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New Essay Topics for ApplyTexas 2013-2014

Application, Blog, Colleges, General, News, Students, Uncategorized

ApplyTexas Essay Prompts A, B and C (applicable to FR, TR and other app types)  Slated to replace current ApplyTexas essay choices A, B and C.  For inclusion in ApplyTexas applications for the 2014 cycle (opening 8/1/13)

 Essay A:

Describe a setting in which you have collaborated or interacted with people whose experiences and/or beliefs differ from yours.  Address your initial feelings, and how those feelings were or were not changed by this experience.

Essay B:

Describe a circumstance, obstacle or conflict in your life, and the skills and resources you used to resolve it.  Did it change you?  If so, how? 

Essay C:

Considering your lifetime goals, discuss how your current and future academic and extra-curricular activities might help you achieve your goals.

Thomas Edison State College – Flexibility for Adults

Blog, Uncategorized

Thomas Edison State College located in New Jersey, has been conferring degrees on adults for forty years by awarding credit for classwork and life experience.  Now many other colleges/universities are following suit. ““We don’t care how or where the student learned, whether it was from spending three years in a monastery,” said George A. Pruitt, the college’s president, “as long as that learning is documented by some reliable assessment technique.”  of the New York Times highlights several non-traditional students by sharing their stories of collegiate success.  [read more]

Elite Colleges Offer Free Courses Online – MOOC

Blog, Colleges, General, Information, News, Parents, Students, Uncategorized

One of the latest trends in Higher Education is the use of MOOC “Massive Open Online Courses.”  The industry leaders, Coursera and edX, announced last week that they have almost doubled their course options by adding courses from some of the top institutions in the country.  “MOOCs have attracted millions of students and captured the public imagination over the past year, allowing people from all walks of life to learn from leading scholars at top-tier universities — free of charge”  writes TERENCE CHEA of the Associated Press.  At the same time he questions the effects of this movement on the degree seeking population.  [read more]

Increased Technology in the Classroom often Equates to Increased Student Cheating

Blog, Uncategorized

All traditional, printed, classroom material should be replaced by a digital version by 2018 suggests the State Educational Technology Directors Association.  In fact Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, asserts that “schools must go digital in order to keep the United States competitive in the global marketplace.”  As educators move toward compliance of technology directives they grow evermore concerned with the unintended consequences of this movement, such as an increase in cheating.  [read more]

Future of Job Interviews, via Twitter

Blog, Career, General, Students, Uncategorized

The day of the 140 character interview is here according to Bruce Horovitz of USA Today. ” Several tech-forward marketing companies are going where few have gone before: They’re ditching the résumé and the conventional job interview process for tweets. A simple tweet or two — sometimes called Twitterviews — can lead to a job.”  This method of interview is used by companies to tweet a series of questions and wait for the response.  This form of interview can be particularly effective with companies or positions that primarily deal with social networking.  [read more]

President Obama Calls for College Accountability Program

Tags: , , Blog, Colleges, General, Information, Parents, Students, Uncategorized

In the State of the Union Adderss, President Obama called for a “college scorecard” to  help parents and students learn to figure out how to get “the most bang for Your educational buck.”

The Whitehouse launches a new website designed to help the public see colleges in a more transparentmethod.   US News provides some helpful links. [read more]

Competencies Rather than Courses – The Future of Education?

Information, Uncategorized

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc, President of Southern New Hampshire University, is an international leader in the competency-based education movement.  Proponents of this form of education assert that a college degree should convey a level of mastery of a subject or set of skills and that seat-time does not equate to acquisition of knowledge.

“The irony of the three-credit hour is that it fixes time while it leaves variable the actual learning. In other words, we are really good at telling the world how long students have sat at their desks and we are really quite poor at saying how much they have learned or even what they learned. Competency-based education flips the relationship and says let time be variable, but make learning well-defined, fixed and non-negotiable.”  [read more]