Northwest Education Law Blog : Northwest Education Lawyer & Attorney : Williams Kastner Law Firm : Tacoma, Seattle, Portland

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Do Twitter skeptics really believe the popular microblogging service offers no educational value, or are they just afraid of it?

While some higher ed officials — including nearly everyone at Wednesday's debate between W. Gardner Campbell, director of the Academy of Teaching and Learning at Baylor University and Bruce Maas, CIO of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee — use Twitter for fun, many balk at the idea of incorporating it into the classroom.

But Campbell had a different take on the implications of audience members feverishly typing away while a presentation is still in progress. “That’s a godsend!” he said. “Suddenly, I’m not just the one at the front just dispensing everything, and the students aren’t just sort of milling about doing their thing — we’ve actually got a team of people working together. And Twitter is the glue that holds the team together.”

It’s also a data-gathering resource. Live discussion threads, Campbell noted, give professors loads of data on the previously mysterious question of what exactly is going on inside the heads of students during a lecture. No longer is a student’s ability to participate in classroom discussions contingent upon whether he is willing to raise his hand and has the good fortune to be called on, he said.

Campbell acknowledged that the idea of having students tweet during lectures can be a scary prospect, not just for CIOs and public relations managers, but for faculty. “What if something gets quoted incorrectly? What if somebody says something that you didn’t want to share with the world?”

“Well, what if?” he continued. “It’s a cost-benefit trade-off.” [Inside Higher Ed]

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About a week into any class at Rio Salado College, officials can make a pretty good guess as to which students will succeed and which ones will not. The Arizona community college, where more than half of the 64,000 students pursue their degrees online, has devised a system of predictive modeling that officials believe can forecast, with 70 percent accuracy, how likely it is that a student will achieve a “C” grade or higher (the threshold for transferable credits) in a given course. The tool -- one of several of its kind -- is intended to help instructors to identify at-risk students early enough that they can intervene.

Rio Salado uses more than two dozen metrics during that first week to predict how well that student stands to fare over the entire course, but some of the most effective are the most basic: Has the student logged into the course home page during that first week? Did she log in prior to the first day of class? Other predictive metrics, such as whether a student is taking other classes at the same time, whether she has been successful in previous courses, and whether she is retaking the course, are culled from the college's student information system.

The predictive modeling system uses these metrics to separate students into three color-coded categories: high-risk (red) students, medium-risk (yellow) students, and low-risk (green) students. The instructors of each class are notified a week in about the “yellow” students in their class, so they can then reach out to those students and try to get them on track. The college says it does not currently intervene in the cases of “red” students, citing limited resources (although officials there say they are working on developing a system to address the needs of those students).

Rio Salado differs in that respect from Purdue University, which has run similar predictive modeling program since 2006, and does keep students in the loop. On Thursday, SunGard Higher Education announced it is partnering with Purdue to market the Signals system to colleges everywhere. Like Rio Salado, Capella University, a for-profit online university that has used a comparable system for the past three years, does not tell students about their risk status. [Inside Higher Ed]

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The Maryland Higher Education Commission has ruled that state residents should not be able to enroll in an online degree program in community-college administration offered by the University of Maryland University College, reports The Sun, a newspaper in Baltimore. Morgan State University, a historically black college, opposed the program on the grounds that it could violate civil-rights laws. In response, Donald N. Langenberg, chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland, has called the commission's decision "insane," comparing it to restrictions that the Soviet Union once placed on citizens' access to information. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Employers are viewing online degrees more favorably, reports Industry Market Trends. Reuters reported that online education grew 13 percent last year, and nearly one-quarter of students now take some online college courses. Adult, mid-career professionals, in particular, are participating in online learning.

A survey of human resources professionals by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 76 percent view online university degrees more favorably today than they did five years ago. In addition, 58 percent of respondents said individual courses taken through online universities are as credible as traditional university courses. Of SHRM's respondents, 95 percent said there is no difference between tuition reimbursement between employees studying through accredited online universities and those studying through accredited traditional universities. [The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers Transcript]

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A group of distance education leaders today plans to discuss how current state-by-state approval and licensing protocols are hampering online colleges, and how those policies might evolve to accommodate colleges that educate students in many different states via the Web. “American labor’s competitive edge requires work force education that avoids entanglement of online and distance educational providers in a duplicative web of processes in order to offer their services,” says a report from a task force assigned by the forum to study the issue.

That report is expected to be the focus of today’s meeting here. Its authors argue that the state-based approval system is centered around the notion that colleges are fixed in a single location that necessarily falls within the borders of a state. Since online colleges aim to teach students in multiple states, they have to go through multiple accreditation processes to achieve a nationwide presence, then satisfy various bureaucratic requirements in each state if they want to keep teaching students there.

This, says John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College (which founded the Presidents’ Forum), can be “sort of a pain in the butt"; more to the point, it forces online institutions to devote a lot of time and resources to acquiring and maintaining licensure in different states. This, the task force argues, “increasingly may act to inhibit student access to essential learning opportunities and at an unnecessarily high cost.”

To remove these anchors from the necks of online colleges seeking a presence in each state, the task force proposes that regional accrediting organizations and their member states reach a common ground on “a specific template of state standards to which all parties would reference their individual requirements.” Under such a system, online colleges would only have to seek the approval of a single accrediting organization and a single state, just like brick-and-mortar colleges -- except they would get to enroll students from all over the country. The system would be based on “reciprocal judgment"; that is, state governments and regional accreditors would have to trust each other that their accredited institutions were on the level.

Solving the discontinuity between state licensing agencies could be the key to getting regional accreditors to trust one another’s judgment, according to Alan Contreras, administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization. If professional licensing agencies in different states can align their standards, curricula designed to prepare students to meet those standards will necessarily become more similar, Contreras wrote in an outline for a talk he is planning to give today at the Presidents' Forum meeting. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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Online education is a growing industry in the United States with estimated revenues of $12 billion at a dozen or so for-profit companies that provide primarily online learning.

Here are some facts and statistics:

- Of more than 18 million U.S. college students, 3.9 million were enrolled in at least one online college course in fall 2007, an increase of 13 percent from 2006. Traditional on-campus enrollment increased 1 percent over that period.

- 85 percent of students who take courses online live in the same region as the campus offering the course.

- 15 percent of kindergarten through high school students may be educated online by 2011, up from 4 percent in 2006.

- 87 percent of children aged 12 to 17 use the Internet. Two-thirds of nursery school children use computers. Just about every U.S. school is connected to the Internet.

- 70 percent of public high school students graduate. Two-thirds of graduates are seen as unprepared for college.

- 47 percent of drop-outs said a major reason for leaving school was "classes were not interesting" and they were "bored." Eighty-eight percent of drop-outs had passing grades. [Reuters]

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Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we'll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a "University of Phoenix" joke.

Of course, a cultural shift will be required before employers greet online degrees without skepticism. But all the elements are in place for that shift. Major universities are teaching a few of their courses online. And the young students of tomorrow will be growing up in an on-demand, personalized world, in which the notion of a set-term, offline, prepackaged education will seem anachronistic.

So how should we think about this? Students who would never have had access to great courses or minds are already able to find learning online that was unimaginable in the last century. But unless we make a strong commitment to even greater funding of higher education, the institutions that have allowed for academic freedom, communal learning, unpressured research and intellectual risk-taking are themselves at risk. [Washington Post]

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They worry about the quality of online courses, say teaching them takes more effort, and grouse about insufficient support. Yet large numbers of professors still put in the time to teach online. And despite the broad suspicion about quality, a majority of faculty members have recommended online courses to students.

That is the complicated picture that emerges in "The Paradox of Faculty Voices: Views and Experiences With Online Learning," part of a two-volume national study released today by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities—Sloan National Commission on Online Learning.

The debate about the quality of online instruction is nothing new. But the scale of this study makes it significant. Responses came from more than 10,700 faculty members at 69 public colleges and universities across the country, a sector that accounts for much of the rapidly growing online market.

Jack M. Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts and chairman of the commission that issued the report, described the findings about online support for such learning as "a call to action." when asked about them in a conference call with reporters. "Institutions are going to have to do a better job of providing the support to the faculty—and, by the way, to the students as well," said Mr. Wilson. The report also punctures the prevailing notion that older professors aren't as involved with online instruction. Veteran professors—those who have taught for more than 20 years—are teaching online at rates equivalent to less-experienced faculty members, it found.

More than 36 percent of faculty members have experience either teaching or developing an online course, according to the report, fresh evidence of the mainstreaming of online education. A large majority of survey respondents pointed to student needs as a "primary motivator" for teaching online. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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H1N1 flu may have two surprising symptoms: innovation and empathy. At least that’s the hope of University of Michigan officials, who are encouraging faculty to make broader use of technology to help sick students keep up with class work.

As faculty create syllabuses for the coming semester, Michigan officials want them to consider the possibility of an outbreak infecting large numbers of students in the coming months. That means finding ways to work with students who may be absent for days by putting greater emphasis on distance learning tools like listservs, e-mail and Web-based teaching platforms. To that end, the university’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has laid out a series of guidelines to help faculty prepare for what could be a challenging year of illness.

“If the circumstances actually come to a head where a lot of students can’t make it to class then I could picture people who had been reluctant and not using these kinds of techniques and tools will be more receptive, and might have a very fast ramp-up getting familiar with them,” said Ed Durfee, a professor of computer science and engineering who regularly posts his PowerPoint slides online. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Paralegalschoolsonline.org posted "50 Fascinating Law Lectures for Professionals and Laymen" which is a compilation of a series of free webcasts, podcasts, and lectures covering a wide range of legal issues. The website describes the collection: "With laws constantly changing, lawyer fees increasing, and interest in law building, the internet has become a virtual library of legal resources. Below are the 50 best law lectures for anyone with a passing or professional interest."

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Posted by Jonathan Kaplan, president of Walden University: A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that looked at 12 years' worth of education studies, and found that online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face instruction.

The study, "An Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," stated that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.” Except for one article, on this Web site, you probably didn’t hear about it -- and neither did anyone else.

But imagine for a moment that the report came to the opposite conclusion. I’m sure that if the U.S. Department of Education had published a report showing that students in online learning environments performed worse, there would have been a major outcry in higher education with calls to shut down distance-learning programs and close virtual campuses.

I believe the reason that the recent study elicited so little commentary is due to the fact that it flies in the face of the biases held by some across the higher education landscape. Yet this study confirms what those of us working in distance education have witnessed for years: Good teaching helps students achieve, and good teaching comes in many forms.

Recently, we examined the successes of Walden graduates who are teachers in the Tacoma, Wash., public school system, and found that students in Walden teachers’ classes tested with higher literacy rates than did students taught by teachers who earned their master’s from other universities. There could be many reasons for this, but, especially in light of the U.S. Department of Education study, it seems that online learning has contributed meaningfully to their becoming better teachers.

Recently, President Obama remarked, “I think there’s a possibility that online education can provide, especially for people who are already in the workforce and want to retrain, the chance to upgrade their skills without having to quit their job.” As the U.S. Department of Education study concluded, online education can do that and much more. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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Finding an online-education program can feel like shopping at a used-car lot. Students often struggle to get reliable information amid a barrage of in-your-face marketing.

A new Web site that debuts today, featuring 12 colleges that largely offer online education to adults, intends to change that. It's called College Choices for Adults. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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Logan Stark's classmates scramble for courses with professors who top instructor-rating Web sites. But when the California Polytechnic State University student enrolled in a biochemistry class on the San Luis Obispo campus, he didn't need to sweat getting the best.
It was practically guaranteed.

That's because much of the class was built by national specialists, not one Cal Poly professor. It's a hybrid of online and in-person instruction. When Mr. Stark logs in to the course Web site at midnight, a bowl of cereal beside his laptop, he clicks through animated cells and virtual tutors, a digital domain designed by faculty experts and software engineers.

By the time Mr. Stark steps into the actual lecture hall, the Web site has alerted his professor to what parts of the latest lesson gave students trouble. That lets her focus class time on where they need the most help.

Mr. Stark's class is one of about 300 around the world to use online course material—both the content and the software that delivers it—developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative. If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a free library available to colleges nationwide.

The government would pay to develop these "open" classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls at universities nationwide in recent years—a great course giveaway popularized by the OpenCourseWare project's free publication of 1,900 courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide have used these online materials. But the publication cost—at MIT, about $10,000 a course—has impeded progress at the community-college level, says Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.

The plan coincides with Mr. Obama's goal for the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But Marshall S. (Mike) Smith, senior counselor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, feels that won't happen simply by moving middle- and high-school students further through the system. Higher education also needs to rope in older students who never went beyond high school, or who abandoned college before finishing a degree, he says. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, is buying a stake in a company that is forming a new online university, and the university is putting his name on its M.B.A. program, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The company, Chancellor University System LLC, is converting the former Myers University, a Cleveland institution that went bankrupt, into Chancellor University, according to the Journal. Mr. Welch is paying more than $2-million for a 12-percent stake in the business, it said, and the university will name its M.B.A. program the Jack Welch Institute.

Mr. Welch does not plan to teach any courses at the institute that will bear his name, but he and his wife, Suzy, are involved in recruiting faculty members and planning the curriculum. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Most of us have had the experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won't open. That concept is at the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part) as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.

Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"

The site promises that students can stop using "lame excuses" like the deaths of grandmothers or turning in poor work.

While the Web site attempts to distinguish its service from cheating, it also advises students on how its services could make it easier for them to get away with turning in a file they know won't open. "This download includes a 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 page corrupted Word file. Use the appropriate file size to match each assignment. Who's to say your 10 page paper didn't get corrupted? Exactly! No one can! Its the perfect excuse to buy yourself extra time and not hand in a garbage paper. Cheating is not the answer to procrastination! - Corrupted-Files.com is!" [Inside Higher Ed]

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College students were given the chance to ditch a traditional classroom for an online virtual world. Fourteen out of fifteen declined.

In her recently published study, “Student Perceptions of a Course Taught in Second Life,” Ms. Cheal wrote that the 15 undergraduate students enrolled in the course raised concerns that too much “play” in the assignments inhibited learning. The students also cited problems with the program’s slow speed and with challenges acclimating to virtual life.

“While there is potential for interactive and engaging education in virtual worlds, those possibilities may be negated if students feel lost with a difficult interface and hardware problems or if students characterize the virtual world as a venue for play incompatible with learning,” she wrote. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]