College Degrees Without Going to Class

More than one-fourth of all college students are taking at least one online class. In its "Room for Debate" series, The New York Times recently asked a number of commentators "Who benefits most from online courses — students or colleges? Are online classes as educationally effective as in-classroom instruction? Should more post-secondary education take place online?" Respondents include: Greg von Lehmen, provost and chief academic officer at University of Maryland University College (as good as classroom lessons); Robert Zemsky, professor of education and chairman of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania (another false gold rush); Anya Kamenetz, author of the forthcoming DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (better and cheaper); Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (making the personal connection); Karen Swan, James Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Illinois Springfield (flexibility and time); and Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (needs more tech support). A good discussion.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

How Administrators Are Collaborating On Line

From shared working documents, through online review of online student applications and web conferencing, to shared spreadsheets with "chat" capability, almost everyone is now working and collaborating virtually. (Some SCUP working groups save money by collaborating using Elluminate.) This University Business article by Ann McClure is a nice review of the different ways a number of campuses are collaborating virtually on administrative tasks. It is blurbed, "Collaboration tools allow administrators to work together even if they can’t get together."

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

'Belting' Technology Users: White Belts to Black Belts (Mark Milliron)

SCUPers know the work of Mark Milliron well. He was a hit as a SCUP–42 plenary speaker (Remember the guy in the gorilla suit walking backwards through the basketball players?) and he will once again (This is brand new information!) address SCUPers in plenary session on Monday, July 12 in Minneapolis at SCUP–45.

Some may not know that he posts regularly on a Catalytic Conversations blog. This fairly recent post is about eliminating the "digital native" and "digital immigrant" labels from technology users and, instead, identifying users based on mastery levels as in the martial arts:

We all know technology white belts—beginners who either want to or have to begin their instruction and are taking their first steps. They’re awkward, they make mistakes regularly, and they can be quite dangerous. Black belt martial artists will quickly tell you it’s far more dangerous to spar an untested white belt than a trained fighter with control. White belts often swing wildly and are less aware of the power of their strikes. The world is full of white belt technology users. From the hasty forwarding of obvious scam emails to posting strange comments on your Facebook wall to excitedly responding to requests for bank information from Nigerian royalty, they’re not hard to spot.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Top Tech Trends from the American Library Association

The 'Top Tech Trends' session at a mid-Winter ALA meeting convened five experts to share the latest trends and observations about what they call issues "affecting patron access and services." Joshe Hadro reports on it in Library Journal. Almost anyone would find this report interesting, but it is especially useful for those who do variations on learning space design. The categories discussed included:

• Discovery Systems;
• User Experience Across the Breadth of Library-Based Interactions;
• The Need to Embrace 'Mobile';
• Augmented Reality;
• End of Apps: "2010 is the year that the app dies."; and
• The Reinvention of the Book.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Rebooted Computer Labs Offer Savings for Campuses and Ambiance for Students

Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.

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What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT.

Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’

It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works.

That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed.

During a recent tour of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, we noted the plethora of 'breakout' rooms which resemble the spaces this article describes as being created from what used to be computer labs.

More than 11 percent of colleges and universities are either phasing out public computer labs or planning to do so, according to this year's survey of college technology leaders by the Campus Computing Project, released last month. At colleges that have not pulled the plug on their labs, nearly 20 percent are reviewing the option. This is the first year the Campus Computing Project has asked the question.

UVa will phase out computer labs like this one, at Thornton Hall, and let students log in to the campus network on their own machines to use expensive software.

Institutions agree that computer labs, much like student centers and libraries before them, are due for an extreme makeover. That is why several technology officials contacted by The Chronicle believe in creating work spaces that hardly resemble the computer labs of the past.

These new spaces might be lounges filled with modular furniture and plasma televisions; virtual labs that give remote laptops access to software; or bigger, better computer rooms with state-of-the-art machines and pleasing architecture that can act as de facto student centers. Fortunately for young caffeine addicts, nearly all officials interviewed said they planned to let students drink and eat while typing away—something that has long been forbidden in traditional computer

Boomers and Technology: An Extended Conversation

Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.

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What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT.

Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’

It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works.

That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed.

AARP and Microsoft held series of extended focus group-like sessions with a bunch of Baby Boomers in May 2009. The focus was on technology use and adoption. The results are the white paper, Boomers and Technology: An Extended Conversation. They'll be of interest to many SCUPers not only because many SCUPers are Boomers, but because of what they reveal about a continuing education market for Boomers as they continue to learn as they age:

Boomers are ready for more technology. They’re actually more likely than those 18-49 — by a margin of 59 percent to 55 percent4 — to agree with the statement “Technology will help me live a fuller life.” And indeed, boomers’ ideas for new technology center around health, communications and the home. Said one Phoenix participant: “How about a phone that has a feedback device to tell you if you’re out of line: like you’re drinking too much, or you’re a little overweight, you’d better cut this out. It keeps reminding you, and when you finally straighten out it gives some positive feedback.” Another participant immediately added: “Or the insurance company gives you the cell phone and it lowers your rates if you behave.”

MANAGING ONLINE EDUCATION: The 2009 WCET-Campus Computing Project Survey of Online Education (22 Oct 2009)

This survey contains more than can be summarized here, but you should go download the executive summary and possibly watch the archived webcast. The bottom line is that online education programs are marked by:

• Rising Enrollments,
• Unsure Profits,
• Organizational Transitions, and
• Higher Fees, and Tech Training for Faculty

The full abstract for the survey report is:

Enrollments are up and rising, profits are often uncertain, and organizational arrangements are in transition according to a new national survey of senior campus officials responsible for managing online and distance education programs conducted by WCET and The Campus Computing Project. Additionally, the new survey data suggest that students enrolled in online programs may pay higher fees than their on-campus counterparts, that many campuses have mandatory training on their faculty before sending them “into the web” to teach online courses, and that quality still looms as a large question for online education programs.

Three questions about enrollments indicate that campuses participating in the survey have experienced healthy gains in good economic times and bad – and that campus officials expect enrollments in their online programs to continue to rise in the coming years. Fully 94 percent of the survey respondents – typically the senior campus officer responsible for online or distance education programs – report enrollment gains in their online programs between 2006 and 2009; almost half (48 percent) report online enrollments rose by 15 percent or more during this period. Similarly, asked about past year numbers (fall 2008 vs. fall 2009), 95 percent report rising enrollment in their online programs; almost two-fifths (38 percent) report a one-year gain in online enrollments of 15 percent or better. Finally, when asked to project enrollments in their online programs over the next three years (2009-2011), 98 percent of the institutions participating in the survey affirm enrollment gains: almost half (47 percent) expect online enrollments grow by 15 percent or more over the next three years.

For more information, please download the accompanying PDF copy of the executive summary and the handout from the WCET Conference presentation on October 22nd. Also available below is the video webcast of the WCET conference presentation.

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009—Key Findings

ECAR studies are proprietary, but the executive summaries are often (as is this one) useful on their own. If you are at a subscribing institution (Check, you might be surprised.) then you may be able to download this entire report.

Like the clothes in their suitcases, the technologies students bring to campus change every year. Occasionally, the change can be dramatic. It’s hard to believe, but when the college seniors we surveyed for this year’s study began their education four years ago, netbooks, iPhones, and the Nintendo Wii had yet to hit the market. When they went home for the holidays during their freshman year, some returned with a brand new game called Guitar Hero for the PlayStation 2, and some may have been lucky enough to score a $250 4-GB iPod nano or an ultrathin digital camera. Today’s freshmen have mobile phones that hold more songs than that 4-GB nano, and they can use them to take digital photos and videos of the same quality as the $400 camera today’s seniors got for their high school graduation.

The same forces of change apply to what college students are doing with their technology. Their written language has adapted to the technology of text messages and 140-character “tweets,” and Andy Warhol’s famous prediction about everyone eventually having 15 minutes of fame is being proved by the proliferation of social networking and YouTube. In fact, the pervasive uploading of content to blogs, video sites, wikis, and personal Facebook and MySpace pages suggests that “15 megabytes of fame” may be a more appropriate prophecy.

The New Guys in Assessment Town: Companies

Pat Hutchings, writing in Change magazine, broadly explores the new world of for-profit consultants and technology teams.

[T]here’s a new kind of help on the way, from outside the institution. Of course many campuses have engaged external consultants to jumpstart the assessment process; that’s not new. And neither is the use of tests and instruments designed by others. What’s new is an influx of for-profit assessment providers offering tools and services that promise, variously, to make assessment easier, faster, less intrusive, more useful, and/or more cost effective.

Some of these firms were founded in the last two or three years and are just getting started. Others have a longer, already prosperous history of work in other aspects of education (like course management) and are now moving into the assessment niche. A few have their roots in other industries—like quality assurance in health care—and have recently added student assessment to the mix. Some are run by academics or former academics and some by people with a corporate background.

Expanding the Canon: Original Research and Content Creation

If your job doesn't take you directly into the classroom, then even though you may work on campus, you may not realize how in some parts of the academic arena, the use of technology has drastically changed what the classroom experience is like. This article could be an eye-opener.

Learning and Technology — “In That Order”

We've had many SCUP Links from Malcolm Brown over the years. This is another good one, where he reports on some in depth discussions with thoughtful students about the use of technology in learning: 

Over the past several years, I have been impressed by how fruitful it can be to solicit students' ideas when making plans for technology in support of learning. Judging from those experiences, I thought it might be worthwhile to construct a New Horizons column from a "geographically distributed" focus-group session, inviting students from a variety of institutions to suggest what educators should be thinking about as we plan our learning environments for the next two to four years. With the help of colleagues, I was able to enlist the help of fourteen students, all of whom responded with thoughtful contributions, summarized here.

In sum, the sentiments most often articulated were: (1) too much or unfettered technology is bad and directly hinders learning; and (2) the use of technology should not come at the expense of personal interaction both in and outside the classroom.

Perhaps the most succinct formulation of these ideas was: "I believe the most important thing to keep in mind about learning and technology is that they should be considered in that order" (CV).

Seven Things You Should Know About Cloud Computing

EDUCAUSE has published another in its "Seven Things" series of explicatory briefs, Seven Things You Should Know About Cloud Computing. Each has been a valuable resource and an excellent way to quickly get up to speed on something you might need to know about. Cloud computing has an impact on IT planning, academic planning, and resource and budget planning: 

Cloud computing is the delivery of scalable IT resources over the Internet, as opposed to hosting and operating those resources locally, such as on a college or university network. Those resources can include applications and services, as well as the infrastructure on which they operate. By deploying IT infrastructure and services over the network, an organization can purchase these resources on an as-needed basis and avoid the capital costs of software and hardware. With cloud computing, IT capacity can be adjusted quickly and easily to accommodate changes in demand. Cloud computing also allows IT providers to make IT costs transparent and thus match consumption of IT services to those who pay for such services. Operating in a cloud environment requires IT leaders and staff to develop different skills, such as managing contracts, overseeing integration between in-house and outsourced services, and mastering a different model of IT budgets.

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

Anya Kamenetz, writing in Fast Company magazine, examines the confluence of Web 2.0 and the Open Education movement in light of some entrepreneurs who think they can transform the business of higher education: 

Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can't easily improve efficiency. 

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.

Ten Things I No Longer Believe About Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology

For more than this decade, the TLT Group has been at the forefront in experimenting with and learning from technology tools to transform teaching and learning. Steve Erhmann recently began a series of essays soliciting responses to which he will reply, about the ten things that - after so many years of paying attention - he no longer believes about teaching and learning with technology. "The first five weeks deal with five specific rewards for investing in technology (visibility and the resources it can attract, better learning, larger enrollment, cost savings, and time savings). Let's start with what I once believed about buying hot new technology in order to attract resources by making your program more visible."

Designing Choreographies for the "New Economy of Attention"

This is a dense resource that will require some . . . attention . . . but well worth the read:

"This experiment reinforced our assumption that the successful implementation of communication channels should always be embedded in the physical organization of space. Choreographing attention is physical as much as it is cerebral. Digital backchannels have to be designed into space, not in spite of it."

Read on:
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000049.html

Practice and Pedagogy of Architecture Must Change?

Minoca Ponce de Leon, dean of the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, writes about how the pedagogy and practice of architecture must be transformed: "Our teaching methodologies and the predominant model of studio instruction has remained virtually unchanged for more than 100 years. More importantly, in the last 20 years architecture has stagnated in the midst of architectural research that focused too closely on topics that proved to have little consequence."

"Today, with accelerated advances in digital fabrication technologies and their widespread application, I believe that we find ourselves in the midst of a second digital revolution. Not unlike the 1980s, as we argue over the significance of these “tools,” digital fabrication is fundamentally changing construction methods and transforming the building industry. This second time around, however, we have a remarkable opportunity to take a more critical stance toward technology and articulate its potential for social engagement, or else we risk perpetuating the divides that threaten to limit the relevance of architecture to the actual circumstances of the building industry—as the current economic downturn has demonstrated.

Other fields are wrestling with these very same issues. Not only will architecture be best served by entering into a conversation with these disciplines, but architecture will best serve and participate in the construction of culture. Much of what lies at the core of our discipline is already playing a central role in the redefinition of other fields. It is telling that design is now an integral part of the curriculum at top business schools across the country. Engineering departments have developed coursework around notions of creative practices, while schools of social work and public policy have aligned social activism with entrepreneurship and design thinking. The value of design has increased in all aspects of society, at the same time that the pertinence of architecture has decreased. By remaining hermetic and, dare I say, self-absorbed, we run the risk of relegating to other fields the cultural power of design as an agent for social change."

Read more here:
http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=3464

The iCampus Technology-Enabled Active Learning Project at MIT

Want to learn about some of MIT's leading-edge learning and technology pilots? In Innovate: Journal of Online Education, James Morrison interviews Phillip Long about MIT's "iCampus," a leading-edge collaboration with Microsoft which began in 1999. Long says that the most important results came from uses of technology to facilitate team-oriented active learning projects. MIT is now moving iLabs to a number of locations with a funding consortium to extend its life.

"Okay. That sounds reasonable. People have been putting experiments on the Internet since the Internet came into being; there's nothing novel about that. The problem has been that in the past, they chose idiosyncratic strategies for doing so. It was a cottage industry in that regard; we had not yet thought carefully about how to create an architecture, design, and tools that were easily replicable and sustainable. Every faculty member chose what to do based on what he/she knew—for example, a certain programming language or a particular design approach—and that instructor put something up and it was great; it worked as long as the graduate student who was there when it was built stayed.

MIT went down that same path. We built a bunch of experiments and then put them online using these same idiosyncratic methods. And sure enough after a short period of time, they all started to bit rot in one fashion or another. Each time we put one up, we gained very little in terms of benefit for implementing the next one. We thought, "There's got to be a better way." iCampus gave us the funding to explore that through a project called iLab. Then Hal Abelson, a colleague, made the point that we should be thinking about this from an architectural point of view; that is, we should be thinking about how to use standardized services that all experiments can use to meet common needs."

Read the full article here:
http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=666&action=article

Horns of the Dilemma for Faculty: Legacy Demands and Technology Expectations

Every knowledge-based profession is struggling with legacy demands and new technology expectations, and including higher education faculty. In Campus Technology magazine, Trent Batson writes about the dilemmas posed particularly by Web 2.0 technologies. The comments section is lively and entertaining.

"Amidst the Web 2.0 tsunami, life on campus goes on as normal. Faculty members are still expected to publish in traditional journals, still expected to meet their classes in rooms equipped with chalkboards and designed for lectures, and still expected by their students to tell them what they should know so they can write it on paper during a test. Where's the tsunami?"


"Granted, dorms have high-speed wireless, labs have StarTrek technologies, and the business side of the campus is run with software. But, then, oh yes, there are the classrooms that look the same and support the same activities as 100 years ago. The business side of campus had to be quick to change to stay competitive and to run the enterprise more efficiently and up to standards. But the actual main business of the campus, the educational culture and its various instantiations, is surprisingly atavistic."

The full article and commentary can be read here:
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/05/06/horns-of-the-dilemma-for-faculty.aspx

Google Searching Tip

Here in the SCUP office, we often get calls from members trying to find something. Sometimes they have a paragraph or two from an original manuscript or article, but either don't know where it was published or how to access it. We've discovered a great secret: Take a fairly distinct sentence from the document, put it into Google search with quotation marks around it, and you'll often find a link directly to the original, or a copy someone else has made available on line.

For example, you might have a paragraph from an article that includes this sentence: " Investment managers faced several unexpected jolts, including the credit freeze, subprime mortgage meltdown, and slowing U.S. and world economies." A Google search for those terms, in that order, kept together by quotation marks yields a strike on the very first listed link. It's a recent Business Officer article about the current trajectory of institutional endowments.

Seriously, this searching trick is not to be underestimated.

Research, Innovation, and Technology Transfer: Maybe We're Not Doing Such a Great Job?

Stephen Quake is a professor at Stanford University and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He writes, in a guest column for The New York Times, about inefficiencies in technology leverage, transfer, and licensing—and says it's broke, let's fix it:

In some quarters of academia there is a deep longing for a return to the ivory tower – that time when the university was disconnected from commercial interests and faculty members were unsoiled by the financial rewards that can be associated with their research.

I must admit that in some respects I share that nostalgia – it would be good for society if there were institutions to turn to for unbiased opinions on the questions that face society. However, it is also true that universities have turned away from the ivory tower model and have embraced a more engaged role in the commercial development of the discoveries of their faculty members.

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Today’s university faculty is a diverse community of ivory tower researchers alongside inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. I will discuss two consequences of this: first, what happens when a faculty member has a financial interest in his research, and second, how faculty inventions are commercialized.

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Although some may still pine for the ivory tower, today’s universities are a swirling cauldron of research that cover the gamut from the esoteric to the applied, and function not only as scholarly institutions but also as engines of innovation. Universities should embrace their role as technology creators and maximize this process by facilitating the efforts of their faculty members. Our country’s economic future could depend on it.