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Blog:  Confessions of a Community College Dean   Last week my mom stumped me when she asked “so, what’s new?”   Basically, nothing, outside of work.   It’s an aspect of quarantine I hadn’t really thought about until it happened.   --   Fall planning is quite a challenge.  One underappreciated aspect of it is that the fall course schedule has been up for a while, and students have already started registering for classes.  It’s not a blank slate.  Any major changes would involve going into the system and making them manually, bit by bit.   In some ways, the “total” scenarios are the easiest.  If we’re totally back to normal, that’s easy.  If we’re totally online, that’s not easy, but it’s clear.  If we’re back, but with strict limits on how many students in a room at once, that’s much more complicated.   For historical reasons, most of the classes here meet once a week for three hours.  Studen...

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — When California schools closed on March 13 in response to the coronavirus, college counselor Brad Ward didn’t know it would be the last day she’d see many of her students at Terra Linda High School. A few weeks later, school was canceled for the rest of the year, leaving her scrambling to stay connected with her seniors who are at a critical stage in determining their post-graduation plans. This story also appeared in Mind/Shift These days, she spends her time doing counseling sessions via Zoom and Facebook, editing juniors’ essays in Google Docs and trying to contact all 320 members of the class of 2020. She and her colleagues hope to reach every senior by email, phone or social media. Some have not signed in for a single remote class, and many have not picked up the laptops and hotspots offered by Terra Linda. Ward has traded a three-hour round-trip commute from Menlo Park to San Rafael for a virtual counseling office set up in her living room, which s...

Blog:  Learning Innovation Developing a Targeted Curriculum plan is the 7th of 15 scenarios we are considering for the fall . This option enables campus social distancing through a strategic design of face-to-face and online course offerings and schedules.  A Targeted Curriculum scenario is when certain courses are designated as high priority, are provided with institutional resources, and may be given precedence for being taught on campus. For example, courses with high demand but capped enrollments, such as seminars, might be taught on campus, as might courses that are essential to allow students to fulfill graduation requirements. Similarly, experiential courses, performance-based courses, and labs might be given priority for on campus meetings, as might courses that require intense faculty-student feedback and discussion, such as writing courses and first-year seminars. What “priority” means will vary from school to school. Some schools may give courses desig...

Their enrollment decisions and ability to pay have been upended. Their preference for being on campus, however, remains intact. from The Chronicle of Higher Education https://ift.tt/2YkzgQD

About half of colleges’ Cares Act aid is meant to go directly to students. Eastern Michigan University may be violating the spirit of the law. from The Chronicle of Higher Education https://ift.tt/3aM12Ik

At his Detroit high school, Jamarria Hall loved the classes where students could share textbooks, passing six torn and outdated hardcovers among 35 students to take turns reading. This story also appeared in American Public Media Hall loved those, he said, because in most classes at Osborn High School he had no books. Instead, students copied down whatever the teacher wrote on the board. Or maybe they had a printout from the school’s copy machine. “How can you learn in that type of environment?” asked Hall, who’s trying to finish his freshman credits at Tallahassee (Fla.) Community College, three years after graduating from Osborn. “It’s setting you up to fail.” A federal appellate court last week agreed and in a historic ruling determined that the students’ constitutional rights were violated by that level of deprivation. In a 2-1 decision last week in the case, Gary B. v. Snyder, judges from the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that students have a right to “a b...

Thursday afternoon found me kneeling in front of my 2-year-old’s bedroom door, crying. She was on the other side, also crying. Nap was not happening…again. And not only was I failing abysmally to convince an eminently unreasonable child to nap, I was missing a work call (actually for this article). So there I was: brought to my knees, literally, by a toddler. And I had to wonder, was there really anything a teacher could tell me about child behavior that might make this easier? Because let’s be real, the teacher look — you know that look — isn’t going to work with tears in my eyes. In talking to three long-time teachers, though, I discovered that most of their tips and tricks for managing child behavior flow from deeply held philosophies about how to care for themselves and relate to other people. And while each educator – a preschool teacher, a middle school teacher and a high school teacher – had their own style, all three said some version of this: “Breathe. The kid’s crisis is...

Instead of trying to capture the in-person experience, instructors might consider playing to the internet’s strengths. from The Chronicle of Higher Education https://ift.tt/3bSfAHB

An estimated 28 million Americans have canceled their education plans due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to an ongoing Strada Education Network survey. And nearly one in five Americans have changed their education plans. "We expect this is a wide range of formal and informal education activities," Dave Clayton, senior vice president for consumer insights at Strada, said in an email. "As we prepare for economic downturn, everyone's wondering about the implications for education -- we don’t fully know the impact yet, but we're tracking this closely. What we do know so far, based on this survey and our historic surveys, is that Americans want to see direct career benefits from their education." The longitudinal survey has wrapped up its fifth week and has garnered more than 5,000 responses. Each week Strada, an education and employment research nonprofit, asks respondents about their job security, income and general feelings of anxiety about the v...

As part of its ongoing exploration into allowing college athletes to profit from their personal celebrity, the Board of Governors for the National Collegiate Athletic Association on Tuesday approved recommendations to allow athletes to be paid for third-party endorsements by the start of the 2021-22 academic year. The NCAA leadership and the State and Federal Legislation Working Group, which was created to help determine the association's response to legislation allowing athletes to receive payment for the use of their name, image and likeness, or NIL, released a report earlier this month to guide the three NCAA divisions' rule making on NIL benefits. The guidelines outlined in the report say any pay related solely to athletic performance will not be permissible, but compensation for other activity such as social media promotions or endorsements of a product or service will be allowed . Athletes may also operate their own businesses using their NIL. Athletes participating...

In the last few days, a number of colleges have announced they will be reopening in the fall . Or, maybe, they "plan" to reopen. "Intend" to reopen. The list now includes American University , Baylor University and Haverford College , as well as many others. The numerous announcements have often included caveats, such as "if it is deemed safe" or "depending on guidance from state and federal authorities." Some in higher ed have questioned the value of these statements (doesn't every institution "hope" to reopen in the fall?) as well as how closely a college's intentions will hew to reality. Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, called the statements "posturing." What a college announces today really has little relation to what its semester will look like in the fall, he said. "I don't make much of anything out of these statements," Kelchen said. "The coll...

About $4.7 billion, or three-fourths of the $6.3 billion in emergency student grant funds Congress authorized in the CARES Act, has been sent to more than 2,000 colleges and universities, according to the Education Department. In addition, 3,482 institutions, or about two-thirds of the 5,136 eligible to get the grants to pass on to their students, have now applied, up from a half a week ago, the department told Inside Higher Ed . But while that was seen as a positive even by critics, colleges and the group representing campus financial aid administrators say the department is interpreting the language in the congressional stimulus package so narrowly that many students are being excluded from getting help. While the controversy over U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s decision to exclude college students brought illegally to the U.S. as minors has been well publicized, critics say guidelines released by the department also exclude other students for having ...