Is Your Distance Education Course Actually a Correspondence Course?
St. Mary-of-the-Woods College should refund $42 million in federal financial aid dollars that it dispersed to students over a five year period. That is the finding of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General, which found that many “distance education” courses should have been classified as “correspondence” courses.
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While St. Mary-of-the-Woods courses and faculty had access to a learning management system and online discussions, the Department said that these were rarely used in practice. For distance education (or telecommunications) courses, they also expect “regular and substantive interaction between these students and the instructor.” The Audit found that “instructors did not deliver lectures or initiate discussions with students.” … How do your classes stack up?
Google-Trained Minds Can't Deal with Terrible Research Database UI
College and university librarians are concerned about students’ search skills, and no wonder:
At Illinois Wesleyan University, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process,” according to researchers there. They tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases. They preferred simple database searches to other methods of discovery, but generally exhibited “a lack of understanding of search logic” that often foiled their attempts to find good sources.
The librarians quoted here understand most of the key problems, and are especially sharp about “the myth of the digital native” — about which see also this deeply sobering Metafilter thread — but there’s one vital issue they’re neglecting: research databases have the worst user interfaces in the whole world.
» via The Atlantic
Research database UI are truly abysmal, followed closely by the UI of most popular online course management systems, and by the UI for most college and university web sites for course registration and other student management activities.
Yet miraculously the forward facing web sites for most colleges and universities are glitzy and dazzling, precisely because they are seen primarily as a recruiting tool.
So there are two Internets in higher education: there’s the spectacularly slick 2012 Internet students see before they enroll, and there’s the barely usable and archaic throwback to a 1997 Internet that students must endure to interact with the registrar, the library, and their courses throughout the remainder of their college career.
Source: infoneer-pulse
Scores show students aren't ready for college
Three out of four graduates aren’t fully prepared for college and likely need to take at least one remedial class, according to the latest annual survey from the nonprofit testing organization ACT, which measured half of the nation’s high school seniors in English, math, reading and science proficiency.
Only 25 percent cleared all of ACT’s college preparedness benchmarks, while 75 percent likely will spend part of their freshman year brushing up on high-school-level course work. The 2011 class is best prepared for college-level English courses, with 73 percent clearing the bar in that subject. Students are most likely to need remedial classes in science and math, the report says.
» via The Washington Times
When 75% of freshmen require remedial classes, it is time to end the fiction of calling them “remedial.”
It isn’t that students aren’t ready for college, it is colleges that are not ready to accept reality and design curricula that meets students where they actually are, not where ivory tower elitists think students “should” be.
This doesn’t mean “lowering standards.” This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold high schools accountable for student learning outcomes. It simply means that for better or worse the norm has very obviously shifted, and it does students a disservice to label them “deficient” when they are quite literally “average.”
Starting a college experience branded with a scarlet letter “R” has a direct and immediate effect on student learning and success. Students quickly succumb to impostor syndrome, convinced that they are far less capable of learning than everyone they see around them, when in fact most are nothing worse than “normal.” When their own expectations are not high — and especially when their teachers have low expectations — these students are more likely to see very routine mistakes in the ordinary course of learning as inevitable failures, and plunge themselves into the vortex of a self-fulfilling prophecy from which many never recover.
Well-intentioned “first-year experience” programs only further stigmatize these students. The programs are based on the assumption that these students are in critical need of specialized remedies, and that the role of the institution is to patiently analyze the “problem” and administer the “treatment,” in spite of its uneven outcomes.
If you diagnose nearly everyone as diseased, you should not wonder why you are facing such a massive epidemic.
Faculty design syllabi, deans design programs, and institutions design degrees based on mythical idealized students that do not exist now, if they ever did. The single biggest mistake in higher education is the propensity to create learning experiences based on what you believe students should know, rather than on what they actually do know.
It is not “dumbing down” your curriculum to recognize that real learning simply does not happen without first connecting it to prior knowledge. The gap between what students know and what they need to know is never narrowed by any presumptions of what they ought to know. The question “What is the capital of New Mexico?” can be answered with the correct response, “Santa Fe,” without ever knowing what the word “capital” means, or even being aware that New Mexico is not part of some foreign country.
Students will never be ready for college until college can prove it is genuinely ready for them.
Source: infoneer-pulse
TEDxMedellín - Larry Cooperman: The Internet and the Future of Higher Education (by TEDxTalks). Cooperman is director of OpenCourseWare, UC Irvine.
“We have to begin to imagine a world in which anyone could learn anything, anywhere, anytime for free, and this is the promise of open education.”
“‘What is the future of the university?’ The way I see it there is going to be a formal sector and an informal sector, and they’re going to play off against each other, in a healthy way.”
Source: youtube.com
Student debt and a push for fairness
via NYTimes:
If you run up big credit card bills buying a new home theater system and can’t pay it off after a few years, bankruptcy judges can get rid of the debt. They may even erase loans from a casino.
But if you borrow money to get an education and can’t afford the loan payments after a few years of underemployment, that’s another matter entirely. It’s nearly impossible to get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court, even if it’s a private loan from for-profit lenders like Citibank or the student loan specialist Sallie Mae.
This part of the bankruptcy law is little known outside education circles, but ever since it went into effect in 2005, it’s inspired shock and often rage among young adults who got in over their heads. Today, they find themselves in the same category as people who can’t discharge child support payments or criminal fines.
Legislation in both the Senate and the House that will restore fairness in student lending by treating privately issued student loans in bankruptcy the same as other types of private debt.
