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higher_education research undergraduate

Like arms races in the world of geopolitics, athletic arms races probably require a joint agreement in order to end—in this case a mutually agreeable means of cutting expenses. Whether this is done through the existing arrangements (especially the National Collegiate Athletics Association) or through other means (e.g., a presidential summit conference involving most leading schools), unified action is necessary. By far the largest expense item is salaries. Football coaches command multi-million dollar salaries because successful teams add millions of dollars to university coffers. Salaries, however, are inflated because players are “paid” trivial amounts relative to their contribution to earnings, so coaches largely capture the income that normally would go to the student athletes.  Limiting football coach salaries to that of the university president would dramatically reduce salaries (or, perversely, increase them for the presidents!) Scholarships for students might legitimately be viewed as wages for student employment, but even here team sizes are excessively large –why, for example, does a sport that fields teams with 11 players need a playing squad of more than 60 players (allowing for multiple persons in each positions in both offensive and defensive units)? The median school in Division 1 of the NCAA spent $2.5 million annually on team travel in 2006. Why can’t distance limits be placed on travel to all but a few special games?  Is the practice of having teams stay in hotels before home games necessary? Why can’t playing seasons be shortened, both for academic and financial reasons?

higher_education costing

Generally the term “disruptive” has a negative connotation. However, with regards to technology, it often is thought of as quite positive. “Destructive innovation” is a phrase often used by economists to describe how introducing new ways of doing things can tear down old processes in favor of better, more efficient ones. Many believe that technology can have this effect on higher education. That is, by leveraging existing internet technologies, educational opportunities can become available to more students, with better outcomes and at lower costs. A recent conference hosted by the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), highlighted many of the existing technologies in higher education today. Virtual desktops, iPad compatible materials and 24/7 student tutoring services accompany existing online courses. Many providers rely on a blended learning approach, where in-class and online learning exist together, complementing one another.

higher_education technology

Through the first half of the 20th century, faculties in academic institutions were generally underpaid relative to other comparably educated members of the workforce. Teaching was viewed as a “calling” in the tradition of tweed jackets, pipe tobacco and avuncular campus life. Trade-offs for modest salaries were found in the relaxed atmospheres of academic communities, often retreats from the pressures of the real world, and reflected in such benefits as tenure, light teaching loads, long vacations and sabbaticals. With the 1970s advent of collective bargaining in higher education, this began to change. The result has been more equitable circumstances for college faculty, who deserve salaries comparable to those of other educated professionals. Happily, senior faculty at most state universities and colleges now earn $80,000 to $150,000, roughly in line with the average incomes of others with advanced degrees. Not changed, however, are the accommodations designed to compensate for low pay in earlier times. Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September.

self_evaluation higher_education

Created by the American Council on Education (ACE), this online resource is designed to help institutions of higher education build effective programs for veteran students and share information. It highlights a variety of best practices including veterans-specific orientation offerings, on-campus veterans service centers, prospective student outreach efforts, faculty training, and counseling and psychological services for veteran students. It also includes video clips, profiles of student veterans programs across the U.S., and a searchable database of tools and resources.

higher_education veterans

The American Council on Education has unveiled a new interactive, online resource for colleges looking to create “veteran friendly” services for military veterans, who are enrolling in greater numbers under the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

higher_education veterans

Apathetic students, illiterate graduates, incompetent teaching, impersonal campuses -- so rolls the drumfire of criticism of higher education. More than two years of reports have spelled out the problems. States have been quick to respond by holding out carrots and beating with sticks. There are neither enough carrots nor enough sticks to improve undergraduate education without the commitment and action of students and faculty members. They are the precious resources on whom the improvement of undergraduate education depends.

best_practices higher_education undergraduate

When your school has 34 Nobel laureates and counting, you wouldn't expect it to be lacking in the innovation department. For Johns Hopkins University, social media is just another space for them to revolutionize. This much acclaimed private university in Baltimore, Maryland is often credited for making great strides in pioneering both the modern research university and modern medicine. Today they're pioneering exciting new ways for institutions of higher learning to make the most of social media.

social_media higher_education

The faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has dedicated this academic year to finding alternatives to the lecture in those subjects. Johns Hopkins, Harvard University and even the White House have hosted events in which scholars have assailed the lecture.

higher_education lectures

When students groan about buying traditional textbooks, their grievances follow a familiar refrain: They’re expensive and usually boring. So this fall, a team of Temple University professors heeded those complaints and abandoned the old-fashioned texts for low-cost alternatives that they built from scratch.

textbooks alternatives higher_education

The University of Missouri system has tweaked new restrictions on the recording of classroom lectures to allow students to at least make recordings for themselves or their classmates, the Columbia Daily Tribune reports. A draft version of the policy had prohibited students from recording lectures at all without written permission from their classmates and instructor.

higher_education recordings lectures

These days the Internet makes it much easier to find the right college to suit any student’s needs. Social media sites now give students access to speaking with previous students of a particular school to learn about student life, the college in general, or even learn more about available accommodation nearby.

higher_education

Education is thriving in Second Life. This enthusiastic subculture is abuzz within the Second Life realm, constantly interacting inside and outside Second Life. Educators are exploring every possible tool the 3D virtual world offers and establishing best practices along the way.

higher_education second_life

Creative and strategic application of modern technologies is a key to success in 21st century academia. An innovative approach for enhancing graduate courses through utilization of virtual worlds, Web 2.0, and cloud computing technologies was developed. To raise students' level of engagement and satisfaction, virtual educational tours and large-scale virtual colloquia were conducted. The goals of the approach were to enhance course learning objectives and support teaching cutting edge information technology topics in core multi-section information technology courses. For immersive virtual worlds, Second Life was utilized; for Web 2.0, Twitter and Twibes were applied; and for cloud computing, Google Docs and WebEx were used. Students and faculty confirmed that the approach provided new, rich, and effective extensions to the current educational platform. The virtual activities supported the pedagogical goals of being engaging, interactive, and reflective on student experiences. In this paper, the developed approach is presented, the utilized technologies and applications are defined, examples of enhanced course objectives and emerging IT topics are provided, findings from actual learning experiences and student reactions are shared, lessons learned and teaching strategies are related, and future plans for applying emerging technologies to teaching and learning are discussed.

technology higher_education second_life

"In his post, Mr. Guzdial recounts how he and two Ph.D. students created the Swiki, or CoWeb, in 2000, so that students would have a place to 'construct public entities on the Web.' The Swikis served intentionally undefined purposes, such as providing a forum for cross-semester discussions and a home for public galleries of student work. 'All of that ended yesterday,' he wrote, because of Georgia Tech’s concerns about Ferpa, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. ... Steven J. McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design, said that because students themselves are not subject to the provisions of Ferpa, if they are the ones posting the material, and not faculty members, then they are acting outside the confines of the privacy act."

privacy ferpa social_media higher_education

This year, seven students have taken their lives across the country's premier technological institutes, an unsettling new high. While 5,857 student suicides were reported across India in 2006, the figure jumped to 7,379 in 2010, according to data released by the National Crime Records Bureau recently.

stress students higher_education

For the past several years, I've taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called "Uncreative Writing." In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they've surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness. We retype documents and transcribe audio clips. We make small changes to Wikipedia pages (changing an "a" to "an" or inserting an extra space between words). We hold classes in chat rooms, and entire semesters are spent exclusively in Second Life. Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Students then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students. What paper did they choose? Is it possible to defend something you didn't write? Something, perhaps, you don't agree with? Convince us.

plagiarism higher_education writing

Let's think back to the mid-20th century, when accreditation first became the gatekeeper for students' eligibility for government grants and credit. At the time, the basic economic model of a university was, more or less, the same that it had been since the 1500s. Because subject-matter experts were scarce and real-time communication options were limited, it made sense to build impressive campuses to attract professors and enable teaching. With such large fixed costs, adding a few more professors was relatively cheap. A critical mass of professors attracted a critical mass of students, who attracted more professors, and so on. That model—substantial fixed costs with low marginal costs (the cost to offer one more class)—is the economic model that was "hard-wired" when colleges' accreditation status and revenue streams were inextricably linked. Because the strongest signals of value in a high-fixed-cost model are the physical plant and faculty credentials, accreditation mostly measures variables related to those. Because student mobility was quite limited, standards governing the transfer of credits were unnecessary. All that worked—for a long time. But online learning has a fundamentally different economic structure. Real-time and speedy synchronous and asynchronous communication options abound. The location of the professor and the student is irrelevant. Content can be cheap or free.

online_learning higher_education technology

Another strategy is to let students use Turnitin on their own drafts. That's the approach taken by Paulette Swartzfager, a lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has taught freshman writing for 40 years. In her case, the idea came from an unlikely source: a student. Ms. Swartzfager was discussing inadequate paraphrasing last year when the student asked if she had used Turnitin. She replied that she had not; like other Turnitin resisters, she wanted to teach, not police. But the student explained that Turnitin can be set to allow students to read its reports. The lecturer gave it a try, and now all of her students screen their work as a default. "What's happened as a result of this has just been wonderful," Ms. Swartzfager says. "They use it as a tool. They keep resubmitting it and working on it until it gets appropriately in their own words, or in quotations, or cited." The students, she adds, are "not nearly so nervous."

plagiarism higher_education

The ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology sheds lights on how information technology affects the college experience. ECAR has conducted this annual study since 2004, and though students' ownership and utilization of technology changes from year to year, students consistently rely upon their instructors and institutions to meet their technology expectations and needs. The 2011 study differs from past studies in that the questionnaire was reengineered and responses were gathered from a nationally representative sample of 3,000 students in 1,179 colleges and universities.

research higher_education