Monday, July 25, 2011, 8:30 AM–9:45 AM

By assessing its facilities using APPA's Facilities Management Evaluation Program (FMEP), Philadelphia University earned an award from APPA and gains further recognition via this article in NACUBO's Business Officer magazine. You may be able to view this video about the award. Below, more from the article:

We did this without significant infusion of annual operating dollars. We did, however, strategically focus our capital improvements in a way that also addressed or eliminated maintenance concerns rather than increasing their numbers. We are proud to say we now have a significantly more efficient deployment of manpower, are available to take customer calls around the clock, have made overall improvements to our physical facilities, and have cared for our grounds such that they are an enhancement to the campus.

You could say our plan was a leap of faith, since we did not have the funds to add extra supervision for the increased staffing to cover extended hours, but we moved forward anyway. We felt we had a good staff of responsible workers, and we put in the systems that would allow work to be tracked and assessed. We made customer service a priority, but did so in a way that ultimately allowed more dedicated time for facilities stewardship.

There is no question that winning the APPA Award for Excellence in facilities management in 2009 was in true recognition of all of our hard work and the university's commitment to make significant improvements. One of the best observations was to see how many other departments championed the physical plant department when the Award for Excellence audit team came to campus.

The results prove that once institution leaders know where they stand, where they want to go, and how to put the funding methodology in place to get there, the rest is a matter of communication, campus buy-in, and finally, execution. It was a testament to the willingness of Philadelphia University's administration and physical plant department to assess performance, and ultimately, implement new processes that achieved results and national recognition.

The big story in higher education last week was a new book purporting to show that many students learn more or less nothing during the first two years at college: 45% show no significant improvement on the standardized Collegiate Learning Assessment test over the first 2 years, and 36% show no significant improvement over four years. The authors label the non-improving students Academically Adrift. [This link will take you to the book on Amazon.com.]

Here's a brief review at The Chronicle, here's one at Inside Higher Ed, and another one in inside blog at The New York Times. From The Chronicle:

Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college. [Further study has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years.] While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master. These findings are sobering and should be a cause for concern.

While higher education is expected to accomplish many tasks—and contemporary colleges and universities have indeed contributed to society in ways as diverse as producing pharmaceutical patents as well as prime-time athletic games—existing organizational cultures and practices too often do not put a high priority on undergraduate learning. Faculty and administrators, working to meet multiple and at times competing demands, too rarely focus on either improving instruction or demonstrating gains in student learning.

Serena Golden took an introductory economics class from StraighterLine in order to compare that really inexpensive, no-instructor, all on line class to more traditional offerings at more established institutions. She has written a three-part paper on the experience, with lots of interviews with experts and descriptions of her class experience. Her report might not shake you up, but will will make you think about academic planning and academic programs (and budgets).

One interviewee whose name you will know is Carol Twigg of the National Center for Academic Transrormation (NCAT). Golden finishes her third and final report with a summation from Twigg about StraighterLine's product:

“Within the universe of institutions,” Twigg said, “there are high-quality courses and mediocre courses and really lousy courses…. [StraighterLine] is well within the sort of mediocre and above, because of the oversight that’s gone into it.”

“I think it’s certainly a viable option within the panoply of higher education offerings,” she concluded. “How’s that for a lukewarm endorsement?” She paused, laughing.

“It’s as good as the other stuff.”

The "other stuff," of course, is what our institutions do now for lots more money.

For the past several months, SCUPer Donald M. Norris has been interviewing leaders in the field of analytics, with regard to higher education. He has summarized best practices and vision in the white paper this post is titled after is also subtitled: "Insights on the Leading Edge From Interviews With Vendors, Practitioners, and Thought Leaders." It can be downloaded at the Public Forum on Action Analytics. 

The following quotation is from page 7,  "Five Insights From the Vendors":

• First, greater affordability and substantial pressure for continuing cost reductions was a pervasive theme. Institutions are demanding this and the vendors are responding. Vendors expressed the desire to provide analytics solutions for any type of institution, and touted examples of community colleges, small professional schools, and mid-sized universities that had deployed affordable analytics applications. The financial crisis will accelerate the affordability imperative.

• Second, the need is widely recognized for analytics that are designed and delivered for the masses and are user friendly and widely available. While some power-user-based reports will continue to be “pushed” out to users, over time analytics increasingly will be “pulled” by ever more sophisticated end users using applications crafted for the masses.

• Third, multi-vendor analytics environments on many campuses will continue to be the norm. Many leading-edge institutions are hedging their bets against a single vendor solution. Indeed, no single vendor solution exists for the multitude of analytics needs and opportunities necessary to achieve the ultimate solution – Action Analytics.

• Fourth, the conversation about new analytics capabilities is closely linked to the emergence of the enterprise technology that will succeed LMS 1.0. On the exhibit floor and in the hallways at EDUCAUSE 2010, a favorite topic of conversation centered on “What is your next LMS decision going to be?” Institutional leaders are exploring many options, including no formal LMS at all. These conversations inevitably included enhancing the analytics that existing LMSs have been unable to provide or support adequately.

• Fifth, there is greater sophistication in talking about the future uses of affordable analytics among vendors and campus executives: presidents, provosts, CFOs, CIOs, and campus planners. Over the past several years, the ERP, LMS, and Analytics vendors have been educating the marketplace – and one another – on how to move beyond the limitations of the existing ERP and LMS stacks. What new analytics needs will be required to deal with emerging institutional needs. Likewise, campus leaders have been facing greater pressure to provide accountability statistics and to improve performance, which requires embedded, formative analytics.

Last week, we had the welcome opportunity to attend the second Action Analytics Symposium in St. Paul, MN. Doug Lederman, of Inside Higher Ed was also there. He moderated a panel discussion. Here's his report on the symposium and other, related movements aimed at getting better data-informed decisions made about student learning:

Those behind Action Analytics wouldn't dare assert that they have a clear solution to that problem, but they left last week's meeting vowing to keep attacking it. They plan to convene national experts in a Web-based community of practice, and to test out concepts locally in the Twin Cities, involving not just the host institutions but the mammoth University of Minnesota, too. While some participants expressed concern that the continuing economic woes in the states would discourage progress on this front -- since "bad times sometimes erode away what was innovative," said [SCUP board member Linda] Baer of MnSCU -- others argued that the combination of economic necessity and continued external pressure from federal and state policy makers would compel college leaders to find new ways to improve their own performance. "If we don't," said [Aimee] Guidera of the Data Quality Campaign, "we will go the way of newsprint."

The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Tech Therapy" section interviews Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, about the value of analytics for higher education leaders. (We recommend moving the slider over and beginning to listen to the podcast at 15 minutes in unless you want to hear a couple of ads and some talk about iPads.)

The first story Hrabowski tells is about a discussion with a senior faculty member in engineering who, anecdotal information, was firm in his belief that everyone who started after a PhD in that program got one. Hrabowski notes that he had hard data that it was more like 50 percent, and was able to get data-informed decisions made. Why did the professor think everyone finished? Perhaps because the students who did not finish were not very visible to him as they slipped through the cracks. With the data, the school was able to better address retention issues.

Tomorrow, the National Research Council will release the data and its reports from the latest effort to rank doctoral programs. The big change this time is less reliance on "reputation" and more on relatively objective things, such as median time-to-degree. We love the image Inside Higher Ed uses in its coverage of the impending release of data. 

(Photo by the Flickr user Captain McDan. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Here is the link to the official NRC page about this.

The Lumina Foundation has been carefully watching the Bologna Process and is engaged in research to determine how aspects of it which set out learning and degree requirements can be brought to the United States. It is circulating a draft of a degree qualifications profile (PDF) that is causing quite a stir in leadership circles.

The following is quoted from an Inside Higher Ed article by Doug Lederman.

"Institutions are similarly sidestepping public calls to clarify what their degrees represent in terms of student accomplishment by employing sample-based testing and assessment programs that say little about learning and even less about what all students should attain," the document states. "In the absence of clear statements of intended learning outcomes, confusion and misunderstanding are to be expected, and they currently prevail."

Statements of that sort may stoke concerns among faculty and other groups that a process that starts with defining what degree earners need to know and be able to do will inevitably lead to an attempt to set national higher education standards, which many would oppose.

The Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities (AGB) has published the results of a study about governing boards and student learning assessment. The following quote is from a Chronicle article about the survey results. You can download the entire report from the AGB: How Boards Oversee Educational Quality. As well, AGB offers the book Making the Grade: How Boards Can Ensure Academic Quality, by Peter Ewell.

The report, "How Boards Oversee Educational Quality: A Report on a Survey on Boards and the Assessment of Student Learning," is based on a survey conducted in November 2009 that asked 1,300 chief academic officers and chairs of board committees on academic affairs how boards oversee academic quality. The response rate was 38 percent, with 28 percent of trustees and 58 percent of chief academic officers participating. Almost one-quarter of the respondents were from public institutions, and three-quarters were from private institutions.

Results of the survey were mixed, Ms. Johnston said. While slightly more than half of respondents said boards spend more time discussing student-learning outcomes now than they did five years ago, 61.5 percent said boards do not spend sufficient time in meetings on the issue. A smaller proportion—38.5 percent—said enough time was spent on the subject in board meetings.

"There is plenty of room for improvement," Ms. Johnston said