From The Higher Education Academy (UK) comes a set of reports that confirms what most of us knew anecdotally . . . that despite the rhetoric, quality in teaching is often not taken seriously in higher education.

Read the summary from the Academy below.

For the full reports, click here.

“Teaching performance is not consistently included in the promotion criteria for academics at UK universities and colleges – and is often completely absent – a new report published today shows.

Despite the vital role that teaching plays in a student’s experience of university, it is research performance that is emphasised in most HEI promotion policies.

The new research forms the second report from the ‘Reward and recognition of teaching in higher education’ project, a collaboration between the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester’s GENIE Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL).

The new research shows that of the 104 institutions surveyed, all of them included research performance criteria as part of their promotions policies but only 73 included teaching performance criteria. Only 45 of the 73 include explicit criteria for assessing teaching performance.  It also found that teaching is less likely to be incorporated in criteria for promotion in the more research intensive.

Professor Annette Cashmore of the GENIE CETL at Leicester comments: “The dominance of the recognition of research over teaching in higher education institutions is anecdotally well-established. The aim of the project we have undertaken with the Academy is to look at the evidence and to make some practical suggestions about what can be done about it. Our work is timely as interest in the quality of the overall student experience grows.”

Commenting on the report, the Deputy Chief Executive of the Higher Education Academy, Sean Mackney, said: “This collaboration between the Academy and the GENIE CETL at Leicester has shown that more needs to be done to put teaching on an equal footing with research in academic career progression.  We have identified a number of steps that will make this possible.”

The project recommends that funding should be made available to carry out work on defining and developing criteria for recognising quality in teaching and quality in the student experience. These criteria should be appropriate to diverse institutional missions and include examples of good practice from the UK and overseas.  It also recommends that universities and colleges should scrupulously apply the criteria and methods to all levels of academic positions.”

Bryan Polivka has worked with a number of online education providers, including Laureate Education and Caliber Learning Network. He now serves as a consultant to other organizations in the e-learning market at G. Bryan Polivka.

Q. Bryan, you’ve suggested that the limited innovation in higher education technology stems, in part, from the fact that “[Education] as an industry is full of people who are content experts, and severely lacking people who are learning experts.” I agree. But isn’t the lack of attention paid to education, itself, a by-product of the bigger issue that educational quality still plays a limited role in determining the success (as it is currently measured) of our colleges?

BP:  Oh goodness yes. Quality, what is that? Most colleges and universities have traditionally measure it by the grades and accomplishments of students they accept. Think about that a minute. It’s like GM saying they can prove they make the best cars, and then showing you the stacks of steel moving into their plants on railroad cars. Can’t argue with that, right?

But even if you have more output-based measures, it’s hard to pin down quality in education. I do a talk on this in which I end up (after starting by mentioning it was the definition of quality that drove the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance mad) pretty much proving to everyone in the room that quality is what people perceive it to be–and people really do know quality when they experience it. It is ultimately judged by students. The quality of the students is then in turn judged by employers and peers and even subordinates in the workplace.

So I tend to focus on the quality of the experience of learning itself, the aha, the excitement of finding out and applying something new, important, big. And how do you measure that? I’m not sure… but I know that the quality of learning defined that way is very, very similar to the joy of discovery, of invention, and of innovation. If our schools were really as brimming with young people hooked on learning, who were as excited about exploring and building and changing the world as those PSA’s they run at halftime of college football games would lead us to believe, we’d have plenty of innovation in educational technology. But our universities for the most part make sure that learning is boring, or they try to jazz it up with bells and whistles, which is further proof they believe it is boring. And students continue to balance out the boring by making their extra curricular activities anything but. And consequently they don’t spend their time innovating their own (or anyone else’s) education.

Q. The textbook industry appears on the verge of a significant adjustment. You recently spoke at a conference on the topic of the future of textbooks. How do you see this industry unfolding?

BP: Unfolding, or unraveling? I’m not sure which it will be at this point. Probably some of both. But If Pearson, the giant of textbook publishers, is any indication then it’s likely to unfold more than it unravels. But there are lots of traps and pitfalls. Many textbook publishers are completely hung up on digital rights management (DRM), convinced that the only way to preserve the future of education, and perhaps the civilized world (one executive actually used those very terms with me), then we must find a way to lock down flat digital content (PDFs) and only allow it in the hands of the person who paid for it. But if that’s the requirement, they’re all going to drown in the digital flood.

No, wait, not all. The Ark has been identified. The textbook of the future isn’t a book at all, which was my point at Learning 2009. It’s an interactive product that can be used as homework, or a study guide, a digital product that provides the same end results as a textbook but without all those annoying little pages, digital or otherwise. The publishers who realize they are in the homework/content delivery/lesson plan business will find digital alternatives. The publishers who try to preserve the textbook, in my estimation, will go down clutching their waterlogged chunks of lumber to the last. Pearson gets it. But I’m not sure how many others do.

Q. I’ve noticed that the more experienced and/or ambitious college instructors are starting to complement their use of learning management systems (e.g. Angel) with other, external applications such as Facebook. In the coming years, we will see courses using a patchwork of applications or is the central LMS safe?

BP: The central LMS is not safe at all. It’s only value in the future will be authentication and record-keeping. The patchwork, as you call it, is actually the cloud. Mashups, I believe, are here to stay.

Think about Facebook for a moment as I list out the things that an LMS does: It authenticates users. It puts them in groups. It fosters discussion. It allows access to shared content. It offers assessment tools (quizzes). It organizes lesson plans and tracks grades. All right, those last two things it doesn’t do, but everything up that point is done either better or easier on Facebook than in Blackboard… and can be done without an enormous centralized system. And (not a small factor) it can be done for free. What would it take to do the whole thing using just Facebook, so faculty could just say, “Here’s your Facebook group, see you there”? Actually nothing, if they used SurveyMonkey for quizzes (it’s free) and Engrade for a gradebook (it’s free). That’s a patchwork, not even a mashup. Don’t like the open access of Facebook, use Ning.com to create a private social network. No one gets in who the teacher, or the school administrator, doesn’t allow. None of this is hard any more.

In my estimation Blackboard and Angel and WebCT (wait, that’s all the same thing!) should be very anxious. To put it in the starkest terms, they seem to be counting on their customers to be too scared, too lazy, or too shortsighted to attempt to run a class in the cloud. They figure if they mash up with Facebook themselves, or offer a Twitter feature, no one will notice that the whole game has changed. Not a good forward-looking strategy. What they need to do is to lead the mashup revolution. But that requires cannibalizing their own customer base for a product that sells a lot cheaper. That’s what Blockbuster couldn’t do, and Netflix ate their lunch. It’s what Sony couldn’t do, and iTunes ate their lunch. It’s what Continental and USAir and TWA couldn’t do, and Southwest ate their lunch. There’s a free lunch coming for someone, courtesy of the LMS powerhouses of old.

Q. You held a number of leadership positions in the educational technology industry during the “early days” (1990s). Did you expect the industry to evolve as it has? What were the big surprises?

BP: It has not evolved as I expected in one big regard. And actually, not to age myself overly, but I’ve been doing this since the mid-1980’s. That’s when I saw an enormous new field being born at the intersection of digital technology and education. Back then the predictions of a coming “digital convergence” of all technology still sounded like some bizarre crossover between sci-fi and New Age philosophy (Everyone sing now, “When the moon is in the seventh house, and VHS aligns with DOS…”). I bought in completely, and left an Emmy-award-winning career in television to take my first full-time job in technology-delivered education in 1989. That’s a story for another time. But what has constantly surprised me, and still does, is how slow it all has moved. Of course I couldn’t foresee social media or any other web 2.0 technologies back then, but the adoption rate has been molasses in my estimation.

Look how far education lags when you compare it to Entertainment or Communications. Communications as an industry is actually called “Telecommunications,” and is defined by technology. If it’s not delivered by technology, it’s not communications. The penetration of technology is 100%. Entertainment is not 100%, but I’d guess more than nine out of every ten dollars spent goes to some sort of technology, counting movies, music, TV, video games, online gambling–really everything except maybe theater, sporting events, amusement parks, and casinos. Where does the technical penetration into Education stand? Fifteen percent? If that. The last good numbers I saw put even corporate training budgets in the US at only 30 – 35% going toward some sort of technology delivery.

But Education got a slow start. Telecom started in the 1800’s with the telegraph. Entertainment started with films in the early 20th century. With the exception of training and educational films (anyone else remember “Our Mr. Sun” from grade school?) educational technology didn’t really begin in earnest until the 70’s, with “closed circuit” television. And both of those other fields are a lot simpler than education, which by definition must be tailored to every individual to be of value.

That’s why I’m so excited about web 2.0 for learning. Social media, 3D virtual worlds, mobile devices… these are technologies that suit the complexities of education, and that, particularly when combined, create a sophisticated enough environment to do almost anything required in education, and (finally!) to truly improve on the limitations of the classroom experience. It’s a brave new world… but it’s been a long time coming!

An interview from the Higher Education Management Group.

For a variety reasons, some of which I addressed in a previous post, there is a dearth of high quality educational media in higher education. Here are three examples created outside of higher education.

Donald Norris of Strategic Initiatives Inc discusses why online learning is becoming a strategic issue in higher ed:

Why Has Online Learning Become Even More Strategic?

“Up to this point in its development, online learning has been waging a battle of acceptance with faculty, institutional leaders, and even some students. Research has shown that online learning has progressively come to be regarded as equivalent or even superior in some ways to traditional, face-to-face learning, especially among 18-24 year old and working adult learners and faculty who were early adopters.

But the Great Recession and the American Higher Education Affordability Crisis have raised the stakes for online learning not just in the U.S., but globally. Transformed versions of online, blended and e-learning hold the potential to be essential elements of the reimagining of American higher education, post recession, to make it sustainable worldwide. Four factors make this so:

• Addressing the American Affordability Crisis. Learners and parents are facing an affordability crisis of unprecedented propositions. In America, the cumulative effect of year-after-year escalating costs of tuition has outstripped the rate of inflation for 30 years running. Gradually American higher education a pricey if not unattainable proposition, for many potential learners. The current recession, rising unemployment, and collapse of the housing market have reduced the net worth of families and changed the educational plans of many learners.

Community colleges and for-profit educational providers have experienced explosive growth in demand this year as learners turn to more convenient, local, high-value, alternatives to mid-ranking public four-year institutions and private colleges. Some community colleges in especially strapped states like California have turned away legions of students this year. Truly transformed learning, using combinations of online, blended, and e-learning, has the potential to both reduce the total cost of achieving competence objectives and improve the success of learners by providing a range and mix of options that meet their personal and financial needs.

The pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education are peppered with stories of community colleges, in particular, whose leaders are experimenting with increasingly transformative mixtures of solutions to these challenges.

• Achieving Financial Sustainability Requires Transformation. The model for funding public institutions is broken, as has been reflected in the diminishing relative level of public support for education in general over the past three decades. During recessionary times, community colleges and other public four-year institutions typically experience their greatest enrollment demand at a time when state and local resources decline. Transformed learning can change the business model so that the marginal cost of learning is consistently reduced to less than the price of tuition, allowing growth to meet demand, even during recession. Market leaders have already achieved this goal. Post recession, the rest of American higher education needs to adopt and scale these practices.

• Transformed Online Learning is a Part of Broader Institutional Strategies. Institutional leaders have spent 2008 “staunching the flow” of the resource impact of the Great Recession. They recognize that they must use 2009-2012 to aggressively leverage stimulus funding and discover not just efficiencies, but innovations and transformations that will enable them to achieve financial sustainability when the stimulus money is gone. Transformed online, blended, and e-learning is one of a set of even broader institutional strategies to achieve financial sustainability that we mention in our white paper, “Linking Analytics to Lifting out of Recession.”

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. The link between learning and employability is tenuous and must be strengthened if America’s to regain its competitive position in the global economy. Learning experiences must be more closely linked to active, immersive application and to the workplace. The capacity to perpetually enhance competences to maintain or raise competitiveness is enhanced with online learning and Web 2.0 tools and patterns of interactivity.

As we look at the future potential of online learning and competence building, we should learn from market leaders how to leverage transformation in business models and learning settings, as described in the next series of blogs.”

Remainder of the post.

Before I quit my faculty position to move into education management and consulting, I regularly lectured to classes with 200-250 students. I was nervous at first, and my delivery was stiff and overly formal. With practice, though, I got good at it. My lectures became almost theatrical, and I enjoyed great reviews from students and colleagues. I learned to love it. (Although I never stopped being nervous beforehand.)

I don’t remember when exactly it dawned on me, but one day I realized that my lectures could and, ultimately should be, replaced by educational media. Not just any media, but well-scripted, thoroughly researched, high-production value media; content that would allow the student to play with the material, test their understanding, get immediate and detailed feedback, interact with other learners, and more. The lecture and all of the associated elements of that style of  teaching is a sad substitute for what is now possible. Sure, we need face-to-face interaction. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But let’s stop using the lecture hall for broadcasting information that can be much better (and more cheaply) done by other means. (For some thoughts as to why high quality educational media is not readily available, see my earlier post.)

So, I was interested to read this post by Philip Greenspun of MIT. (Thank you to Ryan Busch for bringing it to my attention.) His post is essentially a rant on the lunacy of the lecture model. As Greenspun notes, lectures made sense when it was the best (only?) way to broadcast information efficiently. This obviously isn’t the case today. And the argument that lecturing is valuable because it harnesses the age-old value of “storytelling” only holds up if (a) narrative is actually used in the lecture (which is rare), and (b) the academic can tell stories (again, rare).

To prove his point, Greenspun dissects a couple of lectures by a well-known academic from Yale University. His analysis isn’t charitable, but it is accurate. And more importantly, the problems he identified are representative of the problem with the lecture format, and not limited to a handful of academics. (The Yale lecturer identified in the article is no different than thousands of other research-intensive academics. For an excerpt of his dissection of the Yale lecture, see below.)

Greenspun’s larger concern is the health and prosperity of the society. Like others, he believes that we need to rethink education in order to continue to build prosperous, enlightened societies. And it’s this fear of what the future holds for us that may be the driving force behind real change in higher education. People have been calling for change in higher ed for decades (See New Players, Different Game). But I sense a greater level of urgency. Things are getting really bad out there: families, communities, companies, (and even universities) are hurting in ways that they haven’t before. We may finally have, as John Kotter describes it, the required “sense of urgency” to bring about substantial change.

I encourage you to read Philip Greenspun’s notes. They are rough, to be sure. But they draw attention to some very basic facts about the limitations of the higher education model.

Philip Greenspun: “Universities and Economic Growth”

Excerpt (Read the full post here)

Modern University

Teaching technologies developed since 1088:

• movable type
• cheap paper made from trees
• telephone
• photocopier
• email
• Web

How has this changed the way classes are conducted? We still have lectures and homework, just as in 1088. What other industry could survive without adopting at least some of the technologies of the last 1000 years into its core processes?

Improved technology has rendered the traditional university instructional method far less effective. The student has a warm cozy apartment and will find sleeping late an attractive alternative to attending a lecture (or watching Good Morning America). The student sitting in lecture has some sort of device capable of browsing the Web, sending and receiving text messages, supporting games, displaying photos or video to an adjacent student.

Focusing on homework has become much tougher. A modern dorm room has a television, Internet, youtube, instant messaging, email, phone, and video games. The students who get the most out of their four years in college are not those who are most able, but rather those with the best study habits.

No company would rely on this system for getting work done, despite the potential savings in having each employee work from home. Companies spend a fortune in commercial office space rent to create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there for most of each day.

In the face of massive technological advances, the most significant change that universities have made is removing their only quality control mechanism. Through tenure, the university now guarantees professors pay regardless of effectiveness.

Yale University

One argument for traditional lecture-based teaching is that storytelling is a primal human activity. If the cavemen in the movie 2001 were learning from great storytellers, surely it must be the best way to teach today.

A problem with this approach is that it depends on finding millions of great storytellers.

Consider lectures by Robert Shiller, e.g., Econ 252, Financial Markets: Lecture 1 (alternate location):

• 0-4:30: name of course, name of professor, names of TAs, pictures of TAs [all stuff that could easily have been on a handout or Web site]
• 4:30-5:15: bragging about how many important people on Wall Street took his course, bragging about how great the course is even for people who aren’t going on to Wall Street
• 5:15-6:20: talking about how every human endeavor involves finance, e.g., if you’re a poet it will help you get published to know how finance works [my haiku: AIG bankrupt; your taxes gone to Greenwich; no one hears your screams]
• 6:20-7: talking about an unrelated course, Econ 251, and who taught it in previous years [big excitement at a university: some guy other than the usual lecturer taught it because Kahuna #1 was on leave]
• 7-10: history of why two intro finance courses exist, glorious biography of teacher of the other course, [after several minutes, we learn that the other course has a bit more math]
• 10-11:30: show of hands for who is interested in organic chemistry, discussion of how Robert Shiller is reading about this because he has such broad intellectual interests [implicit comparison to finance wizards, though Shiller is not able to cite an example of how organic chemists managed to bankrupt their shareholders and wreck the world economy]
• 11:30-15:00: writes authors of textbook on blackboard, says it is “very detailed”, discusses reactions of previous classes of students to this book, talks about his vacation in the Bahamas with some other important guy, reading textbook by the pool unlike the other stupid tourists who were reading novels. Discussion of what number the current edition is. “I met a really prominent person on Wall Street” who told him that his son had dropped out of the course because the textbook was too hard. Apparently Yale students are too stupid/lazy to read this book intended for undergrads at schools with more motivated students.
• 15-16: discussion of how library is obsolete in the Internet age, how Franco Modigliani is 2nd author of primary textbook, a Nobel Prize winner, and “my teacher at MIT”
• 16-18: discussion of assigning Jeremy Siegel’s Stocks for the Long Run book and how it has sold more than 1/2 million copies [Why do we need to pay $50,000/year to Yale to find books that are stacked out front in Barnes and Noble]
• 18: discussion of assigning his own book, Irrational Exuberance, and how he managed to time both the stock market crash of 2000 and the housing market peak in 2005
• 19-20:15: all of these are on sale at Labyrinth Books, an independent bookstore, as well as the campus bookstore. Talks about how he likes to support independent bookstores. Talks about New Haven bookstore that went out of business some time earlier. Helpfully provides street address for defunct bookstore.
• 20:15-21: discussion of lecture and teaching section schedule; there are six problem sets and they are due on Monday
• 21-22:30: this is one of the biggest classes at Yale [because we are such great teachers]; how grades are determined, e.g., what percentage are problem sets and exams, but then we use judgment as well [so perhaps you can ignore the percentages just given]
• 22:30: writes first topic on the board, “Behavioral Finance”, and begins what might be considered actual teaching.

Does it get better after the first lecture? Let’s look at Lecture 2, in which the first 10 minutes are spent on irrelevant story from Hindu scripture. From 20:30-22:20, the Binomial Distribution formula is written on the blackboard with no explanation:

f(x) = P^x (1-P)^(n-x) n!/(n-x)!all two minutes are taken up with writing (incorrectly; there is an unbalanced parenthesis) and asking if people can read his handwriting. [Compare to two minutes reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution.]

A bit later Shiller presents the moderately scary formula for a Gaussian Distribution with no explanation and says “I assume you’re familiar with this”. Students at Yale must be very intelligent indeed if they can understand the Binomial Formula and Gaussian Distribution simply by looking at an expression. But if they are so smart and math-nerdy, how do we explain this sequence:

• 50:30: begins ad nauseum explanation of present value calculation
• 53:40: we figure out the value of $1 a year from now
• 63: wraps up after having spent 13 minutes explaining something much simpler than the Binomial Distribution, which had been dispensed with in 2 minutes

This is one of the most popular courses at one of America’s greatest universities.

Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 1.7 million Americans work as college teachers (source). If Yale can’t find teachers who can use classroom time effectively, what hope is there for universities with less money and prestige?”

In the long run, the more substantial changes in higher education will involve modifications to its fundamental business model. That being the case, it’s useful to keep an eye on how business models are shifting. The Board of Innovation produced this interesting description of the some of the emerging models. (And if you want a refresher on what constitutes the business model of traditional universities, check out this interesting, but self-serving video description of the traditional university “business model”. Ignore the fact that the video manages to avoid any questions about the assumptions that underlie the model.)

Interview with Higher Education Management Group member, Mike Offerman.

Dr. Michael J. Offerman is Vice-Chairman and President Emeritus of Capella University, and author of the highly regarded blog, The Other 85 Percent.

Dr. Offerman’s full bio.

“Quality” in higher education remains linked to exclusivity (admissions) and costs (tuition).  Are we making any progress in redefining quality?  What are the obstacles to progress on this front?

The idea that the most exclusive colleges represent quality actually begs the question of the real value added by colleges that take only the best and the brightest.  The idea that cost equals quality is just as questionable.  Exclusivity and cost have served as proxies for quality because higher education has argued that it is just not possible to measure learning.  I find this argument to be ridiculous.  To think that organizations designed to teach and prepare researchers cannot figure out how to assess their own work borders on the absurd.  But this belief (or defensive strategy) has been so vehemently stated so frequently by very smart people that it is simply taken for granted inside the academy.

This is a very valuable position to take if you are in an exclusive and expensive school.  As long as you can claim quality simply because you take in only the best and charge them a lot of money, you are in a very lucrative position.  And, many if not most American colleges or universities are focused on climbing up the reputational ladder with hopes that they, too, can live in that exalted and lucrative spot.  Unfortunately, just as there is exclusivity in student admissions, there is also exclusivity in the institutions that are allowed into the club.  Nonetheless, hope springs eternal and the mantra continues that learning is complicated, can only be comprehended by the select few and certainly cannot be measured. Indeed, measuring it would be reductionist, would result in a dumbing-down of the curriculum.

This self-congratulatory, self-righteous and self-serving viewpoint is the real obstacle to progress.  Nonetheless, progress is being made.  Slowly.

I think there is a real and irreversible move to look at learning outcomes as the measure of quality.  While there are transitional measures being used, rather than actual measures of learning, it is only a matter of time until learning outcomes will provide the basis for quality assessment.  The transitional measures that are being used include completion rates, student engagement, student satisfaction, alumni surveys, and some measures of core learning (writing, critical thinking and analytical reasoning).  All of these are very important and should be measured.  But producing more completions could occur because learning quality is decreased.  Students can be engaged and satisfied but not be learning.  Alumni may be tickled to have earned a degree so easily.  And, while the core areas are very, very important and do indicate learning has occurred, they are not enough.  This is a step in the right direction but not sufficient.  We also need to measure whether students have learned in their major or program area.  It can be done, and done in ways that are not reductionist and do not overlook the soft skills.

The problem we have with measuring program level learning outcomes is that every institution claims that their outcomes are differentiated from every other institution.  That means we cannot easily compare “apples to apples.”  Yet, we need to start, as we have done with Transparency by Design, by having institutions clearly articulate intended outcomes for a program, explain in simple terms how these are measured and then report the results of our assessments of graduating students.  As we get experience doing this, we will be able to tell just how differentiated one institution’s program is from others.  I suspect that there won’t be five clearly differentiated programs in accounting, for example.  Hopefully, the high cost school would only be able to justify the high cost if they produced the best learning outcomes and provided the best experience for their students.  I think that quality has to be based on those two factors:  are students learning the intended outcomes and what kind of experience did they have while learning. And I think it is inevitable that information about these two factors will be demanded by prospective students.  Hopefully sooner rather than later.

How will the current and long term financial challenges facing American colleges influence our capacity (and willingness) to meet the needs of “non-traditional” learners?

I am very concerned about the financial challenges facing American colleges and universities and just wrote about the reduced number of students that the California State University schools will serve next year.  When you combine this year’s and next year’s reductions, the total is over 50,000 students, just in that one system.  That would be the equivalent of closing the University of Texas-Austin.

This is part of a larger issue — a growing capacity crisis in American higher education.  There is demand for more higher education access than the traditional institutions can accommodate.  So, at least in the short run, it will not only be the underserved and so-called non-traditional students who will not be served, but also the traditional students coming to college directly from high school, hoping to study full-time

Indeed, it is possible that this population may end up being in a relatively better position than the traditional college students.  That is because these students are increasingly being served by several segments of American higher education that are able to expand capacity, even in the face of an economic crisis.  These institutions include those that specialize in serving adults, often using online delivery, and community colleges.  If you look at the student demographics of the adult online schools and community colleges you will find students who are older, more ethnically diverse and more likely to attend part-time than those at traditional, campus-based comprehensive and research universities.  It is this group of students that I write and speak about in my blog, The Other 85 Percent.

Institutions that increasingly serve this audience include for-profit universities such as Capella, American Public and Kaplan.  But there are also private not-for-profit colleges and universities such as Western Governors, Franklin, Regis, Excelsior and others.  And there are even some public colleges and universities, such as Charter Oak, Rio Salado and University of Maryland University College.  These schools focus on the non-traditional students, usually adults, and have increasingly enrolled African-American, Hispanic and Native American students.

But, they share something beyond student demographics.  They have learned how to expand capacity.  They do that by achieving a level of productivity that allows them to offer certificate and degree programs, relying only on the revenue generated by the program.  They do not depend on state subsidies or endowments to cover the costs of expanded capacity.

The fact is that America needs to increase access for underserved and non-traditional students if we are to find our way out of the economic recession.  The Obama administration and several prominent foundations have set goals for America to lead the world in degree attainment over the next 10 to 15 years.  Analysts have indicated that the high school to college pipeline cannot get us to that goal.  In fact, about 70% of the new degree production will have to come from adults.

Despite this reality, American public policy still is driven by an outdated, romanticized view of college and the college student.  Policy talk is about high school students and their parents choosing a school where the child can live, study full-time and engage in the culture of the campus.  That is a wonderful view.  It is just not what the average college student experiences.  The overwhelming majority of college students are older, and/or study part-time, and/or work more than twenty hours a week and don’t live on a campus.

Perhaps the economic recession may actually help drive a better understanding by policy makers about college and college students.  It is possible that the California State Universities and their peers will have to focus available resources on the traditional students and allow community colleges and the specialized, adult and online schools to continue to expand capacity to serve the underserved and non-traditional students.  If that is to occur, there needs to be a serious re-thinking of federal and state policies so that they not only recognize the service being provided by the “non-traditional” schools but also to remove policy barriers and create incentives for adults, part-timers and other students to utilize these institutions.

What role does increased access to data on institutional performance and student learning play in higher ed reform?

I believe that access to data can play a decisive role in higher education reform.  It is not yet happening because most of higher education is not using the data that exists and fails to understand the power of converting data to actionable information.  It was access to data that drove the creation of Transparency by Design.  We realized that the online delivery format generates huge amounts of data.  Unprecedented data—data on every interaction in the learning exchange, including data about demonstrations of learning outcomes.  But, most of us were not looking at the data in any coherent manner.

Regardless of delivery mode, there is an emerging movement, known as action analytics (see http://donaldmnorris.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html ), to rapidly convert data to actionable information that can be made available not only to institutional leaders, but also to faculty, advisors, students and others.  One element of this effort is to liberate the data so that it is available to folks other than the usual “power-users.”  Data can be shared rapidly without special reports generated by institutional research staff.  The implications for improvement and, I believe reform, are considerable.

The transformative power of the available data is only realized when there is a good deal of transparency involved.  To simply generate data or information and only share it with institutional leadership is not very helpful.  The leaders have limited time to spend with the information; overall, they have not shown much interest in using data to drive improvement or change, and they may not understand the kinds of change that the information might support.  It is when information is provided to students and faculty that it takes on real power.  One example of putting information into students’ hands is Purdue University’s Signals program (http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/x/2009b/090827ArnoldSignals.html ), which gets information to students about how they are doing academically while there is still time for the student to take any necessary steps to change.  That is just one example of the conversion of data to actionable information that can help in student learning, persistence and completion.  But, the most interesting aspect of a program like Signals is that once students start to receive that type of information, they want more.  And, I expect that as they demand and receive more information, they will begin to define and demand the changes that they see might help them.  This is just the beginning of the student/customer becoming more actively engaged in their higher education.  I think it will lead to demands for improvement, service and change that makes their education and their institution better.

Data analysis can also provide rapid, deep understanding about how various parts of the university are performing.  And, when I say various parts, I am not thinking about operating structure but some much more fundamental aspects of the university.  For example, once curriculum maps are made to show how learning activities progressively lead up to intended program level learning outcomes and assessments of learning are embedded across the map, from concept to competency to outcome, whole new opportunities for analysis open up.  It is then possible to see which pieces of the curriculum are producing the best learning outcomes; where students are struggling with concepts, competencies or outcomes; which faculty are producing the best learning outcomes and more.  That knowledge allows for corrective action.  And the process can lead to a more lean curriculum without the considerable and unnecessary repetition of learning that exists in many programs.  This level of analysis not only allows for better understanding about whether and where learning is occurring, but also allows for productivity gains.  Those types of gains can lead to better cost management and ultimately to better prices for students.

Obviously, what I have described is anathema to many involved in higher education.  But, once the information becomes transparent, becomes democratized, the demand for improvement and/or reform becomes substantially empowered.  At that point, change and decision-making is not data-based but is literally data-driven.

From Times Higher Education

Burck Smith is CEO of Straighterline. Full bio.

Q: Burck, can we begin with a high-level description of Straighterline?

Straighterline provides very affordable, very flexible, very well supported online general education courses for college students. These courses have been reviewed and approved by the American Council of Education’s (ACE) Credit Review Service, by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC), and by numerous regionally accredited colleges. Students can get real college credit at any college that will award credit for ACE recognized courses or from one of Straighterline’s partner colleges. Straighterline does not offer financial aid, but the prices are so affordable we don’t think we need to. We charge $399 per course or $99 per month + $39 per course.

Q: In 1995, Eli Noam, a Columbia University professor, wrote an essay entitled Electronics and the Dim Future of the University. Noam suggested that the Internet (remember 28.8 modems?) would enable major sources of instructional content, particularly textbook publishers, to emerge as serious competitors to traditional universities. He noted that textbook publishers had the experience, content, and infrastructure to produce online education that was far superior to, and less expensive than, what was possible from traditional universities. Is Straighterline evidence that Noam had it right?

The modern University is too complex an entity to simply be replaced by content providers. Where Noam had it right is that, where the university experience is primarily about instructional content, then publishers and companies like Straighterline can complement and compete with them. So, students working at a distance, as commuters, in extension programs, and in courses that do not build strong communities (like most general education courses) will benefit from offerings like Straighterline. Straighterline providers greater differentiation in the educational experience for students/consumers.

Q: For a relatively new company, Straighterline has generated a great deal of attention. Kevin Carey’s article in Washington Monthly defined SL as a sign of innovation in an otherwise, staid sector. Others, though, have been less kind – particularly faculty. Concerning the latter, what I find particularly interesting is that the criticisms rarely, if ever, focus on whether the courses in question offer better educational value (i.e. learning outcomes). Instead, the criticisms concern matters such as the threat to employment of academics, accreditation policies, protection of university brands, and the involvement of “corporate plunderers” in the (apparently) “pure” space of higher education. How do we get the discussion to focus on educational value? Is the growth of new, innovative models in higher education dependent on evidence of educational value?

In most industries, new technologies increase value to the end-user – improved quality, reduced cost, or both. However, education has focused only on expanding access. Costs to the end-user have actually increased. I find it impossible to have a discussion about quality without also including cost. For instance, a $1000 course with a 90% pass rate has a cost-per-pass of a little over $1100. A $500 course with 75% has $666 cost-per-pass. Which is the better course? In other industries, the dynamics of a free-market typically incorporate the value benefits of new technologies. However, education’s price points have been protected by artificial regulatory barriers created by accreditation, a byzantine articulation system, and significant subsidies in the form of state budget allocations, federal financial aid and grants, and non-profit status. Without a more rigorous discussion about cost and a better definition of what the product is, innovation will remain difficult.

Q: There are a number of companies now offering what we could term “full service” for online higher education. Organizations like Embanet, Colloquy, and Compass Knowledge provide schools with marketing, program development, enrolment management, technology, and even instructor recruitment to clients wishing to jump start their growth in online ed. Why did you choose another approach?

First, start with the assumption that online education is much, much cheaper to deliver than face-to-face education. Now, add the fact that colleges have almost no incentive to lower their tuition levels. Suddenly, there is a very large difference between the cost to provide a course and the price paid for the course. Third parties can now provide services to colleges, make a profit, and the college will retain at least its original profit level. Because of the profit, this has become a pretty crowded space. Straighterline’s approach is to make the price of course delivery resemble more closely the cost of course delivery – thereby delivering the cost benefits of online education to students rather than being taken by colleges and third party distance education providers. Ultimately, this is where a more rational market would evolve to.