Archive
Reengineering Higher Education
From the Lumina Foundation
The Lumina Foundation’s Elizabeth Gutierrez addressed HACU. Change is needed in the higher education system, and we at Lumina see three changes that will have tremendous impact: 1) Higher education must become responsive to the needs of all potential students—a much wider range of people with more diverse needs. Today’s student—the 21st century student—runs the gamut… racially, ethnically, socially, economically. 2) That word “quality” is important. Our shared conception of what quality really means in higher education. Sadly, too many in our nation still think quality is a measure of inputs and a function of the resources available to institutions. 3) Higher education also must change in terms of scale. To fuel the recovery and ensure the nation’s long-term economic health, we need an ever-growing supply of college graduates. The system must find new and better ways to provide high-quality learning to millions of additional students by 2025.
Continued at: http://www.luminafoundation.org/about_us/leaders/2011-10-31-reengineering_higher_education.html
Clayton Christensen: Why Online Education is Ready for Disruption, Now
By Courtney Boyd Myers
Earlier this year we discussed how the Internet is revolutionizing education and featured several companies and organizations that are disrupting the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom. The Internet has changed how we interact with Time. We can be learning all the time now, whenever we want, and wherever we want. And because of that, we’re seeing explosive growth in online education.
In October, Knewton, an education technology startup, raised $33 million in its 4th round of funding to roll out its adaptive online learning platform. In early November, Khan Academy, an online collection featuring over 2,100 educational videos ranging in intensity from 1+1=2 to college level calculus and physics, snagged $5 million in funding to add two new faculty members that will create lectures for humanities and art-intensive classes.
Continued at: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/11/13/clayton-christensen-why-online-education-is-ready-for-disruption-now/
A Guide to Major U.S. College Completion Initiatives
From AASCU
As the focus of policymakers has shifted from college access to college completion in recent years, numerous initiatives have surfaced in an effort to meet President Obama’s goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. “A Guide to Major U.S. College Completion Initiatives,” a new policy brief from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, provides an overview of the diverse array of projects related specifically to improving postsecondary attainment across the country. The brief argues that coordination of completion activities is essential to avoid duplication of efforts and “initiative fatigue” and warns that access goals must not be abandoned since attainment rates will not improve without a commitment to educational opportunities for everyone. The brief further argues that long-term planning is necessary to sustain completion efforts once funding for specific initiatives comes to an end.
Related articles
- Measures of Student Success (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)
Questions of Quality
By Paul Fain
Students at for-profit colleges typically have less money and academic preparation than do their peers at other institutions. Those and other risk factors muddy the debate over the sector’s performance, and make it hard to compare with public and private nonprofit colleges.
Existing data sources are too thin to create a definitive comparative analysis of for-profits, said David J. Deming, an assistant professor of education and economics at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. But some clarity emerges in a forthcoming study by Deming and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, two prominent Harvard economists.
Read the research paper: http://www.frbatlanta.org/documents/news/conferences/11employment_education_demming.pdf
Focus on Adult Learning . . . Innovation through Inquiry 