Shake Up in the Testing Market

Plus, the Great Resignation in Higher Ed and Just What Is Ron DeSantis Doing with Colleges in Florida?

Fresh off a trip to Sierra Leone and Liberia in my capacity as a board member of Imagine Worldwide, a non-profit working to empower children in Africa with foundational literacy and numeracy through a child-directed, tech-enabled learning solution, I’m working on a longer piece about my experience and observations. As a result, this update will be a bit shorter than usual. But if you’re interested in my past reflections about the ground-breaking work Imagine Worldwide is doing, you can read this trio of pieces:

-       “Why ‘Offline’ Digital Learning Is Critical To Impact Children Worldwide”

-       “The Future of Learning Unfolding In Malawi”

-       “Taking Tablet Learning Global”

Shake Up in the Assessment Market

In our latest episode of Class Disrupted, Diane and I broke down the significant acquisition of NWEA by Houghton-Miflin Harcourt (HMH). For those who don’t know, NWEA is one of the “big three” of benchmark-assessment solutions—basically assessments given three times a year that help teachers and schools know how their students are likely to do on end-of-year tests and adjust accordingly. And HMH is one of the “big three” curriculum publishers.

We framed what we think is HMH’s motivation behind the acquisition and then analyzed whether that rationale makes sense or whether this is good for teaching and learning. Our takeaway? We’re skeptical—and that might be a generous description. You can listen to the whole episode and our train of thought here, as we went deep on a few strands around how assessments work and what the theory of interdependence and modularity has to say about this topic.

Reporter’s Roundtable

One of our favorite segments at Future U. over the years has been doing a roundtable with reporters covering interesting stories in higher education. We brought that feature back on our latest episode titled, “Reporters’ Roundtable: Florida, Amenities U. and the Future of the BA.”

Joining us were Pam Kelley, who recently wrote an entertaining profile of the president of High Point University and his successful efforts to turnaround the campus; Emma Pettit who has been covering colleges in the Sunshine State and the various battles with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; and Paul Fain, who has been writing on a variety of topics around the future of learning and work, as well as on the future of the bachelor’s degree.

Listen to our wide-ranging conversation here.

The Great Resignation In Higher Ed

By now it’s not news that a record 50.5 million Americans quit their jobs in 2022. Most left for offers of higher pay or the ability to work remotely. Higher education hasn’t been immune, but Jeff Selingo and I wanted to understand the forces at play more deeply. To do so, we interviewed Kevin McClure, a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, who studies higher education and has written a lot about how colleges manage their talent, as well as Mary Opperman, who was the chief human resources officer at Cornell University and is currently the senior vice president and university secretary to the Board of Trustees at Syracuse University.

The conversation around talent in higher education—and who is “the talent”—has been one that Jeff and I have now touched on a few times on Future U. But we got to unpack different aspects of that question—and what the answer’s implications are—in a few different ways. With that said, one of the big takeaways remains: although universities have historically treated their faculty as talent and taken their staff for granted, that’s not going to cut it anymore.

You can listen to the whole episode here.

And as always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening.