By Matt Reed. The ASAP program at CUNY has been getting good press recently. In a nutshell, it’s an attempt to take as many distractions away from students as possible, in order to improve graduation rates. Early results suggest that when you require students to attend full-time, you give them intensive personal advising, you give priority in scheduling, and you increase your per-student spending by about sixty percent, you can make meaningful gains in graduation rates. Read more...
By Tracy Mitrano. No one has ever accused the federal government of being ahead of the technological curve, and understandably so. In our society it is the market that drives this kind of innovation, not the government. But even at that speed, it would appear that the federal government might do well to get its policy house in order. Allowing anyone, not to mention the Secretary of State, to operate out of a personal email account shocks even my jaded IT policy conscious. Read more...
By Michelle Lavery. A few months ago I was approached by a friend with concerns about the process of taking maternity and parental leave at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, where we both study. She noted some issues with the process that, to the average Canadian, are fairly out of the ordinary. Our standards for parental leave are pretty high, and we’re used to hearing about year-long leaves that are partially, if not fully, paid with full healthcare benefits. Read more...
By Madeleine Elfenbein. Chronicle Vitae's “Dear Student” series, featuring snarky professor and TA retorts to common student requests for leniency, has garnered some push-back recently from professors and graduate instructors alike (folks like Jesse Stommel, Dexter Thomas, Dorothy Kim, and Kevin Gannon), who argue that public venting about miscreant students is unkind and inappropriate and discouraging to students, not to mention bad for morale. Read more...
By Hanna Peacock. Moving abroad for grad school is a great opportunity to learn a new language. For some programs, in order to be able to communicate with your colleagues, you’ll need to have a good grasp of the language when you arrive. In many other programs the working language is English, even if that is not the main spoken language in the region. I recently moved to Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, for my doctorate. While my program is in English, learning Flemish (Dutch) has still been quite useful and fun. I’m far from fluent, but people keep assuring me that if I stick with it, I’ll get better. Read more...
By Alex Usher. If you follow rankings at all, you’ll likely have noticed a fair bit of recent activity going on in the Middle East these days. US News & World Report, and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) both published “Best Arab Universities” rankings last year; the Times Higher Education (THE) produced a pilot MENA (Middle East and North Africa) ranking at a glitzy conference in Doha last week (don’t be distracted by terminology – THE’s “Middle East” includes neither Turkey nor Israel nor Iran, so it’s also an Arab ranking). Read more...
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. But in my new job, I’m being paid to stay up to date and current in the latest scholarship on teaching and learning, not to mention that we are beginning to offer MOOCs through Coursera (How to Succeed in College!), and so I think it is important to not only try to learn something new, but also to experience the platform we are using ourselves. I bite the bullet and sign up for Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills, offered through Coursera by the University of Melbourne. I am particularly interested in the assessment component, as this is always the question faculty ask about when I propose integrating more problem-based or digitally inflected project-based learning. Read more...
By Kristen Eshleman. This post is the second in a four-part series on MOOC research at Davidson College. We began with “why”, laying out the rationale for leading with a qualitative and residentially focused study. Attending to Davidson students' learning experiences and designing hybrid education has been a primary goal of our research efforts. More...
By Joshua Kim. My Twitter tagline reads: “lover of liminal spaces”. I can claim that as part of my anthropology background, but it’s as much a reflection of my professional life as it is my intellectual interests. Academic technologists have existed in liminal spaces from the beginning. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. Why are we so upset about the end of Sweet Briar College (SBC)? In a country with 21 million college students, why should we worry when a campus of 561 closes its doors? Read more...
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