e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: higher education

  • CCSF Accreditation Crisis: Seven Years in the Making

    Last week the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), which operates under the corporate entity the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), voted to end accreditation for the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) as of July 31, 2014. Unless reversed, the loss of accreditation would like force the 85,000 student college to shut down. CCSF would be the largest college to date to lose accreditation, and it is also the largest community college in California.

    Update 8/21: Date corrected to July 31.

    It might be useful to recap the process and issues that led to the current accrediting crisis. This summary is based on the accrediting body’s findings. In a later post I’ll address the counter arguments made by the school and faculty unions.

    Spring 2006 Evaluation

    The immediate story did not start in 2012 with the institution’s request for reaffirmation of accreditation and subsequent ACCJC evaluation, but rather started back in 2006. In the 2006 evaluation report the commission “validated that that the college meets the eligibility requirements for accreditation and complies with the standards of accreditation” and identified eight key recommendations.

    Recommendations #2, #3, and #4 were “overarching concerns that should receive the college’s focused attention and emphasis”. The recommendations are summarized below.

    • 1) Mission Statement: Regularly review and approve the mission statement in a discrete process
    • 2) Planning and Assessment: Build planning and assessment efforts in an integrated process linked back to the annual budgets, including clear criteria for resource reallocation and / or program and service development, expansion, or termination
    • 3) Student Learning Outcomes: Ensure that student learning outcomes are fully institutionalized as a core element of college operations, with specific focus on curriculum and program development
    • 4) Financial Planning and Stability: Develop a financial strategy that will: match ongoing expenditures with ongoing revenue; maintain the minimum prudent reserve level; reduce the percentage of its annual budget that is utilized for salaries and benefits; and address funding for retiree health benefits costs
    • 5) Physical Facilities Contingency Planning:Ensure the development of adequate contingency plans, which should be implemented in a timely manner in order to reduce potential exposure to losses
    • 6) Physical Facilities Maintenance Planning: Include the future costs of operating and maintaining new and existing facilities in its planning models and allocate funds in a timely manner to ensure the effective operation of these facilities
    • 7) Technology Planning: Bring all unit technology plans up-to-date, and develop a unified college-wide technology plan; this plan should be integrated with facilities and budget plans; funds for technology acquisition and maintenance, including regular replacement of outdated hardware, should be integrated into the institution’s budget
    • 8) Board of Trustees Evaluation: Establish a method of self evaluation for the Board of Trustees, determine the schedule for this process, and complete self evaluations on a regular basis

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  • Open University in the UK, 40 Years After First Graduation

    There’s an interesting three-minute video produced by the BBC that covers the Open University at 40. It was a ground-breaking idea, and to date over 1.8 million students have obtained degrees. The current educational technology boom and interest in online education, including the MOOC phenomenon, owes a great deal to the Open University.

    As it’s too hot today to do much yard work, I might as well add transcription.

    Corduroy and calculus, kipper ties and chemistry.

    The Open University was a curious, groundbreaking mix. Forty years ago, in June 1973, its first graduation ceremony took place. Frederick Lavendar is now 87 years old [was part of first graduating class].

    Lavendar: “It was challenging, but it was exciting, too. Because everyone was in the excitement together.”

    The Open University was a radical concept. No qualifications required, no student campus, learning materials sent through the post, lectures broadcast on the BBC2.

    Professor Craig Mahoney: “The Open University provided access for students who didn’t typically have access to higher education at that time. Distance education was seen very skeptically, and people weren’t very supportive of that. So there was a big challenge.”

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  • MOOCs Beyond Professional Development: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context

    One aspect of last week’s Coursera announcement was the acknowledgement that MOOCs to date have primarily served as a mechanism for professional development, not as a mechanism for serving higher education per se. In the Chronicle article:

     Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, acknowledged that the company was venturing into new terrain. After studying their MOOC users, the company realized that most of them had already earned college degrees, said Ms. Koller. That was well and good, but it suggested to Coursera’s founders that MOOCs would not be sufficient to achieve their ambitions.

    “If you’re looking to really move the needle on fundamental educational problems, inside and outside the United States, you’re going to need to help people reach the first milestone, which is getting their degrees to begin with,” Ms. Koller said.

    and from the New York Times:

    “Our first year, we were enamored with the possibilities of scale in MOOCs,” said Daphne Koller, one of the two Stanford computer science professors who founded Coursera. “Now we are thinking about how to use the materials on campus to move along the completion agenda and other challenges facing the largest public university systems.”

    These statements can be understood by looking at the demographic data for students that have been taking xMOOCs (i.e. from Coursera, Udacity and edX) in their first year.

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  • MOOC as Courseware: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context

    Today’s big news is that Coursera, the largest of the MOOC providers, has signed with 10 public statewide systems. As described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed:

    Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup’s efforts to take online education to the masses.

    Together, state systems and flagship universities in nine states will help the company test new business models and teaching methods and potentially put Coursera in competition with some of the ed tech industry’s most established players.

    The push, which company and university officials previewed over the past several days, is not a single effort but several pilot projects with different goals. Some university leaders are unsure of the direction they are heading in, but the effort will create at least a temporary buffet of experimentation using Coursera’s online platform. A network of universities will be creating or using and buying or selling course material from each other, with Coursera in the middle as a content broker, consultant and host.

    One key aspect of this announcement is Coursera’s full-fledged move into courseware as a new business line to complement their standalone courses. Courseware is the combination of “the curriculum, the course materials, the assessments and, in some cases, the analytics to track student progress and make study suggestions” as described in Michael’s post “MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact“. In essence, courseware is everything but the instructor and interactive discussion, certification and support. This is what is meant by “wrapping” around a MOOC.

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  • MOOCs Explained: Radio Interview with University of Delaware

    Just over a week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a radio interview for the University of Delaware’s local station WVUD, with the Campus Voices interview airing on May 17th. The interview was in advance of Delaware’s summer faculty institute, where I will be speaking in just over a week. I really enjoyed the interview, and this is an area that needs more attention – local educational technology support for faculty innovation, with an emphasis on faculty sharing best practices. The summer institute is May 28th – 31st.

    I was interviewed by Richard Gordon and Paul Hyde, and some of the key topics we explored:

    • Not everyone is a reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education – what the heck is a MOOC?
    • How do MOOCs affect faculty teaching in a bricks-and-mortar university?
    • What are the completion rates of MOOCs and what are the student types?
    • Are there applications beyond higher education?
    • Why is there such significant pushback against MOOCs lately?
    • What disciplines beyond science and engineering are using MOOCs?

    Here is link to the U Delaware radio interview – audio only. It’s about a half hour in length, but with some cool NPR-sounding music to kick it off.

    I have also added some graphics and created a video of the interview.

  • Proposed California Legislation for Statewide Online Education Courses – The Basics

    Outside of the Vatican, the big news this week in higher education is the proposed legislation in California that would identify and approve a set of up to 50 online courses that the three public systems would accept as credit for admitted students. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is co-authoring SB520 that addresses popular, introductory courses for which students cannot get access from their University of California, California State University, or California Community College campus. The pre-coverage of the event included the following:

    As described in the NY Times:

    Legislation will be introduced in the California Senate on Wednesday that could reshape higher education by requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to give credit for faculty-approved online courses taken by students unable to register for oversubscribed classes on campus.

    If it passes, as seems likely, it would be the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own — including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university.

    “We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise: No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed,” said Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the Senate, who will introduce the bill. “That’s the motivation for this.”

    Update 3/14: Text of bill here

    Senate President Pro Tem Steinberg held a press conference today via Google Hangout and video streaming (archive available soon on site) to announce the package of legislation. I have attempted to summarize the press conference below (any mistakes in note-taking are my own, and I’ll update as needed). While Michael and I will both have analysis of this proposal soon, I wanted to first share the information directly.

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  • Further Evolution of MOOCs with Academic Partnerships and MOOC2Degree Launch

    One of the fastest growing educational delivery models over the past year is the school-as-a-service concept, where companies like Pearson, 2U, Academic Partnerships and Deltak provide the services needed for a traditional institution to create an online program at scale. As I have often pointed out, traditional institutions have a organizational designs and cultures that often prevent them from successfully creating self-sustaining online programs, which is the reason for the barrier in the landscape diagram. School-as-a-service model provides a bridge over that barrier.

    Of course, the model that has grown even faster are MOOCs. Yesterday Academic Partnerships launched a new concept called MOOC2Degree that attempts to combine these two models, thus giving working adults (the sweet spot of their market) a lower cost, easier method to get credits in an online program.

    AP Graphic 2

     

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