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In Public-Private Partnership, Community College Allows Students to Bypass Waiting Lists–For a Fee

Months after purchasing the Penn Foster Education Group, a for-profit career training provider, the Princeton Review is entering the distance education market by teaming up with community colleges to offer fast-track allied health-care programs to students who are willing to pay higher tuition to bypass long waiting lists. While the college pioneering the system sees the move as providing an important new option, some faculty members are calling the idea a cash grab that taints the traditional community college commitment to equity.

The Princeton Review will pilot this new public-private initiative at Bristol Community College, in southeastern Massachusetts. By this fall, the partnership will expand the enrollment capacity of the community college’s programs in general health science, medical information and coding, and massage therapy. Eventually, it will expand to offer further space in the college’s nursing and radiologic technology programs.

The programs offered will primarily be online, but the Princeton Review will also provide a new space near the college for students to take lab and in-person supplements to their courses. The program will use Bristol’s accreditation and instructors. Other than the fact that these programs are being offered online, the only difference between these programs and Bristol’s current allied health care programs – which the college will maintain with waiting lists – is that students who wish to take the programs sponsored by the Princeton Review will have to pay more in tuition.

. . . [O]fficials from the Princeton Review make no bones about the fact that they expect to turn a profit from the deal. They believe this public-private model positions the programs between the face-to-face programs at the community college and those at the on-demand and high-tuition proprietary institutions with which they will now compete.

Bristol officials say the expanded capacity in these high-demand programs is essential. John J. Sbrega, president of the community college, noted that the college received about 1,000 applicants for its 72-student nursing program last year.

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‘Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent’

In his new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass), Peter Smith argues that the country needs to reach deeper into its population than it historically has to produce a sufficient number of educated and skilled workers, and that the thousands of current colleges cannot do that job. Following are excerpts of an interview conducted via email by Insider Higher Ed.

Q. Define the “personal learning” that you think is undervalued/under-recognized by the current higher education system.

A. Students are rarely asked, in depth, what they want from their college education and are almost never engaged in an ongoing conversation about it with someone who can affect their higher education experience. Until institutions personally connect the learner with the curriculum and the college experience, the learner is vulnerable. And the ‘at risk’ learner is always more vulnerable.

Additionally, the older one becomes the more experience one has to compare with what they are being taught. So, to fail to integrate someone’s experience into the curriculum both trivializes and frustrates them. That’s why starting with the assessment of prior learning is such an educationally important thing to do.

Q. What are the developments (you call them “game changers”) that make you believe the time is right to create an alternate path to a postsecondary education for these students?

A. You see evidence every day. When AARP solicits proposals for a learning platform for its members, the balance has shifted. When the Peer-to-Peer University moves into its second “term,” the balance has shifted. When StraighterLine is recognized for its courseware alone, the balance has shifted. When the global OpencourseWare Consortium gets three million hits a month, the balance has shifted.

In the book, I devoted a chapter to the “End of Scarcity” and its impact on higher education. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this trend. Colleges are built and organized around scarcity – the expertise of faculty is in short supply, classrooms and labs are limited because they are expensive, and the authority to offer a course of study is limited. Additionally, reputation is built around who you exclude as much as it is who you include and who succeeds. In fact, the whole concept of meritocracy is built on the notion of scarcity because there is not enough room “at the top” for everyone.

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eCornell Named to List of Top 20 Leadership Training Companies

eCornell has been named to Training Industry, Inc.’s 2010 list of The Top 20 Leadership Training Companies. The first annual list was assembled by Training Industry’s review committee to include companies that have demonstrated experience and excellence in providing leadership training services to a variety of clients.

A complete list of the Top 20 Leadership Training Companies can be seen online at www.trainingindustry.com/leadership/top-companies-listings/2010/2010-top-20-leadership-companies.aspx.

Selection of the Top 20 Leadership Training Companies was based on the following criteria:

  • Thought leadership and influence on the leadership training industry.
  • Industry recognition and innovation.
  • Breadth of programs offered and audiences served.
  • Delivery methods utilized.
  • Company size and growth potential.
  • Strength of clients.
  • Geographic reach.
  • Experience in serving the market.

“Leadership training represents one of the broadest content segments of the training industry,” said Ken Taylor, Chief Operating Officer of Training Industry, Inc. “Our list of the Top 20 companies highlights the best in class organizations focused on the leadership skills critical to driving business performance.”

“It is certainly rewarding to be considered in the top echelon of leadership training providers,” said Chris Proulx, CEO of eCornell. “This is a strong affirmation of the significant capabilities, resources and experience we have assembled at eCornell and brought to bear on our clients’ leadership and management development initiatives.”

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New Study: Online Education up 17% to 4.6 Million

The 2009 Sloan Survey of Online Learning reveals that enrollment rose by nearly 17 percent from a year earlier. The survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities nationwide finds approximately 4.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2008, the most recent term for which figures are available.

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“Online education continues to establish itself as demand remains strong and new applications materialize, such as contingency planning for campus emergencies,” said Frank Mayadas, special advisor, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We believe demand will fuel sustained growth especially within public universities and community colleges, raising the need to share research, optimal methods for faculty training, and other best practices to new levels of importance.” The survey is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The complete survey report, “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009” is available on the Sloan Consortium Web site.

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Predictions for 2010

At the start of each year, contributors to eLearn Magazine predict what changes are afoot for the coming 12 months. This year’s installment features the thoughts of such e-learning luminaries as Stephen Downes, Roger Schank, Jay Cross, Elliott Masie, Allison Rossett, Clark Quinn, and others.

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Princeton Review Partners with Penn Foster, Aims to Create Largest Online College Ever

A month after completing its first foray into online higher education by acquiring the distance education provider Penn Foster, the Princeton Review has set its next goal: to help create the largest online college ever. And it thinks it can do it in five years.

The company announced yesterday that it is entering into a joint venture with the National Labor College — an accredited institution that offers blended-learning programs to 200 students, most of whom are adults — to establish what would be called the College for Working Families. The college would offer courses tailored to the needs of union members and their families, beginning this fall.

. . . The new institution would start off awarding associate degrees, with aspirations to running bachelor’s and master’s programs down the line. Tuition would be similar to that at most community colleges.

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How the iPhone Could Reboot Education

How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum.

That’s the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.

The initiative’s goal was to explore how the always-connected iPhone might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity. Think web apps to turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades. For classroom participation, there’s even polling software for Abilene students to digitally raise their hand.

The verdict? It’s working quite well. 2,100 Abilene students, or 48 percent of the population, are now equipped with a free iPhone. Fully 97 percent of the faculty population has iPhones, too. The iPhone is aiding Abilene in giving students the information they need — when they want it, wherever they want it, said Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies who helped plan the initiative. . . .

The traditional classroom, where an instructor assigns a textbook, is heading toward obsolescence. Why listen to a single source talk about a printed textbook that will inevitably be outdated in a few years? That setting seems stale and hopelessly limited when pitted against the internet, which opens a portal to a live stream of information provided by billions of minds. . . .

These are the specific educational problems Abilene is targeting with the iPhone. Instead of standing in front of a classroom and
talking for an hour, Rankin instructs his students to use their iPhones to look up relevant information on the fly. Then, the students can discuss the information they’ve found, and Rankin leads the dialogue by helping assess which sources are accurate and useful.

It’s like a mashup of a 1960s teach-in with smartphone technology from the 2000s.

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Hybrid Education 2.0

What if you could teach a college course without a classroom or a professor, and lose nothing?

According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, there’s no “what if” about it. Earlier in the decade, Carnegie Mellon set out to design software for independent learners taking courses through the university’s Open Learning Initiative, an effort to make courses freely available to non-enrolled learners. But rather than merely making course materials available to non-students, like MIT’s famous OpenCourseware project, Carnegie Mellon wanted to design courses that would respond to the individual needs of each student. It currently has courses in 12 different subjects available on its Web site, mostly in math and science.

In the process of testing the software on Carnegie Mellon students to make sure it would “do no harm” if used, the researchers found that, over a two-semester trial period, students in a traditional classroom introductory statistics course scored no better than similar students who used the open-learning program and skipped the three weekly lectures and lab period. . . .

As intriguing it was to find that a computer program could prepare students to pass tests just as well as a professor, the researchers seem more excited by a hybrid application of the open-learning program that, instead of replacing professors, tries to use them more effectively. By combining the open-learning software with two weekly 50-minute class sessions in an intro-level statistics course, they found that they could get students to learn the same amount of material in half the time.

So what exactly is the pedagogical model Carnegie Mellon has discovered, that has inspired such faith? Essentially, it’s an online
program that teaches students itself, rather than just being the medium a professor uses to teach. Furthermore, it leverages the opportunity to interact directly with a unique student — an opportunity a professor addressing dozens of students in a lecture hall does not have. . . .

In other words, the software acts like a private tutor, quizzing students constantly as they work through linear lessons and adjusting in accordance with how quickly they show they are grasping different concepts. . . .

The virtual tutor takes care of the basic concepts that typically dominate lectures, leaving professors open to plan the face-to-face
component of the course according to what parts of the curriculum the software tells him students are picking up more slowly, and what concepts could bear reinforcement. For example, if a statistics professor notices in the data he receives from activity in the open-learning program that a great number of students struggled with the assessments the program gave while teaching conditional probability, the professor could use the class periods to hold a discussion with his students about that concept until he is confident they get it — a preferable alternative, Thille says, to rolling through concepts didactically and hoping they stick.

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Blackboard Drops Suit Against Desire2Learn

Blackboard, known for its tenacity in the e-learning market, announced on December 15 that it is backing off from its long patent feud with the Canadian company Desire2Learn.

The dispute dates back to 2006, when Blackboard sued Desire2Learn in a Texas district court for 38 counts of patent infringement, seeking millions in damages. The court only upheld three counts, and both companies appealed the parts of the decision they had lost to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which in 2008 dismissed all of Blackboard’s claims against Desire2Learn. But by then the industry giant had filed additional patent-infringement lawsuits against its smaller competitor, which were pending–until December 15, when the rivals announced the détente.

. . .

Many advocates of open source learning management systems strongly backed Desire2Learn in the dispute, and feared that a Blackboard victory might open the way for the company to attack their products and give the giant in the market too much control over it. While Blackboard officials repeatedly said that their actions against Desire2Learn didn’t suggest any course of action against anyone else, the dispute led to much public bashing of the company.

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The Ever-Expanding U. of Phoenix

In the world of for-profit higher education, and higher education in general, the University of Phoenix has historically been viewed as the 800-pound gorilla.

As of Tuesday, it may be more like a 1,000-pound gorilla. As Phoenix’s parent company, the Apollo Group, reported its fourth quarter and annual earnings Tuesday, it announced that the university’s enrollment of degree-seeking students grew to 443,000 as of August 2009, up 22 percent from 362,000 in August 2008. The biggest growth in Phoenix’s enrollments, by far, came among students seeking associate degrees, which rose by 37 percent, to 201,200 from 146,500 in 2008.

About two-thirds of the university’s new students as of August are female, 27.7 percent are African-American, and about half are 30 or over.

The university attributed the sizable increases to a range of factors, including increased efforts in retaining students, expanded marketing, and the “current economic downturn, as working learners seek to advance their education to improve their job security or reemployment prospects.” Many community colleges and several of Phoenix’s major peers in for-profit career education, including Kaplan Higher Education (21.9 percent) and Corinthian Colleges, Inc. (24.4 percent), have reported sharp upturns in student enrollments this fall.

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