By Matt Reed. What if every sector of higher education received the same per-student funding?
Right now, the more affluent the student body, the more public aid money the sector receives. Flagship universities receive more per-student funding than do regional campuses, which, in turn, receive more than community colleges. And if you look at financial aid to students as a form of public funding -- which, in effect, it is, unless it’s a loan -- then private colleges receive more than anybody. Read more...
Finishing What They Started
By Matt Reed. This post is a shameless attempt to learn from others’ experiences. Community colleges have long had multiple markets. One of those is adults who have some college experience, and an accumulation of credits, but no degree. Frequently these are folks who had some sort of major personal-life change in the course of college, and had to walk away. Years later, the decision to walk away acts as a sort of limit on earning power, as well as a nagging sense of something missing. Read more...
Perspectives from IELOL
By Tracy Mitrano. “But Mr. Deresiewicz does propose things like smaller classes, teachers who are more committed to their students than to their research and basing affirmative action on class rather than on race.”
I am at Penn State, attending as faculty the Online Consortium (formerly Sloan Foundation) Institute for Emerging Leaders in Online Learning (IELOL). Three and a half intense days of working on on-line, distance learning from every angle: first and foremost, the global perspective; the how to’s least in terms of technology, most from the institutional organization and cultural perspective. Take away: The Netherlands and New Zealand lead the world in distance education. The United States is way down on the list. Read more...
Games, Games, Games!

Doing more with less
By G. Rendell. Environmental impact (in recent experience, negative environmental impact) correlates with consumption. It's less intuitively obvious, but economic and social sustainability challenges also correlate with consumption. Yet our students are conditioned to adjudge their happiness on the basis of how much stuff they have which, in the default instance, equates to how much they consume. Read more...
Being Used to the 'Best' of Your Abilities
By John Warner. In the wake of posting last week’s column exploring the fact that this will likely be my last semester teaching a fiction writing course, I received a very nice email from a former student. Read more...
Rethinking My Cell Phone/Computer Policy
By John Warner. Twitter is a great tool for eavesdropping.
While working on my course policies for the coming semester, I flipped over to Twitter – as I am wont to do 15 or 20 times per hour – and was brought short by this tweet from Jesse Stommel, an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. Read more...
New Cell Phone/Computer Policy Draft Version
By John Warner. In the wake of my previous post about rethinking my policies regarding phones and computers in the classroom, I spent a good chunk of yesterday rewriting them. I include them here in draft format. Read more...
Data-Driven Madness
By John Warner. Should someone’s sentence for a crime be based on the risk of them committing another crime in the future?
What if that calculation of that risk was “data-driven,” the risk determined based on the defendant’s age, education, employment and educational status, finances, neighborhood, and family history? Read more...
4 Reasons Why I Don't Borrow Digital Books

Ola, commenting on my piece Should You Subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. Read more...