Education

Blog: Confessions of a Community College DeanSherman Dorn asked a great question earlier this week. In response to the growing wave of enthusiasm for “competency-based” degrees, as opposed to credit hour-based, he asked why we couldn’t achieve most of the good that “competency-based” would achieve just by dropping the “hours” from “credit hours.” Since the standard objection to credit hours is that they’re denominated in units of time, and are therefore impervious to productivity improvements, why not just drop the “time” part, keep the “credit” part, and call it good? I’ll have to dust off my old 90’s notes for this one. (Let’s see...Kurt Cobain? No...Winona Ryder? No...Floating signifiers? That’s it!) Because then “credits” become floating signifiers, attached to no particular meaning. They could mean anything, and would therefore mean nothing. That matters because of online degrees and for-profit providers. In my DeVry days, we were careful with the weekend program -- which was specifically geared at working adults -- to keep the number of classroom hours congruent with the requirements for the number of credits given, even when it became inconvenient. The idea was to avoid the suspicion that fell upon certain competitors, who made a habit of awarding outsize numbers of credits for various courses to both make it easier for students to complete programs and to keep their own labor costs down. Give students eight credits for a three hour class -- that is, charge them for eight hours, but only pay the instructor for three -- and everybody wins: the students finish faster, the faculty at least have work, and the institution makes out like a bandit. If we just declare that credits mean whatever a given provider says they mean, then there’s no basis for denying federal funding or regional accreditation to a college that awards twelve credits for a three-hour class and a paper. And now that many of those classes are online -- in which the entire conceit of “seat time” becomes vaporous -- there would be nothing at all to put the brakes on a given college twisting “credits” to mean whatever is convenient at the time. Historically, the redeeming feature of the “credit hour” was that it was at least based on something. The fatal flaw was that it was based on the wrong thing. That’s the appeal of competencies. Let the students demonstrate that they’ve picked up a skill, and let them move on. Where they picked it up doesn’t really matter. Some will move faster than others, and probably most will vary their speed depending on the task at hand. Yes, the documentation aspect of competencies is a bear. The European project of “tuning” wasn’t done in a day, and doing it here isn’t easy, either. SNHU’s College for America -- the first fully competency-based provider that received DOE approval for federal financial aid -- handles the issue of documentation by keeping it entirely in house; it doesn’t accept transfer credits. For a student moving from, say, a competency-based college to a credit-based one, the transfer evaluation component is largely uncharted territory. That’s not to be discounted. But it’s the best and fairest way to break Baumol’s cost disease without just surrendering to a Wild West of credits meaning whatever anyone says they mean. The great appeal is twofold: break the cost chokehold while maintaining academic integrity. I haven’t seen a better way to do both. Is there one? Show on Jobs site:

Sherman Dorn asked a great question earlier this week. In response to the growing wave of enthusiasm for “competency-based” degrees, as opposed to credit hour-based, he asked why we couldn’t achieve most of the good that “competency-based” would achieve just by dropping the “hours” from “credit hours.” Since the standard objection to credit hours is that they’re denominated in units of time, and are therefore impervious to productivity improvements, why not just drop the “time” part, keep the “credit” part, and call it good?I’ll have to dust off my old 90’s notes for this one. (Let’s see...Kurt Cobain? No...Winona Ryder? No...Floating signifiers? That’s it!) Because then “credits” become floating signifiers, attached to no particular meaning. They could mean anything, and would therefore mean nothing.That matters because of online degrees and for-profit providers. In my DeVry days, we were careful with the weekend program -- which was specifically geared at working adults -- to keep the number of classroom hours congruent with the requirements for the number of credits given, even when it became inconvenient. The idea was to avoid the suspicion that fell upon certain competitors, who made a habit of awarding outsize numbers of credits for various courses to both make it easier for students to complete programs and to keep their own labor costs down. Give students eight credits for a three hour class -- that is, charge them for eight hours, but only pay the instructor for three -- and everybody wins: the students finish faster, the faculty at least have work, and the institution makes out like a bandit. If we just declare that credits mean whatever a given provider says they mean, then there’s no basis for denying federal funding or regional accreditation to a college that awards twelve credits for a three-hour class and a paper. And now that many of those classes are online -- in which the entire conceit of “seat time” becomes vaporous -- there would be nothing at all to put the brakes on a given college twisting “credits” to mean whatever is convenient at the time.Historically, the redeeming feature of the “credit hour” was that it was at least based on something. The fatal flaw was that it was based on the wrong thing.That’s the appeal of competencies. Let the students demonstrate that they’ve picked up a skill, and let them move on. Where they picked it up doesn’t really matter. Some will move faster than others, and probably most will vary their speed depending on the task at hand. Yes, the documentation aspect of competencies is a bear. The European project of “tuning” wasn’t done in a day, and doing it here isn’t easy, either. SNHU’s College for America -- the first fully competency-based provider that received DOE approval for federal financial aid -- handles the issue of documentation by keeping it entirely in house; it doesn’t accept transfer credits. For a student moving from, say, a competency-based college to a credit-based one, the transfer evaluation component is largely uncharted territory. That’s not to be discounted.But it’s the best and fairest way to break Baumol’s cost disease without just surrendering to a Wild West of credits meaning whatever anyone says they mean. The great appeal is twofold: break the cost chokehold while maintaining academic integrity. I haven’t seen a better way to do both. Is there one?

Blog: Technology and LearningThe stats of Microsoft's next gaming platform, the Xbox One, are truly impressive. According to Wired, in comparison to today's Xbox the Xbox One will have: 8 times the graphics performance. 5 billion transistors, a ten-fold increase. 8 GB of memory, up from 512 MB. A custom built Blue Ray drive. A 500GB hard drive. Bigger, better, faster. Wow. So why is it that my reaction is mostly meh? Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for the Xbox One is routed in the fact that sitting in one place for hours and interacting with a gaming device is something that I will never ever do. Even a gaming device that I can talk to and gesture at, and that can control every electronic device in my house, is still a piece of technology that fails to match my life. When I play games it will be when I have a few minutes to spare. It will probably not be at home. It will be when I'm traveling, or in-between places, or have a few minutes to kill. The games I buy will be one's that I will only play a few times, so they better be cheap. To the extent that I play games (and I'll admit that I am not a hardcore, or even a softcore, gamer), I will play on my mobile device. Microsoft may invent the world's greatest device to hook up to a TV and play the world's most realistic games. But unless I ever sit in front of my TV (which I don't), this technology will go un-purchased. Which brings us to higher ed. We are probably a good deal like Microsoft. We've been successful. We are big. We know how to continuously improve what we do. We can improve our courses, upgrade our campuses, re-design our classrooms. Whatever the equivalent is in higher ed to adding more transistors and memory and processors, we can do that. It's worth asking, however, if continuous improvement is really what we need in higher ed? Will continuous improvement address the fundamental issues we face around costs, access, and quality variation? Is higher education following the same path as gaming? Are students moving to ahead of us to new platforms for learning and accreditation? Platforms that are more flexible, lower in cost, and designed around their needs rather than ours? Are we busily building the higher ed equivalent of the Xbox One, where instead we should be fundamentally re-thinking postsecondary? Show on Jobs site:

Blog: Mama PhDThis title is not meant to be negative. As all Trekkies recognize, it refers to the latest Hollywood version of the Star Trek series (J.J. Abrams-style), now telling prequel stories of Captain Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, et al. My kids — Nick and Katie, my ex — Jeff, and myself went to a midnight showing recently in Florida. I only fell asleep once or twice. (I now find Chris Pine more tolerable, but still miss Patrick Stewart. Shatner is so last century…) The outing seems an appropriate metaphor for my last Long Distance Mom column. Katie graduates from high school next week. Nick just finished his first semester of college. Jeff is trying to open a restaurant. Ted and I are working on a film project in Venice. I will start to repay the decade of debt I’ve accrued and some of the carbon I’ve put into the atmosphere with my travel, but not until we go to Italy this summer for study abroad programs and salves for our crises (mid-life and teenage). I wish to thank the original writers of the "Mama PhD" book/columns (particularly Aeron), as you all located a much-needed arena for expression—figuring out how a PhD can work for Moms. Since many of the original bloggers have children who are in college now, we are welcoming in a new crew of writers to tell us how they attempt to balance life in the academy, parent young kids, write, cook, clean the house, remain romantic and stay sane—probably in that order. It’s the psychological benefits of blogging—including the negative moments--that have been indispensable to me (and 3.9 million other Mom bloggers). Since my family has “strange new worlds” to explore (I know, I know—I’ll stop with the Trekkie metaphors soon), I’ll let the next generation have the last word: Katie: I love Chris Pine. Nick: I’ve always found the famous, (dare I say… bold?), lines regarding the mission of Star Trek’s Enterprise oddly profound and comforting, though I could never quite put my finger on what it meant to me. Now, on the precipice of adolescence, staring into the void of uncertainty that is adulthood, I’m beginning to understand. It’s a shock to realize after years practically wasted, cocooned comfortably in the constricting apparatus of high school, that you have a very unclear idea of who exactly you are. Simply hatching hasn’t been enough; I’m still shedding pieces, trying not to leave anything important behind. That being said, the metamorphosis of an anxious nineteen year old is far too graceless to keep up the butterfly metaphor. If I had wings to unfurl, I’d be writing about how awesome flying is. So here I am, at my afore-mentioned precipice, getting ready to jump. Jump to what exactly? It remains to be seen. A new college, a new group of friends, a new city, perhaps even a successful attempt at facial hair all loom in the distance as mirages of my possible futures. The gravity of my decision makes it hard to hope for a good outcome. High expectations argue with lower ones over which one is more realistic. In these moments before the leap, all the childhood angst and fear of the unknown bubble up and I assume the worse. The lyrics of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” come to mind. I imagine myself floating in space, shot out of the airlock of life for making the wrong choice, doomed to suffocate on regret and monthly debt payments for the rest of my pathetic existence. There, during those moments of self-prophesized negativity, is where the timeless message of Star Trek comforts me the most. The somber words of Kirk, Spock and Picard instill a hope that makes even deep space travel seem less terrifying, because ultimately, it isn’t about the destination or the outcome. At the risk of sounding like a gift card, it’s about the journey and the experiences you’ll have while on it. Thus I prepare fo

Today was a very productive “writing” day, although no formal “writing” happened.  I realized that in order to go forward with the chapter that I’m working on I needed to go backward and think about and face the book-as-a-whole.  I’ve been avoiding facing “the book-as-a-whole.” My first book, which emerged out of my dissertation, was a much “tighter” project, even though the shape of it in some ways looks similar to the shape of this one.  Ultimately, I had a very narrow scope for what I was trying to achieve, and so I knew where I was going pretty much from the very beginning.  Yes, there were “discoveries” throughout the process – threads that I pulled together – but ultimately, in composing each chapter, I was mapping a particular theory onto a particular literary text in order to arrive at an interpretation of what was, really, a very limited thing.  And so it wasn’t, actually, scary to look at the project as One Big Thing.  I knew what I would find when I did that. With this book project, my process has been less deliberate and a hell of a lot messier.  Now, part of this has to do with the fact that I now understand, in a way that I did not in writing my dissertation/book what a “book” really is.  I’ve read a lot more critical books from beginning to end, for one thing, and I also have been through the process of bringing my own book to publication.  Another part of why this process has been different is because other than when I first began, during my sabbatical, I’ve had to squeeze the book into my other professional obligations piecemeal: I haven’t had the luxury of time that I had during graduate school, and I haven’t had the luxury of the kind of single-minded focus that one has during one’s graduate training.  Let me note, I’m not at all complaining about this: I think it makes my ideas richer, in some ways, that I’m not so imbedded in my original field of specialization, and I think that working in this way is actually allowing me to do more interesting work (at least I have hope that this is the case) than I did in my dissertation/book. But because I’m trying to work on the “first” chapter, I sort of need to know where I’m going to end up in the “last” chapter, if I’m writing the book I want to write, which I don’t want merely to be a a loose collection of disparate chapters around a general idea, but really a work of theoretically oriented criticism that hangs together as a cohesive and coherent whole. And because the project has been evolving since I first pitched the topic (having done no work on the topic prior to said pitching) in my application for sabbatical in 2009, I needed to reckon with the fact that what I’ve been writing, and the ideas that I’m most interested in throughout what I’ve been writing, don’t really match what I initially had set out to do.  I mean, there is a relationship – this isn’t a completely different book – but it’s not the book I’d initially thought I would write, and probably nobody but me could see clearly how the book I’m apparently writing has emerged from the idea that I originally had. But so anyway, I faced that particular scary task, and I was able to a) write a paragraph in which I was able to articulate the three linked objectives of the book-as-a-whole, b) articulate – again in writing – the major theoretical apparatuses that I’m engaging in order to flesh out those objectives (and this was tricky as the theories I’m engaging wouldn’t necessarily seem like obvious choices to bring together), c) discover that I’m going to jettison one particular set of ideas, which are super-interesting to somebody, but which don’t actually fit with the objectives that I outlined that I am trying to

“By the company it keeps.” Andy Smarick talks to Tim Daly about baseball, his football coaching brother, and The New Teacher Project’s new Leap Year—a study that looks at a teacher’s early progress. (Flypaper) Spending less on students. Public education spending has fallen for the first time in nearly 40 years. The country spent $10,560 per student in 2011, which is 0.04% less than the previous year. (Houston Chronicle) It’s never too late. A large chunk of college students in America are more than 30-years-old and are looking for a degree to get them the job they want. Allison Linn talked to several students to get their perspective on college life after the age of 30, including Sharon Anne Nowlin who was a homeless veteran living in a shelter and is now getting a bachelor’s of science. (NBC News) Education is a right that is why we have to fight. At a school closing protest in Chicago, nine-year-old Asean Johnson addresses the crowd and tells them “we are not going down with a fight!” (YouTube)

Today's as good a day as any to share with you the draft report I heard about a couple of weeks back when last discussing the issue of how to assess reform advocacy efforts. As you may recall, the question keeps coming up if and how funders are going to assess the impact of their advocacy efforts, whether they be grants to nonprofits or direct contributions to campaigns or PACs: "Teachers unions (AFT, NEA) and nonprofits on the other side (Broader/Bolder Alliance, Shanker Institute, and the new Ravitch thing) are actively engaged in advocacy as well, and have to figure out if their spending is making a difference, too."  (What About The Impact?) As with teachers and schools, poor evaluations can lead to poor understanding, however.  It's not so easy to get it right.  Michigan State professor and TWIE contributor Sarah Reckhow took a stern look at several recent recommendations for advocacy evaluation (A Misleading Approach to Assessing Advocacy) This newest report, called a Media Measurement Framework, is funded by Gates and Knight and produced by the SF-based LFA Group: Learning for Action, who tells us that the Knight Foundation is in the process of creating an online, interactive version of this framework. This static version will become a collection of online resources.  No word yet on whether the framework is any good or if any advocacy grantees are using it yet.  That's where you come in. Previous posts: A Misleading Approach to Assessing Advocacy [Reckhow]; So How'd The Advocacy Groups Do?; Gates Shifts Strategy & Schools Get Smaller Share [Reckhow]; EdWeek's Balanced View Of Reform Advocacy

I support teachers unions. But facts are facts. When it comes to the issue of spending to influence voters, teachers unions take a back seat to no one.  Former LAUSD teacher Walt Gardner) in Education Week (Buying School Reform)

Bless this woman and her cellulite free ba-donk.

...sort of. Today I went to a meeting at a Big Impressive High Ranked University in the midlands. I drove (because three different trains plus a bus each way took a lot longer and had considerable mess-up potential). I hate urban traffic, and despite strategically chosen leaving times, got thoroughly mired in it both ways (although perhaps that wasn't actually that BAD and I'd missed the BAD traffic through the strategy, undertaken with local advice. What a horrible thought!). Motorways are boring. And some unprintable parked so close to my car in the carpark of the service area that I had to wait for them to get back and remove theirs before I could get into mine and carry on being bored.The meeting was to discuss a big, exciting grant application. I'm flattered to have been asked to participate... but left wondering how come if we get it none of the persons working on the project will be based at NorthernUni (there are perfectly good reasons for this, I can see that they look rational, but I am irrational sometimes) therefore I will not get much if any credit/work load allowance for it and it won't help me get other things at NorthernUni, yet I'm the only person who can produce the 'OMG Need It Now' pilot data for the application and my contribution is the key link that pulls together several disparate elements and makes them into a single project. Maybe I was too nice again... but it's all perfectly reasonable... and I will learn a lot through the grant writing process, I can see already, as well as if we get the project... but still. And I dropped baked beans down my front at lunch time... orange streak on cream top, not a good look. I hate being busty.So I'm feeling pretty blah - and not just because of having got up at 05-30 to 'beat the traffic', and despite the lovely weather today and the fact that all the people at the meeting are nice people who I like to meet up with, and it was kind of fun to spend a whole day talking science... it's just a pain that my to-do list growed again ::pout:: and I'm no closer to solving my "no group from the end of 2013" issue.