Mid-Career Mentoring

By Kerry Ann Rockquemore

In the spirit of continuing to question the tired and dysfunctional myths about mentoring that are pervasive in the academy (the meaning of mentoring, sink or swim, the limit of anecdotes, and mentoring underrepresented faculty) let me move to one that is both organizationally ineffective and individually debilitating: once professors receive tenure, they no longer need mentoring.

Mid-Career Malaise: Even though my specialty is working with early-career faculty, I’m increasingly asked to work with “mid-career” faculty. I’m never exactly sure what that means, but I typically end up with a room full of exhausted women who range from recently tenured to long-term associate professors. In other words, they are people who: a) are afraid of getting stuck, b) feel seriously stuck right now, or c) have been stuck too long in the middle of the academic ladder. I love doing these workshops because the invitation is typically a hesitant and vague combination of “we know there’s a problem but we don’t know what to do about it” and could I provide some appropriate “mentoring

Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2011/11/28/essay-need-tenured-faculty-members-have-mentoring#ixzz1fA44ytZ4

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The Dwindling Power of a College Degree

By Adam Davidson

The 2012 presidential election can be seen as offering a choice between two visions of how to return us to this country’s golden age — from roughly 1945 to around 1973 — when working life was most secure for many Americans, particularly white, middle-class men. President Obama said his jobs plan was for people who believed “if you worked hard and played by the rules, you would be rewarded.” Mitt Romney explained his goal was to restore hope for “folks who grew up believing that if they played by the rules . . . they would have the chance to build a good life.” But these days, many workers have lost a near guarantee on a decent wage and benefits — and their careers are likely to have much more volatility (great years; bad years; confusing, mediocre years) than their parents’ ever did. So when did the rules change?

Continued at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/magazine/changing-rules-for-success.html?_r=1&ref=education

Higher Education Leaders Urged to Improve Data Collection for College Completion Efforts

By Jamaal Abdul-Alim

Higher education leaders should use historical data to gauge graduation rates among diverse student groups for whom graduation is less likely so they can make institutional improvements that help those students defy the odds.

That’s one of the key recommendations made by the lead researcher of a new report being released today by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institution, or HERI, that urges college and university administrators to reassess how they go about the business of getting their students to earn a bachelor’s degree in four to six years.

Continued at: http://diverseeducation.com/article/16667/

Read the report: http://www.heri.ucla.edu/~heri.prev/DARCU/CCReportPressCopy.pdf

Government Accountability Office Calls For More Information About Online Education

By Catherine Groux

As online courses become an integral part of academia, the U.S. Department of Education has vowed to increase its oversight of web-based programs to ensure that students are still receiving a quality education. However, a new report by the Government Accountability Office states that the department does not have the proper information to do so, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A new report urges the Department of Education to gather more data on online education. Report states that the department should strive to collect data on which programs receive the most federal financial aid, as well as which schools have the most students using online education. In doing so, the department will be better equipped to target at-risk programs. Additionally, the report, which was requested by Congressional Democrats, states that the department should find ways to use the new data currently being collected by the National Center for Education Statistics to ameliorate its oversight project.

Continued at:  http://www.usnewsuniversitydirectory.com/articles/government-accountability-office-calls-for-more-in_11939.aspx

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Researchers Rate RateMyProfessors and Find It Useful, if Not Chili-Pepper Hot

By Marc Parry

The Web site RateMyProfessors evokes skepticism among faculty members. Some view the anonymous evaluation site as a haven for rants and odd remarks (“He will crush you like an academic ninja!”), or a place where students go to grade instructors based on easiness or attractiveness (a chili-pepper icon distinguishes professors that are “hot” over those that are “not”).

But new research out of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire suggests the popular service is a more useful barometer of instructor quality than you might think, at least in the aggregate. And the study, the latest of several indicating RateMyProfessors should not be dismissed, raises questions about how universities should deal with a site whose ratings have been factored into Forbes magazine’s college rankings and apparently even into some universities’ personnel evaluations.

“There is the possibility that people may feel legitimized to use the information in potentially dangerous ways,” says April Bleske-Rechek, an associate professor of psychology at Eau Claire, who is a co-author of the new study. They might, for example, give too much weight to comments on the site in deciding whether to hire someone or grant the person tenure.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/Researchers-Rate/129820/

Read the research: http://pareonline.net/pdf/v15n5.pdf

Using mLearning and MOOCs to Understand Chaos, Emergence, and Complexity in Education

By Inge deWaard, Sean Abajian, Michael Sean Gallagher, Rebecca Hogue, Nilgün Keskin, Apostolos Koutropoulos, & Osvaldo C. Rodriguez

In December 1972, Edward Lorenz presented a paper to the National Academy of Sciences in New York, titled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?” This paper introduced what we now know as chaos theory. Chaos theory was only emerging at that time, but it shook the scientific world as it helped describe outcomes for complex systems that were impacted by a variety of factors. As chaos theory became more widely accepted, experts in other fields, including educational research, started to employ it to predict future frameworks.

In the reality of the 21st century’s second decennium, education is molded by a variety of new factors. The use of social media, new mobile technologies, and pedagogical formats has a major impact on the learning and teaching processes of today. Due to these new technologies and emerging formats, education has been forced into a process of transformation, and that causes an imbalance at first.

Continued at: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1046/2026

Online Learning Growth Dwarfs Overall Enrollment

By I. Elaine Allen

I am co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group which, for the last nine years, has published a survey of online education in the United States. It has yet to see any clear indication of an overall slowdown in the growth of online education but there are changes in the differential growth of programmes and in the belief that, in some areas, online education is superior for students.

The rate of growth of online enrolments was slower over the last year, but it continues to outpace the rate of growth of the total higher education student population in the US. Every year since the first report in this series in 2003, the number of students taking at least one online course has increased at a rate far in excess of the growth of the overall student body. The most recent estimate, for the autumn of 2010, shows an increase of 10% over autumn 2009 to a total of 6.1 million students taking at least one course online for that semester.

This is an almost four-fold increase in students taking courses online since our first survey in 2002, and represents a compound annual growth rate of 18.3% over the nine-year period. By comparison, the overall higher education student body in the US has grown at an annual rate of just over 2% during this same period.

Continued at: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20111118193236730

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We Need a Single Standard for Higher Education

By Jonathan Fanton

As a former president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, I have worked for years to strengthen education in many countries. I have come to appreciate that the ideal education system in any nation needs to be sufficiently diverse to meet the needs of students from many backgrounds and with varying aspirations for both their lives and future careers.

Here in the United States, the framework for education has slowly evolved to meet the changing needs of American students. Today, we are moving toward an education system that, at all levels, provides a mix of private and public institutions that serve an array of students. By increasing opportunities for students at all levels of education, we can provide them with the ability to pursue the education that is the best fit for them.

For-profit colleges play an essential role in educating millions of men and women and helping them enter or return to the workforce. And they help our nation become more competitive in the global economy by equipping students with skills that match job opportunities. The effort to establish standards of best practices deserves our support.

Continued at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/11/16/12fanton.h31.html?tkn=YLQF1t5%2BKCSkaL6qJxr7vq6cj%2BkXehdo1EO7&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1

Top Ten Workplace Issues for Faculty Members and Higher Education Professionals

By Greta Petry

Keeping track of these issues, both for yourself and for the people you work with, helps the entire office space feel less alienating.

If you are a faculty member, you may think that professors and professionals are like apples and oranges. You may be surprised to hear that the AAUP-affiliated United University Profession is one of the largest academic unions in the nation, with more than 33,000 members across New York State includes a growing number of academic professionals who are not faculty members.

Why should you care about this?

As the events in Madison, Wisconsin, earlier this year revealed, there has never been a more critical time for unionized employees of all kinds to stick together. What do a firefighter, a nurse, a teacher, a state university college professor, and a student affairs employee all have in common? They serve the public.

Professionals at a public college or university range from the talented part-time graphic artist who designs the posters for your research conference to the perennially patient financial-aid staffer who makes sure the students get their loans and grants.

What do they have in common with faculty members?

As grievance chair for the University at Albany chapter of United University Professions for five years and a professional myself, I’ve learned about a number of ways in which faculty and staff workplace issues overlap. Here are the top ten problems that come up routinely for both faculty and staff.

Continued at: http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/postings.php     Enter #1138 at website to access article.

Graduate Student Debt Matters

By Leonard Cassuto

How many of us are aware of the amount of debt that our graduate students are carrying?

I certainly did not consider that question until recently, but it marks a path leading to precincts that professors must explore. When we design curricula or set graduate-program policies, we need to think about how much money our students will one day owe. If debt affects our students’ lives—and it surely does—then it should affect our thinking about how we teach, and about graduate education generally.

Like undergraduates, most graduate students take out loans to finance their studies. Their debt loads are increased by rising tuition costs, but without the same hope for a compensatory high salary that motivates millions of undergraduates to borrow large sums. The scandalously small percentage of Ph.D.’s who land tenure-track jobs is no longer news, of course. But even tenure-track jobs are not lucrative enough. For a would-be academic, grabbing the brass ring—that is, getting a professor’s job or some other intellectually rewarding position—can lead, instead, to a lifetime of debt servitude.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-Student-Debt-Matters/129812/

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