When Full-Time Faculty and Adjuncts Collide: Ideas to Maintain Departmental Peace
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on December 1, 2017© Magna Publications. All rights reserved. At the most recent Leadership in Higher Education Conference this past October in Baltimore, I gave a session titled “What Your Adjuncts Wish You Knew.” In it, I exhorted the deans and department chairs in attendance…
Becoming a Mindful Leader
This article first appeared in Academic Leader on April 30, 2015 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. We live in a world of distraction. Technology bombards us with new information every second of the day, making it hard to focus on any one thing. Yet one of the most critical leadership skills…
Why Republicans Distrust Higher Education (and What We Can Do about It)
This is the first year that the Gallup poll has included political affiliation in its survey, so there is less historic data than one might desire. However, taken together, the two surveys point out differences in attitudes that can be either a problem for higher education to confront or an opportunity to steer the conversation.
Is Time Up for the Credit Hour?
How do we know if a student has learned enough to attain a degree or credential? Likely, the answer is currently phrased in the form of credit hours: 64 semester hours to earn an associate’s degree, 128 semester hours to earn a bachelor’s degree, and so on. But the credit hour, the most widely used currency of determining work put in toward a degree, was never intended to measure student learning at all.
Seven Ways to Combat Attrition in Online Courses
One of the biggest issues in online education is attrition. “Student retention is a noteworthy issue for higher education institutions and is closely tied to accountability,” write Melanie Shaw of Northcentral University, Scott Burrus of University of Phoenix, and Karen Ferguson of Colorado State University-Global Campus. In an article in the fall 2016 issue of the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, the trio details research they conducted to determine predictors for online higher education student attrition.
The Value of the 60-Year Curriculum
Much focus is currently turned on the metrics that measure the effectiveness of higher education. Selectiveness of admissions is certainly one such metric, but universities are also being judged on employability. However, it is not just the first job that matters; how employable graduates are long after they don cap and gown is also a critical measure of the effectiveness of an education, and institutions need to turn their focus to the lifelong relationship they will have with their graduates.
Bridging the Generational Gap
A while back, an image went viral of a group of school children sitting engrossed in front of Rembrandt’s famous painting, “The Night Watch,” in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Only, seemingly instead of drinking in the influence of the old master, their heads were bent over their cell phones, opting for the small screen over the large canvas.
Should You Expand Your Online Initiative? Key Considerations for Institutions
A number of institutions of higher education, recognizing the potential for reaching new student markets and the opportunities to meet a number of institutional goals, invested significant resources to build strategic online learning initiatives.
How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them
About 20 years ago, when I first started covering higher education from a journalistic perspective in addition to working in the field, the big discussion was how colleges should function more like businesses. Rather than restricting themselves to an older model that placed the mission of the university in the hands of faculty and administrators who purported to know best what students need to learn and that depended on a great deal of state support to get the job done, institutions should be responsive to their customers, who were increasingly seen to be the student and, to an extent, businesses.
Can Blended Learning Boost Retention?
What if blended learning could do more than utilize in-class time more efficiently and increase student interest in a course? What if it could actually boost retention?
Retention is a critical concern for schools such as Long Island University (LIU) Brooklyn that work with populations that include at-risk and underprepared students.
Melissa Antinori Berninger is the assistant writing program director and Thomas Peele is an associate professor of English at LIU. In an analysis of assessment data collected over the past six years, Berninger and Peele found that:
