On Being Student Centered--More than the Periodic Aspirational Message is Needed

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

X's mom died of heart disease when she was 16, her father is disabled, and she is his custodian. X cares for her sister's kids when she needs to make extra money to put food on the table. Z's mother died in a car accident when he was 12, with no life insurance, his sister is disabled and he is her care giver in their small apartment. This is all they can afford; to make ends meet and because of the medical equipment required for care, he sleeps on the couch......Today is a bad day; no transportation.  X is lucky.  She managed to borrow a car, no insurance though. X is picking up Z, her study buddy Z so they can both get to class. Without their mutual support, they would be unable to survive the stress of their personal and academic lives. Both X and Z look to their faculty for support but expect nothing from those who run the institution. If our administration had half of the chutzpah of these students...... I am lost here....

These are the circumstances of a significant enough portion of the students who seek the fulfillment of the hope that is at the very center of the promise of post secondary education in contemporary American colleges. How does an academic institution practice being the sort of student centered place that the typical institution trumpets  from the lofty speeches of its administrators to the pages of its social media products? The answer, increasingly is that they may not.

This post considers the problem of being student centered for the contemporary American university and the growing chasm that separates administrative formalism of the concept (through rules and aspirational sentiments) as against its functional realization.

Indulging the Politics of Age in University Benefits--The Example of Move to Strip Older Family Members of Education Benefits

Universities sometimes provide a window onto the darker natures of societal expectations and beliefs.  And there is nothing like the drumbeat of fiscal crisis (the extent of which remains debatable) to permit these darker natures to indulge in otherwise taboo behaviors.  

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

Nowhere now is this more notable than in the way in which the current (and fashionable) fear of a benefits "crisis" has permitted universities, and sometimes even their faculties, to indulge their darker passions in sometimes quite regrettable ways. I have written about the way in which these crises have permitted universities to indulge in eugenics.  (See, The New Eugenics--The Private Sector, the University, and Corporate Health and Wellness Initiatives).

Today universities are beginning to indulge their passion for discrimination--this time against older persons. The latest trend is marked by the indulgence of a desire to reduce the availability of educational benefits to faculty members by capping the age at which such benefits might be accessed.  

While such efforts tend to be carefully crafted to avoid legal liability for discrimination, the discriminatory intent, as a matter of social norms, is inescapable.  This post considers the vacuity of the rationales usually put forward to support these efforts and suggests that though there may be a legal authority to enact these discrimination, there ought to be a moral basis for opposing these efforts. 

Tracking Online Education in the United States Babson Survey Research Group Report (Jan. 2014)

Grade Change - Tracking Online Education in the United States, the 2013 survey of on-line learning report, authored by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, is the eleventh annual report in this series on tracking online education in the United States. Originally the Sloan Online Survey, in recognition of the founding sponsor, the report is now produced through the Babson Survey Research Group.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

This from the on-line announcement:

Using responses from more than 2,800 colleges and universities, this study is aimed at answering fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education:

Is Online Learning Strategic?
Are Learning Outcomes in Online Comparable to Face-to-Face Learning?
How Many Students are Learning Online?
How are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) faring?
And much more...

This survey also reveals that in 2013:

--7.1 million of higher education students are taking at least one online course.
--The 6.1 % growth rate represents over 400,000 additional students taking at least one online course.
--The percent of academic leaders rating the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those as in face-to-face instruction, grew from 57% in 2003 to 74% in 2013.
--The number of students taking at least one online course continued to grow at a rate far in excess of overall enrollments, but the rate was the lowest in a decade. (Sloan Consortium, 2013 Survey of Online Learning Report)

 The survey may be downloaded: click here to download a copy of the survey.

The executive summary follows:

Bad Management and the University Administrator: Giving Up on MOOCs?

 (Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

American university administrators, like many of their counterparts in the business world, have begun to embrace a certain culture of managerial laziness and short termism that in the long run will likely be as detrimental to the project of maintaining the superiority of American university education as ti has begun to affect the reputation of American business.

Two characteristics especially appear to contribute to these trends. The first, managerial laziness, tends to evidence itself is the move to over exploitation of bought experts on virtually all aspects of university administration, In some cases one might suspect that administrators would hesitate to move their chairs in the offices without having paid an outside consultant first. The problem is not with consultation, necessarily, but with the way in which administrators now tend to mindlessly use consultation reports and recommendations as both a sword to manage and a a shield against personal responsibility for the consequences of following advice. In a sense this dependence on consultants is the more perverse side of risk aversion evidenced by cultures of mindless use of benchmarking to serve as a cover and excuse for doing or failing to do something without any effort to specific application to the context of the university that the administrator is paid to manage.

But more pernicious is the embrace of short term thinking within academic administration. Increasingly, programs and other managerial projects rise or fall within a very short time frame.  The judgement neither looks toward a shake out and development period, nor are hard analytics applied to determine  weaknesses and sites for improvement.  More perverse, perhaps, is that this short termism is deepened as the mad obsession with immediate cash rewards for administrative efforts becomes more prominent in programmatic decision making.  Thus, if a new program is rolled out and fails, without any tweaking or modification based on experience, to produce sizable revenues almost immediately, the program tends to be abandoned in search of the next quick fix.  That, over the long term, this may deny the university valuable income and prestige producing programs appears to make little difference.

Nowhere is this sort of emerging managerial culture more in evidence than in the rise and fall of MOOCs. I have been skeptical, myself about the way in which MOOCs have burst onto the scene--but principally because they have been developed haphazardly and supported by administrators with an eye toward easy money rather than toward academic and programmatic integrity (e.g., Do MOOC Faculty Have a Responsibility For How Courses are Used?;  Monitoring University Governance: "Pigs Get Fat; Do MOOC Faculty Have a Responsibility For How Courses are Used?; Debating MOOCs: Shared Governance, Quality Control, Outsourcing, and Control of Curriculum at Harvard, Duke, American, San Jose State; A Better Approach to Faculty Centered Discussion of Technology Enhanced Education ). 

A Better Approach to Faculty Centered Discussion of Technology Enhanced Education

Cash strapped universities, including many in the CIC, have used their claims of desperation to do two things: first they have increasingly ceded authority over education programs and methods to their Finance Vice Presidents.  Then they have tended to make decisions, driven my the need to generate cash, which they then impose on their institutions with only the barest formal appearance of faculty and staff engagement. Though they tend to fool themselves  into believing that all is well, this sort of ham and high handed approach to programmatic innovation will tend to erode faculty buy in, promote the move to contract faculty (much more docile and cheaper) and ultimately produce a crisis of reputation.

Top tier public institutions appear to be adopting a different approach, one that other public and publicly assisted institutions, increasingly managing from behind the high walls of their academic Versailles, might do well to consider.  This post reports on the way in which the University of Texas has chosen to approach the issue of technology enhanced education.

MOOCs International Organizations Expand the Supplier Base While MOOC Supplier Competition Goes Global

MOOCs have been understood as the creature of academics and the institutions they serve.  Universities, along with their business partners, or when joint ventures of universities are created to develop and profit from this form, appear to have a lock on the form.  That is useful, especially where MOOCs are viewed as a revenue generating and labor leveraging device.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Two interesting developments may change the planning horizons of American universities in the  MOOCs market.  Both may represent potentially substantial market competitors to universities.  Yet at least of them offers the possibility of reaching market's for learners beyond those that universities may view as potentially available for revenue harvesting. One shows how international organizations may be turning to MOOCs in their capacity building and knowledge dissemination objectives.  The second suggests that MOOCs (and revenue competition ) may be going global.  

Engaged Scholarship--De-Centering Faculty From Research and Teaching in a Relentless March Toward a Training Model for Middle Tier Universities?

The financial crises of the first two decades of the 21st century has forced innovation on universities.  Forced to compete for decreasing numbers of students less able to afford increasing costs of traditional education and more likely to encounter university education instrumentally a factor in strategic entry into labor markets, universities have proceeded with profound changes the effects of which will not be apparent to most for years to come.  (A great student perspective on the crisis of university education may be accessed here).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Most of these changes have been well veiled by a combination of well developed rhetoric of passivity ("we can only respond to the market" rhetoric, whose falsity is only augmented by the profound effect on markets that responses produce especially by the largest university players) and by restructuring that increasingly re characterizes most important aspects of university operations as administrative and financial and thus beyond the reach of the traditional governance mechanics of academic governance. These changes have found ready acceptance and the culture of university governance has been affected so that faculty, trustees, administrators and students have begun to understand the university as cultural object in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

At middle tier universities the changes have been evidenced in a  number of ways.  One of the most interesting is what has been euphemistically pushed by senior administrators as "pedagogical efficacy" (see here). In the form of a movement toward "engaged scholarship" some aspects of this drive involve the active complicity of well placed faculty.  The ways in which influential faculty have rushed to rework their academic cultures to more comfortably conform within new markets driven operational cultures at universities provides a useful basis for understanding the nature and direction of changes to the "business" of the academy. In the process of being "helpful", these faculty efforts that mean to change the culture of the academic enterprise, may transform the nature of the academic enterprise, from an autonomous production model driven by its own objectives to one that becomes a secondary element of wage labor markets and the enterprises that drive them. This essay considers whether recent movements to compel academic conformity to so-called "engaged scholarship" might provide a good example of the profound and perhaps profoundly disturbing example of faculty complicity in movements from education to training models, models in which the academic enterprise may lose its autonomy and thus transformed, more explicitly serve other masters. 

Do MOOC Faculty Have a Responsibility For How Courses are Used?

I have been looking at the way that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have begun to affect the control relationships between faculty and administration over the control of course construction and program development.  (See, e.g., Debating MOOCs: Shared Governance, Quality Control, Outsourcing, and Control of Curriculum at Harvard, Duke, American, San Jose State; MOOCs at Penn State; An Update).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

The issue of MOOCs raises a more interesting issue--the effects of MOOCs on more sharply drawing the hierarchical structures among universities.  One of the consequences of thisvertical ordering of universities is the potential that MOOCs could be used to substitute the faculty of higher reputed schools for those of universities of lower reputation; or as the Philosophy Department faculty at San José State put it in "an open letter, the philosophy professors warned that such collaboration could mark beginning of a long-term effort to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”" (Steve Kolowich, "MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2013). 

It is clear that issue of the use of MOOCs to displace faculty raises important ethical and operational issues for administrations at all universities--both exporting and importing institutions.  But it also raises the related issue: "Are professors who develop and teach MOOCs responsible for how those MOOCs are used?" (Steve Kolowich, "MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility, supra.)

This post suggests emerging views.

Debating MOOCs: Shared Governance, Quality Control, Outsourcing, and Control of Curriculum at Harvard, Duke, American, San Jose State

Many universities are looking to massive open online courses (MOOCs) as part of the technology infused future of education.  Penn State, for example, has partnered with Coursera, to develop and deliver these courses, and the programs which may inevitably be built around these. (See also MOOCs at Penn State; An Update; (List of Penn State MOOCs HERE). "Looking to the future, Penn State’s MOOC professors are optimistic about the benefits that teaching the courses will have for both the university and their fields of study." (Stephen Shiflett, Penn State Professors Excited About Possibilities of Massive Open Online Courses, Centre Daily Times, April 6, 2013).

("Sign me up;" Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

But faculties across the country are increasingly raising doubts, and organizing opposition to MOOCs. (e.g., Dan Berrett, Debate Over MOOCs Reaches Harvard, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 10, 2013).  There are two distinct bases for this opposition.  The first goers to shared governance--faculties have raised serious objections to the introduction of MOOCs as an administration initiative, usually with little or no faculty consultation, viewing this as a way of end-running faculty authority.  The second goes to substance--that MOOCs do not deliver quality or substance to a necessary minimum extent.  This post looks to recent oppositional statements by faculty governance organizations at Harvard, Duke, American, and San Jose State. 

MOOCs at Penn State; An Update

The following is from my colleague Mary Miles about Penn State's entry into the MOOC business.

Professor Miles serves as a Faculty Senate representative on the steering committee for Penn State's recently released MOOCS. She, along with several other Faculty Senators, have been actively involved in developing, selecting, and analyzing the current MOOC offerings, and will continue to be engaged in the evolution of MOOCS at Penn State. Her principal charge as the representative is to keep the Senate apprised and involved in this exciting project.

Core Principles for Trandsforming Remedial Education: A Joint Statement

On December 123, 2012 the Charles A. Dana Center, Complete College America, Inc,, Education Commission of the States, and Jobs for the Future issued a joint Statement: Core Principles for Transforming Remedial Education:  A Joint Statement (Dec. 12, 2012). 

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

The objective was ambitious:

 As a result of new research and promising practice, we have more clarity than ever about how we can fundamentally transform our developmental education system to improve success for all students. To propel the movement forward, this statement offers a set of clear and actionable principles that, although not the final word on dev ed reform, sets a new course that can dramatically improve the postsecondary success of millions of students across the nation. (joint Statement)

Read more here.  AT a time of decreasing student numbers and the tendency among academic institutions to engage in sharper competitive practices for what they deem to be shrinking markets, there is much to mine here.  "In the end, the strategies we propose increase overall college completion rates, particularly among students who have traditionally been underserved by our postsecondary institutions." (joint Statement)

Here Comes Generation A: What Faculty Say About Adult Learners

Here Comes Generation A: What Faculty Say About Adult Learners

Thursday, October 25, 2012

1:30p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

508 Rider

Panelists: Martha Aynardi, Director of Academic Support and Special Projects, Penn State Berks; Martha Jordan, Director of Admission Services for Continuing Education and World Campus and Adult Learner Advocacy; Jane Owens, Senior Director of Continuing Education, Penn State Abington; Karen Pollack, Director of Academic Affairs for Undergraduate Programs, Penn State World Campus; and Patricia Shope, Prior Learning Assessment Coordinator, Continuing Education and World Campus

The Penn State Commission for Adult Learners, composed of faculty, staff, and students from across the University system exists to increase enrollment of and improve the adult learner experience at Penn State. In the fall of 2011 a total of 4,807 faculty members were invited to participate in a survey to gather information relative to (1) current attitudes toward adult learners at Penn State, (2) perceptions of the unique needs of adult learners, (3) the types of accommodations necessary for adult learners, and (4) identifying the needs of adult learners that are not currently being met. This panel will present the results of this survey, the background and methodology, and action steps that came about as a result. The panel will also focus on two specific initiatives – a joint effort with Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence to produce a faculty workshop that will inform and prepare faculty to better understand and work with adult learners and the Prior Learning Assessment Initiative.

To register for this free event call the Office of Planning and Institutional Assessment at 814-863-8721 or email psupia@psu.edu. Penn State campuses interested in participating in Quality Advocates via videoconference should contact the Office of Planning and Institutional Assessment.

The Quality Advocates Network meets several times each semester to share ideas and examples of improvement and change. To join the Quality Advocates Network mailing list or to learn more about the meetings scheduled, contact the staff at psupia@psu.edu.