The headline of a recent Washington Post article by Hannah Natanson read “‘Never seen it this bad’: America faces catastrophic teacher shortage.” Ms. Natanson sets the stage by reporting that rural Texas school districts are switching to four-day work weeks this fall due to a lack of staff (hoping to attract new teachers with the four-day option), Florida is asking veterans with no teaching background to teach, and Arizona is allowing college students to instruct children.
All Posts
Credit Accumulation and Completion Rates Among First Year Students
The National Student Clearinghouse issued a report last week titled Credit Accumulation and Completion Rates Among First Year Students. The report was constructed by using data from the Clearinghouse’s Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP). The PDP captures much more information from its participating institutions than is normally submitted to the Department of Education and other public sources.
Open Education Resources (OERs)
When I read a recent article in Tech & Learning about OER Commons, it stimulated my interest in writing an article about how far the OER movement has progressed.
Open Education Global is a member-driven, non-profit organization supporting the development and use of open education around the world. When I served as president at the American Public University System (APUS), our journal editor, Melissa Layne, was a director of OE Global’s predecessor organization.
The 2U Pivot
I missed the 2U earnings release on July 28th and the press release on July 29th announcing their “new partnership model to increase access and affordability in higher education, embracing edX’s flexible approach to degree support.” I didn’t miss, however, the article in Inside Higher Ed describing its pivot.
The item that Inside Higher Ed co-founder Doug Lederman chose to focus on was 2U’s “reset of their core revenue sharing fee for degree programs” if its current partners lower the tuition that they charge students through the 2U online partnership.
Online Education Business Model(s)
A recent article on OPMs from Phil Hill’s PhilonEdTech blog, triggered a link to an article of his from a year ago. In that article, he utilized the graphic below to describe the “emerging OPM successor model.”
While I agree that this model reflects a possible strategy for 2U/EdX and Coursera, I’m not sure the other OPM’s have access to millions of registered global learners.
Read My Lips: No Bachelor’s Required
In a recently published article in the Hechinger Report, Lawrence Lanahan questions whether the new trend to remove a bachelor’s degree requirement for a job will continue.
Mr. Lanahan interviewed several people for this article who never earned a bachelor’s degree and who recently benefited in their jobs’ searches from the new trend. One gentleman with years of experience in retail management and IT applied for several IT jobs on Stellarworx after hearing that the state of Maryland was eliminating the four-year degree requirement for most of its IT jobs (Stellarworx claims to be the leading source for employers to find workers who are STARs – Skilled Through Alternative Routes).
Higher Ed Works
I’m not exactly sure how I was directed to the Higher Ed Works website. Once there, I was fascinated by the organization’s purpose (It’s a non-partisan 501(c)3 public charity that supports public higher education in North Carolina) as well as the quantity and quality of information on its website.
Higher Ed Works publishes blog articles on a regular basis.
Education Quality Outcomes Standards – Another Credentials Framework
Shortly after completing my recent post about Credential As You Go, I read an article about Education Quality Outcomes Standards or EQOS. EQOS is a non-profit organization that was recently acquired by another non-profit organization, Jobs for the Future.
EQOS has established five key metrics of quality assurance that are:
- Learning
- Completion
- Placement
- Earnings
- Satisfaction
Their initiative began when the U.S.
James Webb Space Telescope Releases Its First Images
By now, it’s likely that hundreds of millions of people around the globe have seen the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The pictures are impressive, yet the science behind the technology as well as the science involving the observations is incredible.
The first picture that NASA showed the world at large is titled Webb’s First Deep Field.