Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week

You may think you're getting more accomplished by working longer hours. You're probably wrong.

Geoffrey James

Apr 24, 2012

There's been a flurry of recent coverage praising Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, for leaving the office every day at 5:30 p.m. to be with her kids.  Apparently she's been doing this for years, but only recently "came out of the closet," as it were.
What's insane is that Sandberg felt the need to hide the fact, since there's a century of research establishing the undeniable fact that working more than 40 hours per week actually decreases productivity.
In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity.  They discovered that the "sweet spot" is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.
Anyone who's spent time in a corporate environment knows that what was true of factory workers a hundred years ago is true of office workers today.  People who put in a solid 40 hours a week get more done than those who regularly work 60 or more hours.
The workaholics (and their profoundly misguided management) may think they're accomplishing more than the less fanatical worker, but in every case that I've personally observed, the long hours result in work that must be scrapped or redone.

Accounting for Burnout

What's more, people who consistently work long work weeks get burned out and inevitably start having personal problems that get in the way of getting things done.
I remember a guy in one company I worked for who used the number of divorces in his group as a measure of its productivity.  Believe it or not, his top management reportedly considered this a valid metric. What's ironic (but not surprising) is that the group itself accomplished next to nothing.
In fact, now that I think about it, that's probably why he had to trot out such an absurd (and, let's face it, evil) metric.
Proponents of long work weeks often point to the even longer average work weeks in countries like Thailand, Korea, and Pakistan–with the implication that the longer work weeks are creating a competitive advantage.

Europe's Ban on 50-Hour Weeks

However, the facts don't bear this out.  In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week.  You simply don't see the 50-, 60-, and 70-hour work weeks that have become de rigeur in some parts of the U.S. business world.
If U.S. managers were smart, they'd end this "if you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming to work on Sunday" idiocy.  If you want employees (salaried or hourly) to get the most done–in the shortest amount of time and on a consistent basis–40 hours a week is just about right.
In other words, nobody should be apologizing for leaving at work at a reasonable hour like 5:30 p.m.  In fact, people should be apologizing if they're working too long each week–because it's probably making the team less effective overall.

Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now

Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now

"We need a new playbook," says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. "The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true."

The Start-Up of You, written by Casnocha and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is that playbook. It argues that we can no longer expect to find a job, instead we must make our jobs. As Hoffman says, we have to "find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs, it's differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us."*

Relevant for recent grads to mid-career professionals in the midst of a transition, Start-Up provides pragmatic, actionable advice, finishing each chapter with tasks to complete in the next day, in the next week, and in the next month.

I chatted with Casnocha — a longtime favorite blogger of mine — after reading Start-Up to explore the book's themes in more depth and investigate his collaborative process with Reid.

What role does passion play in a good career plan — if any?


Definitely plays a role. When you're passionate about something, you tend to do better work, longer. The question is whether you find passion or develop it through competence. And then how you square passion with other considerations — such as your aspirations and the market realities. So, passion is key, yes, but it's rather more complicated than many career writers would have you think. Passion without being good at it doesn't get you very far; passion that no one will pay money for is also limited in scope. You need to weigh various factors, passion being one of them.

Do you think there's something new about "entrepreneurial thinking"? Or is it the new word for a type of thinking that has always existed?


All humans were born with entrepreneurial instincts. We quote Muhammad Yunus to this effect — he said that for a very long time humans forged lives by finding food, feeding ourselves. The instinct to create a life is deep within us. What's new are the specific skills that complement that instinct — the skills for adapting in the modern world.

What do you think is the No.1 misconception of people heading into a new career or looking to make a job transition?


That if you simply work hard, good things will happen. It certainly increases the odds, but working hard is no guarantee of anything. There are no guarantees, period.


The question is whether you find passion or develop it through competence.

How important is being comfortable with uncertainty? 


Anything worth doing is going to have degrees of uncertainty associated with it. Clamming up and treating any uncertainty as "risk" to be avoided will preclude you from seizing the very best opportunities. So, it's important. How you actually go about embracing risk and uncertainty is something we detail in the book. One tip: induce risk in small chunks, bit by bit, to raise your tolerance.

I love the idea that you present in the book of an "interesting people fund" — where you encourage people to set aside time and money in advance to keep their networks up to date. Can you talk a little bit about this "long view" approach to networking?


The interesting people fund is a pre-commitment strategy: by pre-committing time and money to meeting interesting people, you increase the likelihood that you actually do it. Because many people know they ought to do it, and think about doing it, but when push comes to shove and it's time to take an hour out of your day or spend $40 buying someone lunch — they punt on it.

In terms of the long view of networks, if you're not taking the long view, you're doing it wrong. Relationships — be it romantic, friendship, or professional – take time to develop. A lot of time. Rushing a relationship into a short term transaction can jeopardize the long-term relationship potential.

I recently read a great quote from Steve Pavlina: "If you struggle financially, upgrade your social skills. Money flows through people." Does this resonate with you?


Absolutely. In the opportunities chapter we say that every opportunity is attached to a person. Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They're attached to people. If you're looking for an opportunity — including one that has a financial payoff — you're really looking for a person.

Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They're attached to people.

If I had to distill the advice in the book down to the simplest possible equation: It might be something like "constant curiosity + action = career success." Is that accurate? What would be your equation?


Gosh, hard question! "Constant curiosity + thoughtful action = career success" could be one. "Change + adaptability = success" could be another. Networks should also be in there somehow!

What was your writing process with Reid like?


I'll be writing about this more on my personal blog in a bit. But the short answer is that we focused on our comparative advantages. I was working on it full-time and could go deep on some of the ideas and how we should organize them. Reid thought a lot about which ideas from the start-up/entrepreneurship world could be mapped effectively to careers. As with all books, we went through a lot of iterations to get it right. Anne Lamott nailed it: "Shitty first drafts." I will say that writing a book forces a certain rigor on the ideas — the linear text limits you but in a way that ultimately sharpens the ideas, I think. Certainly that was the case for us.

--
Jocelyn K. Glei is the Editor-in-Chief of the 99%.

“What I Cannot Create, I Do Not Understand”

April 7, 2012 by Larry Ferlazzo |

“What I Cannot Create, I Do Not Understand”
That’s what was on Nobel-Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman’s blackboard when he died:


I found this image in an article at Scientific American titled Hunters of Myths: Why Our Brains Love Origins.
The entire article is somewhat interesting, but here’s what I think is the really important and useful part to teachers, and the paragraph that accompanied the blackboard photo:
…when we explain something to someone, we understand it better ourselves. It’s called the self-explanation effect and has been demonstrated numerous times in the real world. For instance, students who explain textbook material perform better on tests of that material than those who study it twice. Students who are trained in self-explanation perform better on math problem-solving tests—and are better able to learn new mathematical concepts. And how’s this for a story: when Nobel-Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman passed away in 1988, after a struggle with cancer, these words graced his blackboard: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” His final injunction to his students and the world.
I think this paragraph reinforces the importance of creating opportunities for our students to teach their classmates, as I’ve previously described (see Teaching Students To Teach (& What School Reformers Are Missing) ).
Of course, students could “explain something” to the teacher, or in a paper that would just be seen by a teacher. But I think that lack of an authentic audience reduces its value and effectiveness, not to mention all the real-world skills that having to actually teach develops (refining storytelling techniques, picking up on “cues” from others, putting themselves in the “shoes” of a teacher).
What has been your experience of having students teach others?

Parental Engagement Proves No Easy Goal

By Sean Cavanagh

Few would quarrel with the goal of increasing parents' and families' engagement in education in the name of school improvement. But there's far less consensus on what that engagement should look like—and on how educators and policymakers should be promoting it.

Those questions are evident in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires thousands of schools receiving Title I aid to set aside a portion of that money for family-engagement activities. The Obama administration, among others, would like to boost the amount of money devoted to parental outreach in reauthorizing the law, the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Many researchers and advocates, however, say the current law has not lived up even to expectations on that front. Some say the NCLB law encourages a focus on compliance, rather than fostering creative and sustained cooperation between schools and parents. Others say it offers districts and schools too little guidance on how to engage parents in a meaningful way.

And some argue that superintendents and principals—already saddled with No Child Left Behind's other mandates, particularly in testing—have little incentive to take parent engagement seriously.

"There are well-intentioned provisions in the current law, but the provisions lack direction and some kind of 'oomph' behind them," said Jacque Chevalier, the senior policy strategist for the 5 million-member National Parent Teacher Association, based in Alexandria, Va., which supports strengthening the current law.

In many schools, Ms. Chevalier said, family engagement is treated like an "add-on," with no enforcement. "You combine that with a general lack of know-how about what family engagement is, and you're not going to get great results," she said.

The Obama's administration seems to agree with that criticism.

"The approach to family engagement has been fragmented and nonstrategic, often constituting 'random acts of family involvement,' " the U.S. Department of Education said in a recent statement to Education Week, echoing a term used by other critics of the current law. What is needed, the department said, is "a comprehensive plan for bringing families to the table."

Varied Approaches

While there is no single definition of parent engagement or involvement, it typically describes efforts to have families take an active role in students' lives, and in the academic life of the school, said Steven Sheldon, the director of research at the National Network of Partnership Schools, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The network encourages the use of research-based approaches to collaboration between schools, families, and communities.

For years, parent engagement was associated mainly with family members' volunteering or participating in events at schools, Mr. Sheldon said. But the term has evolved to cover an array of in-school and out-of-school activities that can prove educationally beneficial, such as parents helping children with academic work at home.

Parental engagement in children's education is associated with stronger student achievement, and with students who themselves are more engaged in school—as shown by better attendance, higher graduation rates, and other benefits, Mr. Sheldon said. While research doesn't necessarily point to one type of parent involvement as superior to another, strategies such as working with students at home, perhaps not surprisingly, are associated more strongly with academic gains than other approaches are, he added.

The decade-old NCLB law defines parental involvement as parents' participation in "regular, two-way and meaningful communication" between parents and schools about academics and school activities. The law says that all districts receiving more than $500,000 in Title I aid for disadvantaged students must devote at least 1 percent of those funds to family-engagement activities, and that they must distribute 95 percent of that money to Title I schools.

Yohana Martinez of Brookline, Mass., works on math exercises in a class for Spanish-speaking parents of Boston Public School students at the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Jamaica Plain. The class is part of a Boston Public School program known as "Parent University" aimed at encouraging parents to be more involved in their children's education.

—Erik Jacobs for Education Week

The law also requires Title I schools to have written parent-involvement policies and school-parent compacts, describing how parents should be involved in schools and how they will take part in improving student achievement. Both sets of policies are to be developed and approved by parents.

Of the approximately 13,000 school districts receiving Title I money nationwide, about 28 percent, or 3,600, receive more than $500,000 through the program and would be subject to the 1 percent mandate, according to federal estimates. School districts can devote a larger portion of Title I funding to parent-engagement activities, and some do, researchers and school officials say.

But many of those familiar with the mandates and set-asides say they have not worked as intended.

The requirement that 95 percent of the parent-engagement money go to schools often prevents school systems from putting in place coherent strategies for connecting with families across entire districts, critics say. As a result, some schools, left with only a small slice of a district's overall Title I parent-engagement money and little sense of how to use it, end up making relatively weak attempts to reach out to parents, through perfunctory mailings or unfocused outreach.

In some cases, schools use the money to "buy refreshments for back-to-school night," said Ms. Chevalier of the National PTA.

Karen L. Mapp, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says the law offers districts and schools little guidance on what effective parent engagement looks like. Districts also get conflicting advice from state officials on how the Title I money can be used, said Ms. Mapp, who recently wrote a report describing what she sees as shortcomings in NCLB's family-involvement provisions.

And when districts and schools are successful in working with parents, it's often the result of determined groups of parents and administrators working in isolation, she said.

"You see pockets of good work in districts, in certain schools, but it's not systematic," Ms. Mapp said.

Moreover, districts' adherence to the federal law's requirements is uneven at best, said Zollie Stevenson Jr., a former director of student achievement and school accountability programs at the U.S. Department of Education. Meeting the law's mandates for parental involvement has been one of school systems' worst areas of noncompliance on NCLB Title I policy, said Mr. Stevenson, who is now an associate professor of educational administration and policy at Howard University, in Washington.

For years, parent engagement has been undermined by tensions between parents and school administrators, some of whom are inclined to shut families out of decisions over curriculum or school activities—or who don't know how to bring them into the fold, said Arnold F. Fege, the director of public engagement and advocacy for the Public Education Network, in Washington.

While some administrators are committed to accepting ideas and criticism from families, others "are not honest in involving parents," said Mr. Fege, whose organization is a network of community-based groups that seeks to improve schools and increase college access, particularly in disadvantaged school districts.

The Obama administration has proposed increasing the 1 percent Title I set-aside requirement to 2 percent, which it argues would encourage districts to take bolder steps to engage parents. (Additionally, the administration added parent and family engagement as an "absolute priority" in a recent round of its Investing in Innovation competition, noting that while it is a "critical component of student success," there are "too few models with evidence of effectiveness.")

Not everyone agrees with increasing the set-aside. The American Association of School Administrators supports strong family engagement but worries that raising the set-aside is "prescriptive and ties the hands of superintendents," said Noelle M. Ellerson, the AASA's assistant director for policy analysis and advocacy.

Ms. Ellerson said the AASA agrees that the effectiveness of family-engagement strategies varies by district. But she attributes that inconsistency partly to pressures administrators face to comply with myriad mandates in the federal law, and to the mixed responses that schools get when they try to engage parents.

The federal mandates can seem "like a one-way street," she added. "The requirements are placed all on the schools."

Creative Engagement

Some organizations are trying to help school leaders engage parents in creative and focused ways.

Joyce Epstein, the director of Johns Hopkins' National Network of Partnership Schools, is the author of a widely referenced document that describes "six types of involvement," or ways that teachers, principals, parents, and others can engage families and communities in schools, using an array of strategies rather than relying on any single approach. The network also publishes promising practices used in districts and schools to promote community and family engagement.

Schools that are serious about promoting parent involvement work around barriers that prevent it, said Mr. Sheldon of Johns Hopkins. Many schools, for instance, invite parents to come to school to talk to students about their careers—only to find that work schedules prevent many adults from attending. Schools can overcome those conflicts by asking parents to take photos at their jobs and have their children bring them to school, so that they can be displayed for classroom discussions, he said.

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Engagement sometimes means "providing opportunities for parents to contribute, without necessarily being at the school," Mr. Sheldon said.

Some districts try to reach out to parents in many different settings.

The Boston school system has assigned "family and community outreach coordinators" in schools throughout the 57,000-student district, who seek to strengthen parents' ties with schools and their understanding of their academic and other goals.

Margarita "Ale" Hernandez, a coordinator at Boston's Warren-Prescott K-8 School, juggles a number of duties, which include helping students and families apply for high school, and sitting with parents and translating parent-teacher conferences and meetings over special education services into Spanish, a language in which she's fluent.

"Time is really an issue for these parents," said Ms. Hernandez, noting that many of those adults work more than one job. And if they don't get help with English, "it's hard for them to support their kids academically," she said. "They get frustrated, and it doesn't work."

'Parent University'

Boston also has established a "Parent University," designed to help mothers and fathers with a variety of skills, which include academic-content knowledge and overall parenting skills. Those sessions are held throughout the year. The school system arranges child care and meals for parents during sessions at the university, which like coordinators' positions are supported through Title I money.

When it was launched three years ago, the university drew 500 parents, and more than 2,400 have attended this year.

Shateara Battle has taken part for three years. In one class, the 24-year-old mother got tips on how to calm her 1st grade son and help him refocus on homework when it frustrates him. Taking him outside for a short walk helps.

But Ms. Battle, who works in a hospital, says the most valuable class focused on building her understanding of her son's math curriculum, which initially confused her because it was starkly different from the model she learned in school.

"It's hard to help your child with math," she said, when "even if you get the same answer, they're learning it a different way."

Since attending the classes, Ms. Battle has also become more confident questioning teachers about the pace and content of academic studies in various subjects.

"I was highly involved before, but now I'm more knowledgeable," she said. Sometimes, when she's asked a teacher about a lesson, "they look at me and say, 'How did you know that?' "

Coverage of parent-empowerment issues is supported by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, at http://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/.

Revisiting teaching and learning " Where teachers are replaceable widgets, education suffers'

Where Teachers Are Replaceable Widgets, Education Suffers

By Robert Boruch, Joseph Merlino, and Andrew C. Porter

We have become convinced that in our nation's struggling urban schools, teachers and would-be education reformers are battling through a hurricane that shows no signs of abating. We call this hurricane "churn."

Churn is a remarkable instability among school personnel that makes it nearly impossible to build a professional community or develop long-term relationships with students. It happens when teachers are treated like interchangeable parts who can be moved around cavalierly to plug a hole in a school schedule. It happens when administrators repeatedly order teachers to switch to a different grade, teach a different subject, or move to a different school.

We recently tried to test an idea for improving the middle school science curriculum through a multiyear randomized controlled trial in a big-city public school system. But the constant stream of teachers leaving the classes we were studying made it nearly impossible to get reliable results. After just one year, 42 percent of the teachers in 92 schools who began participating in our study had left it to take other positions within and outside the schools. The instability was about the same in both the intervention group and the control group.

Attrition among teachers is a well-known problem in urban schools. As many as half of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years. And even if they don't switch careers, many new teachers leave urban schools for jobs in the suburbs. A newly released study from the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research shows the harm that teacher attrition does to student achievement.

—iStockphoto.com/Athos Boncompagni

But we think churn may be an even bigger problem for schools and districts. In the urban schools we studied, internal instability was worse than attrition. For every two teachers who left the district or the profession during our study, another three were moved from subject to subject, grade to grade, or school to school.

Unfortunately, this degree of churn is hardly unusual. Other researchers have noted a similar or even greater degree of instability among urban teachers. (We know less about churn in nonurban schools.)

Indeed, churn is such a fact of life in urban schools that most people who are working to improve education here in the United States—educators, researchers, and policymakers alike—have come to accept it as so much background noise. That's why one of us coined the phrase "ambient positional instability" to describe it. Recently, at our request, a graduate student reviewed the results of randomized controlled trials in a major peer-reviewed journal. Of 19 articles in which the researchers detected no effects from their intervention, not a single one considered churn as a possible reason for this failure.

In other words, we as a profession are ignoring churn. We think that's wrong.

In our view, two people are especially well positioned to help us start tackling the problem of churn: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools. We challenge them and everyone who's working to reform our urban schools—from politicians to policymakers to scholars like ourselves—to stop treating churn, or ambient instability, as background noise and start treating it as a problem to be solved. Until we do, churn will keep undermining our best efforts.

We think that churn is hurting kids in urban schools, and hurting them badly.

It hurts them directly, right in the classroom, because teachers are shifted around so often that they can't develop deep mastery of a grade and subject, or develop stable professional learning communities to support their work.

And churn hurts kids indirectly, when researchers like us can't tell whether proposed education reforms are good or bad because the instability weakens even the most carefully designed studies and skews our results. We even suspect that internal churn is a major factor in attrition, driving new teachers right out of the profession.

And churn isn't a problem only among teachers. Many urban districts see astonishing instability among principals, central-office staff, and, at the very top, superintendents. As a result, teachers constantly have to adjust to new leadership styles and new priorities.

The bottom line is that in a hurricane of churn, you can't build the culture of trust and safety that kids need to learn. If we're serious about turning our urban schools around, it's time to devote serious resources to doing something about churn.

Telling Isn't Teaching: The Fine Art of Coaching

By Dr. Richard Curwin

I have the greatest respect for coaches; not every coach of course, but those who care more about their players than about winning. I include those who coach drama, choir, band and all those who spend so much of their time and energy on helping children far beyond the confines of the classroom. Good coaches make great teachers.

Coaches understand that telling a player (or singer, actor, etc.) what to do is not enough. No drama director or soccer coach asks students to sit in the room and explain what to do. They go to the playing environment, demonstrate correct technique and then put the students through multiple repetitions; practice, practice, practice. Repetition ensures that correct technique will become close to automatic when the game is on the line, emotions run high and calm under pressure is required. Coaches are fully aware that knowing what to do is not the same as knowing how to do it.
The same model needs to be used when changing student behavior if we want to successfully improve the choices students make. Incentives, threats, discussions, contracts, consequences, punishments, removal from class and every other technique we use to change behavior are 100% useless if the student does not know how to do something else.

Practice Makes Perfect?

Most interventions are based on letting the student know why his or her choice was inappropriate, and usually what to do instead. "Issac, fighting is wrong. In this classroom we resolve problems by talking, not hitting. Do you understand?" This is telling, and it is insufficient. Even if the teacher showed Issac one time how to talk when angry, and then had Issac demonstrate the technique, also one time, it would still be insufficient. What is missing are repetitions; practice, practice, practice. When emotions run high, Issac will hit again; not because the threat of punishment wasn't strong enough or because the incentive wasn't big enough, but because the new behavior wasn't learned in a way that makes it close enough to automatic. Ask any coach how many repetitions are required for a player or actor to use correct technique in the game. You will never hear any number less than ten, and it's usually a lot higher.
Sometimes we ask a student, "Issac, what are you supposed to do when someone calls you a name?" "I should say I don't like it and walk away." This interaction does not mean that Issac will walk away. He knows the words, but that does not mean he knows how to do it. I can tell you how to shoot a foul shot in basketball, but under pressure I can't always do it. Knowing what is not the same as knowing how.

Transferable Skills

This issue gets confusing because we assume that students know how to do the right thing and simply choose not to do it. And in many cases, this is true. Other cases depend on circumstances. Telling a student to sit down seems on the surface to be pretty straightforward. But in some cases, it is not quite as simple as it seems. How does a child sit down when he was just bullied, learned his parents are getting divorced, found out his brother has cancer, or any of the myriad of possibilities that make sitting down hard to do?
My best suggestion is to teach by the coaching method starting from kindergarten: demonstrate with repetition how to make the right choice in different circumstances, and keep teaching it through high school. Starting early is best, but not starting at all is the worst. Individual student consequences should include a teaching component that goes far beyond telling. It can't hurt even if the child knows both what and how to behave correctly.
And to all the wonderful coaches who give so much to children, I offer my thanks

Institutional collaboration ' A liberal-Arts Consortium'

A Liberal-Arts Consortium Experiments With Course Sharing

April 4, 2012, 4:55 am

By Jeff Selingo

In discussions about the future of higher education, there’s often plenty of hand-wringing over the precarious fate of the hundreds of small, tuition-dependent private colleges scattered throughout the country. With many of them located in out-of-the-way places, their isolation means that merging or even collaborating with other institutions to reduce costs is typically not an option.
But advances in technology can now link together institutions that are separated by thousands of miles. An experiment by a group of 16 liberal-arts colleges and universities in the South might serve as the blueprint for other small institutions looking for ways to maintain a core of academic programs but offer enough variety to attract students.
The concept behind the group’s New Paradigm Initiative is simple: the 16 institutions of the Associated Colleges of the South, which include Davidson College, the University of Richmond, and Rhodes College, join together to offer online and blended courses to students on any of the campuses within the consortium, meaning students at one institution are no longer limited to the courses offered just at their college.
Plenty of colleges these days allow students to take online courses from other institutions, of course. But the system designed by these 16 colleges works more like a traditional consortium: Students don’t have to worry about transferring credits between institutions and no money is exchanged between the campuses, making the process seamless for students.
“In the past few years, we have looked for ways that the association could behave collectively to help all members that in separate ways we couldn’t,” says Lewis Duncan, president of Rollins College. “For some things, having 3,000 faculty, 30,000 students, and 16 campuses is a good idea.”
The initiative will get its start in the fall with a half dozen to a dozen courses at four institutions that have committed so far to the classroom technology, which costs upwards of $250,000. In an effort to maintain the feel of small liberal-arts classes, professors on the home campus of a course will teach in a classroom outfitted with conference capabilities and students on other campuses will take part in real-time, synchronous discussions.
Carol Bresnahan, the provost at Rollins, says she became persuaded of the model last fall when she accompanied a group of faculty members to a Cisco facility in Orlando to try out its TelePresence conference technology. “Our faculty are not interested in 24/7 online education,” she says. “The faculty made clear to us that they like the intimacy of the Rollins classroom. Now the technology is finally available to replicate that in real time from a distance.”
The first courses to be offered will be those that are available on only one or two of the association’s campuses. Languages are the likeliest candidates, Bresnahan says. For example, only Davidson and Richmond offer Arabic. Other campuses have been closing language departments, such as German, as the popularity of various languages has waned. This program could allow a small college to offer the wide variety of languages typically available only at large research universities or elite liberal-arts colleges.
The colleges in the association already have some experience in collaboration from a distance, having offered classics courses cooperatively for the last decade. A study of that program, financed by the Mellon Foundation, found that pedagogical practices employed by faculty members spilled over into on-campus teaching and students reported high levels of learning.
Beyond building a collaboration model for other small colleges to follow, the New Paradigm Initiative could also potentially change attitudes about online education at liberal-arts colleges and in other corners of traditional higher ed, where distance education gets very little respect. That’s for “other people’s children.” To some in academe, the only education of quality is face-to-face.
Last year, when the Pew Research Center and The Chronicle asked college presidents for their opinions of online education, leaders of four-year, selective private colleges were much more likely than anyone else to say it doesn’t offer an equal experience to that of a traditional classroom. Those colleges were also the least likely of any type of institution to offer online courses.
As I listened to Duncan, Bresnahan, and Wayne Anderson, president of the Associated Colleges of the South, describe the New Paradigm Initiative, I wondered just how far the model could expand on their campuses in the future. For example, could a student enroll at Rollins but take the majority of his classes at one of the other 16 campuses and still get a Rollins degree? Would all the institutions pare back their departments and course offerings so there would be no overlap between campuses?
Duncan, Bresnahan, and Anderson aren’t quite ready to go there yet. For instance, students can’t major in something not offered by their home campus. Students can’t take courses on other campuses simply for the sake of convenience. And for now, the program will include only upper-level courses.
“We have already have concern that this is more of a bold and ambitious future than some of the more conservative faculty are comfortable with,” Duncan says. “But in reality, this might become part of a sustainable business model for small campuses.”
Under such a model, each campus in the consortium could put most of its academic resources toward making a few academic programs distinctive and leave the rest to the partner institutions. At a time when lower-level courses on many campuses are quickly becoming commodities, such a strategy allows colleges to differentiate themselves.
It also raises some questions, namely, what’s the value of a degree from a specific institution if many of the courses were taken elsewhere? But with one-third of students transferring colleges before earning a degree these days, that reality already exists on many campuses. With concerns about the rigor of courses and value of credits coming from other places, forming a consortium as these 16 colleges have done might help put some reasonable quality controls on that student swirl.

Rise in E-Book Readership is good news

Rise in E-Book Readership Is Good News for Reading Over All, Report Says

April 4, 2012, 10:01 pm

By Jennifer Howard

More Americans are reading e-books than ever before, on more kinds of devices, a new report from the Pew Research Center has found. That news won’t come as a shock, given the rapid spread of e-readers and tablet computers and the rise of e-content. What might be a surprise, though: The report contains good news for print lovers, too. Readers of e-books like to read in all formats, they favor print books for sharing and to read to children, and on average they read more books over all than print-only readers do.
“They’re heavier readers. They’re more frequent readers,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the group behind the report. “These devices have allowed them to scratch that itch.”
The report, “The Rise of eReading,” analyzes findings from a survey of almost 3,000 people nationwide in November and December 2011, along with data from follow-up surveys of about 2,000 people in January and February 2012. Twenty-one percent of respondents reported, as of February 2012, that they had read an e-book in the past year. That figure was up from 17 percent in December 2011, before the holiday surge in purchases of e-readers and tablets. The average e-book reader said he or she had read 24 books (electronic and print) in the past 12 months. Those who didn’t read e-books averaged 15 books over the same time period.
E-formats haven’t diminished the appeal of reading. Thirty percent of e-content readers said they spend more time reading than they used to. That trend stood out especially clearly among owners of tablet computers and e-book readers: 41 percent and 35 percent, respectively, said their reading had increased since e-content came along, according to the findings. People also said they did a lot of reading on their smartphones and computers.
Print retains its talismanic appeal for many of those surveyed. It still trumps digital as the preferred format for sharing books. “In a head-to-head competition, people prefer e-books to printed books when they want speedy access and portability,” the report says, “but print wins out when people are reading to children and sharing books with others.” More than 80 percent of those surveyed said they preferred print books to read to the younger set.
The report doesn’t try to answer the chicken-or-egg question of whether e-reading devices make their owners more likely to read.  The surveys didn’t reveal “which direction the causal arrow flows in,” Mr. Rainie said. Are avid readers just more likely to buy devices that will allow them to indulge their habit, or “are the devices themselves bringing people more deeply into reading?”
The report also doesn’t shed any light on which genres do best in an e-reading environment. Respondents were asked why they read—for pleasure, for work or school, to keep up with current events, or to research specific topics—but not what kinds of books they read. “We didn’t ask genres. We asked purpose,” Mr. Rainie said. “All purposes are up. For people who have these devices, they’re more likely to be reading for each of those reasons.”
Pleasure remains a big draw for readers. Eighty percent of respondents said they read sometimes because they enjoy it. Almost as many—78 percent—said they read to keep up with current events. Seventy-four percent reported that they read in order to do research, while 56 percent said they did some reading for work or for school.
This is the first time that Pew has surveyed e-reading habits, Mr. Rainie said, so it does not have figures from previous years to compare. It has tracked the rise in e-reader and tablet-computer sales, though. In May 2010, only 3 percent to 4 percent of people surveyed said they owned a tablet or e-reader. That had jumped to 19 percent as of January 2012.

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