discussing which learning outcomes in the profile work for them just as-is, which they'd jettison, a few they'd add.
"College X's portrait might look like a Gauguin, another's might be a Dürer," he said. "Three years from now, you might find 24 different versions, but they'd have the same reference point. They'd have the same form, and be based on the same palette -- the Hitchcock outline."
That result isn't neat and clean, perhaps, but it stands independently of government, and "it's a heck of a lot better than what we have now," Adelman said -- a situation in which politicians perceive colleges to pay too little attention to learning and constantly threaten to wade in and fix the problem.
And they will, Adelman warned, if colleges (and accreditors, whom he sees playing a key role) don't confront their perceived failings themselves. That may be difficult, he acknowledged, but the Lumina project offers a pathway toward doing so. "If higher education runs away from this challenge, it will lose all its claims to sanctity" on questions of student learning.
—Doug Lederman
Diverse Issues in Higher Education: Louisiana Merger Study Puts Southern University Chief, Katrina-damaged Schools in Spotlight
January 27, 2011 by Pearl Stewart
NEW ORLEANS – When Ronald Mason resigned as president of Jackson State University last year to take the helm of Louisiana’s Southern University System, he was the focus of a bitter debate over a proposed merger of some of Mississippi’s historically Black universities. He was against it; then he was for it – sort of. Mason came up with his own plan, but opponents leveled all proposals before they got traction.
Now, just months after he began his tenure at Southern, Mason is once again in the middle of a merger imbroglio. Just as Gov. Haley Barbour had floated the idea with the Mississippi legislature, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal recently announced he is proposing a study of merging historically Black Southern University at New Orleans with the larger, nearby University of New Orleans, which has predominantly White enrollment. SUNO is in the Southern System and UNO is in the Louisiana State University System.
The governor is asking the Louisiana Board of Regents, which oversees higher education in the state, to determine the feasibility of merging the two institutions into one and possibly moving the new entity into the state’s other higher education bureaucracy -- the University of Louisiana System.
“It is important that this study remain an objective analysis, driven by facts and data, predicated on the best interests of students,” Jindal said in a press statement. “We will wait until we receive the completed study before formulating or recommending any legislative proposals for the upcoming session.” In the press release, the governor also noted that SUNO has a 5 percent graduation rate and UNO has a 21 percent rate.
Dr. Joseph Bouie Jr., president of SUNO’s faculty senate and a former chancellor of the university, says the study is the culmination of years of efforts by state officials to shut down SUNO -- efforts that Bouie says have included withholding FEMA funds for repairs to buildings – “and we are still back to 85 percent of pre-Katrina enrollment because this community needs SUNO despite everything that is being done to discourage students from coming here.”
Buoie says, “Not a single faculty member – to a person – not one, is in favor of it.” He said a 2006 study by the Board of Regents concluded the school should not merge because of their distinct missions and roles.
Meanwhile, Mason already had drawn criticism when he said in an October speech that he favored a possible merger of the two schools – with UNO becoming part of the predominantly Black Southern System.
He still stands by that idea. “If UNO wants to change systems, there is already a system in New Orleans, Southern. Such a move would keep both schools open, facilitate academic and fiscal efficiencies and strengthen the Southern system,” Mason said in a written statement to Diverse.
Regarding the governor’s study, Mason says, “If the study recommends his idea, I assume both schools would be closed and a new school would take its place. I do not think closure of SUNO (or UNO) is a good idea.” Mason added that he expects the Southern system’s board of supervisors to draw the same conclusions at a special meeting on Feb. 4.
At UNO, Jindal’s announcement also is being met with skepticism. “First of all, is it a merger or a takeover?” University Senate chairman Dr. Neal Maroney said, posing issues that he said concern UNO faculty members.
“We’re a research university and SUNO isn’t, so how will faculty be shared? And who’s going to be in the administration?” he said.
Maroney noted there wouldn’t be a need to duplicate administrators, which could considerably reduce costs. He also noted that UNO is currently without a chancellor, since former Chancellor Tim Ryan resigned abruptly last fall, while SUNO has a chancellor, Victor Ukpolo. So Maroney wondered if there were a merger, would UNO need to hire a chancellor?
Maroney did concede that a merger could result in savings and said he supported “any reduction in administrators.”
SUNO’s director of public information, Eddie Francis, said the administration was not taking a position on the idea but waiting for the results of the study, noting that it has been proposed in the past. He did, however, comment on media reports about SUNO’s declining enrollment and its purported 5 percent graduation rate. Francis said in a written statement, “Our Fall 2010 enrollment was 3,166, up from our spring 2006 enrollment of 2,037 (our first semester back from Hurricane Katrina), a 67 percent increase.” Francis added that graduation rates for a six-year period that includes the 2005-2006 year of Hurricane Katrina are “tainted” and that the university serves a unique population that often completes college after more than six years.
Maroney agreed that recovery from the devastation of Katrina continues to affect both institutions. According to Maroney, UNO’s fall 2010 enrollment was 10,500 and has been steadily rising since Katrina. And like Francis, he said the graduation rates do not take into account the effects of the hurricane and the increase in non-traditional students.
Jindal set a March 1 deadline for the Board of Regents to present a report based on the study. Mason suggested that instead of conducting a month-long study, “We should do a thoughtful study of ways the institutions, including Delgado (community college) can work together to improve the education product and potentially save money without closing any institution.”
With all of the high-level pronouncements from the governor, administrators and public officials, students say they are feeling a bit overlooked. “Honestly, we’re not being given enough information right now,” UNO student government president John Mineo said in a written statement to Diverse, adding that students need to hear more about what a merger would entail. He also said the uncertainty of whether the institutions will exist in the future could affect enrollment.
“However, I do believe it's too early to judge the effects of such a plan. We won't know if this plan is for the better or worse until more details are given to us,” Mineo said.
Even if the study results in proposed legislation, a two-thirds majority in the state House and Senate would be required to enact a merger.
“We think the governor is counting votes, so it may be possible for it to pass,” Bouie said, but he said he has gathered support to file a lawsuit in federal court to block a merger if necessary.
NEW ORLEANS – When Ronald Mason resigned as president of Jackson State University last year to take the helm of Louisiana’s Southern University System, he was the focus of a bitter debate over a proposed merger of some of Mississippi’s historically Black universities. He was against it; then he was for it – sort of. Mason came up with his own plan, but opponents leveled all proposals before they got traction.
Now, just months after he began his tenure at Southern, Mason is once again in the middle of a merger imbroglio. Just as Gov. Haley Barbour had floated the idea with the Mississippi legislature, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal recently announced he is proposing a study of merging historically Black Southern University at New Orleans with the larger, nearby University of New Orleans, which has predominantly White enrollment. SUNO is in the Southern System and UNO is in the Louisiana State University System.
The governor is asking the Louisiana Board of Regents, which oversees higher education in the state, to determine the feasibility of merging the two institutions into one and possibly moving the new entity into the state’s other higher education bureaucracy -- the University of Louisiana System.
“It is important that this study remain an objective analysis, driven by facts and data, predicated on the best interests of students,” Jindal said in a press statement. “We will wait until we receive the completed study before formulating or recommending any legislative proposals for the upcoming session.” In the press release, the governor also noted that SUNO has a 5 percent graduation rate and UNO has a 21 percent rate.
Dr. Joseph Bouie Jr., president of SUNO’s faculty senate and a former chancellor of the university, says the study is the culmination of years of efforts by state officials to shut down SUNO -- efforts that Bouie says have included withholding FEMA funds for repairs to buildings – “and we are still back to 85 percent of pre-Katrina enrollment because this community needs SUNO despite everything that is being done to discourage students from coming here.”
Buoie says, “Not a single faculty member – to a person – not one, is in favor of it.” He said a 2006 study by the Board of Regents concluded the school should not merge because of their distinct missions and roles.
Meanwhile, Mason already had drawn criticism when he said in an October speech that he favored a possible merger of the two schools – with UNO becoming part of the predominantly Black Southern System.
He still stands by that idea. “If UNO wants to change systems, there is already a system in New Orleans, Southern. Such a move would keep both schools open, facilitate academic and fiscal efficiencies and strengthen the Southern system,” Mason said in a written statement to Diverse.
Regarding the governor’s study, Mason says, “If the study recommends his idea, I assume both schools would be closed and a new school would take its place. I do not think closure of SUNO (or UNO) is a good idea.” Mason added that he expects the Southern system’s board of supervisors to draw the same conclusions at a special meeting on Feb. 4.
At UNO, Jindal’s announcement also is being met with skepticism. “First of all, is it a merger or a takeover?” University Senate chairman Dr. Neal Maroney said, posing issues that he said concern UNO faculty members.
“We’re a research university and SUNO isn’t, so how will faculty be shared? And who’s going to be in the administration?” he said.
Maroney noted there wouldn’t be a need to duplicate administrators, which could considerably reduce costs. He also noted that UNO is currently without a chancellor, since former Chancellor Tim Ryan resigned abruptly last fall, while SUNO has a chancellor, Victor Ukpolo. So Maroney wondered if there were a merger, would UNO need to hire a chancellor?
Maroney did concede that a merger could result in savings and said he supported “any reduction in administrators.”
SUNO’s director of public information, Eddie Francis, said the administration was not taking a position on the idea but waiting for the results of the study, noting that it has been proposed in the past. He did, however, comment on media reports about SUNO’s declining enrollment and its purported 5 percent graduation rate. Francis said in a written statement, “Our Fall 2010 enrollment was 3,166, up from our spring 2006 enrollment of 2,037 (our first semester back from Hurricane Katrina), a 67 percent increase.” Francis added that graduation rates for a six-year period that includes the 2005-2006 year of Hurricane Katrina are “tainted” and that the university serves a unique population that often completes college after more than six years.
Maroney agreed that recovery from the devastation of Katrina continues to affect both institutions. According to Maroney, UNO’s fall 2010 enrollment was 10,500 and has been steadily rising since Katrina. And like Francis, he said the graduation rates do not take into account the effects of the hurricane and the increase in non-traditional students.
Jindal set a March 1 deadline for the Board of Regents to present a report based on the study. Mason suggested that instead of conducting a month-long study, “We should do a thoughtful study of ways the institutions, including Delgado (community college) can work together to improve the education product and potentially save money without closing any institution.”
With all of the high-level pronouncements from the governor, administrators and public officials, students say they are feeling a bit overlooked. “Honestly, we’re not being given enough information right now,” UNO student government president John Mineo said in a written statement to Diverse, adding that students need to hear more about what a merger would entail. He also said the uncertainty of whether the institutions will exist in the future could affect enrollment.
“However, I do believe it's too early to judge the effects of such a plan. We won't know if this plan is for the better or worse until more details are given to us,” Mineo said.
Even if the study results in proposed legislation, a two-thirds majority in the state House and Senate would be required to enact a merger.
“We think the governor is counting votes, so it may be possible for it to pass,” Bouie said, but he said he has gathered support to file a lawsuit in federal court to block a merger if necessary.
Concept Maps Help Build Connections to Learning
By Mary Bart
About eight years ago, students taking Alice Cassidy’s Biology 345 course were asked to create a learning portfolio as their final project for the course. The portfolio was intended to help students demonstrate their learning in creative ways that include examples, connections and reflections, based on three key criteria: content, links and visual diversity. Two pages of the eight-page portfolio had to be a concept map.
Concept mapping, a technique first described by Joseph Novak in the late 1960s, uses visual representations to show relationships among ideas or concepts. It can be an effective way to help students gain a better understanding of difficult concepts.
In the online seminar Concept Mapping: How Visual Connections Can Improve Learning, Cassidy, head of Alice Cassidy In View Education and Professional Development and the former associate director of the Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth (TAG) at University of British Columbia, shared some of the concept maps her students created and noted that student feedback on the assignment was largely positive.
“I found that they valued the experience very much–the creativity of it, the way it valued not only how they showed their understanding of key concepts of the course, but how it valued connections they made between the course, or formal learning, with other aspects of their lives, or informal learning,” she said.
Concept maps come in many forms, including a Spoke: where all related concepts are linked to the main concept in the middle of the page; a Chain, where concepts are linked in a linear sequence; or Net, which is a highly integrated and hierarchical network. And the good news is, there’s no one correct way to create a concept map and there’s no wrong place to start, Cassidy said.
To help you get started, Cassidy provided the following guidelines:
1.Note, on paper or electronically, the concepts you wish to include
2.Rank or order the concepts; starting with a key or main concept you wish to emphasize.
3.Step 2 might help you choose the type of concept map to construct (e.g. chain, tree, spoke, etc.)
4.Step 3 helps you decide where to place your first concept on the page
5.Decide where to cluster or arrange the rest of your concepts
6.Add these concepts, one by one
7.Connect the concepts with lines or arrows
8.Label the lines or arrows with one or a few words to describe relationships between concepts
9.Add more concepts if needed
10.Review your completed concept map and re-arrange/re-work it, if necessary, by adding, subtracting or changing concepts.
As noted, concept maps can be created on paper or electronically. Some of the software tools used to build concept maps or mind maps (simpler versions of concept maps that do not have terms linking the key words) include: Cmap, Inspiration, MindGenius, Creately, and Visio.
Concept Mapping: How Visual Connections Can Improve Learning
By using a concept map, you have a visual tool to depict a set of ideas by linking them and explaining the connections. Concept maps provide a powerful way to help students organize, represent, and understand knowledge.
Concept mapping may be applied in any academic discipline to make better sense of a reading, document learning or thinking, or brainstorm a project. Used properly, they can substantially increase student understanding of difficult topics.
Presented earlier this month, this seminar provides an introduction to what concept maps are and how you can use them in the classroom.
About eight years ago, students taking Alice Cassidy’s Biology 345 course were asked to create a learning portfolio as their final project for the course. The portfolio was intended to help students demonstrate their learning in creative ways that include examples, connections and reflections, based on three key criteria: content, links and visual diversity. Two pages of the eight-page portfolio had to be a concept map.
Concept mapping, a technique first described by Joseph Novak in the late 1960s, uses visual representations to show relationships among ideas or concepts. It can be an effective way to help students gain a better understanding of difficult concepts.
In the online seminar Concept Mapping: How Visual Connections Can Improve Learning, Cassidy, head of Alice Cassidy In View Education and Professional Development and the former associate director of the Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth (TAG) at University of British Columbia, shared some of the concept maps her students created and noted that student feedback on the assignment was largely positive.
“I found that they valued the experience very much–the creativity of it, the way it valued not only how they showed their understanding of key concepts of the course, but how it valued connections they made between the course, or formal learning, with other aspects of their lives, or informal learning,” she said.
Concept maps come in many forms, including a Spoke: where all related concepts are linked to the main concept in the middle of the page; a Chain, where concepts are linked in a linear sequence; or Net, which is a highly integrated and hierarchical network. And the good news is, there’s no one correct way to create a concept map and there’s no wrong place to start, Cassidy said.
To help you get started, Cassidy provided the following guidelines:
1.Note, on paper or electronically, the concepts you wish to include
2.Rank or order the concepts; starting with a key or main concept you wish to emphasize.
3.Step 2 might help you choose the type of concept map to construct (e.g. chain, tree, spoke, etc.)
4.Step 3 helps you decide where to place your first concept on the page
5.Decide where to cluster or arrange the rest of your concepts
6.Add these concepts, one by one
7.Connect the concepts with lines or arrows
8.Label the lines or arrows with one or a few words to describe relationships between concepts
9.Add more concepts if needed
10.Review your completed concept map and re-arrange/re-work it, if necessary, by adding, subtracting or changing concepts.
As noted, concept maps can be created on paper or electronically. Some of the software tools used to build concept maps or mind maps (simpler versions of concept maps that do not have terms linking the key words) include: Cmap, Inspiration, MindGenius, Creately, and Visio.
Concept Mapping: How Visual Connections Can Improve Learning
By using a concept map, you have a visual tool to depict a set of ideas by linking them and explaining the connections. Concept maps provide a powerful way to help students organize, represent, and understand knowledge.
Concept mapping may be applied in any academic discipline to make better sense of a reading, document learning or thinking, or brainstorm a project. Used properly, they can substantially increase student understanding of difficult topics.
Presented earlier this month, this seminar provides an introduction to what concept maps are and how you can use them in the classroom.
UB Web Seminars: Improving retention and graduation rates with CRM software
Thursday, February 17, 2010 at 2pm, ET
Speakers:
Manuel Lujan - Vice President of Enrollment at Texas A&M University-Kingsville & Vineet Singla - Senior Product Manager for CRM at Campus Management
As graduation and retention rates continue to decline, more colleges and universities are looking to their CRM software to help identify and resolve academic and financial issues early, and to keep students on track with their programs. But extending CRM beyond the recruiting office to other departments and campuses presents new challenges, including integration with others systems, brands, and workflows across campus. Case study by Texas A&M University.
Through a case study by Texas A&M University, this web seminar will illustrate how Talisma CRM from Campus Management goes beyond recruiting to:
•Help identify and proactively advise at-risk students
•Keep students on track for graduation academically and financially
•Provide faculty, advisors, and administrators a 360 degree view of students
Who will benefit:
Presidents, chancellors, enrollment and retention officers, academic deans, IT directors. Anyone may register.
Critical Insights. Timely Information. Free Registration
University Business produces web seminars on topics of special interest to higher education leaders. Moderated by UB's Web Seminar Editor, JD Solomon, each web seminar features presentations by higher education leaders and industry experts. These online events are underwritten by our sponsors so that you may view them for free.
Speakers:
Manuel Lujan - Vice President of Enrollment at Texas A&M University-Kingsville & Vineet Singla - Senior Product Manager for CRM at Campus Management
As graduation and retention rates continue to decline, more colleges and universities are looking to their CRM software to help identify and resolve academic and financial issues early, and to keep students on track with their programs. But extending CRM beyond the recruiting office to other departments and campuses presents new challenges, including integration with others systems, brands, and workflows across campus. Case study by Texas A&M University.
Through a case study by Texas A&M University, this web seminar will illustrate how Talisma CRM from Campus Management goes beyond recruiting to:
•Help identify and proactively advise at-risk students
•Keep students on track for graduation academically and financially
•Provide faculty, advisors, and administrators a 360 degree view of students
Who will benefit:
Presidents, chancellors, enrollment and retention officers, academic deans, IT directors. Anyone may register.
Critical Insights. Timely Information. Free Registration
University Business produces web seminars on topics of special interest to higher education leaders. Moderated by UB's Web Seminar Editor, JD Solomon, each web seminar features presentations by higher education leaders and industry experts. These online events are underwritten by our sponsors so that you may view them for free.
The Teaching Professor: How to Deepen Learning through Critical Reflection
Date: Wednesday, 04/20/11
Time: 12:00-1:30 PM CDT
Cost: $259 ($284 after 04/13/11)
Featured Higher Education Presenter: Barbara Jacoby, Ph.D.
How deep is the learning that takes place on your campus?
Too many students simply acquire pieces of knowledge without establishing relationships among them, integrating new information with prior learning, or grappling with big questions. Critical reflection can engage students in learning that challenges their assumptions and deepens the way they understand issues and concepts.
Critical reflection provides one of the best ways to transform rudimentary assignments intro truly transformational learning opportunities.
A process of analyzing, reconsidering, and questioning knowledge, critical reflection adds depth and meaning to college coursework. It also develops critical thinking skills–an essential college learning outcome.
In How to Deepen Learning through Critical Reflection, Barbara Jacoby, Ph.D. will clarify misconceptions about critical reflection and explain the steps involved in incorporating this powerful teaching strategy into course designs.
This 90-minute audio online seminar will cover:
•Designing and implementing critical reflection activities
•Connecting reflection to course content and experiences
•Engaging students in meaningful reflection
•Assessing and grading learning achieved through critical reflection
•What critical reflection is and is not
•The range of critical reflection techniques
•Effective facilitation strategies
•How reflection can address the “big questions” in a discipline
•Applying theory to practice
•Using reflection to challenge simplistic conclusions
This seminar will also include case studies depicting how critical reflection leads to the achievement of course-based learning outcomes.
Who should attend?
This training opportunity is recommended for all campus professionals concerned with improving student learning, including:
•Faculty members in all disciplines
•Faculty involved in service-learning and other experiential courses
•Faculty, academic administrators, and student affairs professionals who coordinate internships, service-learning, and study abroad opportunities
•Faculty trainers
•Directors and staff of Centers for Teaching and Learning
•Student affairs professionals
•Directors and staff of service-learning, community service, and civic engagement offices or programs
•Campus ministers and leadership educators
Unlimited participants at a single site
The cost to participate in this 90-minute audio online seminar is $259, regardless of the number of participants from a single sign-on location at your campus. This is an outstanding opportunity to sharpen the pedagogical skills of all educators at your campus for one affordable, fixed fee. We recommend reserving a lecture hall or meeting space in advance of this event to accommodate a large group.
Your presenter
Barbara Jacoby, Ph.D. is Senior Scholar for the Adele H. Stamp Student Union–Center for Campus Life at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a Fellow of the University’s Academy for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and was a Center for Teaching Excellence Lilly Fellow during the 2007-08 academic year. She writes and consults extensively and makes numerous speeches and presentations across the country.
Q&A
During this live, interactive session, you will have opportunities to share your own experiences with critical reflection and to pose individual questions to Dr. Jacoby.
The key to unlocking deeper levels of understanding is critical reflection. Learn how to use this powerful teaching strategy to enrich the academics at your institution by registering for this seminar today.
Time: 12:00-1:30 PM CDT
Cost: $259 ($284 after 04/13/11)
Featured Higher Education Presenter: Barbara Jacoby, Ph.D.
How deep is the learning that takes place on your campus?
Too many students simply acquire pieces of knowledge without establishing relationships among them, integrating new information with prior learning, or grappling with big questions. Critical reflection can engage students in learning that challenges their assumptions and deepens the way they understand issues and concepts.
Critical reflection provides one of the best ways to transform rudimentary assignments intro truly transformational learning opportunities.
A process of analyzing, reconsidering, and questioning knowledge, critical reflection adds depth and meaning to college coursework. It also develops critical thinking skills–an essential college learning outcome.
In How to Deepen Learning through Critical Reflection, Barbara Jacoby, Ph.D. will clarify misconceptions about critical reflection and explain the steps involved in incorporating this powerful teaching strategy into course designs.
This 90-minute audio online seminar will cover:
•Designing and implementing critical reflection activities
•Connecting reflection to course content and experiences
•Engaging students in meaningful reflection
•Assessing and grading learning achieved through critical reflection
•What critical reflection is and is not
•The range of critical reflection techniques
•Effective facilitation strategies
•How reflection can address the “big questions” in a discipline
•Applying theory to practice
•Using reflection to challenge simplistic conclusions
This seminar will also include case studies depicting how critical reflection leads to the achievement of course-based learning outcomes.
Who should attend?
This training opportunity is recommended for all campus professionals concerned with improving student learning, including:
•Faculty members in all disciplines
•Faculty involved in service-learning and other experiential courses
•Faculty, academic administrators, and student affairs professionals who coordinate internships, service-learning, and study abroad opportunities
•Faculty trainers
•Directors and staff of Centers for Teaching and Learning
•Student affairs professionals
•Directors and staff of service-learning, community service, and civic engagement offices or programs
•Campus ministers and leadership educators
Unlimited participants at a single site
The cost to participate in this 90-minute audio online seminar is $259, regardless of the number of participants from a single sign-on location at your campus. This is an outstanding opportunity to sharpen the pedagogical skills of all educators at your campus for one affordable, fixed fee. We recommend reserving a lecture hall or meeting space in advance of this event to accommodate a large group.
Your presenter
Barbara Jacoby, Ph.D. is Senior Scholar for the Adele H. Stamp Student Union–Center for Campus Life at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a Fellow of the University’s Academy for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and was a Center for Teaching Excellence Lilly Fellow during the 2007-08 academic year. She writes and consults extensively and makes numerous speeches and presentations across the country.
Q&A
During this live, interactive session, you will have opportunities to share your own experiences with critical reflection and to pose individual questions to Dr. Jacoby.
The key to unlocking deeper levels of understanding is critical reflection. Learn how to use this powerful teaching strategy to enrich the academics at your institution by registering for this seminar today.
Hampton University lands $2.69M training grant
January 28, 2011
Hampton University has received a five-year, $2.69 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to partner with high-need Virginia school divisions to offer educational training for administrators.
Administrators will learn research-based practices designed to turn around low-achieving schools, a university news release said.
Participating divisions were classified as level I or level II based on low-income population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The level I districts - Portsmouth, Franklin, Danville and Roanoke - will pay nothing to participate. The level II districts - including Suffolk, Hampton and Newport News - will receive partial funding because they don't meet the education department's definition of "high-need."
Hampton University has received a five-year, $2.69 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to partner with high-need Virginia school divisions to offer educational training for administrators.
Administrators will learn research-based practices designed to turn around low-achieving schools, a university news release said.
Participating divisions were classified as level I or level II based on low-income population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The level I districts - Portsmouth, Franklin, Danville and Roanoke - will pay nothing to participate. The level II districts - including Suffolk, Hampton and Newport News - will receive partial funding because they don't meet the education department's definition of "high-need."
Hampton University has received a five-year, $2.69 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to partner with high-need Virginia school divisions to offer educational training for administrators.
Administrators will learn research-based practices designed to turn around low-achieving schools, a university news release said.
Participating divisions were classified as level I or level II based on low-income population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The level I districts - Portsmouth, Franklin, Danville and Roanoke - will pay nothing to participate. The level II districts - including Suffolk, Hampton and Newport News - will receive partial funding because they don't meet the education department's definition of "high-need."
Hampton University has received a five-year, $2.69 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to partner with high-need Virginia school divisions to offer educational training for administrators.
Administrators will learn research-based practices designed to turn around low-achieving schools, a university news release said.
Participating divisions were classified as level I or level II based on low-income population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The level I districts - Portsmouth, Franklin, Danville and Roanoke - will pay nothing to participate. The level II districts - including Suffolk, Hampton and Newport News - will receive partial funding because they don't meet the education department's definition of "high-need."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)