By John Warner. Due to a combination of bureaucratic reasons and personal choice, this is the last semester in the foreseeable future that I’ll teach an introductory fiction writing course. Going forward, as long as my “visiting” is extended by mutual agreement between me and the college, my time will be spent exclusively on first-year writing. The good news is that I enjoy teaching both composition and fiction, though the enjoyments are rather different. Read more...
By Liz Reisberg. According to The Chicago Tribune, more than 600 freshmen from China will enter the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne this fall. Extrapolating a bit from information that UIUC makes available online, this represents roughly 8% of the freshman class. The 4,447 international students at UIUC represent more than 14% of undergraduate enrollment; Chinese students represent nearly half of the international enrollment. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. One of the issues that came up as librarians on Twitter kicked around the pros and cons of tenure for academic librarians (a conversation started in a blog post by Meredith Farkas and followed up by Maura Smale, Anne-Marie Deitering, and Wayne Bivens-Tatum, among others) was that we lack research training. That may seem odd for people who so often provide undergraduates with . . . well, a kind of research training, but our fairly short and generally practice-focused graduate programs don’t typically include much training in research methodology. Read more...
By Eric Stoller. Last week, Forbes published a fairly in-depth exposé on the business of enrollment management in higher education. Focusing primarily on Noel-Levitz and The National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing & Retention (NCSRMR), the post serves as a pseudo-indictment of the current state of affairs in higher education tuition pricing tactics. Read more...
By Tracy Mitrano. The discussion – and misunderstandings – that continue to roil over net neutrality suggests that it is time for another blog on the subject. I have not changed my mind much since I wrote about it before the Commissioner’s vote recently.
But since teaching the issue this summer, for which I assigned Susan Crawford’s book, Captive Audience, and watching the discussion fairly closely, I have deepened my grasp on some of the operative issues. Read more...
By Matt Reed. Lately I’m enamored of an idea, and I’m wondering if someone has already done it and either shown how to do it, or how not to.
Does anyone have experience with a peer mentoring system for online students?
I’m thinking here of something very different from academic advising or achievement coaching. Read more...
By Matt Reed. “Is that a transfer program or a workforce program?” “Yes.”
I often hear references -- both on campus and off campus -- to the two major missions of community colleges: transfer and workforce. In typical usage, the former refers to the gen ed and liberal arts classes intended for students who move on for bachelor’s degrees and higher, and the latter refers to the courses of study that are supposed to be employable with a two-year degree or less. Read more...
By Matt Reed. Every August, this happens. It’s time to start making decisions about which sections are likely to enroll enough students to run, and which need to be cancelled.
If you’ve never been in on a meeting like that, you may picture it something like this:
Dr. Evil (stroking cat): Prof. Doe really loves this class, but he looked at me cross-eyed once. Screw him! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Group: SCREW HIM! (maniacal laughter ensues, punctuated by flashes of lightning)
The truth is more pedestrian. Read more...
The main group representing student aid administrators has backed a proposal to create a federal database that tracks student progress through higher education and into the workforce.
The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators announced Wednesday that it now supports a “limited” student-unit record system because it would provide more accurate and comprehensive data than the government’s current collection of information, which leaves out transfer and nontraditional students, for example. “As higher education policy is increasingly focused on student success, completion, and outcomes, including the recent negotiations over gainful employment regulations, it becomes increasingly critical to have robust data that gives an accurate picture,” the group said in a report. Read more...
By Nate Kreuter. At the end of my first year of graduate school, a friend -- almost out of the blue -- told me, “When I met you, I thought to myself, ‘Ugh, that guy and I are not going to get along at all.’ But look at us now, we’re friends!”
In an admittedly strange way, I think it may be one of the nicest things one of my fellow graduate students ever said to me. Read more...
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