LWRT (Last Week in Retweets): September 22, 2014

Topics last week include high-stakes testing, predatory lending, retention alliances, City College of San Francisco's accreditation battle, student evaluations, and (I'll bet you thought I forgot about) college ratings.

LWIRT (Last Week in Retweets): September 15, 2014

Introducing a new feature for this blog: Last Week in Retweets. I'll be consolidating the more interesting items on higher education that I've found via Twitter over the past week with some summary and commentary, and posting them every Monday. Subscribe to the blog for great source for keeping up on news about the future of higher ed beyond the hallowed walls (lawns? parking lots? ring road?) of Utah Valley University.

Topics last week include college rankings, credit hours, civility, rankings, competency-based assessment, nanodegrees, rankings, unbundling, and rankings. Oh, and ratings, because the proposed federal government system will only rate institutions, not rank them. They're very particular about that.

Could UVU Have a Park City Mountain Resort-Level Failure?

Sometimes a business does something so trivial, so careless—and so catastrophic—that the mind fails to understand how the people involved could have reached a position of responsibility in a modern corporation. Powdr, the operators of the Park City Mountain Resort ski area, had a sweetheart lease on its terrain, and the opportunity to renew it on the same terms. Having made massive capital investments in a base right in Park City to access the terrain, you would think they would be absolutely on top of renewing that lease.

You would be wrong.

Powdr missed the deadline by a few days, and spent the last few years litigating to try to win back the terrain that gave their base its value. They lost, and last week sold the base to Vail Resorts, who had leased the terrain while Powdr was litigating.

It’s the corporate equivalent of a crash skiers call a “yard sale.” Such a disaster raises the question of what UVU could do to “yard sale” the university. Let me thus suggest conditions that are (1) either within our control or for which we might adequately plan (2) that have a realistic possibility, however low, of occurring, and (3) pose fundamental threats to our ability to function as an institution of higher education?

Rating the Rankings: University Ranking Processes and Methodologies

With the release of the US News and World Report College Rankings this morning, the annual college rankings season comes to a close. There is a wide range of different rankings, with schools at the top of one ranking looking mediocre in another.
[cough]Yale University
[cough]Reed College
[cough]Babson College
What do we make of these? In the spirit of the forthcoming (and, perhaps, always will be) federal Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS), I rate (but not rank!) five of the more prominent systems, and consider where UVU fits into the rankings.

Lee's Proposal to Deregulate Accreditation Gaining Traction with GOP Presidential Hopefuls

Sen. Mike Lee’s accreditation bill has gained the support of two potential Republican presidential candidates, Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Earlier this year, Sen. Lee proposed allowing states to establish their own accrediting agencies as alternatives to the regional accreditation system. According to a piece on the proposal in Slate today, Senators Rubio and Paul have both incorporated similar ideas into their proposals and expressed support for Sen. Lee.

Having the (Aristotelian) Courage to Innovate in Higher Education

(This is an extended version of some remarks I'll be giving to UVU's University Planning Advisory Committee in its January 23 meeting. With a bit of luck I'll have some time to look at a few of the more prominent innovations being considered in higher ed from this perspective before the meeting and post on that as well.)

Too often, especially in such a technology-driven society, we think of the innovative as the opposite of the old-fashioned, the stodgy, the closed-minded. In this binary, innovation is inherently good, and the opponents of innovation are Luddites seeking to hold back progress and seeking stability for its own sake. Often the opponents of the “innovation” are seen as acting out of their own self interest (see the debates on MOOCs in which opponents were characterized as out to protect their own jobs at the expense of students) or out of fear of the new. Implicit in that is a sense of both technological determinism and technological solutionism: technology can do something, therefore it inevitably will do that thing, and that thing will inevitably solve all the problems.

Of course that’s not true often enough to be of any use. Those pursuing innovation have personal interests at stake at least as often as opponents; it is the height of hypocrisy for Coursera, a for-profit company, to accuse those opposed to MOOCs as protecting their own interests. Fear is as prominent on the side of supporters as on that of opponents, as anyone who has heard arguments that we “have to be out in front of change or we’ll be destroyed by it” should recognize. Technologies, as products of social processes that are put to use in other social processes, are no more deterministic than any other social process. And we know of many technologies that make problems worse rather than better. Any of these may be true in any one case, of course. But saying that they are true generally is like saying that flipped coins generally turn up heads.

It seems then, that there are at least three positions: too little innovation to address our problems or take advantage of new opportunities, effective innovation, and too much innovation that pulls us further away from challenges or presents new and more difficult challenges than the ones it solves. We can see effectiveness in innovation, then, as an Aristotelian virtue: a middle point between the extremes of rashness and timidity.

...or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Not Hate the Udacity Pivot

Of course it’s hagiography; it’s in Fast Company, and Sebastian Thrun is in Silicon Valley. Of course he screwed the kids at San Jose State (though more on the virtue of what Cottom does with that conclusion below); that’s what privatized higher education does when “students from difficult neighborhoods” turn out to be unprofitable. And of course he wasn’t making any money; that’s the Silicon Valley business model spoofed so well by South Park. Now if we’re all done doing our best Claude Rains impressions, I want to take a more pragmatic look at the Udacity “pivot” (which admittedly sounds like a chess strategy rather than pedagogy).