Dear Commons Community,

M.O. Thirunarayanan, a professor and dean at Florida International University, had an essay published earlier this week in the Teachers College Record, commenting on the need for traditional colleges and universities to be truthful in their credentialing when students take online programs. He also recommended that state legislatures take up the issue and pass truth in credentialing laws to ensure that information regarding how courses and degree programs were completed is detailed in transcripts and diplomas.  Here is the crux of his argument.

“If diplomas are awarded by colleges/universities that only offer online courses and programs, then it is clear that these academic credentials were earned fully online. In contrast, traditional face-to-face colleges and universities now offer degrees that can be fully earned online without requiring students to ever be physically present on campus. However, the diplomas awarded and transcripts provided by these traditional institutions of higher education do not distinguish between programs completed online and those completed face-to-face.

These issues lead to the following recommendation: there should be truth in credentialing. Organizations should consider some of the following factors when providing credentials for degrees that are earned fully or partially online:

• Are those learners enrolled in online courses the same students as those who complete and submit all required assignments and projects? It is more difficult to determine whether registered students are doing the mandatory work in online courses.
• Although cheating occurs in traditional classrooms, there are more ways students can potentially cheat online. For example, students enrolled in online courses have paid other people to complete courses for them. In addition, web-based services offer term papers, reports, and other projects to assist students in unfair ways that are difficult for professors to monitor.
• Instructors who teach courses online do not always require that tests and exams be proctored. This type of assessment without adequate supervision leaves openings for many forms of academic misconduct. It is often very difficult for online instructors to detect this misbehavior and they may not even be trained to do so.
• There is skepticism among the general public and employers that students who complete courses and degree programs fully online can learn as much as their traditional face-to-face counterparts.

The perceived quality of distance education and online courses will improve greatly if all projects, quizzes, and exams are proctored. If it is not possible to bring students to campus for exams, many companies offer proctoring at a distance. Universities could require students to avail themselves of these services if learners are unable to travel to campus to take their exams. One objection to these requirements is that it inconveniences students and increases the cost of offering distance courses.”

This issue has been around for a while and there is some basis for Thirunarayanan’s argument, however, I don’t agree with several of his premises.  First, student cheating whether online or in traditional courses has been with us for decades.  Maybe a certain type of cheating is easier in the online environment but I am not sure if it is so much more prevalent as to be a problem.  As the author indicates, there are proctoring services and other means to protect against this and they should be used as needed.  Second, there is an assumption here that tests, quizzes, and examinations are the only ways to assess students.  Essays, presentations, and portfolios are just as important and may be more authentic forms of assessment.   What cheating occurs with these are just as easy in traditional as online courses. Third, an online course can actually provide more information about student assessment because there can be a complete record via a LMS/CMS of everything the student has done in the course including responding to questions, participation in group activities, and facilitating course instruction which in general are more difficult to record in traditional face-to-face courses.

In sum, it is fine to raise the issue of student cheating in online versus traditional programs but there are pros and cons on both sides.  It should be the decision of the college and its faculty as to how they address the problem and how they present their diplomas and credentials. And it should not be something dictated by state legislators or other education policy makers.

Tony

NYS-TEACHS Data

Dear Commons Community,

Last year, 99,196 students in New York City’s traditional public schools, or nearly 10 percent of students, were classified as being in temporary housing, according to data from the New York State Technical and Education Assistance Center for Homeless Students, known as NYS-TEACHS, which is funded by the State Education Department and administered by Advocates for Children, a nonprofit group. At the same time, 6,249 students, or roughly 7 percent, in city charter schools were in temporary housing.   As reported by the New York Times:

“The major cause of the disparity, most people agree, is the way charter schools admit students. By law, charter schools admit students by lottery, and most hold their lotteries in April. Many receive more applicants than they have seats available. So, if a family moves between April and September, or in the middle of the school year, and is looking for a school seat in a new neighborhood, they will often be unable to get one in a charter. District schools, in contrast, more easily allow children to move between them.

Charter enrollment “will always disadvantage kids in temporary housing,” Jennifer Pringle, the director of NYS-TEACHS, said. “You have a kid who’s placed in a shelter where the local traditional public school is co-located with a charter school,” she explained. “You can enroll midyear in the traditional public school, but you can’t enroll in that charter school if they don’t have available seats.”

Homeless students are also distributed unevenly among the city’s traditional public schools. There are schools with very few, or no, homeless students, and there are neighborhood elementary schools which, because of overcrowding, will not admit a student in the middle of the year.

…However, in at least 21 of the 29 geographic school districts in the city that have charters, every charter had a lower percentage of students in temporary housing last year than the average among the traditional public schools in the same district. In District 9 in the Bronx, for example, which had the highest concentration of students in temporary housing, 23 percent of students in the traditional public schools were in temporary housing last year, according to data from NYS-TEACHS. Most charters there had percentages of homeless students in the single digits. Icahn Charter School 6 and South Bronx Classical Charter III had the highest percentage, 12 percent.

Students in temporary housing often struggle academically. According to a report on New York City from the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, a policy research organization, students in temporary housing are nearly twice as likely to be chronically absent — meaning they miss at least 20 days of school — as students who are not homeless. They are also nearly three times as likely to transfer schools midyear, and they have much lower rates of academic proficiency.

Students who live in shelters have even more acute academic issues. At the city’s traditional public schools last year, 35 percent of the students classified as being in temporary housing were living in shelters, compared with 29 percent at charter schools.

Charter schools, in general, are known for having stricter discipline than traditional public schools and for being less tolerant of families whose children are chronically late or absent.”

It will be interesting to see how this issue plays out especially since the charter school advocates will soon have a champion in the U.S. Department of Education in Betsy DeVos.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Here is a brief article from The Journal Sentinel via The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new, five-year administrative  review policy of tenured faculty members that was approved yesterday by the State of Wisconsin regents. 

“University of Wisconsin system regents approved a new policy mandating that administrators conduct “independent, substantive reviews” of tenured faculty members every five years, The Journal Sentinel reports. While top administrators already have authority over post-tenure reviews, faculty critics have worried aloud that the change — which makes administrators’ duties in the area explicit — will make it easier for professors to be fired.

The new policy comes amid longstanding angst over the strength of tenure in Wisconsin. Last year, tenure protections were stripped from state law, and professors have criticized the systemwide policies that replaced those protections as insufficiently weak.

System officials have said the changes approved Thursday were necessary because policies approved earlier this year did not mandate independent reviews, which help “ensure that faculty members receive unbiased and impartial treatment,” according to system materials quoted by the Journal Sentinel.

Faculty critics have countered that the move takes yet more power out of the hands of faculty members already battered by poor morale and perceived threats to academic freedom.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker and Academy Award winner,  in an interview with Seth Meyers, predicts that Donald Trump might not take office in January.  As reported by Business Insider:

“After correctly predicting Donald Trump would win the presidential election, Michael Moore made a new prediction that he may not go on to serve his term while talking to Seth Meyers.

The Oscar-winning director made waves when he predicted that Trump would win back in July and now he says he takes no pleasure in being right.

“I never wanted to be more wrong,” Moore told Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s “Late Night.” “I remember when I said this on the show, the audience moaned, like ‘no,’ all because it didn’t seem possible. She was ahead in the polls, she was winning the debates, it was a great convention. And he’s crazy.”

Moore, who even correctly named the states that would clinch the election for Trump, joked that people are now asking him for the winning lotto numbers.

To which Meyers responded, “It’s like you hit the lotto, but instead of winning $6 million you got kicked in the nuts.”

While he was right before, Moore said he has a new Trump prediction and told the crowd to prepare their moans.

“He’s not president until noon on January 20 of 2017,” Moore said. “So that’s more than six weeks away. Would you not agree, regardless of which side of the political fence you’re on, this has been the craziest election year? Nothing anyone has predicted has happened. The opposite has happened. So is it possible that in these next six weeks something else might happen, something crazy, something we’re not expecting?”

To which Meyers asked, “Do you think it’s possible that he now realizes this job is way more work than he wanted it to be?”

“Oh, he is so bummed out,” Moore said. “He may decide he just wants to quit before he even takes office. Everyone in the audience is saying that’s not possible. Everybody in this audience at some point in their life on the first day of their job knew they had taken the wrong  job.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As reported by Business Insider, the online polling firm Morning Consult released the results of a survey yesterday of the most and least trusted news sources in America.

ABC had the highest credibility rating of any news source included in the poll, with 67% of people calling it “credible” or “very credible.”

CNN, which President-elect Donald Trump often derided as the “Clinton News Network” during the election campaign season, was ranked in the middle of the pack, below ABC, CBS, and NBC, but above Fox and MSNBC.

The Wall Street Journal was the highest-ranked newspaper on the list.

InfoWars and Breitbart were near the bottom of the list along with The Onion, a satirical website. Breitbart, which was run by Trump’s eventual campaign chair, Steve Bannon, provided staunchly pro-Trump coverage during the campaign. InfoWars, run by Alex Jones, has been known to spread conspiracy theories.

Nearly half of those surveyed said they’d never heard of InfoWars and Breitbart.

Morning Consult polled 1,605 adults on December 1 and 2. The margin of error is 2 percentage points.

Pew Research Center conducted a similar survey in 2014. It included more news outlets and put The Economist and the BBC at the top of the list as the most trustworthy outlets. ABC, CBS, and NBC were lumped in together below The Wall Street Journal and NPR.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education has just issued a new report, Knocking on the College Door, which provides enrollment and graduation data (2001-2032) by state for our country’s high schools.  The report’s website is quite comprehensive and in addition to the report and the executive summary, data files on all fifty states are available for free download.  This is a treasure trove of data for anyone seeking information on this population. 

In looking at the chart above, the overall number of high school graduates will plateau for most of the next decade with 7 of the 10 years from 2013 to 2023 expected to see fewer or about the same number of graduates compared to 2013, which was the year with highest recorded number of U.S. graduates yet. While the country is projected to see three years of growth between 2024 and 2026, this will be a short- term increase as the average size of graduating classes between 2027 and 2032 is expected to be smaller than those in 2013.

Tony

At 7:48 a.m. on December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii. The barrage lasted just two hours, but it was devastating: eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk. All but the USS Arizona (BB-39) were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. The day after the assault, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan; Congress approved his declaration with just one dissenting vote. Three days later, Japanese allies Germany and Italy also declared war on the United States, and again Congress reciprocated.

We should also pause to remember that 127,000 Japanese Americans encountered violation of their civil liberties in wartime America. Herded into concentration camps, segregated from the rest of society, stripped of homes and possessions, these American citizens and their relatives endured hardships unthinkable in a civilized land.

Dear Commons Community,

Uber is the latest company to invest significant research and development funds into artificial intelligence (A.I.).  In making the announcement, representatives from Uber indicated they envision a future in which cars can make the most complex maneuvers without the help of a driver. To achieve that, cars will need to get a whole lot smarter. Gary Marcus and Zoubin Ghahramani, the two men appointed as co-directors of Uber’s lab, aim is to apply A.I. to self-driving vehicles, along with solving other technological challenges through machine learning.  As reported by the New York Times:

“Marcus and  Ghahramani are joining Uber through an acquisition of their start-up firm, Geometric Intelligence. Unlike most A.I. start-ups that generally follow one method of study of artificial intelligence, Geometric Intelligence takes a multidisciplinary approach to the field.

The acquisition and new research arm, which will be called Uber’s A.I. Labs, exemplifies how seriously Silicon Valley tech companies are betting on artificial intelligence. Google, Facebook and others have also pushed into artificial intelligence, which underlies voice recognition software, digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, and technologies like self-driving cars. Many companies are racing to bring on new A.I. talent to compete against one another.

“Every major company realizes how essential A.I. is to what they’re doing,” Dr. Marcus said in an interview. “Because of the scale of data people are operating on, even the smallest gains in efficiency can turn out enormous changes at these companies, especially in terms of profit.”

With the Geometric Intelligence deal, Uber, which is now valued at close to $70 billion, said it hoped that Dr. Marcus’s team could harness the wealth of data it collects from the millions of daily Uber rides. The company wants to use the data to make major advances in how computers behind self-driving vehicles think and make decisions on the road.

Many of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies, such as Google and Facebook, have tried to commercialize artificial intelligence through the application of algorithms modeled largely on how the human brain functions. This method, called deep learning, leans heavily on the vast data sets that private technology companies own and that are used to train computers to do simple tasks, such as match patterns or recognize faces in photographs.

Part of what drew Uber to Dr. Marcus’s team is that his start-up is tackling artificial intelligence in a different way. Rather than taking just one approach like deep learning, Geometric Intelligence combines data scientists who use varying techniques to study artificial intelligence, including the Bayesian and “evolutionary” methods.

Dr. Marcus, who helped found Geometric Intelligence in late 2014, said the gist of his philosophy goes something like this: Instead of training machines by feeding them enormous amounts of data, what if computers were capable of learning more like humans by extrapolating a system of rules from just a few or even a single example?

In recent years, researchers at institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and the University of Toronto have also worked on similar theories. Using this approach, some reported a breakthrough in “one-shot” machine learning last December, in which artificial intelligence advances surpassed human capabilities for a narrow set of vision-related tasks.”

This is another major step forward in A.I. that deserves attention especially if it is successful in  developing applications built on rules extrapolated from a few observable examples.  If they work, it brings A.I. much closer to natural machine-man interfaces.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

John Wallach sent this along on the Hunter College faculty listserv.   The full story appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

The University of California announced sweeping actions last week to protect its students who came into the country illegally, saying it would refuse to assist federal immigration agents, turn over confidential records without court orders or supply information for any national registry based on race, national origin or religion.

 “While we still do not know what policies and practices the incoming federal administration may adopt, given the many public pronouncements made during the presidential campaign and its aftermath, we felt it necessary to reaffirm that UC will act upon its deeply held conviction that all members of our community have the right to work, study, and live safely and without fear at all UC locations,” UC President Janet Napolitano said in a statement.

Napolitano said the university would “vigorously protect the privacy and civil rights of the undocumented members of the UC community.”

The policies, described as a statement of principles, mark the first unified approach toward federal immigration issues for the system’s 10 campuses, according to UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein.

Napolitano formed a task force to examine possible actions shortly after the presidential election of Donald Trump stirred widespread unease and uncertainty on campuses. UC does not track students’ immigration status but says about 3,700 have obtained in-state tuition benefits under AB 540, a 2001 law designed to help those in the country illegally. 

The UC president announced the new policies a day after she and the heads of the California State University and California Community Colleges sent a joint letter to President-elect Trump urging him to allow students without legal status to continue their educations. Trump, during his campaign, had said he would reverse an Obama administration program Napolitano created as Homeland Security secretary that deferred deportation proceedings against certain young people who stayed in school and out of trouble.

Congratulations Dr. Napolitano and UC colleagues!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Army Corps of Engineers dealt the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other environmental protesters a major victory when it announced  yesterday it would not allow construction of the oil pipeline under the Missouri River.  As reported by the New York Times:

“The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe won a major victory on Sunday in its battle to block an oil pipeline being built near its reservation when the Department of the Army announced that it would not allow the pipeline to be drilled under a dammed section of the Missouri River.

The Army said it would look for alternative routes for the $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline. Construction of the route a half-mile from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation has become a global flash point for environmental and indigenous activism, drawing thousands of people out here to a sprawling prairie camp of tents, tepees and yurts.

“The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing,” Jo-Ellen Darcy, the Army’s assistant secretary for civil works, said in a statement. The move could presage a lengthy environmental review that has the potential to block the pipeline’s construction for months or years.

But it was unclear how durable the government’s decision would be. Sunday’s announcement came in the dwindling days of the Obama administration, which revealed in November that the Army Corps of Engineers was considering an alternative route. The Corps of Engineers is part of the Department of the Army.

President-elect Donald J. Trump, however, has taken a different view of the project and said as recently as last week that he supported finishing the 1,170-mile pipeline, which crosses four states and is almost complete.

Though the Army’s decision calls for an environmental study of alternative routes, the Trump administration could ultimately decide to allow the original, contested route. Representatives for Mr. Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Trump owns stock in the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, but he has said that his support has nothing to do with his investment.

There was no immediate response from Energy Transfer Partners, but its chief executive, Kelcy Warren, has said that the company was unwilling to reroute the pipeline, which is intended to transport as much as 550,000 barrels of oil a day from the oil fields of western North Dakota to a terminal in Illinois.”

… Jon Eagle Sr., a member of the Standing Rock Tribe, said the announcement was a vindication for the thousands who had traveled here, and for the multitudes who had rallied to the tribe’s fight on social media or donated. Millions of dollars in donations and goods have flowed into the camps for months as the tribe’s fight and the scenes of protesters being tear-gassed and sprayed with freezing water stirred outrage on social media.

“I don’t know quite how to put into words how proud I am of our people,” Mr. Eagle said. “And I mean our people. I don’t just mean the indigenous people of this continent. I mean all the people who came to stand with us. And it’s a beautiful day. It’s a powerful day.”

This is at least a temporary reprieve. We will see in January what President Trump will bring to this discussion.

Tony