College Students Worry About Time

Academics are not the only thing keeping college students up at night. A new survey of more than 1,500 undergrads currently enrolled in a two- or four-year institution found that 36% of respondents said time management and 35% identified anxiety as the key factors keeping them from a diploma.

Students also listed being overwhelmed with managing responsibilities (31%) and working too many hours (24%) to pay for school as other factors. The survey results may be the tip of the iceberg since so many nontraditional students are heading to college.

“We have a lot of students with very complicated lives and they have broader issues,” said Mark Milliron, co-founder and chief learning officer of Civitas Learning, which did the study. “Trying to design the right kind of advising support is going to mean a level of diversification and a level of personalization.”

Advising is becoming much more important to students. The study noted that 40% ranked information on career options after graduation and on staying on track to finish a degree as the highest types of advice they should receive. Time management and academic success strategies were listed by 33% of the respondents.

Online Able to Provide High Quality

Some advocates argue that online learning can lead to better outcomes for students, lower costs for institutions, and more access to minorities. A new report concludes all are possible, if colleges and universities do it the right way.

Making Digital Learning Work, a study of digital-learning initiatives at three four-year institutions and three community colleges, found a generally higher retention rate for online students and improved outcomes for Pell-eligible and minority students. It also noted enrollment increases as a result of digital-learning initiatives.

At the same time, the report concluded that online courses do cost less to produce because higher student-to-teacher ratios and less need for classroom space offset the financial investments in course quality. It also suggested that some of the key practices in launching a digital-learning effort include a strategy to meet the needs of different students, support for remote accessibility, and treating faculty members as partners in the process.

“It is clearly important for colleges and universities to adopt a more entrepreneurial approach to digital learning, making innovation a part of their institutional culture and embracing evidence-driven decision-making,” the authors of the report wrote.

Limitations to Predictive Analytics

Colleges and universities are using predictive analytics, such as grades, test scores, and attendance, as a tool to help students succeed. Austin Peay State University, Nashville, TN, was a pioneer in predictive analytics, developing a system called Degree Compass to guide students to courses they should take to satisfy degree requirements.

After initial success, the university discovered limits to what the technology could provide.

“It is simply a tool that’s available for anyone to use,” said Loretta Griffy, math professor and associate provost for student success at Austin Peay, who currently oversees the Degree Compass program. “We have a decentralized faculty advising model, which means we have 385 academic advisors. They each have their own individual styles and how they interact with students and we have a variety of advising tools that they can use. This is just one of them.”

In 2013, Degree Compass was acquired by the software firm Desire2Learn, which stopped allowing students to see grade projections to avoid discouragement. The firm also found that institutions weren’t enamored with the student-directed degree-planning tool and that it was a challenge to integrate Degree Compass with a school’s course catalog and the student information system.

“Sometimes we really hit the mark and nail it early, and get it to the point where something is cultured in our organization by the time the market is ready for it,” said Kenneth Chapman, vice president of market research and strategy at D2L. “I wouldn’t call Degree Compass one of the applications that we saw as hitting the mark.”

Degree Compass is something of a Catch-22, according to Griffy. The algorithms the tool uses need a student’s prior grade history to accurately recommend courses and majors, but students can’t gain much from the information until they have attended classes for a semester or two. By that time, they may have already decided their academic path. Besides, paper degree-planning charts can be just as useful.

“But it’s not fancy,” Griffy said. “You print it and walk around with it. It’s very simple.”

Study Finds Benefits in Microlearning

Tools such as flash cards have been helping students learn for generations. Now, the idea of providing short bursts of information lasting no longer than 15 minutes—known as microlearning—is taking on a new focus in the digital age.

After short lessons, students at Northeastern University, Burlington, MA, use Twitter and Snapchat to create posts of hyperfocused content for others to consume. Research there also found that using social media for microlearning increased student engagement, created learning communities, and provided opportunities for information retention.

“We focus on microlearning where students sometime consume, but often create, content,” said Lindsey Sudbury, academic instructional technologist at Northeastern. “It’s usually created quickly after a lot of thought and integrating what they already know.”

The Northeastern work on microlearning found that breaking education into small pieces allows students to access content more easily and learn at their own pace. The study also reported that it helped reduce student burnout syndrome, which is a concern for medical students.

“With microlearning, you’re constantly getting this information over and over again, so it’s allowing for you to really synthesize information and connect those dots more frequently,” said Clair Waterbury, who works with Sudbury as an academic instructional technologist at Northeastern.

Small Student Loans May Help, Not Harm

Are student loans a burden or a boost? The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) attempted to find out in a recent study.

The study, summarized in a report on MarketWatch, focused on the financial-aid notification letters sent to students at a community college. One randomly assigned group received letters that listed their eligibility for grant and scholarship aid, along with an offer to borrow $3,500-$4,500 in federally subsidized student loans. The other group’s financial-aid letters offered “$0” in federal loans.

Not surprisingly, students in the first group “were 40% more likely to borrow than their peers who received an offer of zero,” said the MarketWatch report. However, it also turned out that these borrowers enrolled in more course credits the following term, earned a higher grade-point average in those courses, and transferred at a higher rate to four-year institutions.

In short, the NBER study concluded, having access to federal loan funds enabled and motivated these students to make faster progress in their higher education. Students who had to rely on other means couldn’t afford to take as many classes and were less likely to complete their studies.

“The big takeaway from this paper is that restricting students’ access to federal student loans, either through making the process of getting the loans more complicated or more opaque or completely opting out of the federal loan program, can harm students’ attainment and potentially make them worse off,” said researcher Lesley Turner, an economics professor at the University of Maryland.

Higher Ed Changing for Student Success

Colleges and universities often talk about student success as their core mission. A study from edtech provider Unit4 found nearly three quarters of institutions are making organizational changes to make student success happen.

The survey of 150 IT decision-makers found that 80% said they had invested in technology to support student success and 62% had recently overhauled their portals, self-service options, or apps to improve the student experience. One fifth of respondents said that more than half of their new technology was custom-built, while a little over 60% reported that less than half of their technology was custom-developed.

While strides are being made, use of artificial intelligence, chatbots, and mobile applications continues to lag behind other investments.

“The fact that today, over one in five of those we surveyed have not modernized their student mobile experience, and have no automation in their core systems to support early alerts for at-risk students is deeply concerning,” said Jami Morshed, global head of education at Unit4. “To truly close the student-college digital divide, organizations need to embrace digital transformation through integrated modern cloud applications that support a truly mobile strategy, delivering new services and value to students and faculty.”

11 Ways to Keep Low-Income Students in School

Low-income college students are far more likely to drop out than better-off students and lack of funds is usually the reason. A new report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation puts some of the blame on institutions for not providing sufficient information in clear terms about the total cost of attendance and how much financial aid students can expect.

Making College Affordable: Providing Low-Income Students with the Knowledge and Resources Needed to Pay for College lays out 11 recommended strategies for colleges and universities to help lower-income applicants better understand their options before they enroll and to assist them if they run into trouble later on.

No. 9 on the list calls on schools to “utilize low-cost textbooks,” noting that high course-materials expenses may “place a burden on students with unmet financial need.” The report points to open educational resources as a potential solution, although it acknowledges that “awareness of these alternative resources among faculty tends to be low.”

The report also endorses a five-pronged set of recommendations from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group for encouraging adoption of open materials on campus.

The first five strategies in the report advocate that institutions should furnish detailed, jargon-free information about the types of financial aid available, eligibility requirements for aid, total costs to attend for four years, and accurate estimates of living costs, and also urge students to meet with a financial adviser. Three strategies ask schools to prioritize need over merit in giving aid, commit to providing aid for all four years, and stop cutting institutional grants when students receive private scholarships.

The remaining two strategies recommend that schools set up programs to help students with financial emergencies and to find ways to integrate local social services with financial-aid programs.

Students Need Skills, Not Standardized Tests

A new survey by Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) International found that the American public wants schools to teach their children career skills and to limit standardized testing. A majority of Americans also oppose using public funds to send students to private schools.

According to the 2017 Poll of the Public’s AttitudeToward the Public Schools, 82% of respondents support job or career skill classes, even if it means spending less time on traditional academics. More than 85% said schools should offer certificate or licensing programs that help students land jobs after graduation, while 82% said technology and engineering classes should be part of the curriculum.

However, just 42% said standardized testing was important and 52% oppose school voucher programs. That figure rises to 61% when religious schools are mentioned.

“These and other results suggest that some of the most prominent ideas that dominate current policy debates—from supporting vouchers to emphasizing high-stakes tests—are out of step with parents’ main concerns,” said Joshua P. Starr, CEO of PDK International, which has conducted the survey since 1969. “They want their children prepared for life and career after they complete high school.”

Good Start for Tennessee Promise

While free-tuition programs have their critics, the Tennessee Promise appears to be working. Of more than 13,000 of the state’s eligible students who enrolled in the first Promise program in 2015, nearly 60% are still in college. Only 40% of their non-Promise peers remain in school.

After two years, 56% of the original class of Promise Students are still enrolled in community college and 14.5% have earned a degree or certificate. Over the same period, 30.5% of non-Promise students were still enrolled and just 5% had earned a degree or certificate.

“These numbers are the first evidence that Tennessee Promise is doing exactly what Gov. [Bill] Haslam and the General Assembly designed: getting more students into college, including students who might not otherwise be able to attend, and helping them succeed once they get there,” said Flora Tydings, chancellor, Tennessee Board of Regents.

To qualify, Tennessee high school seniors must file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, enroll in college the fall semester after their graduation, perform eight hours of community service, register for at least 12 credit hours per semester, and maintain at least a 2.0 grade-point average. The Tennessee Promise also helps mentor students through the college application and enrollment processes.

Low-Income Kids Face College-Entry Wall

High-schoolers from lower-income families are confronted with more barriers when it comes to getting into college than their better-off peers.

The Hechinger Report described several hurdles, including a recent College Board study that found grade-point averages (GPAs) at affluent suburban and private high schools had risen at the same time their students averaged lower scores on college admissions tests, strongly indicating grade inflation. GPAs at urban high schools, with a higher percentage of students in poverty, showed little change, though.

With more colleges and universities basing admissions decisions on GPAs instead of tests, grade inflation at wealthier schools puts low-income students at an immediate disadvantage in applying. “This is especially an issue for the big universities and colleges that can’t really dig into the context of a kid’s high school experience,” commented an official at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Urban high schools are also less likely to offer college-preparatory courses or have enough guidance counselors to help advise students on how to apply for college, according to The Hechinger Report.

Another recent study conducted by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and summarized by Education Dive, revealed low-income students make up only a small percentage of enrollees at selective colleges. The study showed qualified students often didn’t even apply to these colleges because they had no information about financial-aid packages or funds to visit campuses first, among other problems.

Tool Brings Gaming into the Classroom

“Gameful” instruction allows students to choose assignments they think are challenging and uses software to guide them through those choices. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently launched a tool to make that learning approach available in the classroom.

GradeCraft employs competitive leaderboards, badges, and links to unlock information to help students work their way through the coursework. The web application also allows instructors to create course shells in the learning management system (LMS) where students are encouraged to try new things, as well as receive analytics about their progress.

“Everyone starts at zero and then they build toward mastery of the course material,” Barry Fishman, a U-M professor who helped developed the tool, said in a university release. “We get questions about how rigorous a course is given how many students earn high grades, but we consistently hear instructors describe their students doing creative and high-quality work. When you design these environments properly, you can create an incredible learning experience for students.”

The tool, developed in 2012, was made available to all U-M faculty through its LMS earlier this year. Some parts of the gameful learning software are now being used in 58 courses, serving more than 10,000 U-M students. A site license has also been purchased by the University of Arizona.

“We believe gameful is a great way to reconnect students to learning and we’re excited to bring it to a larger audience,” Fishman said.

Checking Grades Predicts Student Success

How often students check their grades online is the best way to predict how well they will do in a class, according to a report from Blackboard. The educational technology firm found that students who accessed its gradebook function were the most successful in a class, while those who never accessed their grades were more likely to fail.

“This surprised me, given that other tools (like assessments) directly and tangibly influence a student’s grade,” John Whitmer, director of analytics and research at Blackboard, wrote in a blog post about the study. “This is an independent behavioral measure and yet is a very strong predictor.”

The data came from spring 2016 courses that were filtered by size of class, average course time, and use of the online gradebook. The filtered results provided information on more than 600,000 students.

The research found that students spent most of their time on the learning management system to look at content. Surprisingly, those who spent more than the average amount of time on course content earned lower grades.

“Students who have mastered course materials can quickly answer questions; those who ponder over questions are more likely to be students who are struggling with the material,” Whitmer wrote. “The relationship is stronger in assessment than assignments because assessments measure all time spent in the assessment, whereas assignments don’t measure the offline time spent creating the material. Regardless, this trend of average time spent as the most frequent behavior of successful students is consistent across both tools, and is a markedly different relationship than is found in other tools.”

Fewer Americans Believe College Is Necessary

The number of Americans who think a college education is mandatory is on the decline. According to a survey from the nonpartisan organization Public Agenda, just 42% of respondents said they needed college for workforce success, a 13% drop since 2009.

Conversely, 57% said there were many ways to succeed without college, an increase of 14% over the last seven years. The study also reported that 46% of respondents said college was a questionable investment because of high loans and limited job opportunities.

Around two-thirds said many people are qualified for college but don’t have the opportunity. In addition, 59% said colleges are more concerned with the bottom line and just 34% said they believed schools cared most about education and students.