By Barbara Fister. Outraged that the library has dropped a streaming video service? Don't blame the library - for anything other than falling for terrible licensing deals. More...
6 juillet 2019
6 juillet 2019
Sharing and Attention in the Academic Gig Economy
By Barbara Fister. Sharing openly is the future, but we need to think about how to do it right.
It struck me today that there is a parallel between the way Big Entertainment appears to have abandoned its attempt to extend copyright terms yet again and the way Big Academic Publishing is beginning to learn how to stop worrying and love open access. More...
6 juillet 2019
Bloopers and Expertise
By Barbara Fister. We hold a meeting at the end of the academic year where there’s only one thing on the agenda: what’s going on with our students as they try to make sense of information? We always have some assessment data to go over, but we also talk about how classes went and what we’ve seen at the reference desk. More...
6 juillet 2019
Other Than That...
By Matt Reed. On the idea that colleges should be liable for their students' loans.
It’s the sort of idea that sounds good if you assume that every college is affluent, every student graduates, recessions don’t exist, nobody ever transfers, everybody can afford to attend full-time and has no other economic obligations, everybody is fluent in English, and we have unit-record data for every student in the country. More...
6 juillet 2019
That First Life Preserver
By Matt Reed. What does a good first outreach to a struggling student look like?
I have a pretty good idea of what it shouldn’t look like. In my own freshman year of college, I was surrounded by affluent prep school graduates on a pretty campus in the middle of nowhere. For reasons lost to the sands of time, I decided it would be a good idea to try to study Russian. More...
6 juillet 2019
Yes, But: Humanities at Community Colleges
By Matt Reed. Important trends.
The Community College Research Center (CCRC) just issued two reports on the state of the Humanities at community colleges in the U.S. One looks at the proportion of students who major in humanities, and also at the percentage of overall courses taken that fall under what the reports call “HLA” (humanities and liberal arts -- a serious misnomer, given that the liberal arts also include the social sciences, math, and the natural sciences, but whatever). The other looks at humanities course enrollment and performance as a predictor of degree completion, vertical transfer, and completion upon vertical transfer. More...
6 juillet 2019
Friday Fragments - June 13, 2019
By Matt Reed. Provosts, debunking the idea of "administrative bloat," more.
The IHE piece on Thursday about treating provosts as COO’s, and as potential presidents, struck some chords with me. More...
6 juillet 2019
The Illusion of Solidity
By Matt Reed. The end of a college.
f you haven’t seen Brendan O’Malley’s piece on the closure of Newbury College, near Boston, it’s well worth reading. More...
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