Should we count all students when analyzing higher education, or only some of them? It’s not surprising that when you include all students, you get different results from that analysis than when you don’t. We think all students should be included. As reported in our last blog post (“Count All Students! New Outcome Measures Now […]
There is new improvement to the U.S. Department of Education’s Graduation Rate statistic. And we should all be using it. Institutions with large non-traditional student enrollments (e.g.: community colleges, online colleges, inner city universities, military-serving institutions) have not been well-represented by the Department’s Graduation Rate statistic. Few of their students are included in the results […]
What are the barriers on your campus to innovations that promote student persistence? That’s the question Michelle Miller, Director of the First Year Learning Initiative with Northern Arizona University, is here to discuss. At NAU, the Persistence Scholars program works with faculty to empower them become informed advocates for new practices that support student persistence. […]
WCET has long been a champion of e-learning consortia, multi-institution efforts to partner to do more together than can be done by an individual campus. Today we feature one of them. In the past, the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium (CTDLC) has reported on its multi-campus e-tutoring program, which has been replicated elsewhere. In 2015 they […]
For the past six weeks I have been serving as the connected learning coach for Collaborative Curiosity: Designing Community Engaged Research, a fully online, graduate level, connected learning course sponsored by the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Division of Community Engagement and taught by Valerie Holton and Tessa McKenzie. Like connected learning, which has been used […]
As we make our way through the final few weeks of the traditional college graduation season, it makes me reflect on the flawed first-time, full-time federal graduation rate used by the Department of Education. There’s been news on this front in the last few weeks. Let me update you on how these stories might affect […]
If you talk to an academic advisor about degree completion for any period of time, you will hear heartbreaking stories of the students who “got away” (students who got close to the goal of graduation but had to stop for a variety of reasons). More than likely, the advisor has reached out to these near […]
January 28, 2014 Thank you to Tony Bates for providing his perspective on productivity and online education, including part 1 on “Main Concepts and Principles” and Part 2 on “Identifying Promising Areas of Productivity for Online Learning.” We asked five experts to give us their reaction to what Tony wrote. They also give their own […]
January 23, 2014 This is the second of two parts of a guest post by noted educational technology thinker, Tony Bates. The first part focused on Main Concepts and Principles. Again, thank you to Tony Bates for his contribution. Russ Poulin, WCET Part 2: Identifying Promising Areas of Productivity for Online Learning In my previous […]
January 21, 2014 In some circles, online learning has become the panacea for increasing access and productivity in higher education. As distance education professionals, we’ve been comfortable with the access issue, but politicians have pulled us into the productivity mix without fully acknowledging the higher education quagmire that they have created or the fundamental changes […]
