Posts published in January, 2016

Bright and Dark Sides of College Internet Addiction

By Melissa Burns

These days college students spend a lot of time on the Web. They like to talk with friends in social networks, they use Google instead of books. Virtual world has become a part of their daily lives as sleeping or eating. Actually there are bright and dark sides of Internet addiction but there is no distinct border which differs in healthy attitude from an illness. In this post we will try to handle the problem.

When the Web is Helpful?

The information about the diagnosis which is called Internet Addition Disorder (IAD) was published as a research and caused heated debates in the mental health community. It is hard to disagree that college students almost ‘live’ in Instagram and Facebook, and clicking links is their favorite activity, but many psychologists reject the Internet addiction as a notion. Even if a greater part of students avoids cheeting during exams they nevertheless spend a lot of time reading news about celebrities, playing online games and uploading photos into their accounts in social media. All of this distracts students from study time.

Positive reasons for constant online activity include:

 

• possibility to complete homework easily using popular applications and software, for instance on devcompanies.com;
• a chance to find the latest updates of needed applications;
• place to read any information for studies as well as download books and textbooks;
• capability to discuss up-to-date issues on forums;
• way to communicate with classmates and instructors;
• opportunity to research job opportunities.

If a young person has some problems with social interaction, he or she can communicate with people online because it is important for mental health. Moreover, the Web is a tool which provides opportunities to study and work online and get knowledge to succeed in your professional life.

How to Prevent IAD?

Here are some tips which can be helpful in healthy Web usage:

 

1. Try to notice warning signs in time. If you realize that you spend more time communicating in Facebook than making your homework, it is time to remake your schedule.
2. Spend more time away from your computer. It’s an obsession to refresh your MySpace page every minute, so if you find out that you do that, just close your laptop and make a break.
3. Give yourself a chance for a ‘face time.’ Meet people in person instead of talking to them online. It is not healthy to rely only on virtual communication. In real life you can meet good people which might play important role in your future.

Preventive measures are always better than getting rid of the consequences. If you understand that you can’t fight Internet Addiction alone and this influences your studies badly, ask your friend or relative help you solve this problem.  If you notice your addiction in time you will be able to prevent it without any bad consequences such as social isolation, depression and many other unpleasant symptoms. Of course, the Web is helpful in many situations but it should not replace real activities and must not obstruct your happiness in your real collegial, professional, and personal life.

Can Technology Help Replace College Counselors And Mentors

Peer Mentors Help College Students Succeed

Carinne Deeds, American Youth Policy Forum

As the first in my family to go to college, I entered the application process with an endless amount of questions. Where should I go to college? Can I even get into college? Where do I find all the necessary forms? What in the world is a FAFSA? Thanks to helpful college counselors at my high school (and after a very long and confusing year of figuring things out by trial and error), I was able to navigate the complicated processes required to get into college. What proved to be even more of a challenge, however, was overcoming my anxieties about actually being a college student before and even after I arrived on campus. What will college life be like? Where should I live? Will I have time for a social life if I also have to work? How and where can I make friends? Will I miss my family? What if I get lonely? What if I’m not cut out for this?

Like many first-generation students, my parents, though they loved and supported me and would have done anything they could to help, were unfamiliar with the complicated processes required to get to and persist through college, as well as the personal skills and resources necessary to not only survive but to thrive as an individual newly embarking into the adult world. Additionally, most of my anxiety about fitting in and being comfortable as a college student could neither be addressed by my parents, nor a high school guidance counselor, nor a university online FAQ page.

I was fortunate to attend a university that recognized the need students have to receive support outside of the classroom and even beyond traditional college advising. Thanks in large part to peers and mentors I encountered through various university systems and programs, I slowly but surely transitioned from college-aspiring Carinne to college-attending Carinne – a transition that changed the course of my life.

The role of peer advising

Peer mentors* have the ability to connect with students in a way that traditional advisors cannot, either while they’re in high school, in transition, or have already made it to campus. Aside from providing additional guidance on logistical issues like form submission and tuition deadlines, peers have a significant amount of flexibility in terms of both the time and the topic of communication. For example, peer advisors can often maintain regular and ongoing contact with their mentees without being constrained by more formal requirements. Additionally, questions of school culture, community, belonging, and even some questions about navigating university systems are usually questions that students either cannot or do not feel comfortable asking traditional academic advisors. Peers may be more willing and able to help students with more personal concerns such as homesickness, social issues, or academic and personal insecurities, and may also have a deeper level of empathy and understanding of these issues, as they have likely encountered similar experiences themselves.

Research evidence affirms the idea that peer supports are crucial in helping students succeed in college, and that many peer mentoring programs have had positive effects on both mentors and mentees. According to theJournal of College Reading and Learning, mentoring programs can improve the interpersonal, communication, and leadership skills of mentors. Both mentees and mentors can acquire better time management skills and a greater sense of responsibility. The mentees themselves receive many additional benefits, such as self-esteem, goal-setting, and career guidance. Research also indicates that peer mentoring programs can have a positive effect on academic outcomes for mentees.

What does peer advising look like?

The term peer advising generally refers to the traditional one-on-one method of advising, in which an older peer (usually a current or former college student) provides support to a future or current college student – preferably from a similar background as the mentor. It also describes those situations in which current college students can connect with other students in the same or a similar stage of the process. For example, learning communities such as those at CUNY provide current students with a network of peers in a smaller, more personalized setting. Students take classes together, study together, and also have access to counselors, tutors, and other support services. These programs capitalize on the idea that students going through a common experience may be ideally suited to support one another, in addition to receiving supports from caring adults. Peer advising also occurs in a variety of forms at the individual level. As mentioned in a previous blog post, the Urban Assembly’s (UA) Bridge to College Program in New York hires and trains alumni to provide counseling to students with regards to the financial, personal, and logistical difficulties faced during the college transition.

This element of providing a personal connection, whether it be in a one-on-one or a group setting, is a unique benefit of peer mentoring programs and is likely one reason they have been shown to be so effective. As I reflect on my own experience as a first-generation college student, I recognize that without the support I received from my peer mentors and the personal connection I felt to the university because of them, my college experience could have ended much differently.

 

Employers Want More Than Degrees

When a Degree Is Just the Beginning

Today’s employers want more, say providers of alternative credentials

 

By Goldie Blumenstyk , Chronicle Of Higher Education

The idea of students graduating from college with just a diploma — a single academic credential — could soon seem downright quaint.

At some institutions, it already is. Community colleges in North Carolina encourage students to complete coursework while earning certifications from industry groups like the National Institute for Metalworking Skills and the National Aviation Consortium. At Lipscomb University, students can qualify for badges, endorsed by outside experts, to prove they have mastered skills such as “Active Listening” and “Drive and Energy.” Students at Elon University get an “extended transcript” describing their nonacademic accomplishments.

Higher education is entering a new era, one in which some industry and nonacademic certifications are more valuable than degrees, transcripts are becoming credentials in their own right, and colleges are using badges to offer assurances to employers about students’ abilities in ways that a degree no longer seems to do. On top of the traditional academic and corporate players, a whole bunch of nonprofits and businesses are also jumping on — if not leading — the movement, including MOOC providers like Coursera and Udacity and so-called coding academies like General Assembly, Galvanize, and the Flatiron School.

Related Content

• A Gallery of Credentials

The explosion in credentials is upending long-held notions about the value of a college degree. Many of these credentials are in digital formats that can be easily shared among students, educators, and employers in new kinds of e-portfolios or on commercial sites like LinkedIn. “The reason we’re so excited about them is that they contain claims and evidence,” says Daniel T. Hickey, an associate professor of education at Indiana University at Bloomington and an advocate of badges and other new forms of verifiable credentials. “What people don’t understand is: That is a game changer.”

It’s also a development laced with confusion. Among colleges, companies, and many other organizations, thousands of bodies now issue postsecondary credentials, in a variety of forms.

As Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, has said, that has left a highly fragmented landscape with no system in place to assure the quality of those credentials. (That is a particular problem for the foundation; its “Goal 2025” is to increase the proportion of Americans who have earned “high-quality” degrees, certificates, and other credentials to 60 percent over the next decade, but it needs to know which ones to count.)

• As students flock to these new providers, investors, too, are taking notice. For those who might once have been captivated by the B.A.s and M.A.s awarded by for-profit colleges, “the trend is to get away from letters,” says Susan Wolford, a managing director with BMO Capital Markets. Companies involved with lifelong learning and “credentializing” are favorite targets for the mergers-and-acquisitions crowd, she says. That includes not just those trendy coding boot camps and MOOCs but also companies that offer training in sales skills or the energy field. Whether it’s a company that gives a credential or merely one that “brands the knowledge” it is offering, she says, “people are very mesmerized by the idea.”

The explosion in credentials is upending long-held notions about the value of a college degree.

In June, Lumina announced a campaign to make greater sense of the evolving practices and policies around the cornucopia of credentials. The campaign echoes the foundation’s Degree Qualifications Profile work, a project aimed at creating common reference points to define the intellectual skills associated with associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees.

The new effort includes grants to groups at universities and a nonprofit organization that are trying to create a “credential registry” for students and employers, and to develop a taxonomical framework to help categorize which credentials reflect what skills. Lumina has also called for a “national conversation” on credentials, to take place in part at a conference in Washington in October. Policy makers and academics will discuss ways to make the fragmented credential system more navigable. The foundation seems to have struck a nerve: About 80 associations, companies, and organizations have signed on as co-sponsors of its campaign.

With an education ecosystem that is increasingly featuring “lots of on- and off-ramps,” says Holly Zanville, the Lumina official heading its credentials project, “we’re going to need some better structures than we have now.”

Several forces are behind the newfound attention to credentials. One is the general interest in badges, which arose in online gaming and spread to higher education as more colleges began using digital portfolios. Another factor is higher education’s recent fascination with competency-based education, which, lacking the structure of courses, is well suited to use badges to determine how certain skills are defined and assessed.

An even more powerful force behind the credentials trend, however, is the so-called skills gap, or the apparent mismatch between the skills employers say they want in job candidates and what they see — or can’t see — in recent college graduates. Couple that with concerns about the cost of college and its return on investment, and what’s left, say observers, is a general unease about the value of a degree and what it signals to potential employers. “It’s unclear how great a signal it was before,” says Michael B. Horn, co-founder and executive director for education of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, which studies innovation in education. Now the picture is even cloudier.

But at this stage, so is the picture for new kinds of credentials, he adds. The crucial factor that will determine the success of these new credentials, he says, is the assessment underlying them, and there, “the thinking about it still seems fluffy.”

“You have to be loyal to your skills. You have to build a skill portfolio you can sell.”

Still, shifts in the job market have lent greater importance to credentials. “It’s the real change in the economy, which requires upskilling,” says Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. But he warns that the value applies only to good credentials, which he, as an economist, defines as those that bring added earnings. And with people changing jobs more often, potential employees are recognizing that they need good credentials to get in the door and advance in their careers. Forget loyalty to your employer, says Mr. Carnevale: “You have to be loyal to your skills. You have to build a skill portfolio you can sell.”

The underlying ethos of the credentials movement — that “it’s all about the job” — may make many four-year colleges and even some community colleges uncomfortable. But that hasn’t kept several of them from experimenting with new types of credentials — in many cases aided by a burgeoning group of young companies like Pathbrite, Fidelis Education, and Parchment, which sell digital products that help students manage and communicate their skills and expertise. Gunnar Counselman, a founder of Fidelis, which also offers tools that colleges can use to build assessments that underlie their badges, says that until recently, his company’s services were a hard sell: “Five years ago, nobody believed the degree was insufficient.” Today, he says, more college officials are starting to say that degrees are necessary, but not enough.

“The whole skills gap,” says Mr. Counselman, “is the result of schools’ not understanding what employers need” and not creating the kind of curriculum modules that would translate to the workplace. Changing attitudes are fueled by frustration with the status quo. You go to school for 16 years, he points out, “and you get four freaking data points out of it”: the name of the college, the name of the degree, the year it was issued, and maybe a GPA.

Lipscomb University, which is working with Fidelis, hopes to fill the information gap with badges that describe the “soft” skills its students have acquired, like communicating effectively and working in teams. Colleges tell students they’re getting training for life, but “we didn’t ever have any way of verifying that or quantifying that,” says Nina J. Morel, dean of the College of Professional Studies there. The badge program is “something more concrete,” she says.

Lipscomb, in Tennessee, has developed 41 badges based on employment-screening techniques developed by Polaris Assessment Systems. The badges will be digital elements of a competency transcript, she says, and can be added to students’ LinkedIn accounts and online portfolios.

It could be a long time before employers start demanding such evidence from graduates, acknowledges Ms. Morel, but “we want to make sure they have every opportunity and every tool in their tool box to convince an employer.”

In fact, for most employers, the college degree remains the key credential, so much so that a 2014 report by Burning Glass, a company that analyzes job ads, found that employers in many fields were requiring bachelor’s degrees for jobs that previously didn’t need them. (The exceptions were for fields, such as health care, in which there are good alternatives for identifying skill proficiency.)

But that may be changing. Recently. Burning Glass analyzed 20.6 million non-health-care job ads from a 12-month period, and it found that 20 percent of all posts requiring a bachelor’s degree also called for applicants to have a certificate or a license for a particular skill. That, says Matthew Sigelman, the company’s chief executive, suggests that employers see the college degree “as a minimum ticket to ride rather than something validating specific competencies.”

Burning Glass hasn’t seen much interest from employers in badges, at least not yet. “That doesn’t mean they don’t have value,” says Mr. Sigelman. But they’ll need to be externally validated, or carry their own brand, if they’re going to matter.

Certificates themselves are not all equal, either. Of the 20.6 million jobs analyzed, Burning Glass found 2.8 million requiring a certificate. But only certain certificates were highly sought. Of the thousands of possible certificates, the same 200 came up again and again. The Project Management Professional (PMP) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) credentials were among those that topped the list.

Those trends have not been lost on the North Carolina Community College system, which has been refashioning its curricula around more short-term, work-force-ready programs. Often, “industry credentials mean more to employers than the academic degree,” notes R. Scott Ralls, departing president of the system. That’s the reason, he says, that when his system’s colleges reconfigured 89 degree programs and collapsed them into 31, they took pains to build those programs so that most of them incorporated industry-certified credentials as steppingstones to the degree. When possible, the colleges prefer to use recognized, existing credentials rather than create new ones, says Mr. Ralls, who will become president of Northern Virginia Community College this month. “It’s about portability.”

But for subjects and fields that are not so easily certified, some experts predict that a proliferation of badges and expanded transcripts will occur, which means a lot more chaos before there is much cohesion.

“Badges without taxonomies, without some shared understanding, without rubrics, are meaningless,” notes Matthew Pittinsky, an assistant research professor in the school of social and family dynamics at Arizona State University and founder of Parchment, a credentials-management company.

But he argues that a system with richer credentials is ultimately a better alternative than one in which the “iron logic of the labor market starts to prescribe the makeup of the bachelor’s degree in a way that most academics would not be comfortable with.”

Reverse Transfer Awards Associate Degrees Retroactively

New from ECS Reverse transfer could raise completion rates Higher rates of degree completion for students in higher education cannot be reached without innovation, for example reverse transfer. A unique process for awarding associate degrees to students who have transferred to four-year institutions from community colleges, reverse transfer policies and programs allow students to combine credits they earned at two- and four-year institutions. They earn an associate degree while also working toward a bachelor’s degree.

 

The Most Useful Apple iPhone and iPad Apps for Students

By Melissa Burns

All responsible students always try to stay on top of useful things for college and treat their studies very seriously. If you use iPhone or iPad you can choose from a large variety of useful applications which are sure to help you study harder, tackle necessary assignments, organize your time better than ever. So let us see what applications are the most appropriate for modern students and note a few ones which are worth using.

Apps for Data Collecting

If you spend much time in college preparing presentations, writing papers or looking for required data, it would be much comfortable to keep all this information in the Cloud. Apple offers a number of apps allowing to keep all papers, spreadsheets and other documents in sync, and access them easily from any place. Moreover, all papers are kept in one place and it’s no matter what device you use. You can share your documents in .doc, .xls, and a few other formats with PC users and they can work with these documents as well.

 

Apps for Class Material Downloading

Apple offers several applications which allow you to download lectures and other class materials right to your iPhone or iPad. In addition, there is a study tool which can save gigabytes of videos, and other types of material by topic you are learning. If you don’t want to ‘grab’ new lessons by yourself, you can sign up for automatic downloading of necessary courses.

 

Scheduling Apps

It is really important to have a task app to make to-do lists for a day or a week in advance. Apple has a few special applications for students always to be ready for exams, paper works etc. To add a task you should just install an app and throw it to your inbox. You can very easily create personal lists, notes, and other tasks. If you make a group project you are able to share lists and get special notifications when the tasks are updated or when the new ones are added or completed.

Apps for Calculation

Whether you are a programmer or a computer engineer the Apple calculation apps are indispensable. These programs support all variants of scientific notation, conversions, and boast many more functions. These apps will be really useful for you even after graduation.

Apps for Making Notes

When you attend to lectures you can use special apps to make notes. Apple applications for iPhone and iPad support tags and separate notebooks, allow you to make photos of a blackboard, and tag them for definite courses. iCloud sync is a great advantage so you can store your files in a cloud and access them whenever you wish from different devices.

New Mac and iOs owners can use most of the apps free of charge. For some older devices the programs can be purchased for very optimal prices. Find all apps here. You can choose such applications for iPhone and iPad as Pages and Numbers for data collecting, iTunes for downloading class materials, Wunderlist for scheduling, PCalc for calculations, and so on.

Melissa Burns graduated from the faculty of Journalism of Iowa State University in 2008. Nowadays she  is an entrepreneur and independent journalist. Her sphere of interests includes startups, information technologies and how these ones may be implemented.

  

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