By Thomas W. Durso. In the past, University of Wisconsin-Platteville staff had to manually enter the records of any student pursuing an online degree. With more than 2,500 students enrolled, this was no easy feat—especially considering staff also had to manually enter course registration, financial aid and even basic contact information. This effort required approximately 500 hours of staff time each semester—or 1,500 hours a year—to accommodate the university’s three-semester system. More...
All-you-can-learn tuition takes off
By Matt Zalaznick. Adult students are treating themselves to a higher ed buffet through a handful of programs where all-you-can-learn tuition lets them move as quickly as they can toward a degree and advancement in the workforce. More...
April Fool(s)proof Speech Builder
By Steven C. Bahls. On this first day of April, I would like to share a fool-proof guide to presidential speech-writing. Use the following to generate a powerful opening, and the rest of the speech writes itself.
Note: you will need a six-sided die (not included). Read more...
Don't Start Me Talkin
By Oronte. If there’s one good reason to have a giant national conference for writers, it’s the chance to see once-a-year-in-person friends like Tom Williams, author of The Mimic's Own Voice and Chair of English at Morehead State University. We always make plans, then we get bookfair blindness like everybody else and the plans don’t happen. But without fail, year after year, we run into each other on the sidewalk or in a hotel lobby and take up the conversation as if uninterrupted. Tom has had a couple of big happy events this year, including the release of his blues novel, Don’t Start Me Talkin’, which arrived at my house only the day I left for the conference in Seattle. I know him well enough as a warm and generous person that I thought I'd best get an objective, third-party review. I asked Sean Singer, who I welcome to the blog for the first time, to take a look. Read more...
Stairways to Heaven Part 2
By Steve Joordens. In a previous post I described the general philosophy of our lab as one focused on building “Stairways to Heaven”; that is, tools that allow us to transform education from where it is now, to what we’d like it to be. That post was a little nonspecific, so in this post I present three of our current “stairways” in a little more detail. Our most established staircase; peerScholar was originally developed to bring written assignments back to our very large (then about 1000 students) Introduction to Psychology class. Read more...
Four Emergent Higher Education Models
By Steven Mintz. The model that dominates non-profit higher education today is under severe stress, particularly at the less-selective institutions that serve the bulk of American students. Four forces – behavioral, demographic, financial, and political -- have combined to disrupt these institutions’ business practices. First, the student swirl. As fewer students earn their credits at a single institution, and take courses from multiple providers -- from early college high schools, at community colleges, and from various online purveyors – the system of cross-subsidies that institutions relied upon to pay for small upper-division classes erodes. Read more...
Colleges as Political Playthings - Pt. 5: Being Nicer to Your Toys
By John Warner. Yesterday the South Carolina state house released a revised proposal regarding the merger of the College of Charleston with the Medical University of South Carolina. Perhaps stung by the blowback regarding the original proposed merger, Representatives Jim Merrill (R) and Leon Stavrinakis (D) put forward a plan to scotch the shotgun marriage and “create a research university at the existing University of Charleston, South Carolina.” Read more...
The Google Gmail Litigation
By Tracy Mitrano. So far the higher education press has paid scant attention to the Google Gmail Litigation case in the Northern District of California Federal Court, San Jose. If there is a jurisdiction worth watching for issues of consumer privacy and intellectual property, more patent than copyright, this is the one! And of all the cases in the former category, none is more important than Google Gmail. Read more...
IPAT considered harmful (#5 of more)
By G. Rendell. Most of the time when students tell me about their environmental concerns, an underlying optimism comes from their faith that technology can save us. Sometimes, they're attending Greenback U to learn more about one or another set of technologies, so that they can be part of the salvation effort. Others hope to learn to teach about exciting new technologies, or influence public policy to gin up more support for environmentally sensitive technologies, or conduct the basic science on which those new technologies can be based, or write books and articles about how wonderful the (upcoming) new technologies are. Read more...
On Their Own
By Laura Tropp. I was at a big chain store with my children, and I had to use the restroom. My 9½-year-old son refused to go in with me, saying that he will not go in a “girl’s” restroom. He insisted he would wait in front of the door for me. Though he wasn’t acknowledging it, this marked a significant turning point in our relationship: this was the first time I would leave him unattended in a public place. Read more...