Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Ohio State University President Kristina M. Johnson, 65 years old, stepped down following an investigation conducted by an outside firm. The content of that research was not disclosed. The university’s Board of Trustees asked for her resignation on Monday.

“I’m saddened by the circumstances. My record of accomplishment at Ohio State speaks for itself, and I made the difficult decision to step down,” Johnson said.

In a statement, Kristina M. Johnson [in the picture] expressed her gratitude and wished everyone the very best in the future. No clue of her departure was issued.

Johnson has served only 2½ years out of her five-year contract. At the time of her departure, Johnson will have the second-shortest tenure as a president at Ohio State behind only former Ohio State President Walter Q. Scott, who served from 1881 to 1883. That does not include acting or interim presidents.

Ohio State’s Board of Trustees will begin searching for the university’s 17th president. The university said it will share more information about the search and how the community can participate in early 2023.

IBL News | New York

SAP (NYSE: SAP), the largest provider of enterprise application software, announced its goal to upskill 2 million developers worldwide by 2025 at the SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas this month.

The German software giant said it would triple its learning offering on its SAP Learning site while it partners with Coursera.com.

Through the Coursera platform, SAP will issue a professional certificate for entry-level job roles designed for learners with no college degree or industry experience.

The SAP Technology Consultant Professional Certificate comprises seven courses, two of which are available today with the rest rolling out over the coming months. Altogether, the certificate can be completed in about  5-6 months.

The authors of the certificate said that demand for technology consultants is set to increase in the coming years. In the U.S. alone, there were more than 50,000 technology consultant job postings in the last year, with a $76,200* median salary for an entry-level role.

SAP’s learning site features well elaborated corporate content about the tools and technologies of the brand.

In total, the platform learning.sap.com includes 25 courses and programs, or “learning journeys,” as the company calls them. Interestingly, those lessons are open, without the need for registration.

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.”