TCCTA Blog

Fulbright Program Offers Global Outreach

Community college educators and their schools are eligible for the highly prestigious and competitive Fullbright programs, administered by the U.S. Department of State.

Best known are the opportunities to teach and study abroad. "All Disciplines" awards are offered in many countries, which allow scholars in all fields of study to apply. Please explore the Catalog of Awards for more information about the awards available. The descriptions contain details on grant activities, qualifications, and grant benefits. The catalog, available here, can also be searched by world region, country, or teaching discipline.

Additional information about the Fulbright Scholar Program can be found on the agency's Web site. As outlined in the eligibility guidelines, applicants must be U.S. citizens at the time of application.

The current competition will close on August 1, 2014.

The Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program assists U.S. higher education institutions in expanding programs of academic exchange. By supporting non-U.S. scholars through grants for teaching at institutions that might not have a strong international component, both the U.S. institution and the scholar grantee benefit. Here is more information.

Free Online Texts Proliferate

The list of open source textbooks is growing rapidly. And this very interesting development is happening simultaneously with a trend at many colleges to consolidate text selection.

Some faculty members don't like the "cookie cutter" approach to instructional materials, and believe the freedom to choose the most appropriate texts is part of their professional rights and responsibilities.

A wild card currently is the preponderance of adjunct instructors on most campuses, who, for practical reasons, are rarely given a choice regarding texts. This raw fact makes it harder for full-time teachers to argue for independence. A common campus approach is to consult with full-time teachers to choose a uniform text for all. But this is less than satisfactory to many teachers—particularly those who have witnessed shelves of books devoted to each professor's choices at university book stores.

At bottom, the controversy is driven by cost. As noted here often, students have testified before the Legislature that books can be more expensive than tuition (depending on the discipline and college), and lawmakers have explored statutory mandates to compel efficiency. Almost no professional educator wants this to happen.

It's probably not the only remedy, but help could be on the way. You may want to examine the Web site of Openstax College, a project of Rice University, as one example. Since Rice's prestige is involved, concerns about "watering down" content may be mitigated. You can see easily from the site if a book is available for your discipline, and view an impressive list of schools headed in this direction.

Students often prefer print to online formats for studying—an understandable concern. However, simple printers are very inexpensive. Once copyright issues are resolved, a cascade of opportunity begins. Graphics that don't print easily could be a problem, however, particularly with some subjects. There are undoubtedly other challenges as well.

To repeat, this is not for everyone, but the outlook seems bright for more academic freedom, not less, when it comes to choosing instructional materials.

Peer Grouping Helps Retention

One relatively inexpensive strategy for keeping students in school involves the creation of peer groups, with key leadership provided by fellow student mentors, faculty, or members of the community.

In San Antonio, the approach seems to be achieving results, according to Jennifer R. Lloyd in the San Antonio Express-News.

Universities are organizing groups of students whose parents did not attend college, by major, or by residential home. At community colleges, you could probably organize students randomly, at least during the long semesters.

A great deal of research indicates that "engagement" is an important factor in retention. That's tough to pull off at two-year schools, where students typically attend part-time and may be hard to persuade to participate in a peer group.

A lot of students who need help don't recognize this need. All the same, it may be worth a try if your school doesn't have such a program.

Some relevant San Antonio details from the article:

Peer grouping takes a slightly different form at Palo Alto College. Its Puente Project helps prepare educationally disadvantaged students to move on to a four-year degree program, plying them with English and student development courses focusing on Latino and multicultural issues. Peers take classes, get advised and attend events together.

The program, which aims to enroll 100 students, currently is seeking mentors from the community, mentor coordinator Stacy Ybarra Evans said.

And:

At Palo Alto, students taking Puente courses showed higher success rates in those classes, meaning they earned a C or better, than students in some regular versions of the classes.

When surveyed, Puente students indicated that friendship played a major role in creating a positive learning experience.

"Disruption" Disrupted

If you have heard the term "disruption" a lot in the past few years, there is a reason. As analyzed by prize-winning author and historian Jill Lepore, in the New Yorker (June 23 issue), the concept is everywhere. Disruptive innovation is the extended—and more positive—version of the term.

The concept's contemporary origin stems largely from Clayton M. Christensen of the Harvard Business School, and relates to market behavior, particularly the question of why established businesses often lose out to smaller startup companies. However, since the publication of Christensen's The Innovative University, in 2011, the term has also become a mantra, repeated by those who wish to reform higher education. As Jill Lepore notes, the book contributed to the "frenzy" for Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.

Professor Lepore also teaches at Harvard.

Such disruption is invariably portrayed as necessary and inevitable—not unlike Darwin's theory of natural selection. Furthermore, disruptive innovation has spawned an apocalyptic cottage industry. From the New Yorker:

Ever since The Innovator’s Dilemma [another book by Christensen], everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced. “Disrupt or be disrupted,” the venture capitalist Josh Linkner warns in a new book, “The Road to Reinvention,” in which he argues that “fickle consumer trends, friction-free markets, and political unrest,” along with “dizzying speed, exponential complexity, and mind-numbing technology advances,” mean that the time has come to panic as you’ve never panicked before. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, who blog for Forbes, insist that we have entered a new and even scarier stage: “big bang disruption.” “This isn’t disruptive innovation,” they warn. “It’s devastating innovation.”

Hence you may have noticed the concept at in-service training or professional development seminars. Isn't it just a matter of time until every school has (despite the rather Orwellian oxymoron) a Dean of Disruption? ("Henderson, I've been looking over your student evaluations. It appears you aren't very disruptive.")

Please read the entire New Yorker article (if subscription is required, it's worth a trip to the library). Jill Lepore is a clever and engaging writer, and you will likely enjoy the piece.

Dr. Lepore shows the many methodological flaws in Christensen's analysis. Most egregiously, she says, he is guilty of "hand-picked case studies," chosen intentionally to illustrate his point. However, many of the companies he profiles actually performed quite well after a purportedly devastating disruption, according to Professor Lepore.

Most importantly for educators, she draws a line between business and other activities:

Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers—obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors.

Most Big Ideas are handed down to us, almost officially, from the Silicon Valley. Here is Jill Lepore's portrayal of the acolytes of disruption, who hope to cash in:

The upstarts who work at startups don’t often stay at any one place for very long. (Three out of four startups fail. More than nine out of ten never earn a return.) They work a year here, a few months there—zany hours everywhere. They wear jeans and sneakers and ride scooters and share offices and sprawl on couches like Great Danes. Their coffee machines look like dollhouse-size factories.

Not surprisingly, her article has attracted response and criticism, such as this piece in Slate by Will Oremus.

 

ERS Offers Discount Dental Plan

The Texas Employees Group Benefits Program (GBP), which includes community and technical college educators as participants, has not previously offered a so-called dental discount plan. However, the Employees Retirement System recently announced a program that is available during the present open enrollment period.

The official announcement, available here, is also found in the most recent newsletter, ERS Connection, which you may have noticed in the mail.

The agency stresses that a dental discount plan is not insurance. Under the plan, participating dentists have agreed to accept a discounted fee from participants as payment-in-full for dental services performed. There are over 6,000 participating dentist offices in Texas, according to the announcement.

Importantly, the two ERS choices for dental insurance will remain in effect.

Here is a link for more information, including FAQs.

How to Be a Dean

Never mind the official job description. Those interested in moving to upper levels of administration need a particular set of skills, to quote from a movie of recent years. (Okay the movie line is about hunting down and killing people. Never mind.)

Matt Reed of Inside Higher Ed. writes a response to an online question regarding this topic. As always, his blog is perceptive and thoughtful. Note that he admits up front that there are many different styles of administration, while he still offers sound advice. There is no precise owner's manual for this. Good and bad supervisors come in all shapes and sizes.

Faculty members may be intrigued by the author's comments regarding how to handle student complaints about teachers. Also, please note his observation about social and professional relationships, which can change when an instructor becomes a supervisor. It's an eye-opener.

Tools to Prevent Online Cheating

It seems clear to almost all teachers that it's easier for students to cheat when assignments and tests are posted online. How prevalent cheating actually is becomes another question entirely.

Have a look a this article by Devon Haynie in U.S. News, which discusses the various ways that instructors are detecting and deterring cheaters. Some strategies are familiar, such as the use of plagiarism-detection software. Turnitin is cited most often, with good reviews from practitioners.

Others techniques are new and interesting:

Keystroke recognition devices: At Pace University, students have developed a keystroke recognition program that gives school officials another way to certify a student's identity, says Vinnie Monaco, a computer science graduate student spearheading the work.

Students first do typing exercises in which the computer measures the speed and rhythm of their typing. Officials can then monitor the typing in later assignments to see if the patterns match up.

Massive open online course provider Coursera is using this technology, as well as numerous other colleges, says Friedman with Boston University. In the future, he says, schools could start using other kinds of biometric technology, such as iris recognition or fingerprint identification, to prevent cheating.

The author also states that the most important weapon is common sense. For instance, if you find a great deal of inconsistency in the quality of the material handed in, it might be a red flag. Trouble is, teachers need to catch the student red-handed, or the individual can just deny it. As the lawyers say, plausible deniability could prevail.

In Defense of Laptops in Class

Faculty members employ a variety of strategies regarding the use of student laptops in class for taking notes.

Some routinely allow the use of laptops, thinking that typing is a more efficient means to take notes than longhand. Others believe the keyboard inherently bypasses the process of reflection, whereas manual composing forces the student to digest lecture material and reduce it to something meaningful and manageable. Diligent students often review their manual notes soon after class to spot problems or gaps, which is another good idea.

Then there are students who update their Facebook profile rather than listening at all. They do this on their hand-held devices too, of course.

Please have a look at this article in Slate by Rebecca Schuman, who defends the use of laptops for taking notes. She provides a number of links for more information and commentary.

By all means begin with this Doonesbury comic strip by (which Dr. Schuman also cites) before starting. It sets the tone of the discussion.

Poll: "Necessity" of Higher Ed. Declines

A new University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll may indicate that publicity about rising college costs and student indebtedness is having an effect.

From an article in the Texas Tribune by Ross Ramsey:

Only 28 percent said a college education is necessary for a person to succeed in today’s work world, while 68 percent said “there are many ways to succeed ... without a college degree.” That’s a big change from the UT/TT Poll of May 2010, when 42 percent called college necessary and 56 percent said there are other paths to success.

Please read the entire article, as it contains interesting information, including a partisan contrast in the opinions of Texans on higher education. Not surprisingly, Democrats and Republicans have divergent priorities.

Another factor to consider in Texas is the booming energy industry in recent years. High school grads can earn a lot of money without going to college. As we all know, this bonanza won't last forever, but the phenomenon can't help but influence public perceptions.

Online Course Offerings Still Growing

A U.S. Department of Education report released recently indicates that a quarter of college students took online courses toward their degrees in the fall of 2012.

Here's the full report, which also shows that Texas is right at the center of things.

Not surprisingly, for-profit schools use more online instruction. The report says that 61 percent of students in four-year programs at for-profit institutions used distance education exclusively, while eight percent employed a combination of online and traditional courses.

In Texas, "less than 4-year" public college students took 10.8 percent online courses exclusively, and 19.5 percent took "some but not all" online. This means Texas community colleges are ahead of other categories in public online instruction.

Contemporary reformers often criticize higher education for inflexibility. However, these numbers indicate that a major transformation is still under way, driven inexorably by the digital revolution of the last two decades. Computers are changing all aspects of life, including pedagogy. One mistake the reformers make is assuming that education is solely about the conveyance of information. Not even close.

The transformation may not come fast enough for some, but it's still significant. Online education is not for everyone, but it's definitely taking its rightful place.