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

We Need Your Help

This election is crucial for there are two propositions that will determine whether the State of California will continue to fund public education or not.
One proposition  (Proposition 30) will effect education funding in the short to medium term and the other (Proposition 32) is a cynical ploy to destroy organizations that advocate for public education. 
What is Proposition 30?
Prop 30 is a small sales tax increase (0.25% or 1/4 of a penny on purchases) plus a small increase in the income tax on those who earn more than $250,000. The money collected goes to K-12 and colleges and universities. If Prop 30 doesn't pass, Rio Hondo College will cut many more classes than it has already done. Rio students will find it much more difficult to transfer to Cal State and UC, plus the tuition at those schools will increase dramatically.
What is Proposition 32?
Prop 32 is a cynical attempt to prevent people from exercising their First Amendment right to freely assemble. Today workers can contribute to their unions PACs by having voluntary deductions from their paychecks; under current law people who don't wish to contribute can simply opt out. Prop 32 will turn this process around. What makes this a cynical power grab is that corporations, whose PACS are funded through corporate funds are exempt. It might be fair if corporations had to get a vote of their shareholders, but this isn't part of the proposition, since it was written by those corporations.
Also wealthy individuals with a personal philosophy are free to spend as much as they like.(see the picture below from No On Proposition 32 website)

Who is funding Proposition 32!

 If you are willing to help pass Prop 30 and defeat Prop. 32 please consider giving a little bit of your time to call and inform your fellow educators and the voters of California. Feel free to contact the author of this post for further information. 

Blackboard Application Misleads Students

Blackboard charges schools to run their system and the school provides this service free of charge to students. However, blackboard is trying to tap another revenue stream.
The new Revenue stream is the mobile student who is trying to complete an online course on their mobile devices. Our students are going mobile, and they want everything on their smart phones or iPods.  Many of them have downloaded the Blackboard App which is free to download. This Application is very limited in its capability and is not a sound way to learn.
In the opinion of this author this business practice by blackboard is unethical. First the application can be downloaded for free. After one logs into the system all of the courses are visible to the students. .

 However once a course is selected the application requests payment. For some students this gives the impression that the school is charging them for the material.  If any student is reading this post, please understand the school has already paid Blackboard for the use of their system, and you can access the system on an old fashion PC or a laptop for free.

They try to sell their subscription by promoting various features such as Roam Free which students on iPads and iPods operating on a Wifi network do NOT need.
It is the opinion of this author that we need to look into an alternative Course Management System. At the minimum we need to explain to our students that the school does not receive any of the fees being collected, and possibly many of the features such as quizzes and test may not function in this application.

After taking the above screen shots, I have deleted this application from my mobile device and am looking for alternatives to Blackboard.

Do We Still Have a Family at Rio

Six years ago when I got to Rio Hondo, I learned an important lesson. The lesson was that we are a family. We did not accomplish tasks in the most efficient way but everyone went above and beyond what was expected of them. They did this because they cared about the success of our students.  I saw many faculty and classified staff volunteering without pay to help our students without compensation. We were happy fools.
More recently, I have noticed that participation by faculty and staff is declining,  whereas I noticed that in the past we would do certain tasks out of the belief that we need to help students.  Now most faculty just teach their classes and hit the road. The level of commitment and love for Rio Hondo has diminished.

What happened? A President who is slowly turning our love for Rio into a commodity that is bought and sold. I am sorry this does not work.   Watch the video.

This Sounds Like SLO in Education

Every morning I listen to various boring podcast as I drink my coffee and smoke my cancer sticks. This morning I was listening to Peter Days World of Business and found two interesting episode. Actually I did not realize they were interesting till I heard the second interview with the Chief Executive of Oxfam Barbara Stocking.
Her response to Business Professors imposing their need for data on non-profit was excellent.  (The following is my attempt to type as I listen) "You use Business measures when trying to measure business like things.... example food cooperative sales figures..."
After an interruption by Peter Day she continues "But when talking of longer term economic development it is not just those measurable things. example resilience.. how do you measure resilience? ask people what is your perception of this project?"
This point did not sink in till I heard the following comment:

"Poverty is the whole of society. it is everything that happens and separating your (nonprofit) part out of that is complicated."
This is similar to education. separating out how much an individual class adds to the educational level of a student is difficult. 
The point that caught my attention and made me drink another cup of coffee and start blogging was a question by Peter Day "but if you get too bureaucratic you will disillusion people on the ground doing the grunt work."
Her response was excellent and made me wish that our Administrators would have the same understanding "that is why we have to be careful what we are going to measure. If you ask them to fill out forms that have nothing to do with our mission then rubbish comes out of the system."
And yes we are creating lots of Rubbish, Garbage or Basura better known as SLO data.

My Favorite Billionaire

I was watching Bill Moyer's Journal and he had my favorite billionaire George Soros. The reason he is my favorite is because he is contrarian and he has managed to make money at being a contrarian. I found a video from few years ago when he was warning everyone about the housing bubble.



Here is the interview with Moyer. Some colleagues have asked me about my economics (mixing it up with my politics). Well my economics is along the lines of George. I believe in the invisible hand but I don't trust it to make the correct decisions 100% of the time. Watch the video he is much better at verbalizing it than I

Comedy Of Moral Hazard

Information, Information and More Information...

I found the Academic Senate conference very useful. One of the useful tools that I learned about and I can not stop playing with is the Data Mart. This site is operated by the State Chancellor's office, and has all the information that are hard to find on campus.

What kind of information?

Student Demographics, FTES, FTES by Distance Education, Retention, Success rates,Student Services Programs, and Staffing Reports.

Another report to look for on this site is the ARCC (Accountability Reporting for Community Colleges). I found these reports interesting because they have placed colleges in groups of cohorts based on Demography of students. For example I have heard many of our staff compare Rio Hondo to Mt. Sac. However, Rio Hondo and Mt. Sac. are not in the same group of Cohorts. Here is Rio Hondo's cohort group:
Alameda; Bakersfield; Cerritos; Chabot; Chaffey; Compton; Contra Costa; Desert; East L.A.; Fresno City; Gavilan; Hartnell; Imperial Valley; L.A. City; L.A. Harbor; L.A. Mission; L.A. Trade- Tech; L.A. Valley; Long Beach City; Merced; Oxnard; Porterville; Reedley; Rio Hondo; Riverside; San Bernardino; San Joaquin Delta; Santa Ana; Sequoias; Southwest L.A.; Southwestern; West Hills; West L.A.; and Yuba.

I will post more on this issue later.

Finally, if you want to learn about our school's budget you can find it here. If you want other schools' budgets click here. Talking of money and budgets the budget person from CCA who was explaining how to read these budgets commented that Rio Hondo and Mendicino have the most honest budget in the State. Now this guy was a CTA union analyst invited to teach us how to read these forms and sometimes correctly sees a conspiracy behind every budget. The next time you see Teresa give her a hug for being one of the best budget persons in the State of California.

B.I.G. Writing the B.P.A.

I attended the first B.I.G. (Banner Implementation Group) meeting on Monday. I replaced Jim N. on this committee. B.I.G. is the committee that will implement our new MIS system. The other faculty on the committee is Belen. There are two consultants, one works for Rio Hondo and the other works for Banner/Sungard (the software company). Our consultant seems like a no nonsense type of a man. He is in the process of figuring out Rio's business practices.
He asked each group to come up with business practices that we can implement. The software is very flexible and robust. However, it has to be customized to fit our business practices. Once the system is programed, it will be hard to go back and make changes. We have to decide on our procedures before we start implementing the system. The software is flexible but having contradicting procedures can lead to failure of the MIS. We need a road map before uploading any features because it will be messy to change anything midway through the process.

So here is my homework: I have to sit down and write down how teachers submit grades, Add/drop, and get our roster now. I need to get the Curriculum people to walk me through the curriculum process, so it can be duplicated in the software. I may have to consult with the SLO people too (I hope not. They are so slooo) if the software can track these tedious forms. I will have to consult with A&R and the Academic Senate to come up with acceptable procedures.

This is going to be a big change and people do not seem to realize how big! It will end all back door channels and the software will enforce the procedures. Before we write anything down please contact me and relay your concerns. As I write these BPAs I will post them here and send them out to faculty before presenting them to the Committee. If you see anything you do not like please hit the reply button or post your comment on this blog.

Want Customer Service Click Here

This is an excellent article explaining the reasons for community college educators resisting the word Customer Service.
I like the following section from the middle of the article:
"To the extent that a college really is a business, the type of business it most resembles is a health club. People pay to join a health club. In return for their membership fees, health-club patrons can expect use of the facilities and access to expert advice on fitness.
But they have not, simply by paying their fees, purchased a right to any particular outcome. Their health and physical condition will improve only as they avail themselves of the opportunity to exercise. Nor have they purchased any particular opinion on the part of the experts in question. The fact that they're paying to be at the health club does not mean a trainer is obliged to tell them their weight is fine when they're carrying an extra 40 pounds.