Archive for the 'Administration' Category

Writing Diagnostic Assessment: Some Preliminary Findings

Published
by
David
on December 5, 2007
in Administration, Assessment, Faculty Development, Funding and Higher Education
. 0 Comments

As many of you know, last month BLSCI applied for external funding from an organization that recognizes exceptional faculty development programs focussed on enhancing undergraduate teaching and learning. In order to make our case for the award, we included some preliminary results from the Writing Diagnostic Assessment data. I’d like to use this post as an opportunity to share some of these results with readers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the work that many have been doing over the years and get some feedback regarding ideas for future analyses.

When looking at the data, on average, students start the semester with scores on both the expectations and writing quality variables in the “middle” range (scores around 3). When we then looked to see if students’ scores significantly improved over the course of one semester in a CIC, there were no major findings. This was because many students started the semester out scoring high (scores from 4 to 5) on many of the variables, and thus did not have any room for improvement (as measured by the diagnostic scoring criteria).

However, when we looked at students who scored in the “low” to “middle” range on all of the variables (thanks Diana for this suggestion!) we observed statistically significant increases from the beginning to the end of the semester on all variables. These increases were consistent across disciplines and schools as well. The figures below illustrate the changes we observed in the data separately for the Weissman and Zicklin Schools.

[click to enlarge]

[click to enlarge]

Although these results are based only on a subset of the data we’ve been able to clean, match, and analyze (~ 5,000 students), they nonetheless illustrate that the work of BLSCI in creating and implementing CICs seems to be paying off for students across the board. Although most probably knew or were able to sense this already, it’s always great to have “hard data.” We would love to hear readers’ thoughts on these findings and how you see these data stacking up next to the work you’re doing with students in your own classes. Also, as always, any general thoughts and/or questions on the assessment data are welcome.

Learning 2.0: free, fun, self-paced, and effective training in Web 2.0

Published
by
Kate
on April 5, 2007
in Administration, Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Literacy, Technology, Web 2.0, What if . . . and Wikis
. 1 Comment

The article “Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks” on Wired.com describes a program where hundreds of staff members at North Carolina public libraries were asked to explore Web 2.0 in ways by trying out 23 things that were simple, yet meaningful and useful.

The result: Learning 2.0.

The impetus was the need for staff to know about Web 2.0 technologies:

When the IT director at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes — a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.

Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0., developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

“The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look,” said Christine MacKensie, director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, which just finished a four-month version of Learning 2.0. “And they certainly won’t now.”

The program is inexpensive to run, but is fun and engaging. Hundreds of staff members signed on.

Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.

They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.

“Librarian avatars were popping up all over the blogs,” said Blowers.

In the end, the library system found that they’d just trained their staff in new media with very little financial output (save some blog hosting and the mp3 incentives), without going to the trouble and expense of bringing in staff training, or forcing people to sit through classes.

Although her original goals for Learning 2.0 were touchy-feely “E’s” — exposing staff to new tools, encouraging play, empowering individuals, expanding the knowledge toolbox, eliminating fear — the effects were both practical and financial.

“We don’t have to wait for some training company to come along and say, ‘For $20,000 we’ll show you how this stuff works,’” said Michael Stephens, who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. “Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program.”

Libraries all over the world are doing just that — moving the entire Learning 2.0 program to their own websites. The program has been duplicated by university and community library systems in Sweden, Australia, Canada and Denmark. In the United States, programs are underway in South Carolina, Florida, Maryland and California. Even the Combined Arms Research Library, a military repository, is trying it.

It’s no surprise that now the 23 Things idea is spreading beyond libraries, to two realms cac.ophony.org readers are much more familiar with: higher education, and business.

Now Blowers’ program is spreading beyond libraries (even virtual ones, like the teen library in Second Life teen library in Second Life): A public relations firm wants to set up a Learning 2.0 program for its staff, and several universities and an elementary school want to use the system to educate teachers, she said.

Several years ago, I taught a semester-long course and some weekend workshops with Paul Allison and Ken Stein of the New York City Writing Project. We walked participants (mostly high school teachers, but also some CUNY and SUNY college faculty) through various experiences, from setting up a blog, editing a wiki, to using bloglines, del.icio.us and tags (this is a few years ago, mind you, when bloglines, del.icio.us, and podcasts were “new” new, or at least a newer new, not old hat, as they are now). Then, as now, new stuff was coming out every week.

The New York City Writing Project was interested in giving teachers a chance to blog, so they’d see if, and how, blogs might be useful for their students. They ended up finding out how blogs, flickr, podcasting, WiKis and all kinds of other web 2.0 applications could be useful in teaching literacy and communication skills, and they ended up using these, and other aspects of Web 2.0, in their classrooms. The 23 Things idea is very similar, though the 23 things could easily be tweaked to include the newest useful Web 2.0 technology, since good new stuff comes out all the time.

Perhaps the best thing about Web 2.0, and Learning 2.0 is that so many resources that work, like the 23 Things program, are free to use and free to build on.

Autonomy, Coherence, and Rigor in the Academy, part 1

Published
by
Anthony
on February 24, 2007
in Administration, Baruch College, Liberal Arts, Pedagogy and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

What is the place of the Humanities in the real world? This question haunts me as I reflect on an altogether mundane conversation I had recently with a colleague at my other (non-CUNY) job, where I teach writing. Here’s a synopsis of the exchange:

A (that’s me): “Hi! What are you teaching this semester?”
C (colleague): “Nothing. I finally have some time to work on my own stuff. What are you teaching?”
A: “A business writing course.”
C: “Oh, that’s really great! You don’t have to deal with . . . you know, the ideology.”

The ideology my colleague was referring to is the theoretical framework behind the program’s basic composition and expository writing courses. Instructors teaching these classes have to adopt a fairly prescriptive approach, both in terms of assignment sequencing and instructional methodology. Such requirements are understandable and perhaps inevitable, given the large number of instructors, most of whom are adjuncts. There has to be pedagogical coherence if thousands of students are to be held to the same rigorous standards.

The business writing course, on the other hand, allows instructors a greater degree of autonomy. There certainly is coherence and rigor in the curriculum, yet there is also a refreshing freedom. I suspect that there is more to this than the fact that a smaller pool of instructors (in business writing) requires less directorial oversight. The requirements and standards of the business writing course result from, and represent, goals that are more non-academic in nature. The ideology behind the more traditional writing courses (basic composition and expository writing) is connected to their “background” in the Humanities, while the “idea” behind the business writing course is to prepare students for success in the “real world.”

Yet the Humanities, it seems, cannot serve purely academic interests. In an environment of assessment and academic accountability, the Humanities, struggling to survive in a largely business-driven world, have little room for failure. They must produce results at once satisfactory to the academy and, in some way, relevant to the “outside” world. Administrators of courses like basic composition and expository writing thus have all the greater need for top-down quality control. The relative autonomy of the business writing instructor, in this view, corresponds to the entrepreneurial freedom of the real-life business person, who may create (to an extent, of course) his own means to a purely practical end.

The issues raised by all of this are particularly interesting to me in my work at Baruch, a business school with traditional Humanities requirements. In the upcoming installments I’ll explore how the different institutions I’m associated with are reinventing the traditional liberal arts education, specifically with regard to writing and communication.

NYT article on blogs of college leaders

Published
by
Joanna
on November 22, 2006
in Administration, Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education and Technology
. 0 Comments

We’ve been discussing here on our own blog how students and professors make use of blogs, but now even college presidents are getting into the game:

Erasing Divide, College Leaders Take to Blogging by Diana Jean Schemo

Teaching Faculty Members to Fish?

Published
by
Joanna
on January 23, 2006
in Administration, Faculty Development and Pedagogy
. 2 Comments

With the generous support of Baruch’s Provost’s Office, the Schwartz Institute’s Great Works Communication Fellows will pilot a faculty development seminar during the Spring 2006 semester. The idea is to work with Baruch faculty members who teach CICs, helping them expand and improve their communication-intensive teaching techniques. Over the course of the seminar, we plan to facilitate discussion, lead activities, and even assign homework on a variety of issues such as assignment, exam, oral presentation, and syllabus design; grading and responding to writing; Blackboard participation; group vs. individual assignments; in-class writing/communicating-to-learn techniques; and so on. (The irony has not escaped me that we are, in effect, hosting a seminar that revolves around the concept of communication-intensive courses in a communication-intensive fashion; at least we’re practicing what we preach!)

To get things rolling, at the end of last semester, we distributed applications to Great Works and LTT (Literature in Translation) faculty for a semester-long, three-meeting seminar, with a modest stipend. We are delighted to announce that we now have 12 faculty members enrolled.

So here’s what I’m wondering. The impetus for this seminar reflects an ongoing question among those of us involved in the development and honing of CICs: where’s the most efficient place for us to focus our limited time and resources – on students, faculty, both? For the past few years, Great Works fellows have concentrated on two methods: running in-class workshops, in which faculty request that we lead their class in a particular exercise, such as how to generate ideas for a paper or how to formulate a thesis; and leading out-of-class workshops, in which students enroll for similar workshops on their own. More recently, though, we’ve started to consider whether we might get better bang for our buck by targeting our efforts directly at faculty as well. Our thinking is that the positive pedagogical changes we’re working for will have to come, in the long term, mostly from the classroom itself, no matter how successful our “support” services are with students. So what do you think? By primarily working with students, are we just running in place instead of improving things more systemically? Should we balance our work with students with an equal emphasis on working with faculty? Would this be doomed in practice by the sensitivities and politics of upward-instruction (i.e. fellows “teaching” faculty about how to teach communication-intensive activities better)? My instinct whispers that each reinforces the other, but I would enjoy hearing comments from others, since most of us have some teaching experience, or have even led similar faculty development seminars.

CAC and Liberal Arts — Strange Bedfellows?

Published
by
Amy H.
on January 17, 2006
in Administration and Liberal Arts
. 0 Comments

I teach THE 1041C (Intro to Theatre) at Baruch, which fosters oral as well as written communication, and I love doing it. I think theatre, as a discipline, is particularly well suited to meeting CAC objectives. But I’d like to play the devil’s advocate for a moment and discuss the tension between skills-development and content in CIC courses.

I recently read Carol Geary Schneider and Debra Humphreys’s article “Putting Liberal Education on the Radar Screen”in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (23 Sept 05). The authors describe a ten-year project by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) called “Liberal Education and America’s Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College.” The initiative aims to increase awareness of the importance of liberal arts education to a generation of students (and their parents) who tend to believe a college degree is “just a ticket to be punched on the way to their first job.”

I imagine most college teachers will not be surprised by the findings of the AACU study, which suggest that students today consider “values and ethics, an appreciation of cultural diversity, global awareness, and civic responsibility” to be the least important outcomes of a college education. Indeed, most view college as “a private rather than a public good,” a way to develop professional skills. The data also suggest that “colleges are not conveying the importance of liberal education to their students,” and Schneider and Humphreys argue that this is part of the problem.

As someone who is personally, politically, and professionally invested in the objectives associated with liberal arts education, I found this article disturbing. It also makes me wonder whether or not CAC feeds the fires of the consumerist mentality described in the AACU study. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I sometimes find myself “selling” CIC objectives to my students, since most of them are non-majors with little interest in the subject: “Two courses in one! More bang for your buck! Learn not only how to talk intelligently about ‘Hamlet’ at cocktail parties, but be scintillating while you do it!” I genuinely believe that communication is intimately connected to critical thinking, cultural awareness, and ethical conduct. But typically, CAC is about skills development, not these other things. Schneider and Humphreys insist that educators and administrators not only need to talk about the value of liberal arts among themselves, but also find ways to articulate their value to students. But will CAC programs, as they expand and proliferate, legitimize students’ tendency to view college as little more than a springboard to a high-paying job? How can CAC teachers and administrators strike a balance between the often-competing objectives of higher education: to shape the next generation of leaders and thinkers professionally, ethically, culturally, intellectually?

If you had a million dollars . . .

Published
by
Mikhail
on December 13, 2005
in Administration, Funding and What if . . .
. 3 Comments

Well, maybe not a million but a lot.

Let’s play a game: Imagine that a big corporation wants to give your school, program, or department a lot of money over three years for an innovative initiative aimed at improving your undergraduates’ ability to communicate orally and/or in writing. How would you spend it?

Now for the rules: 1) The initiative you propose can be hinged on a single big program or a bunch of little ones and can involve curricular support and development as well as co-curricular programs; 2) The outcomes have to be measurable. Assessment of program outcomes, however, may be built into your proposal so that some of the money would go towards assessing how well it’s working. That brings us to . . . 3) Be sure to mention how you plan to assess your program; and 4) Be sure to identify the population of students your program is intended to target.

So that’s it. Put your thinking caps on, people. To add a comment from the cac.ophony.org homepage, click on the post title or the number next to it.