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Great Colleges To Work For 2012
By Josh Fischman and Benjamin Pokross
Open channels of communication, along with concrete ways of appreciating employees and helping them balance work and home, are hallmarks of great academic workplaces. At colleges, such policies have become more important as a slow national economy delays or shrinks raises, according to The Chronicle’s 2012 “Great Colleges to Work For” survey, which identifies 103 outstanding institutions across the country.
At the same time, the report reveals that academe still struggles to find ways to show respect for employees. In that category—one of 12 areas measured by the survey—even colleges that did well got lower ratings from their employees than did colleges recognized in other areas, such as providing a good teaching environment.
Visit: http://chronicle.com/article/At-Great-Colleges-Respect Is/133369/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Related articles
- At Great Colleges, Respect Is a Crucial Benefit (chronicle.com)
- How We Conducted the Survey (chronicle.com)
With Student Learning at Stake, Group Calls for Better Working Conditions for Adjuncts
By Audrey Williams
Academe needs a new model for the professoriate that better supports the growing number of instructors who are off the tenure track, the participants in a national project about the changing faculty have concluded.
The participants, who represent a cross-section of academe and its stakeholders, also said in a report being released this week that they need to align to gather data that will paint a clearer picture of higher education’s increasing reliance on contingent faculty.
A key reason for those two strategies to improve the jobs of contingent faculty members is that their poor working conditions may harm student learning, says the report, a “working document” produced by the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.
The 49-page document, in part, details the challenges linked to the rising number of contingent faculty, who now make up about 70 percent of all instructors at the nation’s colleges and universities. But data that quantify the effects of this shift in the make-up of the faculty and the issues it creates aren’t readily available, the report says. Without hard numbers, campus policy makers may be unaware of the extent of the challenges they face.
Related articles
- Adjunct survey paints bleak portrait (insidehighered.com)
- Freelance, part-time or fixed-term: Is this the future of academic careers? (guardian.co.uk)
- AAUP Proposes Giving Contingent Faculty a Bigger Role in College Governance (chronicle.com)
Understanding Adult Learners’ Needs
By Nachamma Sockalingam
Understanding learner needs is essential for providing quality education. One approach for accomplishing this is through the use of student evaluations. A common argument against the use of student evaluations is that students do not know their own needs. However, many studies have shown student feedback/suggestions to be reliable and valid. If we do not even attempt to understand their needs, we may fail to recognize the support they require to be successful.
To understand what adult learners need from their instructors, 2,719 students at a Singapore university were asked what their instructors could improve on as part of the end-of-course evaluation. The students’ suggestions were then filtered, analyzed and organized across seven categorizes, loosely reflecting the seven principles of good teaching outlined by Chickering and Gamson (1987).
Visit: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/understanding-adult-learners-needs/
Related articles
- Essay urging a new option for faculty on course evaluations (insidehighered.com)
5 Things Real Students Hate about Online Learning Degrees
By Vicky Phillips
Online learning degrees are all the rage – even the Ivy League schools are offering them – but do they honestly live up to all the media hype?
There are some things about online learning that make students want to throw their computers out the window
At GetEducated.com we’ve collected over 1,000 online university reviews from real students taking online classes and the watchful public at large. A recent analysis of all of the 1,000+ reviews reveals that not all online learning degrees are alike.
In fact, there are a couple of real skunkers. Read what real students gripe about when it comes to their online learning experiences.
Trends among Young Adults Over Three Decades, 1974-2006
From Russ Poulin, WCET
This report describes patterns of continuity and change over time in four areas of the transition to adulthood among young adults as measured 2 years after their senior year of high school. The four areas are postsecondary enrollment, labor force roles, family formation, and civic engagement. The analysis population is spring-term high school seniors in 1972, 1980, 1992, and 2004.
Findings include:
• Overall, the percentage of young adults enrolled in postsecondary courses 2 years after their senior year of high school was higher in 2006 (62 percent) than it was in 1974 (40 percent).
• When comparing the postsecondary experiences of high school seniors in spring 1972 with those in spring 2004, the percentage of those who had ever enrolled in a postsecondary institution within 2 years of their scheduled high school graduation was 63 percent in 1974 and 78 percent in 2006.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics
Visit: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2012345
Interactive Online Learning Produces Learning Outcomes on Par with Traditional Teaching Methods
By Leila Meyer
Hybrid teaching methods that combine interactive online learning with limited classroom teaching produce equivalent learning outcomes to traditional classroom teaching methods, according to new research released recently.
The report, Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials, found that when students completed an introductory-level statistics course using an ILO system, along with one hour each week of classroom instruction, their scores on a standardized test of statistical literacy (CAOS) administered before and after the course showed equivalent gains to scores from students who completed the same course through traditional classroom teaching methods only.
Read the Report: http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/interactive-learning-online-public-universities-evidence-randomized-trials
New Americans in Postsecondary Education: A Profile of Immigrant and Second-Generation American Undergraduates
From Russ Poulin, WCET
A new NCES Statistics in Brief, “New Americans in Postsecondary Education: A Profile of Immigrant and Second-Generation American Undergraduates”, presents data from the 2007–08 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study about the characteristics and experiences of 2007–08 undergraduates who immigrated to the United States or are second-generation Americans. The analysis points to differences in educational pursuit and attainment for these two groups compared to all undergraduates and American undergraduates whose parents were born in the United States. SourceL National Center for Education Statistics Digest; WICHE Policy Unit.
Visit: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012213.pdf
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Stratification Undermines American Higher Education’s Capacity for Enabling Social Mobility
By Jamaal Abdul-Alim
Although a college education has increasingly become the sole path into the shrunken middle class, social stratification within the world of higher education threatens to undermine the American Dream.
That was one of the major points that economist Anthony Carnevale made during a presentation Monday at the annual at the 2012 NCCEP/GEAR UP Conference.
“Our post-secondary system has become highly segregated by class, by race and by ethnicity,” Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, said during a workshop titled, “The Growing Importance of Higher Education, Attaining Middle Class Earnings, and the Increasing Stratification of Access.”
Visit: http://diverseeducation.com/article/17239/
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- Has Higher Education Become an Engine of Inequality? (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)
The Disruptions Facing Higher Education, and How Universities are Beginning to Adapt
By Alex Goldman
At no time in history have there been as many unknowns facing the field of higher education. The cost of college attendance, and the resulting mountains of student debt, loom as possible economic bubbles; the college education inflation rate has risen nearly 500% since 1985- schools that cost $10,000 per year in 1985 now charge an average of $59,000. In the recent economic downturn, students graduating from college or university often find themselves unemployed or underemployed, leading to questions about the return on investment of a college diploma.
To boot, new platforms for deploying learning, particularly over the internet, pose to disrupt higher education by presenting alternative pathways to acquiring knowledge and skill. These range from for-profit online universities like the University of Phoenix to non-profits like the University of the People. And with the low cost of content distribution and the possibility of quickly reaching massive audiences, innovators and venture capitalists have taken notice, leading to startups like Udemy and Udacity. All these institutions promise learning at a cheaper rate, many of them for free.
Visit: http://www.iftf.org/node/4220
Related articles
- Has Higher Education Become an Engine of Inequality? (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)
- Is Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity the future of higher education? (cnn.com)
The College-Graduate Glut: Evidence From Labor Markets
By Richard Vedder
The price system works marvelously to allocate resources in our society, but in higher education, prices often do not reflect the true value society places on resource usage, as they are often distorted by a variety of policies. The price of elite colleges, for example, is actually well below what demand-and-supply conditions would warrant, while the price of college in general has been distorted upward by extravagant federal student financial-assistance programs (although some would argue with that contention).
But labor markets are largely free of these distortions, and very recent evidence from them on the whole supports the hypothesis that the huge gains from obtaining a bachelor’s degree may be diminishing for a simple reason: Supply has been rising faster than demand for college graduates.
Visit: http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-college-graduate-glut-evidence-from-labor-markets/32997
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- End US Student Loans, Don’t Make Them Cheaper – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
Focus on Adult Learning . . . Innovation through Inquiry 