Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Stanford, Michigan, Columbia, Georgetown, Duke, and Northwestern’s law schools, among others, joined the wave of swearing off U.S. News & World Report’s ranking.

The exodus started a week ago when Harvard’s, Yale’s, and the University of California, Berkeley’s law schools decided not to participate in the mentioned ranking expressing doubts about its methodology.

Harvard Law School’s Dean, John Manning, summarized the concerns of the schools: “By heavily weighting students’ test scores and college grades, the U.S. News rankings have over the years created incentives for law schools to direct more financial aid toward applicants based on their LSAT scores and college GPAs without regard to their financial need.”

Overall, at least nine of the U.S. News’ top 15 schools have told U.S. News & World Report that they won’t send data for the upcoming lists.

The magazine said that it will continue with its ranking of the 200 accredited law schools in the country, regardless of whether institutions agree to submit their data.

The Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote that “Yale has recently suffered some reputational damage over its hostility to conservatives, leading some to wonder whether the school was pulling out to avoid the embarrassment of losing its No. 1 slot.”

“One way to keep from being held accountable for discriminating against Asian students, or in favor of underrepresented minorities, is to down-weight or eliminate objective metrics such as test scores in favor of harder-to-compare criteria such as essays, interviews, and recommendations. Since doing so would cause the schools to suffer in the U.S. News rankings, perhaps they’re preemptively taking their ball and going home.”

“U.S. News has provided value to those people, and it’s not going to stop just because Yale and Harvard and Berkeley law refused to cooperate. All that will happen is that the rankings will become less accurate — and less helpful to the very people from outside the current elites that these schools say they most want to recruit.” 

IBL News | New York

Supporting online students through data-informed action has become the mainstay in higher education.

“It is important to understand the affordances of the data amassed during an online student’s journey to support their success from enrollment through graduation,” Dr. Bettyjo Bouchey, Associate Professor, and Vice Provost, Digital Strategy & Operations at National Louis University, said at the 2022 OLC Conference in Orlando, Florida, last week.

During a talk session and along with, Veronica Wilson Director of Service Excellence and Retention Strategies at National Louis University, Dr. Bouchey shared a series of student dashboards with scenarios of data-informed actions, as shown below.

Attendees learned how the National Louis University harnesses the many data points collected and maintained to personalize support, increase retention, sense of belonging, and satisfaction, and ultimately keep students engaged from matriculation through to their graduation.

Bettyjo Bouchey and Veronica Wilson [in the picture above] highlighted that too much data can also become a hindrance to effective action. They also stressed the technical obstacles of putting together data for the many platforms functioning at any school, such as LMS, SIS, CRM, and Portfolio.

IBL News | New York

AI and Machine Learning Technologies will make a huge impact on the university business. Specifically, “man-machine interfaces will shape the university of the future, in areas such as academic, administrative, student, and support services.”

This was the main conclusion of a revealing talk by Patsy Moskal (University of Central Florida), Charles Dziuban (University of Central Florida), and Anthony G. Picciano (Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York), which took place in Orlando, Florida, during the 2023 OLC Accelerate conference, last week.

The three presenters [in the picture above] conducted extensive research on data analytics as used in adaptive learning environments and were empowered by emerging data analysis techniques. The substance of this session will be published in Data Analytics and Adaptive Learning: Research Perspectives (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) in early 2023.

Patsy Moskal, Charles Dziuban, and Anthony G. Picciano have published together thirty books and more than 250 articles on these topics.

“AI is impacting everything we are doing at university; the Future University will be deeply impacted by this technology,” said Dr. Anthony Picciano, professor of Education Leadership at Hunter College and Co-Founder of CUNY Online.

“As data analytics and adaptive learning infused by artificial intelligence develops and matures, the future of education will be shaped,” added Picciano.

• Watch the video of the talk

IBL News | New York

Coursera (NYSE: COUR) presented an improved note-taking tool with capturing images and centralized functionaries to increase retention and comprehension this month.

Its goal is to tackle learners’ struggle when recalling what they heard or read, given that statistically, 40% of information is lost within the first 24 hours.

This is how Coursera describes its approach:

IBL News | New York

Georgetown University and Coursera (NYSE: COUR) announced the first fully online liberal arts degree yesterday.

This Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies (SCS) is offered for $22,400.

Each credit hour costs offered at $400, which, according to Coursera, is 22% more affordable than the average online credit hour from privately-ranked colleges. (The pricing was calculated using 64 transferred credits, priced at $400.)

Students can transfer up to 64 college credits, including military training, to their 120-credit degree.

Applications will open in early December 2022, with classes beginning in the summer of 2023.

Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer at Coursera, described the program in a blog post as “an affordable, flexible way for adult learners worldwide with all backgrounds to complete their degrees and unlock their earning potential.”

The degree’s most recent on-campus cohort is composed of 62% students of color and 40% military-connected learners.

Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies said it was introducing this fully online degree to scale this program to learners worldwide.

In the U.S. alone, over 39 million students leave college without a degree. Black, Latino, and Native American students are overrepresented in this population.

The program features high-touch support services crucial to student success, including academic advising. Students will learn skills in communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking in core liberal studies courses.

Nearly all, nine out of 10, employers view the skills taught in liberal studies programs as important for success in the workforce.

IBL News | New York

Harvard’s, Yale’s, and the University of California, Berkeley’s law schools raised concerns about U.S. News ranking methodology and decided not to participate in their survey this week.

Harvard Law School’s Dean, John Manning, said in a letter  to the faculty, “That methodology works against law schools’ commitments to enhancing the socioeconomic diversity of our classes; to allocating financial aid to students based on need; and, through loan repayment and public interest fellowships, to supporting graduates interested in careers serving the public interest.”

“By heavily weighting students’ test scores and college grades, the U.S. News rankings have over the years created incentives for law schools to direct more financial aid toward applicants based on their LSAT scores and college GPAs without regard to their financial need. Though HLS and YLS have each resisted the pull toward so-called merit aid, it has become increasingly prevalent, absorbing scarce resources that could be allocated more directly on the basis of need.”

U.S. News responded to Harvard’s statement by saying that “those test scores are currently still required by the ABA for almost all law schools.”

In addition, the magazine said, “Harvard is in a position to fund students who opt to pursue public interest and scholarly careers.”

Yale University, which has ranked on top throughout the decades, made a similar announcement on Wednesday.

In a detailed post, Yale Law’s Dean, Heather K. Gerken, called the rankings “profoundly flawed—they disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession.”

Gerken added, “We have reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession. As a result, we will no longer participate.”

She also noted, “only two law schools in the country continue to give aid based entirely on need—Harvard and Yale.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote, “Rankings have the meaning that we give them as a community. I do not want to pretend they do not. And rankings will exist with or without our participation. The question becomes, then, do we think that there is a benefit to participation in the U.S. News process that outweighs the costs? The answer, we feel, is no.”

IBL News | New York

U.S. colleges and universities are seeing a strong year-over-year rebound in new international student enrollments, with an increase of 80% in the 2021 / 2022 academic year, according to a report released by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education (IIE) this week in Washington DC.

The study, titled Open Doors 2022, is evidence of the strong interest among international students to travel to the United States, the top destination for international students worldwide, and pursue their studies in person — say the authors.

Moreover, data show that 90% of enrolled international students have returned to in-person learning across U.S. campuses.

A total of  948,519 international students from more than 200 places of origin studied at U.S. higher education institutions during the 2021/2022 academic year,

The surge means a return to pre-pandemic levels.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, international students contributed $32 billion to the U.S. economy in 2021.

“Welcoming international students to American campuses and communities is at the heart of people-to-people diplomacy and a foundational component of our U.S. foreign policy strategy to attract the top talent to the United States,” explained Lee Satterfield, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.

In addition to enrolled international students, more than 184,000 students pursued Optional Practical Training (OPT), a program allowing individuals to gain practical work experiences after academic study.

China and India represent the majority (52%) of all international students in the United States. China remains the top sending country in 2021/22, with 290,086 students on U.S. campuses (-9% year-over-year). India, the second top-sending country, sent 199,182 international students in 2021/22, an increase of 19% year-over-year.

Other places of origin, including Canada, Mexico, and Nigeria, returned to pre-pandemic international student numbers. Notably, Nigeria saw its largest increase (+12% year-over-year) in international students studying in the U.S. since the 1980s.

IBL News | New York

D2L announced the launch of its Creator+ packages intended to save time for creators without any coding work allowing them to deliver interactive learning experiences.

“Creator+ is purposefully built, in partnership with educators and learning design experts, to support the development of better learning experiences,” said John Baker, President, and CEO of D2L.

Toronto, Canada – based global edtech company D2L Brightspace issued an early version of Creator+ in May 2022 and made it available for purchase this month.

According to Forbes, the average teacher works more than 400 hours of overtime each year. And a survey from the Association of Talent Development shows that 67% of organizations believe that having limited resources – time, talent, and money – is the barrier they most frequently face to designing and developing learning content.

Essentially, Creator+ allows for the use of ready-made templates to quickly build content, enhance comprehension with the Practices tool, a wide variety of practice exercises and question types, and create a consistent visual experience with the Content Styling tool.

Phil Hill, the publisher of the PhilOnEdTech blog, wrote, “Creator+ streamlines and improves content creation with templates and themes as well as deeper integration with video tools.”

IBL News | New York

Coursera’s CEO, Jeff Maggioncalda, announced in a public email to employees this week  that its company will start firing people due to the “slower growth rates, environmental uncertainty, and need to make whatever changes are needed, including reducing headcount expenses.”

“I’m sad to share that in order to slow our rate of spending, we have made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team,” he said without specifying any number.

Maggioncalda explained that the company notified all impacted employees via 1:1 conversations with their managers and senior leadership.

Coursera currently has about 1,138 full-time employees.

Laid-off employees will receive a package of four months of pay (plus additional pay based on role and tenure), healthcare coverage for up to four months, which varies by country, and job placement assistance via Randstad RiseSmart.

The firm has also created a Coursera Alumni Talent Hub for impacted employees who want to opt-in.