Students build e-portfolios
Tunxis Community College in Connecticut is helping students create e-portfolios to track their learning and show their work to potential employers, reports Campus Technology. Laura Gambino, a professor of computer information systems, is leading the campuswide push for e-portfolios, which is expected to take years to fully implement. Students are taught to use e-portfolio software; [...]
Stumped by the math problem
Math is a dream killer at Lansing Community College in Michigan. Most new students aren’t prepared for college-level math. Last summer, 34 percent of the students who took the math assessment test “did not score high enough to be placed in the college’s most basic remedial math course, a class that begins with a review [...]
Colleges learn to use social media
Colleges in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley are learning how to use social media, reports the (Allentown) Morning Call. When Heidi Butler first started using the social networking technology Twitter in her job as Northampton Community College spokeswoman, she was slightly unnerved whenever she got a message that a new person had signed up to “follow” her. [...]
Is Obama a college graduate?
The U.S. has dropped from first to 11th in college completion, according to the OECD. But transfers don’t count as college graduates in U.S. statistics, reports Mike Kirst on The College Puzzle. President Obama, who earned a Columbia degree, wouldn’t be considered a college graduate in the OECD tables because he started at Occidental College [...]
Hands on, brains on
In Shakespeare with Power Tools, Erin Carlyle explains how St. Paul College in Minnesota made it to number one on the Washington Monthly’s list of the 50 best community colleges. Once a vocational high school, St. Paul is now a “community and technical college,” blending liberal arts programs with vocational classes. About two-thirds of Saint [...]
America’s best community colleges
America’s 50 best community colleges are listed as part of Washington Monthly’s College Guide. What makes these colleges better than the rest? The magazine uses the Community College Survey of Student Engagement and Department of Education graduation rates to rank more than 600 colleges, writes Kevin Carey. CCSSE “has surveyed hundreds of thousands of students [...]
What’s in a college credit?
What’s in a college credit? In trying to define a credit’s worth, the Department of Education continues to equate credit with “time spent learning rather than with the learning outcomes,” writes Julie Margetta Morgan, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. The proposed regulation defines a credit in three ways (pdf): One hour [...]
Moms go to college — and stay home
At the age of 38, Lisa Hardman enrolled at Arapahoe Community College in Colorado with plans to earn enough English credits to transfer to a four-year institution. (Her two years of credits in music performance at University of Colorado were not very helpful.) Taking classes online helps her earn credits while caring for five children, [...]
College aid lacks incentives
Seeing college as an entitlement, many students slack off in high school, take remedial courses in college and never finish a degree, writes Jackson Toby, an emeritus Rutgers sociology professor, on Minding the Campus. . . . most of the responsibility for the relatively low rate of college graduation compared with enrollment is a result [...]
The debt-free degree
Instapundit, who’s been writing on the higher education bubble, posts money-saving advice from Chris Farley, a former college administrator: My son is going to graduate High School in three years – not because he is a genius, but because he can arrange his schedule to fit in all the requirements and credits in three years. [...]
