Higher Education Innovation

According to State U Online, a new report from the New America Foundation and Education Sector, although 32 percent of all postsecondary students in the U.S. took at least one online course in 2010, public institutions of higher education have been slow to embrace the potential of online learning. The report suggests ways state systems of higher education can build and sustain an online public university and profiles several states that are addressing common challenges such as faculty buy-in, quality control, and financing.

Among the report’s findings:

• States that have had the most success building a “state u online” have:
  • made it easy for students to access available online learning opportunities through such means as a centralized clearinghouse of courses and degrees offered;
  • provided student services support such as e-tutoring and advising;
  • spread costs among institutions through shared contracts for resources such as learning management systems;
  • collaborated within and between states to streamline a student’s path towards completion by making sure credits transfer between institutions and even across state lines.
• Some examples of states that have made steps towards comprehensive online programs include:
  • The University of Wisconsin’s eCampus which provides a catalogue of all online courses available in the system, connected by a single brand.
  • Minnesota State Colleges and Universities which are able to share resources and costs of online learning by way of an inter-institutional online university.
  • The Florida Virtual Campus which provides access to tutoring, advising, and library support services in one place for students in the Florida College System and the State University System of Florida.
  • The University System of Georgia which has created an online core curriculum, subject to approval by each institution that offers general education courses fulfilling requirements at institutions within the system.
  • The Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) which has developed a consortium of 20 regional public distance-education programs in states with a common interest in providing education to rural professionals in fields such as  human services and agriculture.
• The report concluded that for a “state u online” to be successful, systems should consider the following:
  • Sharing costs between institutions, enabling institutions to identify the needs of their own campus, and utilizing existing online education resources (like MOOCs) on a system level.
  • Offering faculty a stipend to teach online courses, giving weight to online instruction in tenure decisions, and providing professional development for course design.
  • Providing a clearinghouse of online courses, so students can learn about various online opportunities in one place.
  • Creating agreements among institutions to allow credits to follow students.
  • Providing detailed information on the policies, procedures, and benefits of online learning to all students before they begin an online program.
  • Designating administrators to follow up with students who did not show signs of activity online.
  • Embracing prior learning assessments and competency- based education to accelerate time to degree for students.

New America higher education experts Amy Laitinen and Rachel Fishman discuss policy reforms that could alter the higher education system for the better. Laitinen explains how to move past the credit hour and measure learning, not just seat time, and Fishman explores how public universities are collaborating on that and other issues to develop online courses. Fuzz Hogan hosts.

Guest post by Danielle Kehl and Benjamin Lennett from New America's Open Technology Institute.

For a kid growing up in rural northern Wisconsin, attending the state university offers a key avenue to broaden career opportunities or gain skills to better run the family farm. In recent years, as public institutions like the University of Wisconsin (UW) have increasingly embraced online courses and flexible degree options, the university’s resources may seem more accessible than ever—but only if you live in a part of the state that has adequate and affordable broadband.

UW has long been devoted to serving the public interest, cultivating one of the biggest and most ambitious extension programs in the country over the last century. “The Wisconsin Idea,” first articulated by Governer Robert LaFollette and University President Charles Van Hise, was a vision for the university in which its academic activities were connected to every local community. Van Hise declared in 1904: “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state.” It suggests that “the boundaries of campus are the boundaries of the state.”

This post originally appeared in New America's blog In the Tank

When I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took approximately 8-10 large lecture classes. I remember walking into my first lecture as a freshman—Introduction to International Relations—and choosing between a seat on the first floor or in the balcony. I chose the first floor, somewhere in the middle. The “classroom” that day was brimming with more than 500 students. As the professor went over the syllabus, it became evident that attendance at lecture was “strongly encouraged” as there would be no way to quickly take attendance. By the second lecture, there were many empty seats.

Many freshmen and sophomores who attend public universities find themselves stuck in these large, introductory courses. With no one to check up on them or give them personal attention, many fall through the cracks—they may stop attending class and then do poorly on exams, or they may fall behind and withdraw from the course.

With this in mind, when I began to research online courses and credentials at public universities for a policy report, I assumed I would find the same problems endemic to large lectures—high attrition and low success rates.  Instead, I found something that surprised me:  While some online courses may suffer the same problems as lectures, several universities have discovered simple ways to keep students engaged once they start exhibiting drop-out warning signs, like neglecting assignments or lectures. In many instances, the data collected about online students by some institutions create a safety net to prevent drop outs where none exists in a face-to-face lecture-hall setting.

Guest post by Mandy Zatynski

Officials at eCore, the University System of Georgia’s online curriculum, collect heaps of student data every year: individual course completion rates, withdrawal rates, and even the number of those identified as at-risk each semester.

Every day, Melanie Clay, dean of eCore, says she looks at the dropout rate and compares it to the rate at the same time last year. “If it’s not going in the direction we want it to be going in, then we … try to analyze why until we figure out why,” she told me when I visited her office at the University of West Georgia last fall. It could be the online platform (Is it user friendly?), the instructor (Is s/he responsive?), or the student success adviser – the person tasked with calling (yes, on the telephone – twice, then regular contacts by email) every student identified as at-risk. The student success adviser has to be caring, but convincing. Dean Clay knows online courses are just as important as face-to-face courses, even though it’s easier to forget about them.

Yesterday, my colleague Rachel Fishman released a new policy paper, entitled State U Online. Besides synthesizing a progression of steps for building and sophisticating a public online education model,the paper provides a compelling look back at distance education in the U.S. as a nearly 300-year-old phenomenon, not a 20-year-old blip. This historic perspective strongly suggests the answer to a question skeptics of online education continue to pose: Is technology-based education yet another passing fad? While State U Online shows technology-based education is here to stay, one reason the question has persisted may be that faculty themselves are reticent to face the pursuant question, which is whether there will be a place for them in the academic workforce of the future. The answer is that it depends on the structure of faculty work and, in public institutions, what the state hopes to gain from it.

Online learning has become a permanent fixture of our system of higher education. Yet, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of college students, have been visibly slow to embrace it.  Many of these institutions were founded with a mission to serve their citizens, including those unable to attend in residence. Yet even as the technological means to achieve this goal reaches new heights, public universities too often shy away from the challenge.

Today the New America Foundation and Education Sector released State U Online, a report that examines the history of distance learning at public colleges dating back to the eighteenth century.  This paper not only reviews the online offerings at many public colleges and universities, but it also identifies consistent patterns that can help institutional and state-system leaders chart a path forward for the online future. The analysis identifies five steps that institutions and states can take to build a coherent system-wide State U Online. Each step builds on those before it, leading toward increasingly integrated systems in which students can move freely among institutions within a state and eventually beyond state lines. The steps are (access the infographic here):

In a recent report, the Community College Research Center and the Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy present findings from a three-year evaluation of Washington State’s postsecondary education performance funding system, the Student Achievement Initiative (SAI).  The report updates findings from a 2011 report and shares new observations on the system’s results.  Additionally, this report makes suggestions for states considering a similar performance funding system.

Among the report’s findings:

• Washington State’s Student Achievement Initiative (SAI), which is the state’s second wave of performance funding, is distinguished by two innovations.
  • The SAI measures and rewards colleges for students’ intermediate achievements (such as completing a college-level math course or earning a certain number of credits) in addition to completion.
  • The SAI provides data to colleges to help them identify their strengths and weaknesses and take steps to improve their student completion rates.
• Although recent updates and changes to the SAI addressed valid concerns from colleges using it, the report authors identify remaining challenges that may provide insight for other states looking to implement a similar system.
  • The SAI’s metrics were designed to communicate with lawmakers and the public but did not help colleges figure out how to improve, nor did they provide help in interpreting their results.
  • Colleges may require a different set of metrics than state policymakers so that faculty and staff can understand which practices and policies may need to change in order to achieve better results.
  • The data generated by a system like the SAI should be widely disseminated and faculty and staff should be engaged in the process of improvement if institutional improvement is to be achieved.
    • Too often, faculty and staff on campuses using the SAI were frustrated or confused with what the data meant or how to use it to drive change. 
  • Performance funding systems should be sure to utilize a funding formula that does not disadvantage colleges for serving vulnerable populations.
  • Money for a system such as the SAI should be part of the institution’s baseline funding and integrated into the institution’s core operations.

For more than 100 years, the time-based credit hour has been the currency of higher education. Originally created to calculate eligibility for Andrew Carnegie’s free faculty pension system, the credit hour evolved to become much more. Entire systems have been built around and upon the time-based credit hour, including the economic lifeblood of many colleges and universities—federal financial aid. But today, the U.S. Department of Education approved Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) College for America (CfA) to be the first program in the country to receive federal financial aid based on “direct assessment” of student learning, rather than the credit hour. This move from the federal government could signal a new era for higher education—one in which we value and pay for learning rather than time.

Southern New Hampshire University, a small, private liberal arts institution, is familiar with pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Over a decade ago, it added a three-year competency-based bachelor’s degree to its regular course offerings. Rather than squeeze four years of “time” into three years through summer and weekend classes, the faculty identified the core competencies students should have upon graduation and then wove those competencies into every course and assignment. By looking at the program holistically, rather than just as a combination of courses, the school was able to eliminate redundancies in the curriculum and focus on what students were expected to learn and do.

A new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and Education Sector, “Selling Students Short: Declining Teaching Loads at Colleges and Universities,” assigns tenure-line university faculty a remarkable amount of blame for the high price of college. As the report states, bemoaning faculty labor costs is common practice among critics of the academy, who frequently assume the single largest university budget category (usually faculty compensation) holds the most fat. To his credit, author Andrew Gillen moves beyond that simplistic assumption and seeks evidence of ineffective faculty spending. In doing so, he tells a compelling and concerning narrative about university products and faculty priorities: the instructional mission of American higher education is being short-changed, particularly for students and taxpayers. Unfortunately, the report’s conclusions ultimately overreach and overshadow its main value—generating greater policy discussion around the costs and products associated with faculty work.

Gillen uses federal data to demonstrate reductions in tenured and tenure-track (TT) teaching loads across institution types, between academic years 1987-1988 and 2003-2004. He provides a cohesive synthesis of factors widely thought to contribute to this outcome, with some emphasis on Massy and Zemsky’s concept of “the academic ratchet.” The academic ratchet explains that as faculty seek reputational prestige and career mobility through increased attention to their research responsibilities, they must, and readily do, decrease attention to instruction and other responsibilities. The report neglects to mention the other half of this framework, (“the administrative lattice”), which explains how administrators enable faculty to restructure their work: they expand their ranks, also at added cost. Data show administrative growth, both in terms of expenditure and added employees, has been prodigious in recent years.