Story Telling

Here is a video that shows how I teach economics. I use stories and the drawback of this method is that sometimes the students tell me the stories in the portion of the exam where they have to write an essay. In this video the speaker is a science teacher.

Freshmen Mindset

The following is from our very talented librarian Ms. Judy Sevilla-Marzona.

 

In 1998, two professors from Beloit College in Maine created the “Mindset List” describing the world view of incoming college freshmen. As a reminder to college faculty to keep their examples and references current, it proved immensely popular both in the US and around the world and has been updated every year since. Click on this link to read this year’s Mindset List for the Class of 2017, most of whom were born in 1995.

Some highlights:

·    Dean Martin, Mickey Mantle, and Jerry Garcia have always been dead.

·    They are the sharing generation, having shown tendencies to share everything, including possessions, no matter how personal.

·    Having a chat has seldom involved talking.

·    Rites of passage have more to do with having their own cellphone and Skype accounts than with getting a driver’s license and car.

·    Threatening to shut down the government during federal budget negotiations has always been an anticipated tactic.

·    Jurassic Park has always had rides and snack bars, not free-range triceratops and velociraptors.

·    Courts have always been ordering computer network wiretaps.

Judy Sevilla-Marzona

Librarian/Professor

Rio Hondo College

Link and highlights courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

School Starts Again

Reflecting on my summer vacation, I found it boring. For me living is interacting with other people and I realized that I can not wait till school starts again. I realized this fact as I woke up at 4 AM and could not go back to sleep. As I tried to sleep again, my mind was racing with "how will I organize my syllabus?", ....."what if the students do not respond to this method of presentation?" etc etc (with all of the etc relating to presenting my dismal discipline to students.
That was another realization that the topic or the subject is just an end that I use to go through the process of sharing my philosophy that 'resources are limited and choices have to be made always resulting in giving up an alternative choice better known in economic parlance as opportunity cost!'
Although I complain about the boredom of summers, I did learn how to slow down and worked on patience.
So how do you (reader) feel about coming back?
Are you excited, or not?
Please take a moment and participate in our informal poll.

Community College Classes in 1968-9

I drank beer (it has to be Bud) with my 78 or 79 years old Marine neighbor. The conversation turned to what I do an where I teach. To my surprise he was familiar with the California Community College system. After returning from Vietnam in 1968 he attended OCC.
He told me about how he was offended by students who were there not for learning and disrupted the learning process, and how he once stood up and told the class to "shut their traps" because "I am here to learn and get a job."
I quickly offered him a job to attend my class and pull the same stunt. We both laughed and took another sip of our Budweiser. However, today I realized that I am lucky to teach at Rio Hondo college where the students are some of the best behaved in my short teaching experience as a community college instructor.  I am blessed to be working with some of the finest students in California.
If you were a student at Rio Hondo in the past please share your favorite memories with us.

Hypothesis Fox News and Self Experimentation

This last week I have been exposed to Fox News as I spend time with some senior citizens to learn patience and earn some good karma. A few days ago I overheard a conversation that went as follow:

A "this is not accurate" 

B "you would say that, you voted for that radical (referring to Obama)."

There was some good nature back and forth before the person who agreed with Fox offered to switch the channel to something else. The so called 'Radical' declined the offer and just asked to turn 'the volume down.
He did not want to watch another channel because "they... my Nerves with all the flashing jigamigs."
Later I went to my mothers house and watched TV with the sound off.  I watched Fox, MSNBC, CNN for two hours and realized this gentleman was right.
The images and the camera work on Fox is very smooth and calming, where as CNN and MSNBC kept having breaking news and the images changed at a faster pace.
Could this be the reason why senior citizens prefer Fox?
With the sound off I found Fox calming too and an enjoyable experience, and fell into a deep sleep.
Second question: Am I a senior citizen?

Is it Hope and Change or Fear of Change?

Yesterday, I discovered my fear of loneliness in a 79 years old man. As I sat with a 79 years old Marine that left the Marine Corp after serving our country in Vietnam in 1968 who dislikes all Muslims and evangelist "that push their crap down the throat of others." (his words). I discovered he tolerated my background because he was lonely and wanted someone to listen. We have made plans to cook up bacon (Hallal bacon) and eggs once a week at his place.
After leaving the Marine Corp in 1968 he became a successful entrepreneur and he can satisfy his every physical need but he gave me the impression that he was not happy. The theme running through his complaints was loneliness and change.
He talked about how things change but I could sense disdain for the word change.  I love change but I started to question my love of change. As I listened to him with Fox News running in the background in my head I was listening to an internal dialogue. It  went something like this "Is change worth it? Look at how much pain it causes?.. Is it hope and change or fear of loss and change? The fear of losing a known way of life!"
Any way I have to go and buy some bacon. May Allah forgive me.

Adjuncts Take Heart

Our colleagues who piece together an income by teaching part-time at various campuses should take heart.  It's actually possible to earn $200,000 for teaching a single course.  What's even better is that it you only have to teach one day a week for about three hours.  Plus you can get graduate assistants to do course research, administration, and grading.

For the details, see the Gawker article.

A Government Website

It is summertime and I am spending my time listening to various podcasts. Here is one that caught my attention. Click to Listen
It is a BBC show on Design and to my surprise the winner of the design contest was a website. The more surprising fact was that the website was a government website.
The designers looked at how the users use the website. Most people going to the website do not start from the Homepage! Most users start from an outside search engine.
The other observation made by the designers was something that I wrote about on this blog before! Most people are not insiders and do not care about the set up of the organization. They come to the website for a specific task.
Our school is updating the school website. I hope they will think of those search engines out there and make items easy to find by various website. This is something that is not visible but something that is running in the background of the page for various search engine robots to find.
Oh in case you are wondering which website won the design contest. It was the following Government site which is not visually appealing for this blogger.

https://www.gov.uk/

MOOA Massive Open Online Administration?

Here is an interesting observation by Benjamin Ginsburg. During my time as Academic Senate President, I attended many meetings where they were just copying what other schools had done to pass Accreditation. At the time some faculty wanted to reinvent the wheel, whereas I let my inner Economist take over and sided with the Administration in wanting to get it done.
Reading this essay the following section jumped out at me: 

Ginsberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would have saved more than a half billion dollars.   See more 

insberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would have saved more than a half billion dollars.  "One way to look at it," he said, "Is that through their tuitions students paid about $500 million for strategic planning that might have been used for curricular development or other educational purposes."  The MOOA plan, he declared, would end such wasteful duplication. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.lmqg9EcP.dpuf

Ginsberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would have saved more than a half billion dollars.  "One way to look at it," he said, "Is that through their tuitions students paid about $500 million for strategic planning that might have been used for curricular development or other educational purposes."  The MOOA plan, he declared, would end such wasteful duplication. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.lmqg9EcP.dpuf

Ginsberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would have saved more than a half billion dollars.  "One way to look at it," he said, "Is that through their tuitions students paid about $500 million for strategic planning that might have been used for curricular development or other educational purposes."  The MOOA plan, he declared, would end such wasteful duplication. - See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa.html#sthash.lmqg9EcP.dpuf

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.