UMUC and What Could Become a Scandal

Headlines in the region last week highlighted the resignation of the president of UMUC, U of Maryland's online learning operation.  What I found interesting were the allegations that she shortened courses from 14 to 8 weeks and eliminated proctored final exams.  That kind of stuff sounds familiar, but it is hardly in the realm of academic integrity, but it is is in the realm of boosting enrollment (profit).

Student Learning (not-learning) in Colleges

The Washington Post had a front page article yesterday, Colleges have their Own text anxiety, which focused on the fact that there is some data now that suggests that some students learn very little in four years of college, although I am not sure why anyone would be surprised by that.  This has been kicking around in discussions since the appearance of the 2011 book, Academically Adrift.

What struck me in the article was the call for more critical writing in college courses, which is something that we try to do, despite indirect pressure from college admin to make the course easier (though no one will admit to saying that) so that we have better student success and retention.  We should probably require even more writing than we do now!

The article also mentions another supposedly new grading technique called "minimal marking," which is also something that we have been doing for years now--it is amazing that as soon as a big university starts doing something that has been academically innovative for years now, then it is the big university that garners all the attention and kudos (very weird).

In any case, after reading the article, I am convinced that we are moving in the direction of pre and post testing of students.  We probably wouldn't have to do that if more instructors would just stop giving every student who shows up in class a passing grade simply for being there.

The Impossibility of Innovative Tech Projects at a Community College

The problem is tech support (better to say the absence of it). The tech guys have to spend so much time just managing email (someone is always responding to a phishing email and bringing down the entire system) and college resources (virtual drives to store virtual documents) that they have no time to support anything that is outside of the box.  Plus none of them are trained to do that.  They are network and security guys and just have a hard time dealing with any kind of academic support. I have reluctantly moved project after project that I have tried to work on to locations outside of the community college, literally because it is too frustrating trying to get any support.

What about Quality, Challenging Courses?

See, Jay Mathews, Washington Post, Put Spotlight on School, not Sports. (For a moment, let's disregard the enormous billions of dollars spent each year on college sports instead of academic facilities and resources.) No, what a college wants is "student success," which means higher graduation rates (or increased student retention so that students take more classes and pay more tuition).  It is rare the college that is actually about quality courses with real reading and writing challenges for students.  This is particularly challenging for a community college.  From my perspective, the oft-quoted figure that students study maybe 12 hours a week is an inflated figure.  I can come up with a class schedule that will require far less hours and still reward a student with solid grades of "A" and "B."  Faculty are afraid to hold students accountable and perhaps even fail them (that's not the student success that schools are looking for).

The Blackboard Strait-Jacket

We continue to be stuck with the old frame set-up of Blackboard.  There are literally hundreds, probably thousands, of digital apps out there, but we have Blackboard and it's ten or so features. 

New Digital History Course

Right now I am working on developing a new "intro" to digital history course, which I hope to be able to offer in both online and on campus forms in the future.  This has been a lot of work so far, and I still need to write up some more notes to go with the syllabus.  Here is the draft course site:
http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS295/Index.html

Push Enrollments Up

The demand to increase online student enrollments is unbelievable.  Somehow no one seems to make the connection between that and an accompanying demand to increase student success rates.