Call him Dr. Shaq O;Neal

(CBS News) During his 19-year National Basketball Association career, Shaquille O'Neal's teams won four titles.
But now he's adding a new and different title: Doctor.
O'Neal dominated pro basketball, and used the fame he earned on the court as an entree to a lucrative career away from the hardwood, in movies and commercials.
In a recent ad for Buick, he said, "I've got shoes that are bigger than most hybrids - and more stylish, too."
O'Neal earned millions and became a household name but, through it all, he was working on another goal.
In a public service announcement for Barry University, from which he's graduating Saturday, he says, "You know me from my reputation on the court, but basketball is just a part of my life. I'm also a student."
O'Neal continues to keep a promise he made to his parents in 1992, when he left Louisiana State University for the pros after his sophomore year.
More than a decade after he began college, O'Neal received his Bachelor's degree from LSU, then went on to earn an MBA from the University of Phoenix.
On Saturday, he adds another impressive title: an Ed.D. - a doctorate in education.
And as he points out, it's a real degree, not an honorary one.
"When he was in class," says Barry University Associate Prof. Dr. David Kopp, "he was front-and-center, raising his hand. He had no problem fitting into the desk, which was my concern."
But no one was concerned about his commitment: Over four-and-a-half years, O'Neal took 16 courses, completed 54 credit hours and carried a grade point average of 3.8.
He now wants to be called "Dr. O'Neal" - because he's earned it.

© 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Harvard and MIT Put $60-Million Into New Platform for Free Online Courses

May 2, 2012, 

By Nick DeSantis

The group of elite universities offering free online courses just got bigger.
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced a partnership that will host online courses from both institutions free of charge. The platform, its creators say, has the potential to improve face-to-face classes on the home campuses while giving students around the world access to a blue-ribbon education.
The new venture, called edX, grew out of MIT’s announcement last year that it would offer free online courses on a platform called MITx. The combined effort will be overseen by a nonprofit organization governed equally by both universities, each of which has committed $30-million to the project. Anant Agarwal,  director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who led the development of MITx, will serve as edX’s first president.
Students who complete the courses on the edX platform will not receive university credit, although they could earn certificates.
At a news conference, the leaders of edX described it as a tool that colleges can use to experiment with online courses and study how students learn. For example, Mr. Agarwal said, in the prototype MITx course “Circuits and Electronics,” researchers “gather huge amounts of data” on students’ use of the platform, including how much time they spend watching videos.
Since edX courses have the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of students, the data sets could be “very statistically significant in a very short amount of time,” he said.
edX plans to host its first courses this fall, across an array of disciplines. Mr. Agarwal said the platform would allow colleges to join Harvard and MIT in creating brands with the “x” signifier, also would be offered as open-source software for institutions that want to build on it. It will be distinct from the continuing distance-education programs at Harvard and MIT, including Harvard’s Extension School and MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which has been putting course materials online for a decade.
L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s provost, said the driving force behind the partnership wa “not to make money” but to improve learning for both the universities’ traditional students and the public at large. But, he added, the project will need to find a way to support itself, and its leaders are exploring ways to help it be self-sustaining.
“Clearly, we want to make sure that this does not become a drain on the budgets of Harvard and MIT,” Mr. Reif said.
Other elite universities have attempted online-education programs that were closed after experiencing financial woes. Those efforts included Fathom, a project led by Columbia University that ended in 2003; and AllLearn, a collaboration that closed its doors in 2006.
The partnership between Harvard and MIT is one piece of an online-education revival among elite universities that has emerged in the past year. The edX announcement comes after four top-tier institutions teamed up last month with a for-profit company led by two Stanford computer-science professors to offer a similar array of free online courses. Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced the partnerships with Coursera, a company that sprouted from Stanford’s early experiments with massive open online courses.
George Siemens, associate director of Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute and a pioneer of massive open online courses, as they are known, said the creation of edX represents in part an attempt by two universities to reclaim space in open online education, where venture capitalists have recently gained a foothold. While Coursera plans eventually to profit from its course offerings, he noted, it’s not yet clear how edX will support itself, and the model its leaders choose will dictate its longevity.
“Is there a sustainability model in place for these initiatives?” he asked. “Otherwise, it will end up being what happened with Fathom and others.”
Depending on how edX develops, Mr. Siemens said, the project may even begin to affect the basis for colleges’ accreditation. In a decade, he speculated, campus administrators may view this recent period of college investment in online-education projects as the moment when the alternative-credential model took off.
“It’s a natural progression of the Internet influencing and impacting what we thought was a pretty stable field,” he said. “But all it takes is six months of pretty surprising announcements in terms of open-course initiatives, and all of a sudden you can start to picture that education seems to be at the threshold of a very dramatic change.”

What are your personal views on on-line courses?  Do you think this funding can be used for other educational purposes? Can on-line teaching have the same impact as in class teaching and instruction? 

Gains in Access, Less in Success

Gains in Access, Less in Success

May 4, 2012 - 3:00am

Doug Lederman

In 2007 -- long before President Obama pushed to make college attainment a national priority and three years before the phrase "completion agenda" first appeared in these pages -- a group of public university systems put themselves on the spot.
Working with (and to some extent prodded by) Education Trust, which promotes the educational success of low-income and minority students, the 22 systems of two-year and four-year colleges and universities committed to increasing their attainment levels, in large part by closing the gaps in performance between underrepresented students and their peers within a decade. And they committed, too, to documenting their progress by collecting and publicly reporting detailed (and in some cases, previously unreported) data on student access and success.

In a report released Thursday, Education Trust and the National Association of System Heads, collaborators on the "Access to Success Initiative," lay out how the initiative as a whole and the individual systems have fared at roughly the midpoint of the project.

The results, as one might have predicted, are mixed. On the positive side, the 300-plus community and four-year colleges in the 22 systems collectively enrolled 42 percent more low-income students and 23 percent more black, Latino and American Indian students in 2009-10 than they did in 2005-6. The four-year institutions among the group's member systems also cut to 6 percent from 12 percent the difference between the representation of low-income students in their freshmen classes and the proportion of high school graduates who are from low-income backgrounds.

As seen in the figure below, most of the 22 systems had either met (or made meaningful progress toward) their goal of cutting in half the access gap for low-income students. But the figure shows significantly less success in reducing the gap for underrepresented minority students.


As seen in the figure below, though, the public-college systems (whose enrollments range from roughly 35,000 in the Connecticut State University and South Dakota systems to those in California and New York that are more than 10 times that size) have made far less progress so far on measures focused on student persistence and completion rather than enrollment.
Systems of two-year colleges were as likely to see their success rates for low-income and minority students decrease than improve from 2005-6 to 2009-10, and the gap between the success rates for low-income and minority students and those for all other students grew in many systems.


More than three in five of the participating Access to Success systems, meanwhile, have seen their six-year graduation rates for minority and low-income students rise at their four-year colleges, though the relatively few have made progress on closing the success gaps for those students.

The report calls out individual institutions and systems that have made particular good progress in various areas (San Diego State and Florida State Universities for closing racial and socioeconomic gaps, for instance, and the City University of New York and University of Wisconsin Systems for improved success rates in two-year institutions). Its authors, in interviews, note that the work that these systems began when they committed to the project in 2007 has been made much harder, in many cases, by a combination of exploding enrollments and vanishing budgets in the wake of 2008's economic downturn.
"It speaks volumes about the willingness and commitment of system leaders that regardless of what the context looks like or the boundary conditions they're facing, they're showing there is still work that can be done toward increasing educational attainment," said José L. Cruz, vice president for higher education policy and practice at Education Trust and one of the report's authors.
He said it was particularly noteworthy that two systems, the University of Texas and Colorado State University Systems, have newly joined the Access to Success group.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/04/report-documents-university-systems-progress-college-access-and-success#ixzz1tw68XfTd
Inside Higher Ed

Thoughts and suggestions on the article? Do you think there has been improvements and strides for increasing diversity for students in terms of race and socioeconomic status? What can we do as practitioner and scholars in the field about this issue?

Grad students response to Riley's post on African American Studies

Northwestern AfroStudies Doctoral Students weigh in on the significance of African American Studies Departments 

Read it here 

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/grad-students-respond-to-riley-post-on-african-american-studies/46421

Vice Dean at U. of Pennsylvania Resigns After Bogus Doctorate Is Exposed

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April 26, 2012

Vice Dean at U. of Pennsylvania Resigns After Bogus Doctorate Is Exposed

By Michael Stratford

A vice dean at the University of Pennsylvania resigned on Thursday after it was revealed that he had misrepresented his academic credentials.
Douglas E. Lynch, vice dean of the university's Graduate School of Education, quit after having falsely claimed on his résumé that he received a doctoral degree in philosophy, economics, and education from Columbia University.
Penn officials initially told The Philadelphia Inquirer on Wednesday that they had known about the misrepresentation for several months, had levied "appropriate sanctions," and had decided to keep Mr. Lynch in his leadership role. But later on Wednesday, after an Inquirer reporter sought comment from Amy Gutmann, Penn's president, the university changed its tune and immediately placed Mr. Lynch on leave "pending the outcome of an ongoing investigation."
On Thursday the university accepted Mr. Lynch's resignation, and it now "considers the matter closed," Stephen J. MacCarthy, vice president for university communications, said in an e-mail.
Mr. Lynch was admitted to a Ph.D. program in philosophy at Teachers College of Columbia University, according to Columbia, but he has not yet received a degree. Mr. Lynch is currently enrolled in the program, and has until the end of the spring 2012 semester to complete all the requirements for the degree, according to Columbia.
A spokeswoman for the graduate school at Penn told the Inquirer that Mr. Lynch had mistakenly believed his doctoral degree was complete.
Columbia said Mr. Lynch did receive a master's degree in philosophy at Teachers College in 2010. The Inquirer reported that Mr. Lynch had misstated information about that degree, too, saying on his faculty Web page at one point that he received the master's degree in 2005. That same faculty Web page also incorrectly stated that Mr. Lynch completed his doctorate in 2007, according to the Inquirer.
A version of Mr. Lynch's résumé that was available on Penn's Web site on Thursday morning listed the doctoral degree from Columbia, but it did not list any dates for any of his degrees. The file showed that the résumé was last modified in February.
Mr. Lynch's résumé also lists an M.B.A. in finance from New York University and a B.A. in economics from Arizona State University. Both institutions confirmed that Mr. Lynch had indeed received those degrees, in 1995 and 1987, respectively.
Mr. Lynch was hired by Penn in 2004. He previously worked at New York University, the College Board, and Arizona State University, according to his résumé. He did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Correction (4/30/2012, 5:08 p.m.): This article originally stated imprecisely where Columbia University said Mr. Lynch received a master's degree in philosophy in 2010. It was at Teachers College at Columbia, not at Columbia itself. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.