Closure rates of small colleges and universities will triple in the coming years, and mergers will double. Those are the predictions of a Moody’s Investor Service report released Friday that highlights a persistent inability among small colleges to increase revenue, which could lead as many as 15 institutions a year to shut their doors for … Continue reading
Filed under Distance Learning …
University-Run Boot Camps Offer Students Marketable Skills — but Not Course Credit
Level, a venture that offers students courses in data analytics, has a motto of sorts. It’s written in large letters across the program’s website: “Real skills. Real experience. Two months.” The motto sounds a lot like the boot-camp style of education offered by companies like General Assembly. But Level, a product of Northeastern University, is neither … Continue reading
3 Tips for Handling Discussions in Online Courses
I’ve been teaching a large online class for the first time this semester, and as the course involves looking at a number of challenge interactive works and games I put a lot of emphasis on discussion forums and critical debate. However, discussion forums of this kind present a lot of potential problems in an online … Continue reading
Overcoming Online Persistence Challenges With The Trojan Café (Part 2)
One of the first ideas that came out of the planning phase was to create student forums that would allow interaction between users. Students were already utilizing Blackboard discussion boards to meet course requirements, therefore the infrastructure was ideal for hosting casual student forums. Forums are moderated by staff and have been a significant attraction … Continue reading
Overcoming Online Persistence Challenges With The Trojan Café (Part 1)
Vincent Tinto’s conceptual “Schema for Dropout from College” correlated academic and social engagement with student success and learning. However, several factors make social engagement more difficult for non-traditional, online students. They don’t have the opportunity to participate in social engagement and institutional extracurricular activities that are afforded to traditional, on-campus students. Consequently, online students often … Continue reading
Going Online, Being Digital
It’s taken decades, but educational technology is finally beginning to change the way we think about education itself — not just the way we deliver it. Twenty-four years ago, I taught my first writing course in a classroom kitted out with 25 computers. A few years later, I team taught my first online and hybrid … Continue reading
That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket
…What kind of boss hires a thwarted actress for a business-to-business software startup? Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s 42-year-old cofounder and CEO, whose estimated double-digit stake in the company could be worth $300 million or more. He’s the proud holder of an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Canada’s University of Victoria and a master’s degree from Cambridge … Continue reading
Liberty University Owes Rapid Growth to Federal Student Loans
Liberty University is not just your average school down the road. The once small Christian college founded in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell now has the largest student body of any private nonprofit university in the country. With over 70,000 students, the university has become a destination for political candidates seeking the GOP’s more … Continue reading
Community Colleges Coming Live to California Prisons
Bryan Hirayama, an assistant professor at Bakersfield Community College, made a little bit of history this year. He became one of the first community college professors to teach inside a California state prison in roughly the last 20 years. Hirayama’s communications course at Kern Valley State Prison last spring led the way for hundreds of … Continue reading
How ‘Elite’ Universities Are Using Online Education
After years of skepticism, higher education’s upper class has finally decided that online learning is going to play an important role in its future. But what will that role be? Recently, conversations about “elite” online education have revolved around the free online courses, aka MOOCs, which Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of other top universities … Continue reading
