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January 12 - January 27, 2018
online courses have achieved average cognitive outcome parity with their face-to-face counterparts.
These courses have been shown to achieve cognitive learning outcomes comparable tothose of traditional classroom-based courses.
With each passing year, the learning preferences of these digital natives, raised in a world of texting, Facebooking, and computer gaming, will favor the online educators.
That is true of DeVry University. Of DeVry's roughly $1.5 billion 2010 operating budget, nearly $225 million, or 15 percent, went to advertising its programs and name.
All students were required to take at least one online class to graduate.
By 1999, the college had mapped out fifty-one “fast track” majors, with emphasis on highly enrolled ones such as English and business, which would allow a student to make progress to graduation during not only fall and winter but also during the traditional summer break; these included articulation agreements with state universities in Idaho and Utah where students could continue in pursuit of bachelor's and master's degrees.
Faculty rank will not be a part of the academic structure of the new four-year institution.
In 2010, McKinsey would find that those faculty members made an average of $92,439 in total compensation, compared with $80,867 for their institutional peers.11
The faculty would engage in scholarship “focused,” as Bednar said, “on the processes of learning and teaching.”
Hofstra and Northeastern universities both eliminated football at the end of the 2009 season. At Hofstra, $4.5 million was thus freed for other purposes, including need-based student aid.12
In 2010, the University of California, Berkeley eliminated five sports, including baseball, affecting some 20 percent of its student athletes and thirteen coaches, but producing a much needed savings of $4 million in the year immediately following.13
The entire cost of the new activities program, including the non-athletic categories, was funded at one-third the cost of the old athletics budget.
By 2009, the university sponsored 192 unique activity programs that were run by more than 7,500 students.
Hoping to avoid this problem, the BYU-Idaho team tasked with creating the internship program recommended that an internship be required as part of each integrated major. Though academic credit would be granted, the requirement would be fulfilled in a student's semester away from classes; a student attending the spring and summer terms and the fall semester, for example would perform the internship in winter. Along with this recommendation, the university implemented the team's proposal to create an internship office and establish formal relationships with major employers in a dozen “hub
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The idea found especially warm reception with the major accounting firms, which could plan on having BYU-Idaho students working not only in the summer but also in the much busier fall and winter seasons, when most clients close their books and finalize their taxes.
Many students failed to see the value of an internship at all. As the internship program matured, the emphasis shifted from creating new employer relationships to convincing students to take advantage of the opportunities already available.
arguing that a great institution needs “fresh eyes” at least every decade.
“raise substantially the quality of every aspect of the experience our students have,”
“Don't take courses. Take professors.”
To launch the effort, he convened a daylong meeting of the faculty. The result of their discussion was a list of more than two hundred principles. That list was turned over to a committee of volunteers who worked for more than a year to aggregate and whittle the two hundred principles down to half a dozen.
the Learning Model included the five principles and a proposed cycle of (1) preparing to learn, (2) teaching one another, and (3) pondering and proving one's learning.
students are responsible for their own learning and for teaching one another.
Christensen argued that great teaching not only engages students but makes them partners with the instructor in the learning process.18 That partnership requires a teaching and learning “contract” running both between instructor and student and also among the students themselves.19 The contract includes the course syllabus, with its assignments and grading standards, but goes much further. It embodies the expectation that students and instructors will come to class prepared to teach one another in an environment of mutual trust and respect.
Instructors become responsible for dual competency, mastery of both the subject matter and the art of conveying it for maximum student learning.
some faculty worried that putting more of the teaching responsibility on students would lead to what some called “ignorance swapping.”
The team organized seminars and developed a learning resource website that included tools for creating cases and problems, concept tests, and systems of peer mentoring.22
the difference between teaching and creating learning experiences.”
As adoption of the Learning Model progressed, there was also the converse problem: teachers relying too much on students to instruct one another without first having conveyed enough foundational information or having established the necessary framework for class discussion.
The first four items on the BYU-Idaho course evaluation form read: 1. I was prepared for class. 2. I arrived at class on time. 3. I was an active participant in online or face-to-face class discussions. 4. I sought opportunities to share my learning with others outside of class.
Maryellen Weimer, Professor Emeritus of Teaching and Learning at the Pennsylvania State University, has documented both the benefits of what she calls “learner-centered teaching” and the reasons that many faculty members and students resist it. Some students, she has found, like being spoon-fed and criticize instructors who use anything other than “teaching-as-telling” methods; they particularly resist pedagogical changes that create grading uncertainty. Faculty members, for whom the transition to learner-centered teaching initially means more work, and who worry about the risk of failing to
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He had observed at close range Larry Summer's unsuccessful attempt to overhaul Harvard's Core.
Still, he felt that Lowell, Conant, Bok, and Summers were wise to put Harvard College's General Education curriculum among their leading curricular priorities.
a teaching principle enunciated by Charles Eliot at his inauguration and cited by Bok: “The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through. A mind must work to grow.”30
according to students, lectures consumed nearly 80 percent of class time.
Clark had suggested that this ratio be inverted, with professors lecturing only 20 percent of the time.32
Both through heavyweight teams that operated for a year or more and also through shorter-term initiatives, he and his colleagues sought to systematically improve students' experiences with representatives of the university.
simple as screening form letters for courteousness; the bursar's office, for example, was encouraged to find ways to show increased respect and concern in billing notices, even in the case of past due accounts. Likewise, telephone operators and office receptionists (most of them student employees) received etiquette training. The standard for answering inquiries went beyond being respectful and well informed about one's own sphere of operation. Front-line representatives of the university were taught to stay with inquirers until their questions were answered, even if that meant escorting them
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When applied effectively, the Learning Model, with its discussion emphasis, allowed for effective instruction of at least ninety students, the size of a first-year MBA section at the Harvard Business School. Clark set the limit on Foundations courses at eighty-five, with a targeted average of thirty to forty.
From the beginning of his tenure at BYU-Idaho, Clark had advised his administrators to apply the following rule: “Take the amount of communication you think is necessary and double it; then, take that amount and triple it.”
“administrative monologue”
The university opened its doors to anyone with a high school grade point average of 2.0 (a C average) and an ACT score of 16 (the equivalent of 790 on the SAT);
hybrid online learning allows students to choose among multiple paths for achieving a specified outcome.
they made student-to-student interaction an essential element of the courses they created.
They found additional inspiration and guidance in a mounting body of scholarly evidence that sometimes the best learning occurs peer-to-peer.
To Mazur's chagrin, administering Hestenes's tests of conceptual understanding to his Harvard undergraduates revealed that about half couldn't apply what he had taught them.
Looking at the test, one student asked, “How should I answer these questions? According to what you taught me? Or according to the way I usually think about these things?”
“That was the moment,” Mazur would later say, “I fell out of my ivory tower. It was then that I began to consider new ways of teaching.”12
Rio Salado College, one of the eight schools featured in Winning by Degrees.
A “block calendar” offers 48 start dates each year, with a combination of 16-week and 8-week courses; an automated learning management system, RioLearn, allows students to take the first seven days of study to choose between the 16- and 8-week paths.
BYU-Idaho's full-time faculty members also participated in the screening of specially recruited and trained online adjunct instructors.
