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Changing Higher Education

A theme we’ve talked about before here: That tuition is subsidizing research.  But now it’s coming from the Chronicle which draws more attention.

There’s an interesting implication of this finding related to the higher-education “Race to the Top” funding and President Obama’s goal of having more college graduates.  If college education is actually much cheaper than tuition would have us believe, the actual cost of generating more college graduates could be made much lower than the cost of sending more kids to college.  Could we create an alternative? Could we get more Americans educated at a college-level by avoiding colleges, perhaps creating some other institution — without research or athletics?  What would it mean culturally to set up something else that doesn’t have the “college” name but has that role?  Would we just be re-creating community colleges?

While universities routinely maintain that it costs them more to educate students than what students pay, a new report says…

Computing Education Blog

This the title of a post I just wrote for the new Higher Education Network page of the Guardian. Readers of ChangingHigherEducation will find some of my favorite themes in this post. Check it out! 

Changing Higher Education

Changing Higher Education

I’d like to see the studies that this article is referencing.  I do agree — Window’s style TabletPC’s are much more flexible, and I find Ubiquitous Presenter to be a powerful educational technology.  (Great to see Beth Simon and Bill Griswold quoted in this piece.)  But I wonder if the iPad allows for a different kind of interactivity, one that can also be used for learning, but we’ll have to learn how to leverage that.

Despite the iPad’s popularity—Apple has sold nearly 15 million of them and just came out with the iPad2; and there are dozens of competitors, like the Samsung Galaxy—early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher education. They are great for viewing media and allow students to share readings. But professors cannot use them to mark up material on the fly and show changes to students in response to their questions, a type of interactivity that has been a major thrust in pedagogy.

Even students have issues….

Computing Education Blog

Changing Higher Education

Dear University Leaders: You might want to think twice before clicking “send” on your next e-mail.

WikiLeaks, scourge of governments worldwide, now has a copycat for academe. And the new group is itching to publish your university’s deepest secrets.

Its Web site, UniLeaks, debuted this month with a pair of open letters to university leaders in Australia and Britain. The Australian activists who run UniLeaks are pushing for openness in the face of what they see as the corporatization of higher education. They complain of unprofitable courses abolished, employees made less secure, and students reduced “to mere customers or clients of the university.”

UniLeaks has yet to back that bluster with any blockbuster scoops. But the site’s main administrator says it has received an “overwhelming” amount of correspondence from Britain-based students and academics. That support includes at least one potentially newsworthy data dump: an “entire e-mail repository” of a “large prominent university…

Wired Campus

“Doomed” is rather a harsh word.  How about “Headed for Change”?  While the rhetoric is extreme, the arguments made in this series are certainly interesting and challenging.  What’s going to happen to the American Public University System?

So where is all this going? Consider these six facts:

College debt is becoming the next major loan crisis following the same scenario as housing crisis: Too many huge loans made to people who cannot possibly afford them.

States have made, and continue to make massive cuts in funding higher education. Specifically, funding cuts the operational budgets of state-run universities and colleges.

The budget cuts have driven up tuition and fee costs, making the concept of an ‘affordable’ college education at a state-run institution a myth.

The budget cuts have also forced higher education institutions to increase class sizes and cut services, so students/parents pay more and get less in return.

The budget cuts have effectively ended the concept of job…

Computing Education Blog

Mobile devices are one year away from transforming education. For the third straight year.

The 2011 Horizon Report, an annual look at technology trends affecting higher education, points to mobile devices as one of six technologies to watch. Of the other five trends, game-based learning and learning analytics—using data to track student progress—are new additions for 2011.

The report, produced by the New Media Consortium and Educause, notes that mobile devices have been listed before, but it says that resistance by many schools continues to slow the full integration of mobile devices into higher education.

Game-based learning is poised to see greater use within the next two to three years, the report says, and will follow one of two tracks. Game-playing itself may be used to develop decision-making and problem-solving abilities, as well as leadership skills, or educational content embedded into games can teach students as they play. The report points to multiplayer role-playing…

Wired Campus

The news has been filled recently with two “orthogonal” continuing stories about higher education.  The first story involves a seemingly never-ending list of egregious activities that touches almost all of the well known (and less well known) names of for-profit higher education, and the congressional indignation that has followed. It seems increasingly likely that the congress will enact laws that will restrict significantly the conditions under which the for-profit higher ed world can access government student financial aid.  Should this happen, it could greatly constrain the growth of the for-profit sector, and, in fact, put the survival of some of its players at risk. The second story involves the increasingly aggressive growth of on-line degree programs of traditional, bricks and mortar non-profit universities and colleges. This aggressive growth has been driven by an increasing understanding that current funding models of the non-profit sector are broken, and it is imperative…

Changing Higher Education