What works in online learning?

What works in online learning?  It’s got to be easy to use and easily affordable, writes William Wade, dean of Online Learning at West Kentucky Community & Technical College in Community College Week and the League for Innovation in Community College’s Learning Abstracts, December 2011.

Consistency is key, writes Wade.

 Common menu labels, consistent syllabus procedures, and uniform teacher-student communication policies help students move from one course to another.

For example, testing should be labeled “testing” in all courses, not “quizzes” or “assessment” or “evaluation.”

Creative presentation with on-demand content also is important.

Faculty have added games, puzzles, videos, live audio sessions, and animation to their formats. They have introduced themselves with back-porch videos, animated Voki comments, and on-screen fireworks. . . . What does not work is last year’s lecture from last century’s notes. Standing in front of a class physically or virtually and reciting course material from decades ago won’t make it, and neither will adding that material to an online class.

Success online courses engage students by letting them  create and share ideas and analyze real-world applications of what they’re learning, Wade writes.

The biology class that tests the water in a local river or creek or the composition class that studies political speeches for logic and significance are the ones that move the student forward.

Money matters, but so does quality, Wade writes.

So many quality tools are available free or for a minimal cost that students no longer need to pay hundreds of dollars for software or textbooks.

Mobile learning using the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Zune, and 3G and 4G networks is increasingly important. Students want flexibility and multiple ways to access material.

Obama: Raise tuition, lose federal aid

College affordability was the theme of President Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan yesterday. He called for spending more on Perkins loans and work-study programs — going from $3 billion now to $10 billion  – but only at colleges and universities that provide “value.” Students at colleges that raise tuition could lose access to loans and work-study jobs.

In addition, the president’s plan (pdf) includes a $1 billion “Race to the Top for college affordability” and a $55 million “First in the World” competition to encourage productivity innovations, reports the Washington Post.

Higher education — including community colleges and lifelong learning for workers — is “an economic imperative,” Obama said. While he proposed increasing tuition tax credits and keeping interest rates low on student loans, he said that’s not enough. “Look, we can’t just keep on subsidizing skyrocketing tuition.”

So from now on, I’m telling Congress we should steer federal campus-based aid to those colleges that keep tuition affordable, provide good value, serve their students well.  (Applause.)  . . . If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down.

If “provide good value” and “serve their students well” means anything, it means the federal government will monitor graduation rates and employment outcomes, as well as tuition, for the entire higher education sector. Currently, “gainful employment” rules, which monitor former students’ earnings and ability to pay back loans, cover only for-profit colleges and community college vocational programs.

Following the speech, Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, issued a statement saying there’s concern that the proposal would “move decision-making in higher education from college campuses to Washington, D.C.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former education secretary, said the autonomy of U.S. higher education is what makes it the best in the world, and he’s questioned whether Obama can enforce any plan that shifts federal aid away from colleges and universities without hurting students.

“It’s hard to do without hurting students, and it’s not appropriate to do,” Alexander said. “The federal government has no business doing this.”

President Obama also touted college “report cards” showing college costs and how well graduates do in the job market.

The U.S. Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are working on Know Before You Owe, a financial aid shopping sheet that will let future students estimate their debt, monthly payment and likely ability to repay loans. Parents and students also have requested a breakdown of college costs and information on repayment rates for graduates at each college.

Again, Obama touts community colleges

President Obama touted community colleges as “community career centers” in his State of the Union speech. He proposed training 2 million people for skilled jobs through business-college partnerships, not a new idea.

Obama cited the experience of Jackie Bray, a single mom in North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic. “Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College,” Obama said. “The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training. It paid Jackie’s tuition, then hired her to help operate their plant. I want every American looking for work to have the same opportunity as Jackie did.”

The president also pledged to make a college education affordable, pitching his student aid promises to middle-class families.

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 solution lies in performance-based funding that rewards institutions not for the number of students they enroll, but for how many of their students succeed.

Tennessee is linking 70 percent of higher education appropriations to results and quality rather than enrollment.

Ohio’s public colleges and universities have saved more than $900 million over the last few years through joint purchasing of products and services, Merisotis writes.

Technology also can help students cope with college costs.

Research shows that prospective college students and their families still find it difficult locating information about college, and particularly the availability of financial aid and grants. We recently announced the winners of our NextGen planning grants and now six college access organizations are developing innovative technology solutions that will help students gain easier access to information about paying for college and applying for financial aid within college admission.

Employers must help colleges train skilled workers and help workers pay for advanced training, Merisotis adds.

Students hit hard by textbook costs

Textbook costs are a growing burden for community college students, writes Eric Frank, president and co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, Inc., on the College Affordability blog.

Most community colleges have held down tuition increases in the last decade, according to a recent study (pdf).  Yet textbook prices increased 22 percent over the last four years, quadruple the inflation rate, Frank writes. As a result, many students are not buying the books they need, surveys have found.

Some policy makers are trying to innovate. California will fund the creation of 50 free online college textbooks. Washington State’s Open Course Library offering community-college students affordable online resources.

However, the textbook industry resists change, Frank writes. As sales go down, publishers “raise prices and revise editions faster to flush out used books.”

Disruptive new business models have emerged to change the economics of the $8 billion college textbook business. Educational entrepreneurs with new ideas and technology innovations are offering students a variety of alternatives to high-priced, static course materials.

Options range from textbook rentals to digital textbooks to the more transformative open textbook model, which gives students free, unlimited access to their texts online, and allows instructors to edit the content to match the learning outcomes of their course.

Open textbooks, part of the growing open educational resources (OER) movement, is an easy way to drive down costs and reach under-served students.

Textbook costs must be part of the national conversation on college costs, Frank writes.

Hess: Edu-stories for 2012

President Obama’s re-election campaign will promote Race to the Top and college affordability to woo suburban swing voters, predicts Rick Hess in Ten Edu-Stories We’ll Be Reading in 2012. The Republican nominee will stop attacking the Education Department and talk up education reform to appeal to moderates, he adds.

For-profit college entrepreneurs will look to expand overseas in response to “relentless attacks” by the media, the Obama administration and Sen. Tom Harkin, Hess writes. This year, for-profit colleges began screening out high-risk students in response to “gainful employment” regulations.  Next year, administration officials will complain the for-profits are narrowing access to higher education, he predicts. Future quote: ”Sure, we’ve promised to punish for-profits if they enroll students who don’t graduate or earn enough after completion, but we just assumed they’d find ways to ensure that these students get a degree and a good job.”

Hess also foresees a backlash against anti-bullying campaigns, reminiscent of the “zero tolerance” reaction, and recognition that “flipped” classes — students watch videos at home and work on problem solving in class — don’t work for homework-dodging slackers.

Federal policy pushes up college prices

College tuition is soaring in response to federal policies on student aid and university research funding, argues Arthur M. Hauptman, a higher education financing analyst, in an essay in Inside Higher Ed. Jawboning won’t help, he writes. Neither will top-down regulation.

Pell Grants aren’t a major push factor for college prices, Hauptman believes. But rising spending for Pell may be the reason colleges are shifting their own aid away from the poor and toward middle-class students.

The rise in student loans correlates strongly with the rise in tuition.

Currently, colleges can just maintain or raise their prices and shift the cost-sharing to loans for a broad range of their students. This needs to change. One way to accomplish this would be to require that needy students not receive all their aid in the form of loans.  In effect, this would mean that institutions must offer discounts to their needy students who borrow, thereby reducing their debts.

In addition, students shouldn’t be allowed to borrow excessively for living expenses.

Now, community college students who face $2,000 or $3,000 in tuition and fees are eligible to borrow $10,000 or more to cover their total expenses. This applies at all institutions for students who live at home or off campus. This provision should be changed so that reasonable limits are placed on how much these students can borrow. Ditto for students living in dorms or on meal plans – they should not be allowed to borrow excessively large sums for this form of consumption. Such a change would likely have the beneficial effect of reducing how much institutions charge for these non-education services.

Students can’t use federal grants to pay for remedial courses, pushing them to borrow, Hauptman writes. He suggests students be able to take tuition-free remedial courses offered by providers who’d be paid by the government based on their success at raising student competencies. Colleges would have to compete with private companies for the remedial ed business.

Federal student loan subsidies should be eliminated or limited to Pell Grant recipients, he recommends. “This may seem harsh medicine, but the benefit is very expensive, not well-targeted to those most in need, and serves as an incentive for students to borrow more than they otherwise would.”

Linking loan repayments to post-college income makes sense, Hauptman writes, but it will serve “as a further encouragement to institutions to keep their prices high and let the loan system deal with the consequences.”

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 University, Carnegie Mellon and Berea College.

New financial aid policies to encourage completion were discussed, said Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, who also testified before Rep. Virginia Foxx’s committee on streamlining college costs.

. . . there seemed to be some consensus at the White House meeting that the federal government should develop policies on financial aid, its biggest tool, to spur a higher graduation rates, whether by limiting the number of semesters for which students could receive aid, requiring them to attend full-time, or doling out aid bit by bit to discourage students from dropping out mid-semester, or other approaches.

Requiring full-time attendance to qualify for Pell Grants would have a huge impact on community college students.

College leaders also talked about the importance of linking colleges with K-12 education and the potential for technology to cut costs.

“If we’re going to address the 37 million adults with some college and no degree, we can’t just tweak the existing model,” said Robert W. Mendenhall of Western Governors University, an online nonprofit university. “Mostly in higher education, technology is an add-on cost that doesn’t change the model at all. We need to fundamentally change the faculty role, and use technology to do the teaching.”

Larry D. Shinn, the president of Berea College, did not disagree. “We’re structured in a 19th-century model, but I think we all know now that blended learning, combining technology and classroom learning, can let us educate for less cost,” he said. “The question is how we get there from here.”

“Technology can help us educate more students faster and better.”said Jared L. Cohon, the president of Carnegie Mellon, which has developed online classes used at other universities.

No for-profit colleges made the guest list.

Open-access universities and community colleges have the most experience in controlling costs, writes Jonathan Gibralter, president of Frostburg State in Maryland.

President Obama plans to continue to talk about the problem of college affordability, which was spotlighted by the Occupy protests.

Affordability and transparency

The U.S. Education Department’s new College Affordability and Transparency Center lets prospective students research expensive and low-cost alternatives in all higher education sectors.

For example, here’s a list of public two-year colleges with the highest tuition. Quite a few are in New Hampshire. The cheapest community colleges are all in California.

Starting tomorrow, career and vocational colleges will have to inform prospective students about tuition, fees and typical costs of books and fees, graduates’ median loan debt, the on-time graduation rate, the job placement rate and the occupations the program prepares students to enter.

Colleges and universities will be required to provide students with a net price calculator by late October. The calculator will estimate the actual costs of attendance, taking grants and scholarship aid into account, based on the family’s income.

Unaffordable community colleges

Community colleges are supposed to be “an inexpensive on-ramp to a bachelor’s degree,” but tuition hikes are pricing out low-income students, concludes Affordability and Transfer: Critical to Increasing Baccalaureate Degree Completions by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Tuition at public two-year colleges—traditionally the only affordable option for first-generation, low-income, and traditionally underserved college students—has increased much more rapidly than inflation over the past 20 years. At the same time, nationwide median family income, when adjusted for inflation, has actually declined over the last decade.

States haven’t increased aid enough to keep college affordable, the report finds. Needy students are working more hours and taking fewer classes, making it less likely they’ll ever complete any kind of degree.

President Obama’s higher education goals depend on keeping entry-level college affordable.

“It’s time for state policymakers to focus on affordability,” NCPPHE President Patrick M. Callan said. “If we want better graduation rates, we’ve got to make sure our tuition and financial aid policies measure up.”

The report projects increases in high school graduates in states such as California, Arizona and Texas, where a majority of college students enroll in community colleges.  That will put more pressure on the two-year system.

On the positive side, the report praises several states for making it easier for transfer students to complete a four-year degree.

Florida, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Washington state now offer transfer associate’s degrees, a package of courses whose credits are fully accepted toward four-year institutions’ general-education requirements.

California is creating a transfer degree program that guarantees junior status to those transferring to the state university system.

City University of New York’s board has voted to simplify transfers and standardize core curricula across the 23-campus system, despite faculty opposition.

The NCPPHE report’s recommendations to states include:

Stabilize rates of tuition increases, taking family income in each state into account, and increase need-based financial aid.

Ensure that tuition and student financial aid policies do not discourage full-time attendance at two- and four-year colleges.

Make financial aid available for transfer students so they can attend full time, and for part-time students so they can keep making progress toward a degree while they work to support their families.

Hispanic students are especially dependent on access to community colleges. Nationwide, 50 percent of Hispanic students, 31 percent of blacks and 28 percent of whites start at community colleges.

Graduation rates for community college students vary enormously from state to state, the report finds. In Nevada, only 20 percent of students who start at a community college complete a two-year or four-year degree. The completion rate is 74 percent in North Dakota and 65 percent in Vermont. Nationwide, 33 percent complete a degree.