Posts Categorized: Technology

More on the Core

From a higher education perspective, new "Common Core" standards could improve student college-readiness levels, reduce institutional remediation rates and close education gaps in and between states. By 2014-15, many K-12 education systems should be able to adopt new state assessments after working to implement new state standards for student learning in English Language Arts and Mathematics. M...

MOOCs: When Opening Doors to Education, Institutions Must Ensure that People with Disabilities Have Equal Access

Massive Open Online Courses (“MOOCs”) are free online courses offered by institutions of higher education to individuals across the world, without any admissions criteria. Through web-based courses hosted by MOOC platforms such as Coursera or edX, student-participants learn by accessing media, including documents, pictures and uploaded lectures on the course website. While MOOCs may m...

Learning in the Clouds?

Engaged learning—the type that happens outside textbooks and beyond the four walls of the classroom—moves beyond right and wrong answers to grappling with the uncertainties and contradictions of a complex world. My iPhone backs up to the “cloud.” GoogleDocs is all about “cloud computing.” And Facebook, well, forget the clouds; it’s as ubiquitous as the sky. But learning? Really...

New Directions for Higher Education: Q&A with ACE’s Molly Corbett Broad on Attainment

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President ...

Limping to the Top

New England is aging ... but gracefully? Last week, the Census Bureau reported that three New England states are the oldest in the U.S. in median age: Maine (43.5 years), Vermont (42.3 years) and New Hampshire (42 years). The other states in the region are old too: Connecticut (40.5 years); Rhode Island (39.8 years) and Massachusetts (39.3 years), compared with a national median age of 37.4 yea...

Beyond the “Two-Body” Problem: Recruitment with Dual-Career Couples Support

“When both of the partners meet our standards for excellence in teaching and research, and where they can both make contributions to the curriculum, it’s a great way to both recruit and retain. ... It also brings us the greater richness of what two people bring.”—Cristle Collins Judd, Dean for Academic Affairs, Bowdoin College Though Dean Judd is referring to faculty couples, she could be...

We’ve Let Student Loans Become a Horror Story … Now Is Time to Face It

For the past 30 years, the student debt issue has been slowly simmering. Government loans quietly edged out grants as the primary form of financial aid, while college tuitions continued their rise. All the while, we piled debt on to students without adequately preparing them to manage it. Now, student debt has come to a boil. An astonishingly high 30% of the 37 million Americans with student lo...

Dreams Can Come True

Southern Vermont College's recent first-year seminar, From the Shoes of Our Ancestors, was a collaborative effort with the nearby Bennington Museum and Lincoln High School in Yonkers, N.Y. The students traced their roots by recording oral histories, documenting them through genealogical research, which included vital records searches and online investigations, and illustrating findings in famil...

COOCs Over MOOCs

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are all the rage these days and are being offered as a potential way to shorten the degree-attainment process and thereby reduce costs. With escalating tuition at public and private institutions and shrinking median household income, the energy around MOOCs is fueled by the question often asked by students, parents and policymakers: Can a meaningful higher educa...

A Business School on a World Mission

The idea of “doing good while doing well” is hardly new. But the Y Generation’s response to it is different. They are literally taking on a youth revolution that extends from one part of the world to the other, while changing the conversation around social good and entrepreneurship. My colleague Ahmad Ashkar, founder and CEO of the Hult Prize, one of the world’s leading pl...