Our College Makes Major Advance in Diversity

President Teresa Dreyfuss
CREDIT: Rio Hondo College

Tonight the Rio Hondo College Board of Trustees named Teresa Dreyfuss as President/Superintendent, and in doing so, are to be congratulated for making progress in increasing the diversity in academic leadership.

A study released by the American Council on Education (ACE) details the startling lack of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in leadership positions in academia; only 1.5% are college and university presidents, 2% are chief academic officers, and 3% are deans.  All the while Asian Pacific Islanders make up the largest racial minority group in the professoriate.

The brief, "Raising Voices, Lifting Leaders: Empowering Asian Pacific Islander American Leadership in Higher Education," identifies several obstacles to advancement:

• Racial bias: Like other minority candidates, Asian Pacific Islander Americans struggle against the prototype of a college president that some hiring committees hold. 
• Stereotypes: Their leadership qualities may be viewed as not matching Western qualities that are typically valued, such as charisma, assertiveness and direct communication styles.
• The forgotten minority: Even though Asian Pacific Islander Americans are underrepresented in senior leadership, they are rarely recruited in efforts to diversify candidate pools.
• "The Model Minority": The high representation and high success rate of Asian Pacific Islander Americans in American higher education leave many oblivious to their stark lack of representation in the field's leadership.
• Lack of mentoring: While participants largely acknowledged the value of having a mentor, they concurred with the findings of a 2009 ACE study that indicated a lack of mentoring among Asian Pacific Islander American chief academic officers.

Congratulations President Dreyfuss!

Jim Chandler

Turning On Turnitin from Inside Higher Ed

Writing professors question plagiarism detection software | Inside Higher Ed

Software to detect student plagiarism is faced with renewed criticism from the faculty members who may confront more plagiarism than do most of their colleagues – college writing professors.
Members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication passed a resolution at their annual convention last month to denounce plagiarism detection services, including products like Turnitin.
According to the resolution, "plagiarism detection services can compromise academic integrity by potentially undermining students' agency as writers, treating all students as always already plagiarists, creating a hostile learning environment, shifting the responsibility of identifying and interpreting source misuse from teachers to technology, and compelling students to agree to licensing agreements that threaten their privacy and rights to their own intellectual property."
The resolution formalized a long-simmering faculty resistance to the services, which come in the form of software. While many faculty members use the software enthusiastically, some -- especially in composition -- argue that the software oversimplifies a complex issue, shifts responsibility from people to technology and breeds mistrust between students and teachers.

Continue Reading...

The New University of California Will Have No Faculty

California Assemblyman Scott Will of Santa Clarita introduced AB 1306, a bill that would create the New University of California.  What's new about this institution?  No faculty.

That's right, no professors to teach the students.  The bill states 

The New University of California shall provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.

Students will just gain the knowledge and skills on their own and then pay the New University to take the final exam and receive academic credit. 

Students - just think.  No homework, no papers, no labs, no group projects, no tests except for the final, no all-nighters, no falling asleep in class, no professors droning on, no problems finding open seats in classes,…

CREDIT: The University of California Los Angeles

Who writes and proctors the exams if there're no professors?  The New University will buy them from "qualified entities" who will also give the exams.

Who would drive over a bridge designed and built by civil engineers alumni of the New University? If this idea is so wonderful, why restrict it to associate and baccalaureate degrees?  Who wouldn't see a physician who earned their M.D. from a medical school at the New University? 

Assemblyman Wilk to his credit does realize that even if there's no faculty, the New University does require eleven trustees and a chancellor.  This chancellor will be "authorized to employ and fix the salaries of, employees to assist him or her in carrying out the functions of the university."  How many administrators does it take to run a university that has no campus, no faculty, and no buildings?  Probably more than we can imagine.

The problem of access to higher education has a simpler solution that the ones proposed by Wilk and Darrell Steinberg.*  Invest in the existing systems: the Universities of California, the California State Universities, and the California Community Colleges.

* Steinberg introduced AB 520 that will require the state's colleges and universities to accept credits earned in Massive Open Online Courses. 

MOOAs: Another Massive Idea

Massive Online Open Administrations!  From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Study after study has shown that the people at the top—the deans and vice-presidents and other Grand Poobahs of bureaucratic reproduction—have grown far faster than faculty in the past couple of decades. And their salaries are far higher, over all, than those of professors. As a study from the conservative Goldwater Institute pointed out:

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research, or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student grew by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.

So if we could find a way to put administration online, to create Massive Online Open Administrations or MOOAs, we could really cut some fat and reap some serious rewards.

And this:

It’s possible that administrators won’t immediately see how revolutionary MOOAs would be, but faculty and students must help them understand that MOOAs would be good for all of us. Really. The first colleges to start MOOAs can sell their superior administrators to institutions with more B Team administrators. B-Team-admin sorts will be let go. All the colleges can reap the benefit of cut administrative salaries and share the costs of MOOAs, thereby allowing them to cut tuition. So it is that MOOAs will make higher ed more democratic and accessible to all.

Administrators of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your salaries.

The link. 

MOOCs: A Massively Bad Idea

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

According to a recent article in The Chronicle, a state senator in California has sponsored a bill that would establish “a statewide platform through which students who have trouble getting into certain low-level, high-demand classes could take approved online courses offered by providers outside the state’s higher-education system.”

In other words, students at California’s public colleges who are unable to enroll in regular classes due to overcrowding will instead be steered into MOOCs, or massive open online courses.

That strikes me as a massively bad idea.

For the rest of the piece, follow this link.

An Economist On Shared Governance

Skip Seventeen (17) minutes into this video, and find out why the Faculty and the Classified staff at R.. Hon... (I do not want to get into trouble again) fight to have a say in the running of the school. Listen to the argument being made and will quickly discover the students and the surrounding community will win by allowing faculty and staff to participate in governance of the college.

SHIFT CHANGE - preview from Mark Dworkin on Vimeo.

Are We Drawn To The Grotesque?

I have been listening to fellow faculty across the campus. During the time of Dr. TMJ people would comment about this blog but today nobody remembers this blog. During the ugly days looking at the Stats for this blog we could see a larger number of people coming here. Today not so much.

Is it that people are attracted to the Grotesque? I see it on the freeway... People slow down to look at an accident on the other side of the freeway. I think this is called Rubber necking.

Also this blog has been dormant. There are not many posts, so NO reason to come here. 
I have been trying to get other faculty across campus to post on this blog. However, the response I get is "I could not post on your blog".

Let me clear!!! This Blog is NOT my Blog!
This Blog belongs to NOBODY! 

It is just a place to come to and share our ideas both good and bad.
If you are a faculty and wish to blog. All you need is a NON Rio email account associated with a Google account and I will give you permission to post on this blog.

This Blog needs your observations and ideas. 

Induction, Deduction and Incentives

I have been listening and reading about how strange data sets are being collected and used by various companies to make an educated guess at concepts that at first glance do not seem measurable. For example a very famous company uses the length of their lunch lines to figure out how much interaction is taking place. What?
Math was not my strongest subject and as I tried  to read up on this subject I realized that I have forgotten most of what I forced myself to learn in school. Despite my limitations I noticed the following oversimplified process.

1. They collect tons of data without knowing if it will come in handy or not
2. They go through the data with very very complicated math searching for patterns.
3. They observe to confirm whether reality matches what their formula spat out.

Now to the world around me and some Deductive reasoning by me trying to pass for an inductive one!.
I have noticed the following phenomena in Education.  The politicians or some rich person start with a hypothesis followed by the so called educational experts trying to find the data to prove their patrons point of view correct. I forget but I think this is Deductive Reasoning where the Hypothesis comes first followed by the proof.  Another name for this is 'top down logic'.
Here is the problem with deductive reasoning in Education. The experts in search of a patron will twist the data to prove the Politician and/or the wealthy donors' hypothesis. The educational experts will go out and create various data sets for this task.
The way corporations are doing it is Inductive where they collect the Data followed by coming up by the Hypothesis.  There is no Hypothesis nor a "Pet Theory"  backed by resources creating an incentive to make up spurious data.  The Data is there in plain site. It can be as simple as the lunch line, or counting how many students walked up the hill to get to class. All that is needed is collection of it for insertion into powerful computers with a fancy formula to crunch it.

A View From The Reference Desk

As a librarian I get to see the learning process from another vantage point – what happens outside of class when a student works on completing an assignment?  I have found that some students still need face-to-face instruction from librarians.  One day this week I spent 45 minutes going over the mechanics and basics of creating a citation with a student who was turning in her first essay for an English class.  Clearly the student was intimidated by the whole idea of doing a citation.  She was hoping I would find the citation builder from the Web that she had used the first time.  I explained that it would be better if she learned how to construct the citation from the ground up and especially, if she plans to continue in college (emphatic yes) she would have to construct many more citations.  So, I went over constructing a citation step-by-step and she worked the citation through start to finish.  There was some resistance on her part, claiming she wasn’t up to the task.  When she finished the citation she said something like “Oh, it’s not as hard or as bad as I thought it would be, it’s actually kind of easy.”  Her experience is not an isolated incident.  Later, my colleague at the reference desk said, “It’s a good thing there were two of us at the Reference Desk, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to give the student that much of your time.”  All this makes me wonder if there is a way instructors can squeeze in 20 minutes or 30 minutes for a librarian to give students a presentation about one thing library-related that they are struggling with?  We currently have samples of citations and instructions about how to construct a citation on the library website.  But somehow when you do your first citation from something you have in hand (article, printout, URL) it is a better learning experience to construct your own citation for your item.  Or we could post a link on the library web page to some free citation generators?  I cannot say that I am fan of or an advocate for this sort of thing.  Disclaimer:  Please remember my posting reflects only my opinion and not the opinions of anyone else in or outside the library.

Not Everyone is an Insider

This post is about me observing me interacting with a secure website for a few big organizations and realizing some of the mistakes I made and some mistakes I could not prevent when Access Rio was being built.  In order to protect my online privacy I will not share the name of the organizations that I am talking about.  This happened to me with two organizations in two different industries and the good website is yet in another industry.
I had to get an appointment with a person in one of these organizations. However, I could not accomplish the task. I went to the physical location where the appointment would take place and was told to go onto the website. I explained that I could not figure out their log in procedures. They made me wait till someone came and walked me through the process.
Being an old man, I forgot the process as soon as I got home. The next day I tried to log in and I could not. I called the 1800 number and got some lady somewhere in the Midwest to send me my password via old fashioned mail.
Three days later with my username and password in hand I logged in and realized that I could not figure out the set up of the site. I started doing what I always do clicking at random on various links to figure out the site.
As I was doing this I quickly realized that the site was set up more for the convenience of the people who work there rather for their clients.  This criticism is not completely fair since they are trying to deal with rules set up by another bureaucracy and want to protect my information.
So what is my complaint?

• I have used secure websites for other organizations that deal with my private information. However, once inside their website is very intuitive to navigate.  

• Better sites are intuitive to navigate because they are well organized
• Better sites lack clutter (I do not suffer from having too many choices).
• If a choice is offered, it is very clear and I do not have to guess which option to choose within the option.

•  The attitude of the people working at the physical location was upsetting too.
•  I got the feeling that I am not smart enough because I cannot figure out their stupid website.

So what did I miss when we were building Access Rio?

• I assumed that since the Millennial generation are internet natives they will figure it out.  Well I am online all of the times and I could figure out the thinking of these two websites.

What am I guilty of partialy when building Access Rio?

• Some of the clutter on the Access Rio page is due to me!

I am guilty of pushing for this!

To be fair to myself I fought to keep some of the other clutter out of the page with some (not complete) success.

Who else is guilty of  which sin I will not say but I do believe we need to keep our physical presence and remind both faculty and staff that not everyone is an insider. Some of our students are just passing through and do not want to learn our Byzantine ways!
 If some new Byzantine rule such as deadlines or a new procedure is forced upon us by some other bureaucracy (such as the State or the Dept of Education) we should have that displayed in bold letters somewhere on the Access Rio website.  Actually we do have a place for that but we should consider moving the announcement section to the top and the  middle of the first page and make it bigger.

We should move this to make it more visible!!

History of Website and Diminished Marginal Utility

There is a new website committee to improve the college website (sorry I am not allowed to link to this website).  This committee was killed off by a clique of Administrators who did not care for the opinion of  faculty and staff.   During the implementation of Access Rio in order to get the attention of students that they have an email account this group of Administrator insisted in using small text on the website. Yours truly watching students noticed they tend to click on big colorful buttons and ignore links in small text. I suggested and was ignored to put a big bright button on the website. This idea was ignored since it came from a faculty member.  Well this faculty member noticing another pattern of that only the squeaky wheel gets greased got squeaky and success! Burned out fighting this battle, I let the people in charge do whatever they want.
Fast forward to today...
Some members of the Accreditation searching and failing to find documents brought this issue to the forefront again. This time I stayed out of the fight but I was curious enough to visit the college website after many years and discovered that my suggestion had spread like fungus across the website.
Dear reconstituted website committee while my idea works on a site full of text, it is less effective as more and more is added.  In Economics we call this Diminished Marginal Utility (each additional graphic button is less effective then the previous).

Flex Day Respect is a Two Way Street

Respect is a two way street

I am not a positive person and I am always looking for flaws to improve. However, I was impressed with the tone of the flex day this year. There seemed to be a theme of working together. Every speakers' message was how we faculty, staff, and administrators can work together.
The Academic Senate Leadership was surprised by a unilateral change by administration but kept their displeasure with this unilateral decision under wrap. Did you notice the unilateral change which violates AB1725?
In the past due to disrespect of the previous administration toward faculty and staff,  the Academic Senate would be in revolution mode and the whole proceeding would have broken down. However, this year with this new team of Administration, the Academic Senate leadership was upset but decided to keep it quiet till they investigate the issue further.
I would like to congratulate President Dreyfus for surprising this old grouch!
Please NOTE that I am speaking as an individual faculty and not as a representative of the Academic Senate

Audio Vs. Print

I have been listening to audio books from Audible on my iPod. Mostly I listen to novels by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and other quirky writers. Also I listen to books on historical figures. However recently I tried to listen  Antifragile Things that gain from disorder by my favorite author Nassim Taleb.   I realized that unlike fictional novels, I can not follow nonfiction books in an audio format. 
Although it was fun to listen to his arguments, it was hard to follow it. I found myself constantly going back and reviewing what was said.
This made me understand why some students can remember and rewrite my crazy stories on the essay portion of their exams, but can not completely answer the question.  I believe they are relying on my lecture and are not reading the textbook.
As they listen to my lectures they remember the stories I tell to make the lecture more interesting but miss the more technical aspect??
Talking of stories I am working on using a story from the book Rant by Chuck Palanhiuk, to illustrate how resources can be misallocated. In this story Rant finds gold coins and gives them to his classmates. As the number of children with gold coins (with purchasing power) increases, the store owners expand the number of aisles dedicated to toys reducing the number of aisles for other  necessities. Also prices start going up which is another econ concept. Can you name it?

Moody's On Higher Education

Here is a story on falling enrollment at four year schools, and how they are dealing with this declining enrollment.
Here are two that caught my attention:

1. International students 
2. Cost efficiency in the Administrative area