Blog: off until after Labor Day

Blog is on vacation in honor of start of semester. Will return Tuesday, September 8.

© 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.

New ranking web site: What Will They Learn?

With an alarmist tone, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) publishes rankings of U.S. higher ed institutions. In fact, the organization says, "What we found is alarming." The ACTA web site is called What will they learn?

On the plus side, ACTA provides a clear-cut view of their criteria (essentially analyzing course offerings for a "solid" core curriculum) and an even more obvious result: grade of A, B, C, D, F, with breakdown by discipline, tuition, and graduation rate.

Quickly get a handle on the ratings by clicking "Compare Schools" from the front page menu (or clicking here for a direct link).

© 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.

How many SLOs, really?

How many SLOs (Student Learning Outcomes) are enough? Answers from three sources:

Academic Assessment
Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa
Writing Student Learning Outcomes
A total of five to seven student learning outcomes is typical. The number of student learning outcomes a program has is not as important as the number of student learning outcomes the program is trying to assess in any one year.


Assessment web page
University of Rhode Island, Kingston
Student Learning Outcomes 101
Three to five may be plenty!

Learning Assessment Committee
Laney College, Oakland, California
How to Write Student Learning Outcomes
There should be 3-8 SLOs for each class or program. When in doubt, fewer is better.

© 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.

How many SLOs?

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) are the core of most assessment initiatives today. That doesn't mean they are limited as a center piece (or centerpiece). In fact, this core may be better envisioned as an envelope. And as recent discussion on a listserv would indicate, the envelope should be large enough to address all that a program faculty sees as representing what students should learn by the end of the degree.

If a meaningful SLO is one that clearly reflects a competency, then your basic set of 3 outcomes will not reflect "all" that students should learn. Would 6 outcomes be enough? Would 8? More? (Posters on the listserv did not have an answer.)

Assuming that we subscribe to the idea of humans having some limits on their ability to focus, we can use George Miller's magical number of 7. Humans can handle 5 to 9 things (in phone numbers, in memory, in relationships, in file folders) before they start having to juggle. Before they lose track. Before they shrug.

That principle suggests naming a recommended number of SLOs for a faculty group to focus on. But it doesn't have to limit the faculty's thinking about competencies. Categories of competencies can be reflected in the SLOs. Then, the next matter is how to set about measuring them, probably with staggered schedules so that just a few SLOs are addressed per year.

By limiting the number of new assessments each year, the faculty has the luxury of also re-visiting measures from previous years. And that's the real power of assessment: measuring, making an improvement, and re-measuring. The re-visiting represents closing the loop.

A formula I am growing fond of:
6 outcomes X 2-3 assessments = 12-18 measures per year. Now, comes the next question: how many faculty members does it take to.....

© 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.

Diplomas and Dropouts: A study of higher ed today

Diplomas and Dropouts: Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (and Which Don't). Long title! For the short and manageable version of this AEI 2009 report, go to the Executive Summary and then click links at bottom for the actual report and, most helpful, a file of FAQs.

© 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.

A Costing Model with an Excel file to play with

EQ, which is short for EDUCAUSE Quarterly, devoted the summer issue to the giant topic of Tackling the Economic Downturn. Among the cost-conscious articles is a contribution on A Costing Model for Project-Based Information and Communication Technology Systems. The article comes with an interactive Excel file for readers' experimentation.

The authors are Brian Stewart and Dave Hrenewich of Athabasca University. Hrenewich is Director of Computing Services; Stewart is the institution's CIO.

© 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.

Crowdsourcing: The New Peer Evaluation

The Chronicle introduced Duke prof Cathy Davidson's new grading scheme with this quote by Davidson: "In school systems today, we’re putting more and more emphasis on quantitative assessment in an era when, out of the classroom, students are learning through an entirely different way of collaboration, customizing, and interacting."

All true, although perhaps a nod to the purpose of assessment could be made. That's included in Davidson's blog on the subject. She will use crowdsourcing for the peer interaction that will inform grades (which will be outlined on a chart).

A reply to the blog that I especially liked: gharp's August 8, 11:49pm entry called "Gaming Grading." Moving students to peer evaluation and self-evaluation has high value. And is much more difficult than simply grading them, oneself.

© 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.

Blog for Business Educators and more folks, too

The Teaching Post blog by Harvard professor emeritus Jim Heskett is published by Harvard Business Publishing. Heskett presents ideas and techniques in keeping with his position in the Participant-Centered Learning seminars sponsored by the company.

Lots of publishers run blogs and this one certainly carries the company message. What is outstanding about the blog is the commentary it generates through readers' posts. Even the least-compelling (to me) blog title leads to contributions from readers that invariably interest me. Always a good read.

© 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.

Blogs for and about evaluators

Evaluator and Evaluation Blogs, a web page of the American Evaluation Association, lists web-logs (blogs) related to evaluation. The entries are helpful in carrying hyperlinks to the blogs as well as to Examples.

An entry includes the focus of the blog and also notes when the blog was created. A couple in the list were first published in 2004. Most, though, are from 2008. A couple of 2009 blogs are also listed. A less visible element is the "Updates in YEAR," which gives the number of new entries. A few are outstanding at 99 and 103.

© 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.

Principles for online course development

There are a number of referring email names that I always take time to follow up on. Claudine Schweber is one of them.

Claudine pointed readers on a Sloan-C listserv to an article about funding for new distance learning courses. Published by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington think tank, the report is called Educational Tools for the 21st Century. What I liked was the report's five principles for (online) course development:

1 - Develop courses to certification standards.

2 - Promote partnerships for the widest possible course adoptions.

3 - Use a common design architecture

4 - Develop both stand-alone and faculty-mediated courses.

5 - Provide for rigorous assessment of learning outcomes.

© 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.