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By JD Solomon. Study finds MOOC student engagement varies widely from traditional offline courses Are you a viewer, solver or an all-rounder?
A team of researchers from Cornell Tech, Cornell University and Stanford University have released a study that provides the most comprehensive look to date at how students engage with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). With their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning, but very little is actually understood about how participants engage in these courses and how their success should be judged. The new study from Cornell and Stanford concludes that MOOCs serve very different goals than traditional courses, and students should be assessed accordingly, beyond just course completion and their grade. More...

By Marcia Layton Turner. Historically, Western Michigan University’s 12 on-staff recruiters could visit as many as 40 or 50 high schools in a week and collect up to 1,000 paper cards filled with prospective students’ contact information. In a year, they could easily collect 10,000 such cards, which were brought back to campus and then entered manually into the university’s contact management system. More...

By Thomas W. Durso. Streamlining the awarding and processing of student loans—Federal Perkins as well as institutional loans—began at the Illinois Institute of Technology with a simple question and a frustrating answer.
“It started because I asked, ‘What is the process?’” recalls Jackie Anderson, associate director of student accounting. “No one really knew.”
So Anderson rolled up her sleeves and dove in. More...

By Thomas W. Durso. No one disputes that the management of the seven units housed under the Drexel Business Services (DBS) department worked hard. The units generate $68 million in revenue, $38 million in expenses and $5 million in expense recovery annually for the Philadelphia-based institutions. The units’ respective managers were responsible for their own budgets, purchasing, accounts payable, reconciliation, cash handling, forecasting, HR and quarterly reporting. More...

By Kylie Lacey. Outsourcing loan default prevention management to remove institutional burden and improve student services.
The coming change in how student loan default rates are calculated may mean bad news for some colleges and universities. More...

By Kylie Lacey. Creative ways that default prevention providers connect with borrowers.
“We include in our emails a link to a brief video that explains that we are counselors, not collectors, working on behalf of the college the borrower attended, and that we work with borrowers and their loan servicers to resolve their loan payment issues. The video invites the borrower to call us.” More...

By Melissa Ezarik. Highlights from UB’s higher ed leadership conference.
And based on the feedback from our 1,273 attendees, the “Technology Changes Everything” tagline will be put into practice as administrators and educators from the more than 500 institutions represented at the event share information and propose projects and programs back on their own campuses. More...

By Timothy Burke. The idea that higher education makes you a better person in some respect has long been its soft underbelly. The proposition makes most current faculty and administrators uncomfortable, especially at the smaller teaching-centered colleges that are prone to invoke tropes about community and ethics. The discomfort comes both from how “improvement” necessarily invokes an older conception of college as a finishing school for a small, genteel elite and from how genuinely indispensible it seems for most definitions of “liberal arts”. More...