Top 10 College Stories From 2012

Degrees Help with Better Jobs and Income Even In A Recession

Amid much public discussion about whether college is a good investment for graduates, a Pew Economic Mobility Project report considers whether or not a degree still helps people find better jobs and earn more money. The simple answer is yes. And, as the study’s main finding suggests, the impact of a college degree has not been affected by the recession nearly as much as some reports

How To Use An Online Classrooms To Collaborate Better

Guest Blogger: Andrew Roth

Online classrooms allow you to teach or learn from just about any place that has a computer and Internet connectivity. You can connect with the other participants at any time. However, staring at the computer screen all the time could make you feel isolated. With the lack of personal interaction, students are at risk of losing out on the social aspect of learning, which might affect their ability to successfully perform team work outside the classroom. Online learning can be made more productive and fun by improving collaboration.

What Is Effective Collaboration?

This is more than just communicating with the other participants or building a community. Effective collaboration requires students and instructors to cooperate with each other in achieving a common goal. Students who join an online classroom already have a common purpose; the social presence aspect helps them share information and resources to improve learning.

Tips for Better Collaboration in an Online Classroom:

– Planning the Course:

The online course has to be carefully tailored to incorporate collaboration. When group participation is made mandatory, its importance is conveyed to the students. Give them an agenda to follow, along with clear instructions for carrying out assigned activities. If they know what is expected of them in advance, they are more likely to believe in the effectiveness of collaboration in an online classroom if they see the instructors and management share a strong belief that the system works.

– Role of the Instructor:

An online instructor plays an important role in making collaboration work. He or she needs to decide whether the entire group should collaborate as one or whether smaller groups would bring about better results. The instructor must monitor the forums constantly to ensure that students are interacting as expected and learning objectives are being met by the collaborative environment.

– Involve Students:

Let the students start interacting with each other much before the actual group course work begins; this will foster camaraderie and make it easier to work as a team when required. Also, welcome and appreciate their ideas for improving collaboration; they know what works best for their group. Encourage them to document their plans to specify the group coordinator, the means to be used for communication and a task breakdown with internal deadlines.

– Technology and Tools:

The right technology is needed to allow collaboration between remotely located students and teachers. Set up discussion boards and forums with access control. Students and instructors can also collaborate via web calls and synchronous chat sessions over the Internet.

Online Classrooms for a Collaborative Future:

Besides the course material, an online classroom teaches students valuable lessons like working as a team, being flexible and respecting other cultures. Their problem-solving and negotiating skills are also sharpened through peer interaction. You need to keep coming up with innovative tasks like case studies and team games to make online classroom collaboration fun and help the students to learn and grow. With the right approach, an online classroom can be a highly productive social learning environment.

Andrew Roth is a professional tutor. He blogs regularly on  using technology to facilitate the educational process. To learn more about long distance degree programs, check out the Concordia University Blog.

Top Higher Education Policy Issues For 2013

Top 10 Higher Education State Policy Issues for 2013

With states’ legislative sessions getting underway, the AASCU State Relations and Policy staff presents here its 6th annual briefing on the top 10 higher education state policy issues most likely to affect public higher education across the 50 states in 2013. This briefing is informed by an environmental scan of the economic, political and policy landscape surrounding public higher education, as well as a review of recent state policy activities and trends. Some issues are perennial in nature, while others reflect attention to near-term circumstances.
Authored by the AASCU State Relations and Policy Analysis Team

10 iphone apps for college search

Martina Keyhell : Guest blogger

Here’s the link to the article: (http://www.becomeananny.org/blog/10-iphone-apps-to-help-manage-your-college-search/ ). You can also go to (Becomeananny.org) and check it out there since I always feature my most recent articles on the homepage.

USA Ed Department College Remediation Figures Can Be Misleading

The study below understates the need for remediation because it includes only those who took remedial courses , not the number that need remediation. A variety of studies calculate remediation at over 60% of community college students and 25%  of 4 year college students. Many of these students do not take remedial courses before they drop out, or postpone taking them , and then never finish their program of studies.. So read the study below with great caution.

A National Center for Education Statistics report sheds light on incoming college students who are taking remedial classes and how the landscape has changed in the past decade. The percentage of freshman who had to take remedial classes dropped from 1999-2000 to 2007-2008 from 26.3% to 20.4%. The report found lower percentages of white students taking remedial classes compared to black and Hispanic students. (Education Week, premium article access compliments of edweek.org, 01/04/13)

Human Resources In Broad Access Higher Education: More Reseach Needed

  Author/s:

Susanna Loeb, Eric Taylor, Agustina Paglayan, Stanford University

Broad-access higher education institutions play a large and growing role in American human capital development, yet research describing how these institutions function and identifying the key elements of institutional effectiveness is sparse. Research focused on elementary and secondary education consistently demonstrates the significance of human resources – particularly teachers and school leaders – in educational production. Successfully recruiting, retaining, assigning, and developing effective instructors requires understanding the instructors themselves, and the administrators who both manage personnel practices and can have direct influence on student outcomes outside the classroom. The importance of these educators for student learning and educational attainment is particularly large when we restrict attention to inputs that institutions and policy makers can use as levers for change. Yet, like most topics discussed in this series, very little of the research on educators is set in higher education institutions and even less in broad-access higher education institutions. Given this lack of information on higher education personnel, the goal of this paper is to identify lines of research related to instructors and managers that are likely to be productive both for understanding the effectiveness of broad-access institutions and for identifying useful avenues for improvement.

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• The Changing Ecology of Higher Education

Investors See Profits For On Line Postsecondary

INVESTORS LOVE ONLINE EDUCATION
Higher education is one of the hottest growing sectors in Silicon Valley, and with good reason. The college premium is enormous. College-educated men have seen their wages increase since the 1960s even as wages for men with some to no college education have dropped. College grads face much lower unemployment rates than other educational groups. The gains among advanced degree holders are even larger. So, unsurprisingly, demand for higher education is increasing. But despite being a great investment, the upfront cost to college in terms of tuition is as high as ever, with real costs increasing by a third over the 2000s. So companies like Minerva, Coursera, and Udemy that promise high-quality courses delivered online are attracting a lot of investor attention. The article is in The Washington Post.

Grade Inflation Exposed By Historical Study

Grading in American Colleges and Universities
by Stuart Rojstaczer & Christopher Healy : For Teachers College Record on line
Here we report on historical and recent grading patterns at American four-year colleges and universities. Records of average grades show that since the 1960s, grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public-commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade. These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technol ogy.