Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
California’s community colleges have cut as much as 20 percent of courses since 2008, driving enrollment to its lowest point in two decades, concludes a new report. Enrollment fell from 2.9 million students in 2008-09 to 2.4 million students in 2011-12.
Encouraging wait-listed students to take online courses is a “massively bad idea,” writes a community college professor. Poorly prepared students can’t handle MOOCs.
The Minerva Project, which promises an elite, rigorous, all-online college education, is drawing attention. Ben Nelson, who founded the Snapfish photo web site, sees Minerva as an alternative to the Ivy League. Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard, will chair the advisory board, which will include Bob Kerrey, a former senator and head of the New School in New York, and Pat Harker, president of the University of Delaware and a former dean of the Wharton School.
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“Minerva aspires to reinvent everything, from the business model and the curriculum to the way in which teaching is delivered,” writes The Economist.
“I don’t want or need to disrupt Harvard. I care about the kid who should have got into Harvard but didn’t,” says Nelson. Minerva is aiming at the “children of a Wipro middle manager from India, or a Foxconn line operator from China,” says Nelson.
The curriculum will focus on skills rather than traditional academic studies and be based on four pillars: critical thinking, use of data, understanding complex systems and leading through effective communication. The course content will be outsourced, drawing from what is readily available online and through a “Minerva Prize” competition to get leading educators to design classes. It will be delivered via the internet to classes of 25 students and a professor will then engage them in debate. Students will be located in several cities around the world, and be expected to move to a different location each year.
Nelson says it will be harder to get into Minerva than the Ivy League, but that assumes lots of people will be willing to pay $20,000 a year to watch videos, chat online and hang out with fellow Minervans. (If that $20,000 doesn’t cover room and board, Minerva will be no bargain.) The venture is for profit.
It sounds a bit squishy, writes Dan Willingham, but courses will be demanding, and “students who do not perform well will (gasp) fail the course.”
California college students could bypass wait lists and earn credits online under a bill introduced by a Democratic legislative leader. State colleges and universities would be required to accept credits from faculty-approved online courses for about 50 high-demand, lower-level classes with long wait lists.
Nearly two-thirds of community college students place into remedial math. Half of students in Statway — Carnegie’s intensive, yearlong developmental math pilot –passed a college statistics course in the second semester. By contrast, only 5.9 percent of non-Statway remedial students at the same community colleges earned college math credit in their first year; that rose to 15.1 percent in two years.
Sugata Mitra once put a computer in a hole in a wall in an Indian slum and let street kids teach themselves to use it. Now a Newcastle University professor, Mitra won the 2013 TED prize — worth about $1 million — to develop what he calls School in the Cloud, reports Time. “In nine months a child left alone with a computer would reach the same standard as an office professional in the West,” Mitra said in after accepting the prize.
Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) are designed to capitalize on children’s curiosity. He plans to hire “a global network of retired teachers who Skype into ‘classrooms’ all over the world but especially in the most remote and underserved areas” to help groups of children learn. It’s the “granny cloud.”
“The role of the mediator is to ask the right questions and listen to the children bragging about what they did,” Mitra says.
. . . “The model is you have eight children and one computer. Not one computer per child,” he says. And although he seems to advocate a very hands-off approach to teaching, he did say that his method would be supplemental to traditional schooling, not a replacement. ”There are going to be 10 different ways to teach the next generation. I have touched the tip of the iceberg of one.”
His Self Organizing Learning Environment toolkit can be downloaded for free.
College statistics students in a hybrid class — online instruction plus a one-hour face-to-face session — performed slightly better than the control group and spent 1.7 fewer hours per week on the course, write William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, Kelly A. Lack and Thomas I. Nygren in Education Next.
“The effect of the hybrid-format course did not vary when controlling for race/ethnicity, gender, parental education, primary language spoken, score at the standardized pretest, hours worked for pay, or college GPA,” the authors report.
Half the students who participated come from families with incomes less than $50,000 and half are first-generation college students. Less than half are white, and the group is about evenly divided between students with college GPAs above and below 3.0.
Carnegie Mellon designed the hybrid course, which was taught at public universities in New York and Maryland.
Students in the control group received three to four hours of face-to-face instruction each week.
Moving to the hybrid model could cut the costs by 19 percent to 57 percent, depending on whether professors do all the teaching or assign sections to teaching assistants, the authors estimate.
Digital learning is expanding access to higher education, but may be widening the achievement gap. Students who have trouble learning in a traditional classroom have even more trouble learning online, concludes a study of community college students in Washington state. For older students, women and high achievers, the difference between online learning and face-to-face learning is small.
To meet soaring demand and control college costs, California colleges and universities will expand online courses.
Also: How to avoid college ripoffs.
In The Right Mix, Education Sector’s Susan Headden profiles a charter high school in Los Angeles that’s using blended learning to personalize instruction — despite having 48 students in a class. The Alliance Tennenbaum Family Technology High School “combines online and traditional instruction and allows students to learn in three different ways,” she writes.
On this particular fall day, 16 students are getting traditional in-person instruction in Algebra I from teacher Wendy Chaves; roughly the same number are doing math problems online; and still others are gathered in clusters of four tutoring each other. No matter where they are in the rotation, they see the student-to-teacher ratio as what it effectively is—an ideal 16-to-1.
Students work at their own pace, Headden writes. “With the software taking up chores like grading math quizzes and flagging bad grammar, teachers are freed to do what they do best—guide, engage, and inspire.”
Tennenbaum’s BLAST model breaks the day into two-hour blocks with students spending 40 minutes at each station.
Students report to stations based on what regular pre-tests have shown they can do. The low performers go right to direct instruction with the teacher, the high performers start with the collaborative session, and those in the middle start with online work.
Let’s say the English lesson is about effective use of literary devices. Students might start with a teacher-led lesson on metaphor, personification and the like, followed by an online tutorial on the MY Access! writing program. They write a short essay, which the computer immediately scores for mechanics and grammar. If the student has too many mistakes, he takes another tutorial and writes the essay again. He sets himself a deadline (say, all clean by the third draft), and when he has met it, submits the piece to the teacher for feedback on meatier qualities like content and organization. Finally, in the collaborative session, students critique each other’s work, making suggestions for improvement based on what they have learned from the teacher and online.
Students don’t move ahead until they show mastery. Online programs let students review a lesson until they understand it. The software analyzes keystrokes to collect data on each student’s learning.
Tennenbaum has excellent teachers, but mediocre software, says Principal Michelle Tubbs. “There is no A-plus software out there,” Tubbs says. “Most of it is C-plus or below.”
Technology lets the school hire fewer teachers, but the savings are wiped out by technology costs. However, once the school reaches full enrollment, the technology is expected to pay for itself.
“When computer-assisted learning fails, it is usually because technology has been deployed as an add-on,” writes Headden. “BLAST shows that for technology to make a difference in student learning, it must be integral to instruction, and it must come with humans attached.”
Public Impact’s new Opportunity Culture Charter School Network hopes to use technology to enable excellent teachers to reach more students. Four new schools plan different approaches to creating an “opportunity culture” for teachers: Foundations College Prep (Chicago), Ingenuity Prep (Washington, D.C.), Touchstone Education (Newark) and Venture Academy (Minneapolis).
Some students may get college credit for passing massive online open courses now that the American Council on Education (ACE) has certified five Coursera MOOCs taught by university professors.
But it’s up to universities to decide whether to grant credit. Duke won’t even let its own students get credit for the ACE-certified Bioelectricity and Genetics courses taught by Duke professors.
Don’t sneer at the low-cost online degree, writes a correspondence-school graduate who went on to earn a PhD, work as a professor and run a think tank. For many people, the choice is cost-effective higher education or none at all.
The hot way to earn low-cost college credits: Take a free online course and pass a “challenge exam.”
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