A few days off for the holiday

Off... for Thanksgiving week. Blog will return in December. ~ M. Bold

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

December Conferences: Moodle LMP Among Them

Campus Technology's free webinar series (upcoming schedule online) runs during the front half of December with topics on Wellesley's content management system (Dec 3), cloud computing (Dec 9), and moodlerooms as LMP or learning management platform (Dec 10). The webcasts have a commercial flavor, to be sure, but they also communicate a lot of knowledge about new software and services (and, yes, sometimes Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS). Reservations are taken but if you miss out on a seat, you can return to the schedule page and access a past webcast "on demand." This is the method I use about half the time.

Newest abbreviation on the block: LMP for learning management platform. Distance learning (DL) in higher ed has moved through CMS (course management system but now used almost exclusively for content management system) to LMS (learning management system). LMP has some nice connotations, among them the concept of one platform among many to be employed in DL. That's opposed to a "system" which implies a complete environment, even though systems can be open. There's one more connotation from a personal perspective: I've been studying pause tables, the platforms that dogs employ on an agility course. I like that analogy best of all for DL: a platform for use, probably on a temporary basis, and existing in between other events.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Free Conferences Online: Claremont Colleges Digital Library

Conferences and symposia at Claremont Graduate University are among the most affordable but there's one more resource that's free: Claremont Colleges Digital Library. Access requires only the QuickTime player (also free from Apple). Production values are sometimes low but the video playback is superb, thanks to QuickTime.

The menu for the Online Video Library provides titles and speakers, identification by conference, and length of video. Using your browser search function [Control F] you can quickly scan the page for "Scriven" and find hours of learning to be accomplished on your own time.

A more leisurely stroll through the menu leads to other excellent resources on evaluation and higher ed issues, in general. Elsewhere on the page are links to text and video about some of the Claremont series. Some links involve a charge but you'll also find some free items, such as the first 45 minutes from the 2009 Stauffer Symposium, which happened to be Claremont's first webcast effort in addition to the F2F conference. Click on "Positive Psychology Conference - Video Footage" on the left side of the menu web page and scroll down to the black square that offers the free show. (I took the time to play the free excerpt—it's a good representation of the day but I'll admit that I'm glad I saw it in person. You can also view the whole day for $25.)

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Travel and Technology (Fall Conferences)

Fall conference travel... for SAIR, IUPUI, NCFR, and next up, SACS... has prompted a new technology list for the season. These are my new and returning tools that make working possible during travel weeks:

VOIP EAR BUDS:
VOIP headsets are as old as VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), but its the ear bud version (with mike in the cord) that caught my eye this year. This version of connecting to the laptop is comfortable and easy to pack. Don't get confused by regular ear buds and mike (for your cell phone). Nor the plain ear buds (for your MP3 player). In short, look for the two crucial components: the mike in the cord and the ending points in 2 input jacks. Find all those elements (happily, for under $20) and you're ready for enhanced VOIP. (The graphic above also shows one more feature: retractable cords via the round element in center.)

WAVE ON CHROME:
My waves can still be counted on one hand but I'm working on learning Wave, Google's new email offering. It's really a conversation piece, in more ways than one, and it requires one of just a handful of qualified web browsers. So, that's why chrome is new for me, now, too. After the novelty wears off, we'll know if Wave really adds to my productivity. Right now, it's a major learning curve. Chrome is much easier to adopt and I especially like its + sign at the top to create a new tab.

APPLE AIRPORT:
I travel with my PCs, not my Apple laptop, but I carry along the Apple Airport in order to turn cable Internet access into wireless access in my hotel room. This durable item is a standard now. I spend a lot of time worrying that I will fail to unplug it upon departure.

AIR CARD:
For the hotel rooms with too-expensive or too-slow Internet, I plug in my USB "card" which is really a neat little stick for accessing the 3G network. I also use it in airports. (Think of it as a cell phone for the laptop because it actually does have a "phone number" assignment from the cell service company.)

GOGO NETWORK:
And then there's this new inducement to work while traveling: Internet access from 30,000 feet. Just a couple of days ago, on an aging S80, I found the plane to be WIFI-enabled. It was a red-eye flight and I didn't want to disturb neighbors with my laptop so I accessed the network with my iPhone. And surfed. Hardly got my money's worth ($7.95) but enjoyed the luxury of having WIFI everywhere.

MISSING:
What's missing? Life could be pretty darn perfect if we had an assessment cruise... with affordable WIFI on ship. Travel and technology go well together.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Note: Advising In World

Virtual advising has officially entered Penn State's stock of student services. The institution's Second Life island is the locale for meetings between avatars "in world"; advisers' availability is posted on the Penn State Online web site. See the staff photo (of avatars) on that web site.

An inventive feature of the Penn State initiative: walk-in hours.

The image at right is not from Penn State. That's my avatar on the island of Texas Woman's University. I have keynoted in SL, met with students, and helped to create a student research symposium. All good things to do virtually. Recommended starting point for anyone new to the immersive environment: NMC, New Media Consortium.

FYI: I don't worry over the debate of whether we in higher ed should be teaching in Second Life. Or even whether higher ed should invest in virtual worlds. But I do think we should all practice in every SL venue open to us. We need to practice. SL is probably not going to be the virtual world we teach in 10 years from now. But it's a great place to practice now.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

CollegeInSight: Mashup Guide to Higher Ed

The explosion of data sources on U.S. higher education no doubt matches the growth of the Internet. It's a 2000s story, with updates daily. Today's entry isn't about a brand-new web publisher (because The Institute for College Access & Success has been around for a few years, researching access as well as student experience with loans) but an established one's beta web site for displaying college data to the public.

The number of "public" guides to colleges continues to grow with emphasis on easy to pull statistics. This one, CollegeInSight, handles data well and permits even custom tables (through the "explore all data" tab). Data reflect more than 150 variables from multiple sources. The primary sources are recognizable to folks in IR but not to much of the public: IPEDS reported to NCES, Pell Grant files, FISAP reported to DOE, and CDS or Common Data Set maintained by Peterson's.

The resulting mashup, with its clear identification of sources, sets a new standard for data sites concerning higher ed.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Comparability of College Assessments

In the search for proof of what college can do for the nation, we have a fair number of accountability initiatives. Some prescribed by government, some by accreditors. And then there are the self-assigned initiatives although they may be prompted by those other prescriptions.

We move quickly from "accountability" to "assessment," because we need measurement. So, assessment-the-process and assessment-the-instrument develop and we must then move to "validity," because we really need to know if we are measuring what our charge for accountability demands that we measure.

Some associations emerge to help with the process, one being VSA, Voluntary System of Accountability. That's a gathering of 4-year public universities just since 2006 to bring transparency and accountability to higher ed. VSA's most visible achievement (on the web, at least) is College Portraits, a collection of institutional profiles providing "comparable information" on colleges for easy review by students and families.

Recently, VSA published a report on validity of what most educators consider the "top" standardized assessments (instruments) of gen ed skills, specifically tests from the CAAP, CLA, and MAPP. The results announce that the assessments are comparable in what they do. The report does a nice job of explaining the results when the institution is the unit of analysis and when the student is the unit of analysis. (The results differ.)

Depending on what assumption you (personally) have about standardized assessments of gen ed skills and applicability to student learning, you now have an answer.

Assumption #1: Such assessments measure student learning. Your answer: The top assessments are comparable and you can proceed with your choice based on other criteria (cost, logistics, etc.)

Assumption #2: Such assessments may measure something but probably not student learning. Your answer: The top assessments are comparable; in short, they're all the same.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Authenticating Identification... No, Just Identifying

Negotiated rule-making on the question of student identity in distance learning suggested a common sense approach and that is now made official in the final regulations from Department of Education. The fast find: search for "identity" on the web page.

The October 27 publication (in the Federal Registry) was among a cluster of final rulings on the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, abbreviated as HEOA. Announcements about similar regulations are made on the Higher Education page of Ed.gov. Although designed as a web page, the site reads a lot like a blog, with stacked entries over time and sidebar hyperlinks to other sources.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Reporting Assessment Results (Well): Pairing UNLV and OERL

Following the work of University of Nevada - Las Vegas Office of Academic Assessment and their online Assessment Toolbox, a good outline for reporting to stakeholders includes a link to OERL with recommendation to explore the tabs for Plans, Instruments, and Reports.

One of the richer guides on the OERL (Online Evaluation Resource Library) site is the Alignment Table for Report Components. Between the two web sites, you find the short and long of assessment report-writing.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Old Dominion's GNATs

"The number of colleges and universities carrying out assessment activities since the early 1980s has grown from a handful to virtually all institutions of higher education today."

~ from the History web page of Old Dominion University web site on assessment

The history of assessment at Old Dominion does a good job of highlighting the events since the '80s that drive measures today. The lesson is subtly made: attention to outcomes assessment is relatively recent. Old Dominion is frank about its own recent attention to building infrastructure for assessment. One of the institution's strategies was formation of GNATS—Great New Assessment Teams.

Old Dominion indicates that its assessment web site is "new and improved." Not knowing its previous condition, I can at least call the current version neat, clean, and easy to read. From left, check out the Assessment Cycle. From right, go ahead and click "Top 10 Facts About Assessment of Student Learning." The Top 10 list draws you in....

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.