Universities, Rich in Data, Struggle to Capture Its Value

Needs more automatic matching to actual uses, needs, outcomes. 

Universities, Rich in Data, Struggle to Capture Its Value     By UCLA

December 29, 2022

Merging together data from various sources is a major challenge, respondents said.

Universities are struggling to make sense of their vast administrative datasets, according to researchers Christine L. Borgman at UCLA and Amy Brand at MIT.

The two surveyed senior officials focused on university data governance and management to identify a shortage of coordination and expertise. Respondents cited issues about commercial control of internal systems, local capacity for data-informed planning, a lack of databases of record, and few coordinated information management strategies and administrators with data-science backgrounds.

"We unexpectedly found a pervasive void of infrastructure thinking and a relatively limited set of data-informed planning successes," said Brand.

The researchers's study, published in Science, suggests universities could expand infrastructure investments to enhance access, integration, and intelligence, as well as fortify their data management capacity.

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College in a MetaVersity?

Change is coming,  but the metaverse is also not ready.     Based on our own experiences,  there is much yet to be done to prepare content, delivery and users of training and interaction in this way.  Meta-reality is still hard.  

College in the Metaverse Is Here. Is Higher Ed Ready?

By Inside Higher Ed, August 8, 2022

This fall, students at 10 universities will attend metaversities, immersive virtual reality platforms where remote faculty and students don virtual reality headsets and meet synchronously as they would on a physical campus.

This fall, students at 10 U.S. universities will attend metaversities, virtual reality (VR) platforms where educators and students wear VR headsets and interact synchronously.

Advocates claim VR increases student engagement, achievement, and satisfaction, but some scholars worry about metaversity technology licensors putting revenues above academic freedom, exploiting students' data, or replicating biased narratives in VR.  Many such challenges can be addressed by aligning educational best practices, commercial incentives, and political resolution, while students may find metaversities better than engagement via remote, two-dimensional screens.

Last year, Morehouse College tested a proof-of-concept metaversity with courses in world history, biology, and chemistry, and participating world history students improved their grade point averages 10% compared to grades in the same class facilitated through Zoom and face-to-face. ... 

The University of Massachusetts' Nir Eisikovits believes on-campus education will ultimately supplement metaversities, not vice-versa. ... 

From Inside Higher Ed

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Fewer Foreign Students. Implications?

Taught a course at Columbia that showed me the considerable dominance of foreign students.   How much will this change things for universities?

Fading Beacon    By The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 8, 2022

American higher education has long prided itself on being a brilliant beacon, attracting generations of students from around the globe.

They come for education and for opportunity. Many, having established ties to America, return home to take roles in academe, business, or government. No country has trained more foreign leaders than the United States.

Others stay, becoming a critical part of the American talent infrastructure. They fill our faculty offices, our laboratories, our boardrooms. One in five entrepreneurs who founded start-ups in the United States is an immigrant — and three-quarters of them first came to America as students. While they were enrolled, they brought diversity and millions in revenue to their campuses.

But that beacon, bright for decades, may have begun to dim. The Trump administration, with its America First policies and bellicose rhetoric, sent the message that foreign students were not welcome. Then the Covid-19 pandemic shut the country's borders. Last year's decline in international students — the U.S. government reported an 18-percent drop in overall student-visa holders and a 72-percent decrease in new enrollments in 2020 — is without precedent.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

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