Thailand: Rankings vs. assessments

In the Bangkok Post, Vasu Thirsak writes that...

The recent hoopla over university 'rankings' was ill-conceived because the focus should have been on self-improvement, not which university was better than another.

When the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (Onesqa) released its assessment of the quality of university-level institutions recently, there were complaints and a few hostilities here and there against what most people perceived as being the Thai-university "rankings."

Of course, Onesqa was quick to emphasize that the report did not "rank" Thailand's universities, but its voice was not heard over the boisterous din of detractors.

All of this sounds pretty familiar too.

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Australia: Home-grown rankings gain support

Here are some quotes from The Australian. Some of this sounds very familiar.

Support is growing across the higher education sector for an independent national university ranking system that would be more comprehensive than the Shanghai Jiao Tong survey of world universities.

Monash University vice-chancellor Ed Byrne advocated a national ranking system to enhance the sector's performance in line with national needs. Professor Byrne said too much emphasis was placed on the internationally recognised Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, which focused on research and hard sciences.

He recommended an Australian system that would also give due weight to teaching, learning and community engagement.

"It would be interesting to have for Australia an agreed national ranking system that would look at research output, educational excellence and community engagement in a way that the government and the Australian people could have confidence in," he said.

Such a ranking could provide universities with a strong guide for assessing their own performance. But, as with all rankings, Professor Byrne said, care should be taken not to over-emphasise comparative standings.

Ross Williams, author of the discontinued Melbourne Institute rankings of Australian universities, backed the idea. He suggested that a new system could take into account the different missions of universities.

Professor Williams said such a system could act as an additional check on the performance indicators the federal government was looking to introduce, such as the Excellence in Research initiative.

But he cautioned that it was important there be several different rankings that differentiated between the various missions of universities. He said attempts at an aggregated single ranking tended to be simplistic and distorting and risked causing "mission drift".

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Quality assurance in Europe

University World News tells us that:

In its first report on progress in quality assurance in higher education, the European Commission has pointed to significant developments towards greater transparency and credibility over the past few years. Progress has not only been made in the way universities deal internally with quality assurance, but also on external evaluation of institutions and programmes. Many new national quality assurance agencies have been established and there is increased awareness of European standards and guidelines on quality assurance.

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Quality, and not just counts, counts.

The University World News summarizes an Australian article that expresses something I've been thinking regarding rapidly growing emphasis on improving retention and graduation rate numbers. Here are a couple of quotes:

As a key performance indicator in university quality assurance processes, the retention of students in their studies is an issue of concern worldwide. Implicit in the process of quality assurance is quality improvement. In an article titled Improving student retention in higher education, published in the latest edition of Australian Universities' Review, authors Glenda Crosling, Margaret Heagney and Liz Thomas examine student retention from a teaching and learning perspective, in terms of approaches that have an impact on students' decisions to continue with or withdraw from their studies.

One way to improve quality in regard to student retention is to identify influences and causes of student retention and attrition. Engaging students in their studies has been identified as important in retaining students and stemming attrition. Institutions have shared responsibility to facilitate student engagement.

Some reasons why students leave are beyond the control of institutions, but the organisation and delivery of the curriculum is an area over which universities and colleges have significant autonomy. Addressing student retention via learning, teaching and curricular developments has the advantage of meeting the needs of all students - not just those either identified as at risk, or who proactively seek additional support.

Trudy Banta on designing effective assessments

In a Faculty Focus article, Trudy Banta answers some questions about assessment prior to her upcoming online seminar.

Merisotis and Lumina: Balancing quantity with quality

One of the most hope-inspiring figures among those leading the struggle for excellence in higher education is Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation. What Lumina calls their Big Goal is to “increase the nation’s level of high-quality college degrees and credentials to 60% by 2025.” You’ve heard others say similar things, including President Obama.

What I find hopeful about Lumina are a couple of things in particular. One is that they’re walking the walk by funding worthy initiatives, including one of the best-known – Achieving the Dream.

But the other thing that I find especially hopeful about Merisotis and Lumina is that, among the players who genuinely have enough clout to make a difference, they place as much emphasis on improving the quality of our students’ learning as on increasing the numbers of degree holders. I fully support the calls for, and efforts toward, increasing retention and graduation rates and getting more of our citizens into college and out the door with diploma in hand. President Obama, state higher education coordinating boards, institutional, state, national, and global leaders – I’m with you in this effort.

What sometimes worries me, though, is the lack of balance between calls for quantity and quality. To put it very bluntly, I don’t care if we graduate lots more students unless they know and can do the things that are required to make our communities – local, state, national, and global – safer, freer, and more cooperative, prosperous, and enlightened.

So here are a few quotes from a recent interview with Merisotis. I picked the first quote for a reason that’s pretty obvious. The second shows the balanced approach that I admire. The third is his reply to a question about another balancing act – between resources committed to instruction vs. to research. And the fourth addresses still another type of balance

…college attainment rates are rising in almost every industrialised or post-industrial country in the world except the US. Today in some countries, more than half of young adults are degree holders. What's especially disturbing, given the increasingly global nature of the economy, is that attainment rates in many other countries continue to climb while ours remains stagnant.

Expansion can and must take place without a dilution of quality. Our goal very explicitly states that we want 60% of Americans to have "high-quality degrees and credentials," and we have initially defined those as degrees and credentials that have "well-defined and transparent learning outcomes which provide clear pathways to future education and employment." We have just begun the work of defining, fleshing out and reaching consensus on the learning outcomes we should seek and we are absolutely committed to maintaining - even improving - the quality of American degrees and credentials.

In a world of limited resources, we need to invest the funds where they are likely to have the most impact on our society. In this case, that is in the learning that students receive from higher education, which translates into broad societal benefits as well as benefits to individuals. The research role of higher education is critical to the innovation that we need, to be at the cutting edge of change as a nation. But that role is and should be limited to a relatively small number of institutions.

Do you see higher education as a route to a specific occupation or area of employment, or rather more broadly? It's not an "either-or" proposition. Rather, it's "both-and." Higher education must prepare students for the world of work while it also helps shape them more broadly as citizens of their nation and the world at large.

AdultStudent.com

Just found this. Looks like there might be some good stuff here.

Service learning resources

Some resources on service learning, compiled by Innovative Educators:

• The Use of Technology in Higher Education Service-Learning
  
• A Smart Start to Service-Learning
  
• What are the Characteristics of Service-Learning?
• Faculty Toolkit for Service-Learning in Higher Education
  

Can we talk?

Do's and don'ts for more effective classroom discussions.

You’ve got to love academia’s ironic practice of tossing graduate students and inexperienced professors into discussion groups and symposia. Even seasoned hands often find leading discussion-based classes quite challenging. They run counter to our training: responsibility is in the hands of non-experts (students), agendas are fungible, concrete data is elusive, and outcomes are unpredictable.

Don’t despair; student-centered classes are generally more rewarding than presentation-style counterparts. The smaller rosters give the professor a chance to get to know students, be astonished by them, and learn from them. Skillfully done discussions empower students, make the proverbial light bulbs snap on with the greatest regularity, and force students to plumb the intricacies of a subject rather than just trying to figure out your grading angle. The trick for leaders is getting the hang of them.

Political science profs exploring new ways

Couple of quotes from a recent article in Inside Higher Ed

Practicality was a major theme at teaching sessions here at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Many professors expressed dissatisfaction with traditional teaching methods – and also discussed the need to find alternatives that don’t either take so much time that they can’t do their research or hijack the syllabus away from the material they would like to cover.

There was a general consensus that there are ways to better engage political science students -- but also that these methods take much more time and, in some cases, cost more money. Many of the ideas discussed here were attempts to challenge the traditional lecture format “without ruining your life....”

A twist on embedded assessment of writing

Here's another angle on embedded assessment of writing proficiency that is also an example of collaboration between academic affairs and student affairs.

In recent years, Brown University has asked its incoming freshmen to write candid letters to their academic advisers. To students, the objectives seemed simple: to introduce themselves, to share goals for the next four years, and to show they had read the summer reading assignment.

There was no promise of confidentiality, but some incoming freshmen in the classes of 2011 and 2012, just out of high school and perhaps a bit naive, concluded that only their advisers would read the letters....Instead, the students’ letters were also read by staff of the university’s writing center, who gave advisers a heads up on which freshmen might need extra help with their writing.

Making feedback in online courses more engaging

Here's a brief item from Faculty Focus.

More about service learning in Canada

Who knew there was all this good stuff in a publication about higher ed in Canada?

Clicking in Canada

More from University Affairs:

If you’ve ever wondered what your students are really thinking during class, particularly those with 700 or more students, you may want to consider using a student response system, often called a clicker. This little device looks like a remote control and is used by students to respond immediately to multiple-choice questions given by the instructor.

Service learning in Canada

From a recent article in University Affairs:

A little over five years ago, University Affairs published a cover story on what was at that point a fairly new innovation on Canadian campuses: community service learning. CSL is a teaching model that, by combining volunteer service with academic work, aims to instil in students a sense of civic engagement while also offering something of benefit to the community.

Entitled Educating Citizen Jane and published in the February 2004 issue, the article struck a chord. Larry Gemmel, director of the Canadian Alliance for Community Service-Learning, calls it “the famous foundational article” that helped to jump-start the movement in Canada.

Assessing diversity preparation in teacher education

A recent post to the ASSESS listserv begins like this:

I am currently researching the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs in the area of culturally responsive teaching. I am interested in finding a survey or inventory that institutions give to their student teaching/internship teacher candidates and/or public school beginning teachers to assess the success of the teacher’s institutional preparation program specifically regarding meeting the needs of teachers’ diverse student population.

There have been a couple of responses so far that look like they might be promising. If you're interested in following this discussion, go to the listserv's archives and track down the thread called "Assessing Diversity Preparation in Teacher Education Programs."

Community action for frosh

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Last night I spent several hours at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Ewing, New Jersey, a small community that is part of the greater Trenton area. It is, in other words on Princeton University’s urban frontier. For many years we have been sending our newly arrived freshmen on canoeing and backpacking trips, which we call Outdoor Action. It took us a long time, but we finally realized that there was actually demand for a very different sort of activity, and the Student Volunteers Council inaugurated Community Action about 20 years ago.

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Are majors obsolete?

From a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

...if a baccalaureate program for physician's assistants requires its graduates to be proficient in Spanish, Mr. Zemsky would not force students to take formal Spanish classes. "I would say, You're not getting out of here without learning Spanish," Mr. Zemsky says. "Let us show you three or four ways you can learn Spanish. You choose what's best for you. It could be summer immersion. It could be an online course. We should want to test students for competencies, and not simply give them credit for seat time."

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Higher education performance measured

From the Lumina Foundation's newsletter:

What students know when they graduate from college and the value that knowledge offers to a state is of increasing interest to policymakers. A study from the Delta Cost Project shows how public colleges use available resources to produce graduates with credentials that are valued in their employment markets. Results are compared across states. Read The Dreaded P Word: An Examination of Productivity in Public Postsecondary Education.

College success factors for 1st generation students

From the Lumina Foundation's newsletter:

Many first-generation students who begin their postsecondary education at a four-year institution are at risk of leaving without a degree or "reverse transferring" to a two-year college. According to a working paper titled Institutional Transfer and Management of Risk in Higher Education, the strongest indicator of transfer status is a student's ability to access key supports such as guidance, financial help, and goal setting.

Using rubrics to improve online teaching, learning

A couple of quotes from a short article in Faculty Focus:

A well-designed rubric is an effective communication tool. It emphasizes the important skills or concepts to demonstrate. It provides criteria for evaluation and takes the intangible on an unfamiliar assignment and makes it more tangible. While rubrics clarify assignments for students, a rubric does so much more for the online instructor.

A rubric streamlines the grading process. It helps teachers to efficiently work through a stack of ungraded papers. It quantifies the elusive expectations and makes them clear. There can be no claims from students saying, “You never told us that was needed.” One cannot argue with the on-screen, printed standards. It makes estimates more scientific and grading fairer. There is no room for bias or subjective prejudice in rubric utilization, because a rubric is impartial. A student either meets the defined objectives or does not. This helps promote fairness and increases satisfaction, since there is no preferential treatment when everyone is measured using the same benchmarks.

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Museum-hopping with the freshmen

And here's another twist on the shared experience for freshmen.

Dancing with the freshmen

Here's a different approach to the widely-used freshman-shared-experience program.

Should credit hours become obsolete?

From Dean Dad's blog in Inside Higher Ed, some quotes:

It's certainly true that people can learn important things outside of credit-bearing classes. And in some parts of the curriculum, even the stodgier colleges have long had provisions for students to "test out" of individual courses. The idea there is there's little point in marching you through a course when you've already mastered its key content.

While that model isn't new, it has historically been confined to the margins. An AP course here, a CLEP there, but you still have to take enough credits to graduate.

Credit hours are bureaucratic constructs that have little to do with teaching. They're ways of breaking curricula into component parts, the better to allow for transfer, substitution, and the like. (In most states, they've also become tied to various funding formulae. We measure our enrollment both in terms of headcount -- that is, people -- and FTE's, which are denominated in credit hours.) They make inevitable a cost spiral that far outplaces inflation, since you can't increase productivity when your units are measured in time. (As the rest of the economy becomes more productive per hour and teaching doesn't, teaching becomes relatively more expensive.)

Awarding some sort of recognition for task completion or demonstrated competence independent of the time it took to achieve that offers one potential way to break the upward spiral. If you manage to blast through calculus in eight weeks instead of fifteen, more power to you.

That said, though, I could easily envision the abandonment of the credit hour as relatively beneficial to those already on top...and devastating to the rest.

To the extent that we move from "here's what you need to do" to "what do you want?," we both enable high achievers to cut loose - a clear good - and allow the less savvy to wander aimlessly, which is a real problem.

If colleges are going to continue to earn their keep, they'll need to address the very real economic issue of the credit hour, without forfeiting the real value created by making courses of study - as opposed to individual courses - legible. That means not giving up on 'general education,' no matter how much some students bitch about it. It also means getting out in front of a competence-driven currency, lest it leave us behind. It probably means making convincing arguments to the effect that an education is more than the sum of its parts. (Hint: the social and extracurricular aspects are not to be discounted.)

As disconcerting as some of that is, I'd hate to see colleges go the way of newspapers. When the mode of production changes, typically, the leading producers change, too. The mode of production of education has to change, and now, can. We'll need to come to grips with that in some sort of serious way, or others will, edupunks or not.

"Good enough" technology

According to Joshua Kim,

This month's Wired magazine has a great article by Robert Capps, "The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine." Capps argues that simple technologies will often displace complicated technologies when if they become both cheap and ubiquitous.

...learning technology is a perfect example of this trend. Students, and then faculty, will gravitate to tools that provide 80 percent of the benefits for 20 percent of the costs (the 80/20 Pareto principle). The danger in not recognizing this desire among our learners for ubiquity, ease of use, and continuous availability is that they will migrate to platforms and tools that are not provided and supported by our institutions.

The Course Management System may be the primary example....Just as the core principles of active learning (including constructivism and student creation) begin to diffuse throughout our teaching faculty the tools that students utilize to create and share content and engage in dialogue may diverge from our central campus CMS. Already we are seeing students use Google Docs and Ning to collaborate, YouTube, Ning and Siideshare to post their work, and Facebook and Twitter to communicate. The advantage of all these tools are their relative simplicity and their portability, students can take both their skills in using the medium and the content and networks they generate with them. These tools are the opposite of the dominant CMS paradigm in that they are not siloed, they don't depend on the institution to create accounts or manage the platforms, and they have full control of the features (as opposed to the traditional CMS where the instructor retains privileged control).

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Just for fun. Skip this one if you're in a serious mood.

Fondly remembering one of our favorite movies. C'mon and admit it; you love it too.

New issue of Bringing Theory to Practice

The August 2009 issue of the newsletter for AAC&U's Bringing Theory to Practice project is now available. One of the articles overviews the past four years of the project:

While there is still much to be derived from the intricate connections between students’ engaged learning, civic development, and mental health and well-being, aggregate findings from the Bringing Theory to Practice Demonstration and Intensive Site Program research over the last several years have provided strong evidence that the linkages among these critical elements of student success are connected in salient, and oftentimes powerful, ways.

New issue of AAC&U News

The new September 2009 issue of AAC&U News, is now available. It includes items about a new approach to academic advising at UW-Madison, the LEAP initiative, the new VALUE rubrics, and several other things of interest.

Teaching & learning as nouns & verbs

In Today's Campus, Marc Prensky thinks about the active learning style that's more effective with today's traditional college age students using the analogy of parts of speech. A couple of quotes:

Digital immigrants view digital technology as a series of tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Flash. The tools can be used to get various things done. Each can be mastered (and taught) individually. In fact, you may right now be offering a “course” in any one of them, as does TV’s “Video Professor.”

Put in other terms, our professors who are digital immigrants see the technology as a series of “programs” or “things” or – in linguistic terms – Nouns.

Today’s students, if they are “native speakers” of digital technology view it in a very different way. They see technology as the means of getting things done: of communicating, of sharing, of presenting, etc.

In linguistic terms our students see technology as Verbs.

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