Submitted by G.A. Admin
Learning Online
The internet is giving birth to a revolution in learning that is changing the way we educate ourselves in and beyond the classroom. E-learning initiatives such as OpenCourseWare (OCW) projects are aimed at making university-level course materials available online at no charge whatsoever. The driving philosophy behind this project is parallel to that of open-source software; by making education accessible and open to everyone, we can ultimately increase innovation and share the global benefits. The OCW movement was spearheaded by MIT’s OpenCourseWare program in October of 2002, which continues to offer OCW course materials under the Creative Commons license.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is one of the major contributors to the OCW movement which partners with educational institutions to extend the reach and impact of opencourseware, ensures the long-term sustainability of opencourseware projects, and fosters the development of additional opencourseware projects.
For organizations looking to share knowledge online, Utah State University has released a free open-source content management system that allows you to develop and manage an open access collection of course materials.
Since 2002, a number of universities across the world have created OCW projects, here are a few:
North America
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon
John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Irvine
Utah State University OpenCourseWare
Tufts University OpenCourseWare
Capilano University OpenCourseWare (Canada)
Asia
China Open Resources for Education (NGO)
Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium
United Nations University (Japan)
Tokyo Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare
National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (India)
Korea University OpenCourseWare
National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan)
FETP OpenCourseWare (Vietnam)
Europe
ParisTech Libres Savoirs (France)
Grenoble Ecole de Management (France)
OpenCourseWare Universia (Spain)
Universidad de Sevilla (Spain)
Latin America
Universidad de Monterrey (Mexico)
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Learning by Doing
The oldest and easiest way of learning is not via instruction in a classroom setting, but by observation and copying. That’s how babies learn such complicated things as walking on two legs, and languages. The human mind is programmed this way. It works extremely well, given a chance.
The original intent of classroom teaching was economies of scale and increased efficiency in spreading knowledge among larger numbers of people. Teachers in lecture halls are a rather modern introduction of production line techniques in the learning environment, of exerting power over the learning subjects, through regimentation of practice and thought.
Before modern classroom teaching was introduced, there was the family’s or the tribe’s “telling story” time, which meant parents, siblings, and friends sharing their experiences. By design, humans’ receptors for learning are automatically set on full absorption when they are listening to, maybe watching, shared experiences, or whatever the story is being talked about tonight. If we need to be instructed, an additional effort on our part is needed, i.e. that we WANT to learn about the subject and pay full attention. It’s a lot more exhausting, too.
It seems that we’ve come a long way since then, in fact full circle.
Paradoxically, that one-to-many teaching method in a controlled setting via regulated procedures has become a purpose in itself, a self-perpetuating education machine which is run at tremendous cost, forever rising. While technology has advanced to the point where the dissemination of information costs are exorbitantly low, and still dropping.
Of course, to be utilized, we need to give up cumbersome classroom teaching and replace it with individual teaching and learning relationships which can, essentially, go from any place to any location in the world, including one’s home, tent or under a tree on the beach. Yes, learning can be that easy and inexpensive for almost all forms of learning, up to and including Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Far removed from studying Einstein’s theories, but as a practical example, I suggest that, if you are so inclined, you have a look at a less than 100 seconds movie clip of my popular “Tai Chi Win” course, which in its entirety consists of 150 movements and takes up to 53 minutes, depending on the exercising speed. As a side benefit, if you were to practice Tai Chi every day, your body and mind will be put in close-to perfect balance, steeled against the stress onslaughts of the day.
Again, merely as an example of how easy it is to learn from individual demonstration and individual participation, you can download free of charge how I am doing my Tai Chi Chuan form, slowly. All you need to do is follow along. Not a single word is spoken. No directions are given. Nobody talks at you. There is no one trying to sell anything. The presentation is for you alone, from me alone. You can just watch, enjoy, follow along if and when you wish, come back to it and play it again. Learning and practicing was never easier. Coming to you from Hawaii with Aloha! By Win Straube
P.S.: The purpose of this story is not to create interest in learning tai chi, but to realize that in this time and age any form of teaching can and truly needs to come back to the method which works best: Learning by observation and copying. Also that nowadays this is possible at vastly reduced cost compared to what presently are thought of as conventional teaching methods. Yes, if you can, do pick up a copy of QGE=A Quality Generic Education is the Answer, University Press of America, 2007, for keys to the solution.
The original intent of classroom teaching was economies of scale and increased efficiency in spreading knowledge among larger numbers of people. Teachers in lecture halls are a rather modern introduction of production line techniques in the learning environment, of exerting power over the learning subjects, through regimentation of practice and thought.
Before modern classroom teaching was introduced, there was the family’s or the tribe’s “telling story” time, which meant parents, siblings, and friends sharing their experiences. By design, humans’ receptors for learning are automatically set on full absorption when they are listening to, maybe watching, shared experiences, or whatever the story is being talked about tonight. If we need to be instructed, an additional effort on our part is needed, i.e. that we WANT to learn about the subject and pay full attention. It’s a lot more exhausting, too.
It seems that we’ve come a long way since then, in fact full circle.
Paradoxically, that one-to-many teaching method in a controlled setting via regulated procedures has become a purpose in itself, a self-perpetuating education machine which is run at tremendous cost, forever rising. While technology has advanced to the point where the dissemination of information costs are exorbitantly low, and still dropping.
Of course, to be utilized, we need to give up cumbersome classroom teaching and replace it with individual teaching and learning relationships which can, essentially, go from any place to any location in the world, including one’s home, tent or under a tree on the beach. Yes, learning can be that easy and inexpensive for almost all forms of learning, up to and including Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Far removed from studying Einstein’s theories, but as a practical example, I suggest that, if you are so inclined, you have a look at a less than 100 seconds movie clip of my popular “Tai Chi Win” course, which in its entirety consists of 150 movements and takes up to 53 minutes, depending on the exercising speed. As a side benefit, if you were to practice Tai Chi every day, your body and mind will be put in close-to perfect balance, steeled against the stress onslaughts of the day.
Again, merely as an example of how easy it is to learn from individual demonstration and individual participation, you can download free of charge how I am doing my Tai Chi Chuan form, slowly. All you need to do is follow along. Not a single word is spoken. No directions are given. Nobody talks at you. There is no one trying to sell anything. The presentation is for you alone, from me alone. You can just watch, enjoy, follow along if and when you wish, come back to it and play it again. Learning and practicing was never easier. Coming to you from Hawaii with Aloha! By Win Straube
P.S.: The purpose of this story is not to create interest in learning tai chi, but to realize that in this time and age any form of teaching can and truly needs to come back to the method which works best: Learning by observation and copying. Also that nowadays this is possible at vastly reduced cost compared to what presently are thought of as conventional teaching methods. Yes, if you can, do pick up a copy of QGE=A Quality Generic Education is the Answer, University Press of America, 2007, for keys to the solution.
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Three-Year Solution
How the reinvention of higher education benefits parents, students, and schools.
Condensed version of article by Lamar Alexander NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 17, 2009, from the magazine issue dated Oct 26, 2009
Alexander, now a U.S. senator, was U.S. education secretary for George H.W. Bush, president of The University of Tennessee, and governor of Tennessee.
Hartwick college, a small liberal-arts school in upstate New York, makes this offer to well-prepared students: earn your undergraduate degree in three years (six semesters) instead of four, and save about $43,000—the amount of one year's tuition and fees. A number of innovative colleges are making the same offer to students anxious about saving time and money. The three-year degree could become the higher-education equivalent of the fuel-efficient car. And that's both an opportunity and a warning for the best higher-education system in the world.
The United States has almost all of the world's best universities. A recent Chinese survey ranks 35 American universities among the top 50, eight among the top 10. Our research universities have been the key to developing the competitive advantages that help Americans produce 25 percent of all the world's wealth. In 2007, 623,805 of the world's brightest students were attracted to American universities.
Colleges like Hartwick are rethinking the old way of doing things and questioning decades-old assumptions about what a college degree means. For instance, why does it have to take four years to earn a diploma? This fall, 16 first-year students and four second-year students at Hartwick, located halfway between Binghamton and Albany, enrolled in the school's new three-year degree program. According to the college, the plan is designed for high-ability, highly motivated students who wish to save money or to move along more rapidly toward advanced degrees.
By eliminating that extra year, three-year degree students save 25 percent in costs. Instead of taking 30 credits a year, these students take 40. During January, Hartwick runs a four-week course during which students may earn three to four credits on or off campus, including a number of international sites. Summer courses are not required, but a student may enroll in them—and pay extra. Three-year students get first crack at course registration. There are no changes in the number of courses professors teach or in their pay.
In April, Lipscomb University in Nashville also announced a three-year option, along with a plan for veterans to attend tuition-free and make it easier and cheaper for community-college students to attend Lipscomb. Lipscomb requires its three-year-degree students to take eight semesters, which means summer school is required. Still, university president Randy Lowry estimates that a three-year-degree student saves about $11,000 in tuition and fees.
The three-year degree is starting to catch on, but it isn't a new idea. Geniuses have always breezed through. Judson College, a 350-student institution in Alabama, has offered students a three-year option for 40 years. Students attend "short terms" in May and June to earn the credits required for graduation. Bates College in Maine and Ball State University in Indiana are among other colleges offering three-year options. Later this month the Rhode Island Legislature is expected to approve a bill requiring all state institutions of higher education to create three-year bachelor programs.
Changes at the high-school level are also helping to make it easier for many students to earn their undergrad degrees in less time. One of five students arrives at college today with Advanced Placement credits amounting to a semester or more of college-level work. Many universities, including large schools like the University of Texas, make it easy for these AP students to graduate faster. According to the U.S. Department of Education's most recent statistics, about 5 percent of U.S. undergraduates finished with bachelor's degrees in three years.
There are drawbacks to moving through school at such a brisk pace. For one, it deprives students of the luxury of time to roam intellectually. Compressing everything into three years also leaves less time for growing up, engaging in extracurricular activities, and studying abroad. On crowded campuses it could mean fewer opportunities to get into a prized professor's class. Iowa's Waldorf College has graduated several hundred students in its three-year-degree programs, but is now phasing out the option. Most Waldorf students wanted the full four-year experience—academically, socially, and athletically. And faculty members will be wary of any change that threatens the core curriculum in the name of moving students into the workforce.
"Most high governmental officials who speak of education policy seem to conceive of education in this light—as a way to ensure economic competitiveness and continued economic growth," Derek Bok, president emeritus of Harvard told The Washington Post. "I strongly disagree with this approach." Another risk: the new campus schedules might eventually produce less revenue for the institution and longer working hours for faculty members.
Adopting a three-year option will not come easily to most schools. Those that wish to tackle tradition and make American campuses more cost-conscious may find it easier to take Trachtenberg's advice: open campuses year-round. "You could run two complete colleges, with two complete faculties, in the facilities now used half the year for one," he says. "That's without cutting the length of students' vacations, increasing class sizes, or requiring faculty to teach more." Simply requiring one mandatory summer session for every student in four years—as Dartmouth College does—would improve his institution's bottom line by $10 million to $15 million dollars, he says.
Just as a hybrid car is not for every driver, a three-year degree is not for every student. Expanding the three-year option or year-round schedules may be difficult, but it may be more palatable than asking Congress for additional bailout money, asking legislators for more state support, or asking students for even higher tuition payments. Campuses willing to adopt convenient schedules along with more-focused, less-expensive degrees may find that they have a competitive advantage in attracting bright, motivated students. As George Romney might have put it, these sorts of innovations can help American universities, long the example to the world, avoid the perils of success.
Condensed version of article by Lamar Alexander NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 17, 2009, from the magazine issue dated Oct 26, 2009
Alexander, now a U.S. senator, was U.S. education secretary for George H.W. Bush, president of The University of Tennessee, and governor of Tennessee.
Hartwick college, a small liberal-arts school in upstate New York, makes this offer to well-prepared students: earn your undergraduate degree in three years (six semesters) instead of four, and save about $43,000—the amount of one year's tuition and fees. A number of innovative colleges are making the same offer to students anxious about saving time and money. The three-year degree could become the higher-education equivalent of the fuel-efficient car. And that's both an opportunity and a warning for the best higher-education system in the world.
The United States has almost all of the world's best universities. A recent Chinese survey ranks 35 American universities among the top 50, eight among the top 10. Our research universities have been the key to developing the competitive advantages that help Americans produce 25 percent of all the world's wealth. In 2007, 623,805 of the world's brightest students were attracted to American universities.
Colleges like Hartwick are rethinking the old way of doing things and questioning decades-old assumptions about what a college degree means. For instance, why does it have to take four years to earn a diploma? This fall, 16 first-year students and four second-year students at Hartwick, located halfway between Binghamton and Albany, enrolled in the school's new three-year degree program. According to the college, the plan is designed for high-ability, highly motivated students who wish to save money or to move along more rapidly toward advanced degrees.
By eliminating that extra year, three-year degree students save 25 percent in costs. Instead of taking 30 credits a year, these students take 40. During January, Hartwick runs a four-week course during which students may earn three to four credits on or off campus, including a number of international sites. Summer courses are not required, but a student may enroll in them—and pay extra. Three-year students get first crack at course registration. There are no changes in the number of courses professors teach or in their pay.
In April, Lipscomb University in Nashville also announced a three-year option, along with a plan for veterans to attend tuition-free and make it easier and cheaper for community-college students to attend Lipscomb. Lipscomb requires its three-year-degree students to take eight semesters, which means summer school is required. Still, university president Randy Lowry estimates that a three-year-degree student saves about $11,000 in tuition and fees.
The three-year degree is starting to catch on, but it isn't a new idea. Geniuses have always breezed through. Judson College, a 350-student institution in Alabama, has offered students a three-year option for 40 years. Students attend "short terms" in May and June to earn the credits required for graduation. Bates College in Maine and Ball State University in Indiana are among other colleges offering three-year options. Later this month the Rhode Island Legislature is expected to approve a bill requiring all state institutions of higher education to create three-year bachelor programs.
Changes at the high-school level are also helping to make it easier for many students to earn their undergrad degrees in less time. One of five students arrives at college today with Advanced Placement credits amounting to a semester or more of college-level work. Many universities, including large schools like the University of Texas, make it easy for these AP students to graduate faster. According to the U.S. Department of Education's most recent statistics, about 5 percent of U.S. undergraduates finished with bachelor's degrees in three years.
There are drawbacks to moving through school at such a brisk pace. For one, it deprives students of the luxury of time to roam intellectually. Compressing everything into three years also leaves less time for growing up, engaging in extracurricular activities, and studying abroad. On crowded campuses it could mean fewer opportunities to get into a prized professor's class. Iowa's Waldorf College has graduated several hundred students in its three-year-degree programs, but is now phasing out the option. Most Waldorf students wanted the full four-year experience—academically, socially, and athletically. And faculty members will be wary of any change that threatens the core curriculum in the name of moving students into the workforce.
"Most high governmental officials who speak of education policy seem to conceive of education in this light—as a way to ensure economic competitiveness and continued economic growth," Derek Bok, president emeritus of Harvard told The Washington Post. "I strongly disagree with this approach." Another risk: the new campus schedules might eventually produce less revenue for the institution and longer working hours for faculty members.
Adopting a three-year option will not come easily to most schools. Those that wish to tackle tradition and make American campuses more cost-conscious may find it easier to take Trachtenberg's advice: open campuses year-round. "You could run two complete colleges, with two complete faculties, in the facilities now used half the year for one," he says. "That's without cutting the length of students' vacations, increasing class sizes, or requiring faculty to teach more." Simply requiring one mandatory summer session for every student in four years—as Dartmouth College does—would improve his institution's bottom line by $10 million to $15 million dollars, he says.
Just as a hybrid car is not for every driver, a three-year degree is not for every student. Expanding the three-year option or year-round schedules may be difficult, but it may be more palatable than asking Congress for additional bailout money, asking legislators for more state support, or asking students for even higher tuition payments. Campuses willing to adopt convenient schedules along with more-focused, less-expensive degrees may find that they have a competitive advantage in attracting bright, motivated students. As George Romney might have put it, these sorts of innovations can help American universities, long the example to the world, avoid the perils of success.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Thomas Friedman on Entrepreneurial Education
Thomas Friedman, "The New Untouchables," New York Times, October 21, 2009, courtesy Scott Tilden
Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.
Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Internet Archive Opens 1.6 Million E-Books to Kids with OLPC Laptops
Condensed version of 10/24/09 article on Xcomony.com by Wade Roush, chief correspondent
All 1.6 million books digitized so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), Internet Archive director Brewster Kahle announced today at the Boston Book Festival in downtown Boston.
Kahle said the announcement capped a year-long collaboration between the Internet Archive and the OLPC, which was founded by MIT computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte. “
The little green laptop, called the XO, “makes a really good reader,” said Kahle, an MIT-educated computer engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Internet Archive in 1996.
The Internet Archive operates 20 scanning centers in five countries, where hundreds of workers are manually scanning books from public and university libraries, mostly public-domain works for which the copyright term has expired. It collects these books at its Open Access Text Archive. It also makes them available to people in developing nations via a network of satellite-connected print-on-demand “bookmobiles.”
Now the books will also be available to the roughly 750,000 to 1 million schoolchildren in developing countries who have XO laptops.
“We set a date of this meeting, a year ago, to say let’s get our books in really good shape,” Kahle told Xconomy after the panel session. “We were first going to do it in PDF, because the screen is a really a beautiful screen, but we found that if we were really going to make it work for people in developing countries—if you want to get this to kids in Uruguay—then having a 10-kilobyte file beats the heck out of a 5-megabyte file. So we went and converted our books such that it would work. And the One Laptop Per Child guys went and made it so that those worked well on the XO. They are working very hard to make it so that kids can search on and find those books, and one million six hundred thousand now will be available to the one millions users of the One Laptop Per Child. We’re really psyched about that.”
He drew an explicit contrast between these approach and the more closed and controlled e-book sales models being forwarded by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors. But getting new, copyrighted books onto platforms that don’t provide strict digital rights management protections is still a tricky business proposition—so for now, the book sharing arrangement between the Archive and OLPC is restricted to free, public-domain books.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Straube Foundation encourages you to...
... get your virtual library card: http://www.archive.org/account/login.createaccount.php
... volunteer to help scan books: http://www.archive.org/about/archivejobs.php#vol
All 1.6 million books digitized so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), Internet Archive director Brewster Kahle announced today at the Boston Book Festival in downtown Boston.
Kahle said the announcement capped a year-long collaboration between the Internet Archive and the OLPC, which was founded by MIT computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte. “
The little green laptop, called the XO, “makes a really good reader,” said Kahle, an MIT-educated computer engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Internet Archive in 1996.
The Internet Archive operates 20 scanning centers in five countries, where hundreds of workers are manually scanning books from public and university libraries, mostly public-domain works for which the copyright term has expired. It collects these books at its Open Access Text Archive. It also makes them available to people in developing nations via a network of satellite-connected print-on-demand “bookmobiles.”
Now the books will also be available to the roughly 750,000 to 1 million schoolchildren in developing countries who have XO laptops.
“We set a date of this meeting, a year ago, to say let’s get our books in really good shape,” Kahle told Xconomy after the panel session. “We were first going to do it in PDF, because the screen is a really a beautiful screen, but we found that if we were really going to make it work for people in developing countries—if you want to get this to kids in Uruguay—then having a 10-kilobyte file beats the heck out of a 5-megabyte file. So we went and converted our books such that it would work. And the One Laptop Per Child guys went and made it so that those worked well on the XO. They are working very hard to make it so that kids can search on and find those books, and one million six hundred thousand now will be available to the one millions users of the One Laptop Per Child. We’re really psyched about that.”
He drew an explicit contrast between these approach and the more closed and controlled e-book sales models being forwarded by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors. But getting new, copyrighted books onto platforms that don’t provide strict digital rights management protections is still a tricky business proposition—so for now, the book sharing arrangement between the Archive and OLPC is restricted to free, public-domain books.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Straube Foundation encourages you to...
... get your virtual library card: http://www.archive.org/account/login.createaccount.php
... volunteer to help scan books: http://www.archive.org/about/archivejobs.php#vol
Friday, October 16, 2009
Bureaucrat U
Daniel L. Bennett, administrative director at the Center for College Affordability & Productivity in Washington, D.C. This article was published in Forbes Magazine, July 13, 2009 and has been condensed for this blog.
Pay the teachers, not the administrators.
College tuition increased by 6.6% a year over the past decade, a rate that is approximately 2.4 times that of inflation. One big cause: the bloating of university bureaucracies. Between 1997 and 2007 the administrative and support staffs at colleges expanded by 4.7% a year, double the rate of enrollment growth. The burgeoning army of college bureaucrats defends this extraordinary growth as necessary to provide consumer-oriented students with an expanded breadth of noninstructional services. Yet this obfuscates the underlying mission of colleges to produce and disseminate knowledge. It is time for higher education to go on a diet.
The ballooning of college administration has resulted in a sharp decline in labor productivity at colleges during a period of technological advancement that has improved productivity in most other industries. It has also occurred at a time when students are getting less for their money: Instruction has shifted from full-time professors to underpaid and overworked adjunct faculty. Three-fourths of new instructor jobs created over the past 20 years have been part-time positions. If the employment trends of the last decade are sustained, then administrative employees will outnumber instructors at four-year colleges by 2014.
Perusing the careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, I noticed that Georgia Southern University has an opening for a recreation therapist, the University of Florida an opening for a director of multicultural and diversity affairs, and the University of Maryland, College Park openings for a coordinator of off-campus student involvement and a director of fraternity and sorority life. Will educational outcomes improve with the addition of positions such as these? I fervently doubt it.
Trends in spending make it clear that institutional priorities have shifted, as resources have been reallocated from classroom instruction to paper pushing. According to a recent report from the Delta Cost Project that uses U.S. Department of Education data, between 1995 and 2006 spending growth on student services and administration outpaced growth in expenditure on instruction by a multiple of 2 at the private research colleges, 1.75 at public research colleges and 3.2 at public master's degree granting colleges.
Did you know that an academic dean at a doctoral institution receives a median salary of $190,000 (plus generous fringe benefits) or that the median salary of an assistant dean is above $116,000? The College & University Professional Association for Human Resources found that last year senior administrators recorded a third consecutive year of 4% pay increases and a twelfth consecutive year of pay increases above inflation. Nearly 10% of the 425,000 administrative and support staff employees at 272 research institutions earned a salary above $100,000 last year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Higher education is engaged in a spree of empire-building that will be a burden on the public purse. The recession has provided some restraints on cost-increasing behavior at colleges; many schools have announced unpaid furloughs and staffing cuts. This is a good start, but my guess is that the train will pick up steam again once economic recovery stabilizes.
All we need are students and parents willing to vote with their feet when it comes to choosing a college according to value. This can happen only if more information about colleges is made publicly available in a digestible manner, something that the establishment vehemently opposes.
Pay the teachers, not the administrators.
College tuition increased by 6.6% a year over the past decade, a rate that is approximately 2.4 times that of inflation. One big cause: the bloating of university bureaucracies. Between 1997 and 2007 the administrative and support staffs at colleges expanded by 4.7% a year, double the rate of enrollment growth. The burgeoning army of college bureaucrats defends this extraordinary growth as necessary to provide consumer-oriented students with an expanded breadth of noninstructional services. Yet this obfuscates the underlying mission of colleges to produce and disseminate knowledge. It is time for higher education to go on a diet.
The ballooning of college administration has resulted in a sharp decline in labor productivity at colleges during a period of technological advancement that has improved productivity in most other industries. It has also occurred at a time when students are getting less for their money: Instruction has shifted from full-time professors to underpaid and overworked adjunct faculty. Three-fourths of new instructor jobs created over the past 20 years have been part-time positions. If the employment trends of the last decade are sustained, then administrative employees will outnumber instructors at four-year colleges by 2014.
Perusing the careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, I noticed that Georgia Southern University has an opening for a recreation therapist, the University of Florida an opening for a director of multicultural and diversity affairs, and the University of Maryland, College Park openings for a coordinator of off-campus student involvement and a director of fraternity and sorority life. Will educational outcomes improve with the addition of positions such as these? I fervently doubt it.
Trends in spending make it clear that institutional priorities have shifted, as resources have been reallocated from classroom instruction to paper pushing. According to a recent report from the Delta Cost Project that uses U.S. Department of Education data, between 1995 and 2006 spending growth on student services and administration outpaced growth in expenditure on instruction by a multiple of 2 at the private research colleges, 1.75 at public research colleges and 3.2 at public master's degree granting colleges.
Did you know that an academic dean at a doctoral institution receives a median salary of $190,000 (plus generous fringe benefits) or that the median salary of an assistant dean is above $116,000? The College & University Professional Association for Human Resources found that last year senior administrators recorded a third consecutive year of 4% pay increases and a twelfth consecutive year of pay increases above inflation. Nearly 10% of the 425,000 administrative and support staff employees at 272 research institutions earned a salary above $100,000 last year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Higher education is engaged in a spree of empire-building that will be a burden on the public purse. The recession has provided some restraints on cost-increasing behavior at colleges; many schools have announced unpaid furloughs and staffing cuts. This is a good start, but my guess is that the train will pick up steam again once economic recovery stabilizes.
All we need are students and parents willing to vote with their feet when it comes to choosing a college according to value. This can happen only if more information about colleges is made publicly available in a digestible manner, something that the establishment vehemently opposes.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Teacher Turns 'Crazy Idea' Into New School
Condensed from an article by Thom Patterson posted on CNN.com, September 9, 2009
"I have a crazy idea": Those five words changed a simple meeting of school officials into the realization of Kim Ursetta's dream.
Ursetta, then president of a local teachers' union, blurted out those words 18 months ago during a meeting in the office of Denver, Colorado's, schools superintendent.
The other officials in the room leaned in as Ursetta leaped into a sales pitch that would turn an ordinary day into a highlight of her career.
"I want to start a new kind of school," she said, a union-sponsored public school led by teachers, not a principal.
"I started talking about 21st century skills and wanting to prepare our kids in math and science, especially our low-income and ethnic minority students," Ursetta said. "We've been doing schools the same way in this nation for 150 years, so if we don't step up, then nothing is going to change."
Superintendent Michael Bennet -- now the state's freshman U.S. senator -- did not say no to the idea, and Ursetta walked out the door "excited" and "shocked."
She immediately started "pulling together a group of teachers to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and ask how you would do a school differently."
Three weeks ago, Ursetta's dream became a reality, as Mathematics and Science Leadership Academy opened its doors to 142 kindergartners and first- and second-grade students in Denver's mostly low-income, largely Hispanic Athmar Park neighborhood.
A board-certified, 16-year teaching veteran, Ursetta, 38, believes the lack of teacher flexibility ranks among the top barriers blocking the nation's children from receiving the best education possible.
As a teacher at traditional schools, Ursetta said she and her colleagues weren't allowed to change the order of their lessons.
Two of the school's 12 teachers take on administrative duties as "lead teachers," performing the traditional role of a principal.
Although they follow school board-approved curriculum and standards, instructors can easily rearrange lessons to "make better sense for the kids" -- making better connections between different subject matter, Ursetta said.
Sometimes, for example, it makes sense to group Ursetta's kindergarten students with first-graders working on the same subject.
"You normally would have to ask permission to do that," she said. "But here, we just do it. We're able to try different things to teach them instead of just following a script."
The lack of quality school leadership is a big reason that experienced teachers leave their schools, Ursetta said. "Studies show when you take accomplished teachers and allow them to have a leadership role, that's when they see the most success. Scores just soar. That's how we're focused here."
"I have a crazy idea": Those five words changed a simple meeting of school officials into the realization of Kim Ursetta's dream.
Ursetta, then president of a local teachers' union, blurted out those words 18 months ago during a meeting in the office of Denver, Colorado's, schools superintendent.
The other officials in the room leaned in as Ursetta leaped into a sales pitch that would turn an ordinary day into a highlight of her career.
"I want to start a new kind of school," she said, a union-sponsored public school led by teachers, not a principal.
"I started talking about 21st century skills and wanting to prepare our kids in math and science, especially our low-income and ethnic minority students," Ursetta said. "We've been doing schools the same way in this nation for 150 years, so if we don't step up, then nothing is going to change."
Superintendent Michael Bennet -- now the state's freshman U.S. senator -- did not say no to the idea, and Ursetta walked out the door "excited" and "shocked."
She immediately started "pulling together a group of teachers to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and ask how you would do a school differently."
Three weeks ago, Ursetta's dream became a reality, as Mathematics and Science Leadership Academy opened its doors to 142 kindergartners and first- and second-grade students in Denver's mostly low-income, largely Hispanic Athmar Park neighborhood.
A board-certified, 16-year teaching veteran, Ursetta, 38, believes the lack of teacher flexibility ranks among the top barriers blocking the nation's children from receiving the best education possible.
As a teacher at traditional schools, Ursetta said she and her colleagues weren't allowed to change the order of their lessons.
Two of the school's 12 teachers take on administrative duties as "lead teachers," performing the traditional role of a principal.
Although they follow school board-approved curriculum and standards, instructors can easily rearrange lessons to "make better sense for the kids" -- making better connections between different subject matter, Ursetta said.
Sometimes, for example, it makes sense to group Ursetta's kindergarten students with first-graders working on the same subject.
"You normally would have to ask permission to do that," she said. "But here, we just do it. We're able to try different things to teach them instead of just following a script."
The lack of quality school leadership is a big reason that experienced teachers leave their schools, Ursetta said. "Studies show when you take accomplished teachers and allow them to have a leadership role, that's when they see the most success. Scores just soar. That's how we're focused here."
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