Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning

Fink (2013) proposes a taxonomy of significant learning that he synthesizes from decades of conversations with students and teachers on the topic of significant learning whose examples include, "learning how to learn, leadership and interpersonal skills, ethics, communication skills, character, tolerance, and the ability to adapt to change." (Fink, 2013) This taxonomy has the following categories,

• Foundational Knowledge
  Understanding and remembering:
  
  • Information
  • Ideas
• Application
  
  • Skills
  • Thinking (Critical, creative and practical thinking
  • Managing projects
• Integration
  Connecting:
  
  • Ideas
  • People
  • Realms of life
• Human Dimension
  Learning about:
  
  • Oneself
  • Others
• Caring
  Developing new:
  
  • Feelings
  • Interests
  • Values
• Learning How to Learn
  
  • Becoming a better student
  • Inquiring about a subject
  • Self-directing learners

Reference [1] Fink, L.D., 2013. Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. John Wiley & Sons.

“it’s not a superior education, but a superior peer group”

A Bloomberg opinion piece by Andrea Gabor states

"
These results suggest that “it’s not a superior education, but a superior peer group” that makes the difference for high-performing students, said Lisa Barrow, one of the authors of the Chicago study and a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
"

which includes references to a few related studies. Worth further reading!

Higher Education: Articles on Ideological Diversity on Campuses

I happened to come cross a few articles on the topic of ideological diversity on college and university campuses. This topic interests me.

Nicholas Kristof writes at the New York Times,

"Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us."

In parallel, Fredrik deBoer argues at the Los Angles Times,

"But academics are at fault, too, because we’ve pushed mainstream conservatism out of our institutions. Sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons have found that about half of professors identify as liberal, versus only 14% who identify as Republican. (At the time of their study, in 2006, only a fifth of American adults described themselves as liberal.)

......

In my network of professional academics, almost no one recognizes that our lopsided liberalism presents a threat to academia itself."

and suggests that,

"Our public universities are under massive pressure and at immense risk, and those who should be defenders of public universities still don’t understand that they’ve created the conditions for their destruction."

Funding STEM at the Cost of Liberal Arts?

Again, STEM or not? I saw an article in New York Times on funding STEM at the cost of liberal arts. This argument has been going on for a while and this New York Times article is not going to be the last one. Many feel very strong about this, for it or against it.

I am using this post as a bookmark for this type of news articles. I'll come back and add more ...

A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding, By PATRICIA COHENFEB. NY Times. 21, 2016.

Cost of Higher Education: New York Times and Slate Editions

Recently, New York Times published an op-ed opinion piece entitled "The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much" (the piece). The piece assigns a single factor to the cause of the rising college tuition, that is, the bloating university and college administration. The piece is interesting to me. I would like to drop a note on the piece.

The piece definitely won many praises -- who does not hate rising college tuition cost? I would like to say that the piece is an excellent piece simple because the piece certainly garnered many serious discussions. A few readers wrote to the New York Times expressed their opinions toward the piece. Among the opinions, some counters the argument made in the piece by arguing some university administration has become more efficient, and some argues that the bloating administrative cost is partially a result of the complexity of the higher education business, such as, the increased complexity of regulatory compliance. The Inside Higher ED has a blog post on this piece as well. The blog post refutes the center thesis expressed in the piece.

The discussions on the piece that I enjoy reading and listening the most are an article in Slate.com and a podcast from Slate.com. The article and the podcast point to a few important questions.

1. Is the cost of college education really rising? If it is rising, how much rising is it?
2. What are the factors driving the rising college education cost?

To answer the first question, we have to come out some metrics. There are at least two metrics.

• Total higher education expenditure (or cost), including tuition & fees paid by students and government expenditure and subsidy
• Higher education expenditure per Full-Time-Equivalent student (FTE)

It appears that we can have the following observations.

• The Slate.com article and podcast suggest that the total higher education expenditure indeed increases over time. However, so does the number of students enrolled. Then, although the higher education expenditure per FTE is rising, it does not rise much.
• Indeed, the university & college administrations have gotten bloated. It is a contributing factor of the rising cost of higher education. However, the bloat is partially a result that universities and colleges must deal with increased complexity of regulatory compliance.

One may ask the question, whether we can make higher education more efficient by reducing the cost per FTE.

• We do not seem to have a solution to reduce the cost amid recent technological advancement in delivering education content and service. Some cites the so-called Baumol Effect to explain why we cannot be more efficient. Nn article in Forbes has a discussion on the Baumol Effect.
• It is questionable that universities and colleges have any real incentive to reduce the cost per FTE. Some points out the prestige and ranking of a college is positively correlates to the tuition -- the more expensive a college is, the higher rank or reputation the college may enjoy, which is important to recruit more and better students.
• Some blames the Federal Financial Aid program, such as an Wall Street Journal article and the Forbes article just mentioned above.

The Stem Crisis: Shortage or Abundance of STEM Graduates

From time to time, some minor voice on the shortage of  STEM graduates starts attract attention. Contrary to more dominant view that not only does STEM shortage exist, it may also be a crisis in the making, a recent IEEE Spectrum article questions whether such a crisis is real, which got my attention. A debate ensures and the discussion continues.

I would like to document the opinions of both sides that  I come across.  I'll come back to update this post when I come across new articles.

Motion: There is a STEM Crisis

For the Motion

• Rosen, L., The Truth Hurts: The STEM Crisis Is Not a Myth, The Blog, The Huffinton Post, September 11, 2013
• Xue, Y., Larson, R. STEM crisis or STEM surplus? Yes and yes

Against the Motion

• Teitelbaum, M.S., The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage, The Atlantic, March 19, 2014
• MAnft, M.,The STEM Crisis: Reality or Myth?, The Chronicle of Higher Eucation, November 11, 2013. [Cached PDF]
• Charette, R.N., "The STEM crisis is a myth," Spectrum, IEEE , vol.50, no.9, pp.44,59, September 2013. doi: 10.1109/MSPEC.2013.6587189
• Computer science graduates struggle to find work despite IT skills shortage
• Americans Won't Like Hearing The Real Reason That Silicon Valley Is Pushing So Hard For Immigration Reform
• Is there really a shortage of STEM graduates?
• Matloff, N., A Disappointing Paper on the Question of Possible STEM Shortages 

Neutral

• The supply of and demand for high - level STEM skills
• The STEM Crisis: scientifically supported?

Massively Open Online Courses

This just serves as a bookmark for the leading websites offering Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). I found many good computing courses.

Coursera
Udacity
edX
EduKart