In celebration of Earth Day, and in the spirit of giving more than just one day to the consideration of our planet and our impact on it, this is the first in a series of articles which I’ll post this week and into next related to sustainability in higher education.

In September 1962 Rachel Carson published her groundbreaking work, Silent Spring, documenting the negative impact of pesticides on the environment, specifically on birds.  The book received nationwide acclaim and landed on the New York Times best-seller list where it stayed for 31 weeks.  In 1962, the New York Times wrote of Carson and Silent Spring, “’She tries to scare the living daylights out of us and, in large measure, succeeds.’” The editors of Discover Magazine recently included Silent Spring among its list of the 25 greatest science books of all time.  Prior to Carson’s book, environmentalism and sustainability were lofty ideals that had very little concrete application and brought even less sense of collective urgency.  As a result of Carson’s book, however, tangible actions were taken (the banning of the harmful pesticide DDT).  Carson proved to us all that even the voice of one individual can make a difference and with her voice, given to us through her work, Silent Spring, the modern environmental movement was born. 

Through various fits and starts, the American environmental movement has continued to gain momentum.  The passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1970 was a promising step in the right direction and represented the world’s first national policy on the environment.  The NEPA met with resistance in the United States, however, but sparked a larger movement and environmentalism as a discipline and practice began to spread across the globe.  National efforts to address environmental problems including climate change became more commonplace and the United Nations established its Environment Programme in 1972 as a result of the UN Conference on the Human Environment.  In recent years, despite international criticism regarding the United States’ stance on several international environmental treaties (most notably the Kyoto Protocol) Americans are beginning to see sustainability featured more prominently in their daily lives.  Addressing what is arguably the world’s most pressing collective issue will take more than a conscious recycling effort.  We must realize that negative changes to the environment impact every aspect of our lives and must be addressed in a holistic and comprehensive fashion.  One sector of American life is taking sustainability very seriously – American higher education is leading the march toward promoting sustainability. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Vincent Tinto’s research related to student retention is well known among academicians.  His 1975 paper in the Review of Educational Research creating a theoretical construct of the major factors leading to student retention has been cited in hundreds, if not thousands of papers and publications.  Additionally, Tinto’s sociological construct of the college dropout influenced future researchers toward examining the cause of dropouts instead of blaming the victim.  In 1987, Tinto published Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition (and later reprinted a second edition in 1993). That book is particularly significant to me for several reasons. 

In 2004, the American Public University System (APUS) Board of Trustees elected Dr. Kate Zatz as a new board member.  As APUS’s newly appointed president, I visited Dr. Zatz who worked at Hudson County Community College in Newark, New Jersey.  We talked about a number of things during my visit and I asked her if she could recommend any publications about student retention.  She handed me a copy of Leaving College and told me that it was an excellent resource for reading about student attrition research.  I read it and distributed copies to others at APUS.  Later on, Leaving College and my interest in student retention would inspire my doctoral dissertation and subsequent research related to online student retention.  When I received a pre-publication notice for Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action a few months ago, I ordered a copy.

In the preface to Completing College, Vincent Tinto states that the goal of his book is not to develop a new theory of retention but to suggest a framework that institutions can utilize in applying policies and actions to improve retention and college completion.  Based on the quantity of dog-eared pages and highlighted paragraphs in my copy, I would say that he has accomplished his goal.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the early days of online education, a commonly discussed phenomenon was the low completion rates of students.  Some chose to explain the departure of students using characteristics such as lack of social integration and academic integration for students matriculating in online programs as identified by Vincent Tinto and others.  As technologies utilized in the classroom improved and subsequently, online teaching techniques, student persistence improved as well, but not close to the levels sustained by some of the best face-to-face programs. 

In research that I conducted initially for my doctoral dissertation and then later in a paper with my colleagues Phil Ice and Angela Gibson, I identified several factors as significant variables leading to student disenrollment from an online program.  These variables include no transfer credit received, student’s last grade of F, student’s last grade of W, and low number of courses completed by the student in a 12-month period.

Over the past year and a half, my colleagues and I have continued to examine the student disenrollment patterns at the American Public University System (APUS) and have discussed those patterns with colleagues at a number of other institutions offering online programs.  More and more, I have come to believe that the persistence of students who complete three or more undergraduate courses at APUS and the tendency of students who complete fewer than three courses at APUS to eventually disenroll are much more correlated to adult student behaviors previously identified by researchers using data from traditional institutions.

During the past decade, a major increase in enrollments has occurred  with the number of adults attending online programs versus face-to-face programs.  The reasons are obvious:  working adults are able to attend online programs from any location at any time.  Those with jobs that frequently take them out of town no longer have to juggle schedules to meet the requirement of taking a face-to-face class, but can log in from another city or country; the only requirement is a computer and an internet connection.  Additionally, adult students with a family can come home from work and log in to their classroom after dinner and after the children go to bed.  Those adults whose jobs require them to work non-traditional evening or night shifts can log in during times that suit them and not worry about losing sleep to attend face-to-face courses at a local college or university.

One of the earlier studies regarding persistence rates of adult students was published by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).  In this study, researchers Laura Horn and Mark Premo identified seven risk factors that were associated with the likelihood that a student would not graduate from college.  These risk factors were:  being independent, attending college part-time, working full-time while enrolled, having dependents, being a single parent, delaying entry to college, and not having a traditional high school diploma.  Working adults attempting to complete an associates’ or bachelor’s degree are likely to have at least three of these risk factors and those with children may have five or six.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have read three articles in the last three days about alternatives to earning a college degree, primarily through certification of one kind or another.

The first article, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the concept of “badges” that are awarded by various websites, training companies, individuals, etc. The concept is that the badge is relatively easy to earn (to keep the learner motivated and engaged) and indicates that they have achieved a certain skill level or learning competency.  At the Khan Academy, students receive a “Great Listener” badge for sitting through 30 minutes of video lectures and can earn an “Awesome Listener” badge after completing a full hour of video lectures.  In addition, visitors and users of that site can earn badges indicating “Master of Algebra” or “Challenge Patches.”  Similarly, MITx is a newly announced venture by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), slotted to be released in an experimental prototype version in the spring of 2012 and designed to recognize people who complete MIT’s online courses and successfully pass the tests and quizzes.  MIT has an arrangement with OpenStudy to offer badges to students who are helpful in course discussions.  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has a $2 million grant to test the badge platform in education.  With the Foundation’s support, The Mozilla Foundation (best known for the Firefox browser) is “building an Open Badge Infrastructure to enable the interoperability and collection of badges” which will “support badges from any issuer across the Internet.” 

Both The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education wrote about the tenured Stanford professor who has left to form a startup, Know Labs.  Sebastian Thrun and a colleague taught an artificial intelligence MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) this summer to more than 160,000 students and he plans to commercialize that type of course through the Udacity portal owned by his startup, Know Labs. Thrun’s venture will not only offer courses developed and taught by him but also by others.  One of the first courses that Udacity will offer is “Building a Search Engine” which will be seven weeks in length and which will be taught by David Evans, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia.  Thrun is betting that the word (grades/recommendation) of a highly regarded professor will win over prospective employers or current employers of students taking courses.

Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, wrote an article for the Chronicle’s Innovations blog entitled “Beware: Alternative Certification is Coming.”  Most of the article talks about Straighterline’s lower priced college course offerings and the announcement last week that Straighterline is offering students the opportunity to take the Educational Testing Service (ETS) iSkills test and the Council on Aid to Education’s (CAE) Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) test (the one made famous by New York University Professor of Sociology and Education, Richard Arum and University of Virginia Assistant Professor of Sociology, Josipa Roksa in their book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses).  Vedder also discusses the Khan Academy and MIT certification offerings.  My favorite paragraph from his article relates to his discussion of the first week of beginning economics courses when professors explain the point that:  “If the price of something rises a lot, people look for substitutes.  Resources are scarce and they [people] maximize their utility by shifting away from high priced goods or services to the lower priced good or service.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Rich DeMillo has a lengthy background in academia serving as a professor at four different universities, Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech College of Computing, Director of the Computer and Computation Research Division of the National Science Foundation, and was Hewlett Packard’s first Chief Technology Officer.  His latest book, Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities, developed from a five page memo that he planned to send to his colleagues about what was wrong at his university then evolved to a whitepaper in which he solicited the advice of friends and colleagues, and eventually to a book. 

Unlike Clayton Christensen who writes about innovative companies as a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (thus making his transition to writing about innovative universities less surprising), DeMillo’s background is in engineering and computer science.  His observations, however, stem from his background as a professor at a traditional “brick and mortar” school.  From his position inside the hallowed halls of academia, he notes that the institutions in the middle, those between the elite institutions (top 75) and institutions that admit everyone, are the ones that are in trouble with a value proposition squeeze coming from above (elite) as well as below (business model to serve anyone or everyone at a lower price point).  DeMillo stresses that modern universities are businesses (contrary to some of the myopic ideologues who insist that non-profit institutions don’t have a business model) and are competitive organizations run by smart people.  Similar to Christensen, DeMillo argues that the class-oriented society and culture of higher education creates a faculty-centered model that is difficult to break out of for institutions undergoing competition for enrolled students.  (For a review of Christensen’s book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way to World Learns, see my August 2008 blog article.  To see my review of Christensen’s book, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, see my August 2011 blog article.)

DeMillo states that in any market, the winners are those with competitive brands, price, or value.  Brand is difficult to build for all but the elite colleges and universities, price continues to increase for almost all institutions and in most cases is becoming uncompetitive, and value is a concept seldom understood by the faculty at most institutions.  Because most college presidents are promoted from the ranks of academics, they are ill-equipped to understand the importance of strategic planning and understanding competitive threats from business disruptors like creative proprietary institutions.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the past several years, online higher education has come under increased scrutiny by the federal government and policymakers.  As a relatively new trend, online education has been closely examined by some, not so closely examined by others, and has a number of critics.  In a recent report called “Odd Man Out: How Government Supports Private-Sector Innovation, Except in Education,” published by the American Enterprise Institute, author John Bailey notes that an acute lack of support and engagement from government agencies to the private sector in education is not only out of sync with other public-private enterprises, it is counterproductive in attempting to reform higher education. 

Bailey points out that the public sector has frequently employed the expertise of private industry in various attempts to solve the nation’s problems.  For example, in March 2010, President Obama reached out to private-sector businesses, agreeing to provide some $150 billion in support of those businesses developing an alternative to foreign oil.  He said to the CEOs in attendance, “’Your country needs you to mount a historic effort to end, once and for all, our dependence on foreign oil…And in this difficult endeavor, in this pursuit on which I believe our future depends, our country will support you.’” 

In another example, Bailey points out that the Review of US Human Spaceflight Plans Committee established by the White House Office of Space and Technology Policy recommended that NASA seek private sector assistance in developing commercial spacecraft.  “The review argued that this would free NASA to focus its attention and investment on developing more advanced capabilities, particularly in deep-space exploration.”  In each of these examples, a significant problem or dilemma has been acknowledged and government has rightly recognized that private sector innovation has the business agility and market understanding to propose and execute a meaningful solution.

Read the rest of this entry »