Higher Ed, Bigger Courses

How to make huge university classes more meaningful - Parentcentral.ca

Here's some interesting discussion about the large class issue.  Even though it's within the Canadian system, it's still very relevant.

"No longer just a problem faced by large schools like the University of Toronto, whose Convocation Hall lectures pack in more than 1,000 students, smaller universities are feeling the pressure of an enrolment boom that is outstripping staff hires."

And the story continues...

"The survey tracked how universities are trying to make large classes
more engaging – some with media technicians and studios to add bells and
whistles to video lectures. It’s a problem more of them face: 14 of all
19 universities reported at least 30 per cent of their first-year
lectures last year had more than 100 students, the HEQCO survey found —
five more universities than the year before."

Redesigning the Accreditor? Comparative student learning measures? Changes are afoot!

From Inside Higher Education, April 14,2011

News: What's 'Good Enough'? - Inside Higher Ed

Last week, at his agency's Academic Resource Conference here, Wolff and WASC's other leaders sought to sell presidents, provosts, and faculty members from the region's four-year colleges on the idea that, with policy makers in Washington increasingly questioning the future of accreditation, the time has come for major changes in the agency's peer review process.

Many of the alterations in the "redesign" would represent a significant break with how WASC and the other regional accrediting agencies have historically operated, including by making public the commission’s letters of findings about individual colleges and using an outside auditing firm to review the finances of publicly traded higher education companies during WASC’s accreditation process. Currently, WASC announces the actions it has taken on colleges, but does not release the evaluations themselves.

But perhaps no change would be more dramatic than a proposed requirement that colleges benchmark their own learning outcomes and measures of student success (i.e., retention and graduation rates) against those of their peers. One WASC document summarizing the commission's goals suggested that each institution would work with WASC to set a "target graduation rate" (and potentially different rates for different subgroups) that it would "be expected to meet or exceed."

List of Next Generation Learning Challenge grant winners - the face of innovation

Next Generation Learning Challenges

Check out this list of Next Generation Learning Challenges grant winners.  Fascinating list of innovative projects.

Learning Analytics projects funded by the NGLC project

These should be interesting to watch - and they are open projects, which means we should all take advantage of them as the evolve.

NGLC Grants Target Open Courseware, Blended Learning -- Campus Technology

Recipients whose proposals focused primarily on student retention and analytics included:

Central Piedmont Community College: Online Student Profile Learning System: A Learner Analytics Model for Student Success;
City Colleges of Chicago: Math On-Demand + Early Warning System (also includes a blended learning component);
Eckerd College: In-Class Polling for All Learners (also includes a student engagement component through the use of classroom clickers);
Iowa Community College Online Consortium: eAnalytics -- ICCOC Best Practices in Using Learner Analytics to Enhance Student Success;
Marist College: Open Academic Analytics Initiative;
Sinclair Community College: Scale-up and Sustainability of the Student Success Plan Software;
University of Baltimore: A Socially Centric Blended Learning Model for At-Risk Youths at an Urban University; and
University of Hawaii System: STAR: Using Technology to Enhance the Academic Journey.