By Elizabeth Matthews - EvoLLLution. Every year, approximately 250,000 undergraduates participate in a study abroad experience for a semester or yearlong program. These intensive cultural experiences offer many benefits to college students, including the ability to learn in a different country, immerse themselves in new/unfamiliar cultures, and share and exchange ideas with peers and professors who may hold different perspectives then their own. More...
Waiting For Public Funding Rather Than Innovating Is a Recipe for Disaster
By Michael Horn - EvoLLLution. University of California President Janet Napolitano took recently to the pages of the Washington Post to review and critique new books on the future of higher education by University Ventures Fund Managing Director Ryan Craig (College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education) and New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program Director Kevin Carey (The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere). More...
The New Breed of Competency-Based Education Degree Programs: A Trend or Fad? (Part 2)
By Robert Hill - EvoLLLution. As a full-time seasoned university professor, I am not some ostrich with my head in the sand wistful about what happened to all of our erstwhile residential students. I recognize that few students attend highly selective, prestigious institutions. Most students attend either a public state college or university, and almost half of all our undergraduate students currently attend a community college. More...
The New Breed of Competency-Based Education Degree Programs: A Trend or Fad? (Part 1)
By Robert Hill - EvoLLLution. Education, both at the K-12 and post-secondary level, is certainly susceptible to trends. There is a long litany of modern innovations that were prophesized to revolutionize the way we teach (“deliver instruction” to use the current jargon) or the way our students learn in college. Some of them include service learning, study abroad, dual credit, prior learning assessment of experiential learning, open admissions, clicker devices, distance learning, learning communities, freshmen seminars, the flipped classroom, low-residency and accelerated formats (even three-year bachelor degree programs), outcomes assessment, anti-plagiarism software, fully online and blended/hybrid courses, and of course, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). More...
Who are the Students of Today and Tomorrow? All of Us
By Karen Gross - EvoLLLution. Over the past few months, a number of colleges/universities and private employers have forged partnerships, shining a spotlight on these unique relationships. These arrangements are designed to create win-wins: enrollments go up at institutions of higher education (much needed in today’s marketplace) and employers can offer an added benefit to their employees and improve the quality of their workforce. More...
High Tech Higher Ed: How Changes in Educational Technology are Transforming the Industry
By Chris LaBelle - EvoLLLution. The NMC Horizon Report has been a respected source of new and upcoming trends in the field of educational technology for some time. More...
What Adults Want: Exploring the Higher Ed Landscape for Adult Undergraduate Students
By Robert S. Lapiner - EvoLLLution. Some four years ago, Frederick Hess writing in The Atlantic brought broad public awareness to trends that insiders in higher education had long observed. He noted statistics that still hold today (according to the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics and the most recent U.S. Census surveys): adult students over the age of 25 constitute nearly 40 percent of all those enrolled in higher education. More...
Three Ways to Drive Student Engagement and Success
By Walter Rankin - EvoLLLution. This article starts with an assumption and an admission. The assumption is that there is a positive correlation between student engagement (in courses and through extracurricular and co-curricular activities), student success, and strong retention and graduation rates. More...
Institutional Strategies for MOOCs: Berklee’s Approach
By Debbie Cavalier - EvoLLLution. Berklee College of Music was founded on the revolutionary principle that the best way to prepare students for careers in music is through the study and practice of contemporary music. More...
Receptiveness to Learning: Responsibilities of the Educator and the Student
By Steven Cooke - EvoLLLution. In many of the classes that I teach, I find a resistance to learning to be more and more common. While this usually fades with prompting and grading related to the demonstrated use of research, a few students don’t benefit from this prompting because they do not value the learning. More...