The Ideal Professor vs. The Typical Professor

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

It’s a new year and a new semester, with new courses and different students — along with perhaps a few favorite courses and students you get to spend time with all over again, and maybe a couple of each you won’t miss at all. In other words, it’s a new beginning.

As we begin again, I thought this characterization of “The Ideal Professor” might be of interest. It’s offered by students who were asked to compare their Ideal professors with their Typical ones. This cohort of juniors and seniors rated professorial characteristics in three areas: personal, course design, and policies and behaviors. The items were selected for the survey based on research in each of these three areas.

Perhaps a bit surprising is the lack of strong distinctions between Ideal and Typical professors. “We found that preferred qualities and behaviors were not wholly absent in the Typical professor — they simply appeared less pronounced than in the Ideal professor.” (p. 182) Despite overall similarities, the research team does describe some of the differences between the two as “striking” and eight of these are listed below. The numbers reflect the percentage of students who endorsed this characteristic for their Ideal professors and the percentage who said they characterized the Typical professor.

Continued at: http://ebm.facultyfocusemail.com/c/tag/BPFCw2B8X3cvB8fSlaAAAAABBE/doc.html

Alumni Adrift

By Allie Grasgreen

Researchers created quite a stir last year — to say the least — with the release of Academically Adrift, the book about a longitudinal study that found many students don’t learn much in college, particularly in the way of skills like critical thinking and analytic reasoning. The culprit, the authors argue, is a lack of academic rigor in most classes that required little reading, writing and studying.

If true, those findings alone are grim enough. But a new study from the same authors says the data’s implications for students extend beyond their time in college and into their early years as graduates.

The new study found a positive correlation between poor performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment — the test used in Academically Adrift to measure gains over the students’ time in college — and unemployment, credit card debt, and likelihood of living at home.

Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/25/next-phase-academically-adrift-research-links-low-cla-scores-unemployment

Massive Courses, Sans Stanford

By Steve Kolowich

For students looking to learn skills and land jobs, might the good word of a highly regarded instructor count as much as the imprimatur of a highly regarded institution?

The question arose in the fall, when a handful of professors at Stanford University decided to teach free courses online to tens of thousands of students who were not enrolled at the elite California university. The students would receive no Stanford credit; only a signed letter by the instructor, acting apart from the university.

The pair of part-time Stanford instructors who co-taught the most successful of the open courses, on artificial intelligence, now intend to put the importance of the institutional brand to the test. They are co-founders of a company that will offer two similarly “open” courses beginning in February, this time independently of the Stanford name.

The company, called Know Labs, has funding from Charles River Ventures and aspires to be a for-profit enterprise that offers high-quality college courses on the cheap to tens of thousands of students at a time through an online learning portal called Udacity.

Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/24/stanford-open-course-instructors-spin-profit-company

Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online

By Jennifer Howard

In academe, the game of how to win friends and influence people is serious business. Administrators and grant makers want proof that a researcher’s work has life beyond the library or the lab.

But the current system of measuring scholarly influence doesn’t reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social Web. Research that used to take months or years to reach readers can now find them almost instantly via blogs and Twitter.

That kind of activity escapes traditional metrics like the impact factor, which indicates how often a journal is cited, not how its articles are really being consumed by readers.

An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. “There’s a gold mine of data that hasn’t been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact,” says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/As-Scholarship-Goes-Digital/130482/

Colleges Can Take 4 Steps to Assure Quality, Group Says

By Dan Berrett

Increasing the percentage of college graduates in the United States has become a collective aspiration of policy makers, advocates for higher education, and President Obama. But this push for quantity will mean little if colleges cannot demonstrate the quality of the degrees they confer, says an advocacy group.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Can-Take-4-Steps-to/130438/

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A Disrupted Higher-Ed System

By Jeff Selingo

The “disruption” of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard’s Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players.

What exactly those innovations will look like remains a matter of debate. One view from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, envisions a future in which every industry will be disrupted and “rebuilt with people at the center.”

In this recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg talked specifically about the gaming industry, which has been upended by the popularity of social-gaming venues, such as Words With Friends and Farmville.

But what if we applied her people-centered vision to higher ed?

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2012/01/26/a-disrupted-higher-ed-system/

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International Volunteer Service: Good Intentions Are Not Enough

By Amanda Moore McBride and Eric Mlyn

The last decade has seen the proliferation of international volunteer programs and international service-learning courses offered by American colleges and universities. Such opportunities send undergraduate and graduate students abroad to work with local nonprofits and other community partners. Think of students building a health clinic on an alternative spring break, teaching English in remote villages, or holding babies in an orphanage.

We have followed and been a part of the growth of this pedagogical approach, building programs and researching their results. Our experience has made it clear that we need to better understand what exactly these volunteer activities are producing for the students and communities. The future of this field will be best served when practice is closely linked to research. As a field, service learning has made progress in this area, though much remains to be done so that the possible positive outcomes do not get lost despite its best intentions.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/International-Volunteer/130459/

Mixed Grades: A Survey of Provosts

By Scott Jaschik

Chief academic officers believe that higher education faces serious concerns about academic rigor, grade inflation and student cheating – but that their own campuses are exempt. Those are among the findings of a new Inside Higher Ed survey of provosts and chief academic officers at American colleges and universities.

Respondents generally gave their colleges and universities strong grades when asked broad questions about academic quality. But they scored their institutions lower on specifics that are important to students and their families (preparing graduates for the job market), issues being pushed by some educators (preparing good citizens) and issues that greatly frustrate many students, parents and politicians (controlling the price of college).

Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/mixed-grades-survey-provosts

(Not) Using Data for Decisions

By Kenneth C. Green

Today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed presents the results of a national survey of provosts and chief academic officers (CAOs). I’m pleased to report that The Campus Computing Project worked with the editors of Inside Higher Ed on this survey. Some 1100 (ok -1081!) CAOs across all sectors of American higher education participated in this December 2011 survey.

The CAO survey follows previous Inside Higher Ed surveys of presidents, chief financial officers, and chief admissions officers.  Some of these surveys used common questions, allowing us to compare the data on key issues as seen from various seats at the cabinet table.

One of the more interesting findings across the surveys of presidents, provosts, and CFOs is how these institutional leaders assess their campuses on using data to aid and inform planning and decision-making. Alas, the news is not good.  As shown below, less than two-fifths of the presidents, provosts, and CFOs surveyed by Inside Higher Ed this past year report that their institution does a “very effective” job of “using data to aid and inform campus decision-making.”

Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/not-using-data-decisions

‘Adrift’ in Adulthood: Students Who Struggled in College Find Life Harsher After Graduation

By Dan Berrett

College graduates who showed paltry gains in critical thinking and little academic engagement while in college have a harder time than their more accomplished peers as they start their careers, according to a report released today.

The report, “Documenting Uncertain Times: Postgraduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort,” follows up on the highly influential and controversial book Academically Adrift, which was published one year ago. The report is being released at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and it expands upon many of the themes that the book explored by following a subset of students from the book into early adulthood.

Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/Adrift-in-Adulthood-/130444/