College is the path to the American Dream
To keep open the path to the American Dream, we must tackle college productivity and affordability, writes Jamie Merisotis, CEO of the Lumina Foundation in the Huffington Post. To increase productivity, institutions and systems must find ways to graduate significantly more students while controlling costs and delivering high-quality degrees. We believe that part of the [...]
Badges undercut colleges’ monopoly on credentials
Badges aren’t just for Boy Scouts — or video game enthusiasts — anymore, I write on U.S. News. The Mozilla Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) have created a $2 million Digital Media and Learning Competition to encourage the development of digital badges that recognize lifelong learners’ [...]
Technology will help — but not yet
Technology will help improve student success rates — in the future, said James Applegate, a Lumina Foundation vice president, at the Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas. Executives agreed that technology won’t change teaching and learning immediately, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. “We’re beginning to get lots of data on things like time of [...]
Free e-books may be a bad deal
Free e-books may not be a good deal for tech-poor community college students, writes Dean Dad. Textbook costs are a real issue for students at many community colleges. For the intro to biology sequence, for example, the textbook and lab manual combine to cost over three hundred dollars. That’s pretty close to the tuition and [...]
‘Dual’ students learn IT skills
A Florida magnet school is graduating students with information technology certificates and college credits, reports U.S. News. Crooms Academy of Information Technology offers college-level courses in computer networking, software programming, and web design, earning Crooms the title of Most Connected Classroom in U.S. News‘s inaugural ranking of tech-focused high schools. Crooms offers 16 courses developed at Seminole [...]
Obama puts college costs on agenda
Rising college costs was on the agenda this week, when President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan met with college leaders at the White House. Most were chancellors of large state university systems, but Thomas Snyder of Ivy Tech Community College was invited along with the presidents of the three nonprofits, the all-online Western Governors [...]
JFF links colleges to real-time jobs data
With up-to-date labor market data, community colleges will be able to align training to employers’ needs in their regions, reports Jobs for the Future. The Credentials that Work initiative, funded by the Joyce Foundation and Lumina Foundation, uses new technology to aggregate and analyze online job ads. Colleges can follow hiring trends, employer demand, and [...]
E-tutoring gets personalized
Adaptive e-learning technology for remedial students is becoming more sophisticated and personalized, reports Inside Higher Ed. Desperate to boost success rates for developmental students, colleges are seeking foundation support to fund e-learning tools, according to Carol Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. Most companies are offering variations on a theme: “adaptive” technology [...]
Data-mining Sherpa guides students
Personalized guidance for academic surfers is the goal of Sherpa, software developed by the South Orange County Community College District. Sherpa mines student data to guide them to relevant courses, information, and services, reports Chronicle of Higher Education. A new student might get a link to the online orientation. A student with a high grade-point average might get [...]
New technology, old (bad) study techniques
College students are transferring ineffective study habits from wire notebooks to wireless netbooks, concludes a new study published in The Journal of Educational Psychology. From Science Daily: . . . students tend to study on computers as they would with traditional texts: They mindlessly over-copy long passages verbatim, take incomplete or linear notes, build lengthy [...]
