Tag: Student Surveys

Cultural Determinants of Data Acquisition Costs

I saw a fascinating piece in the New York Times awhile back.  It was about a trend at American universities, asking applicants if they were gay or not.  Apparently, these institutions believe that by asking students this question, they are sending a message that they are a gay-positive environment. Interesting. Americans think that transparency about identity is the path to utopia.  Enrolment statistics by race?  They’ve got them.  Indeed, they are required to keep such statistics, because of a clutch of laws

Read More »

Students Aren’t Keen on “Disruption”

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the current proliferation of MOOCs is meeting an enormous demand for access to informal learning opportunities.  Millions of people are signing up for courses which interest them, picking a few bits they wish to consume, and, in a few cases, even completing them – all at the low, low, price (to the user) of zero.  Undoubtedly a great development. But for MOOCs to be sustainable they have to eventually generate some revenue, and

Read More »

More Data on Credit Transfer (Part 3)

So, yesterday we saw that, in fact, the vast majority of transfer students receive credit for their previous work, and in quite substantial amounts as well.  But what about the credits that didn’t get recognized? There’s a pretty clear correlation between non-recognition and changing programs.  Overall, university transfer students said that more than 60% of their credits were accepted for transfer (among those who had any credit accepted, it was roughly 75%).  But as the figure below shows, the results were

Read More »

Actual Data on Transfer Credit (Part 2)

It’s easy to make transfer credit seem like a really big deal.  Outside of BC and Alberta, institutional credit transfer policies are pretty ad hoc, and there’s no shortage of anecdotes about students having to re-do courses they’ve already done.  But little data has hitherto been available to help us understand the extent to which credit transfer policies affect times-to-completion. Until now. Using HESA’s CanEd Student Panel, we examined this question from a couple of different angles.  Figure 1 gives

Read More »

Who Wants MOOCs?

Over the past few months, a lot of ink has been spilled, and pixels displayed, on the subject of Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs).  For me, three particular types of stories have stood out: two by their presence, and one by its absence. The first kind are those breathless, OTT pieces about how MOOCs are either “changing universities for good” (Don Tapscott), or “definitely a disruptive industry” (Clayton Christensen).  It’s never entirely clear what the factual basis for these claims

Read More »