Electronic Portfolios for Student Learning?

I teach a one credit ePortfolios course at Broome Community College. The focus is career, showcase ePortfolios, but we are beginning to use it for student assessment in one of the departments. I encourage students to define their own ePortfolios as possibly working portfolios where they are uploading and reflecting on artifacts that are in progress or to showcase their work. The course focuses on reflection, self-definition and professionalism.

We have used a few platforms and are currently using WordPress. We will be moving to WordPress MU in the fall. I look forward to having some students create their own themes to increase ownership of their sites. In the fall we will include BuddyPress to add a social networking component encouraging increased feedback from peers and instructors. Students are familiar with WordPress, since many use it for their courses or for themselves and they learn more about the flexibility of the platform in the course.

BCC began using ePortfolios with Engineering Technology departments three years ago as part of grant initiative and now we have a required course for Business Information Technology students, which is open to all students. As jpegan mentioned below we include peer reviews as well as an instructor assessment of the student’s ePortfolio. The student chooses if they want to keep their ePortfolio public or private.

I think you brought up an interesting point about student choice of ePortfolio platforms. It is something that is important to encourage ownership of the student’s portfolio. I like Salt Lake Community College’s “both-and” approach.

Thanks for the timely article! At our university we promote the use of e-portfolios and the philosophy of authentic assessment, lifelong and active learning, and the importance of being a reflective practitioner via the formative/summative portfolio. I have been particularly interested in the tools used for creating and maintaining the student e-portfolio. I have been evaluating the work of students, and the experiences with such tools as EPSILEN (http://epsilen.com) Mahara (http://mahara.com), Wikispaces, Google Sites, as well as the WYSIWYG Weebly interface (http://weebly.com). Because of the high degree of tech skill variance in the college student population, is it best to scaffold the e-portfolio process through an in-house tool or should students be allowed to out source their work where the support may be questionable?

I am very interested in the e-portfolio tech tools that other institutions of higher education have adopted. What level of support? Hosting? Workshops? Caveats? I am concerned about the reliability of the Web 2.0 tools and their longevity. To what extent are faculty adopting e-portfolio’s in their personal practice (Do as I say…not as I do)? Many thanks for considering my questions!

I attended the same forum on the e-portfolio in San Francisco with a colleague from our Center for Teaching and Learning. A couple of reflections: not much has changed in the last 3-5 years in terms of struggling to figure out the best way to get student buy-in with portfolios as a longitudinal learning tool across the curriculum and within general education; faculty and administrators often rush to place portfolios in the context of program assessment and accountability rather than starting with student learning, intellectual growth, and self-reflection as the primary purposes for asking students to build and maintain portfolios, paper-based, electronic, or both. Our fits and starts with portfolios on this campus suggest that we need to identify disciplines, faculty, and student degree programs that would benefit most from using portfolios and pilot them to create a new culture of portfolio usage among students and faculty who find them to be useful, easy to maintain, and truly relevant to their educational experiences.

I like the questions, although I am somewhat intrigued that people should still be asking them after so many years of ePortfolio exploration. Here are my responses:

1. How can we best promote student investment in and ownership of the e-portfolio process?

There are two major aspects of an ePortfolio that will promote student investment. (a) Firstly, ownership. If students can stamp their own identity on the application if colour schemes, font-styles, added graphics and widgets can be incorporated then there develops a sense of ownership, “Look, this is ME!” (b) It is not much use investing effort in creating a well-organised collation of artefacts, reflections etc if the students cannot take their ePortfolios with them on to their next posting, whether HE, employment or even ‘between jobs’. – Simply, if an ePortfolio is not portable it can hardly be called an ePortfolio.

2. Should e-portfolios function primarily as showcases of students’ best finished work, or ought students to include works in progress, or even ideas that may still be germinating?

It must be both. The one main repository will certainly contain artefacts of which the student has pride enough to want to show to others, possibly publicly. However, in getting to that stage, some items will still be in the process of development, perhaps needing peer-review or mentoring. Yes, even a place to put scrap ideas, half finished drafts, plans or collations of references or bibliographic notes.

3. Should e-portfolios be private or public? If public, what are the benefits of that, and how can legitimate privacy concerns be dealt with?

A good ePortfolio tool will allow both. eFolio for instance requires, on setup, the student’s Date of Birth and if under 19yrs will automatically set the ePortfolio to private. Youngsters can then allocate ‘permissions’ to parents, teachers, mentors or peers to see selected pages. Again, a good system will allow 19+ students to make certain ‘views’ public whilst leaving others as private.

4. Who should choose the platform for the e-portfolio? The student? The institution? Some combination of both? (An interesting note: Salt Lake Community College appears to have taken a “both-and” approach on this question. When creating the e-portfolio they’ll use as part of their general education program, students may choose from three supported platforms: Yola, Weebly, or WordPress. They’re also free to choose a different platform if they wish; they just can’t count on support for it.)

Although I like the idea of students choosing their own applications, as a teacher, I would not relish having to adjust to navigating around several different systems. After all, if the institution is to encourage whole-school implementation then all staff should be able to familiarise themselves with the tools that the students are using. There is a special synergy when all staff and students are using the same system. Collaboration, messaging and use of a variety of Web2.0 tools would make for an horrendous duplication of functionalities. But, I suppose it will also depend on the age of the students. The list of three ‘supported platforms’ are mere websites or blogging tools and only include a small fraction of the functionality of a real ePortfolio. Although ‘Free’ in their basic state there are obvious inadequacies (including support) that require paying for. Personally, I would not call any of these tools an ePortfolio!

5. Are e-portfolios best used within a particular course? A particular department or program? Across an entire campus?

Yes, quite possible to use across a whole campus, particularly if all faculty have had previous equal opportunity to staff training and access to workstations. However, introductions are often best done incrementally. Some successful implementations have started, with younger students, in pastoral contexts, or ‘learning to learn’ sessions. Concerning multi-media, some subjects, like Design & Technology lend themselves to the use of graphics, Drama Studies might use video or Language lessons might start by using MP3 recordings. Quite simply, I believe that every department can start from within their own experiences, and quite soon students will take the initiative to use a whole variety of rich-media throughout all subject areas.

Please see http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/eFolio-01.htm or
http://www.efoliointheuk.blogspot.com

In the 1997 film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact, S. R. Hadden teaches Ellie Arroway “the first rule of government spending: why have one when you can have two for twice the price?”

If only! When it comes to curriculum materials like textbooks, practice exercises, test item banks, instructional videos, and online simulations, our government, universities, and schools are more than happy to pay for them again, and again, and a hundred thousand times again, year after year.

This made sense in the days before the advent of the Internet, when students had to compete for access to educational materials. In those days, if Johnny was using the calculator, Jenny had to wait her turn; if Mary was reading the science book, Mark had to wait his turn. Schools needed to purchase a calculator and a science book for each child in school if they wanted each child to have ready access to these resources.

Since the advent of the Internet, the competitive nature of educational materials has disappeared. While Susie is running calculations in the online chemistry laboratory, another million students are using it too; while Johnny is exploring genetics in the online simulator, another million students are too. It’s just like when you read the news on CNN.com while a million other people do, too – we don’t have to wait our turn for the newspaper any more.

An online educational resource is different from a physical educational resource because every student can use the same online resource at the same time. We don’t need to buy a copy for every student in the nation / state / school – one copy is enough for everyone! Yet despite this fact, schools in the state still enter into contracts with commercial online curriculum providers that require them to pay for a “copy” for each and every student. What a waste!

But it gets worse. In the past we took some solace after paying the huge bill for all those calculators and textbooks in knowing that, once we paid for them, third graders could use them for many years to come, or undergraduates could sell them back. Unfortunately, commercial curriculum providers don’t sell ebooks or online curriculum materials – they rent them to schools and students, generally on a one-year contract. This means that in addition to paying for tens of thousands of copies when only one copy would suffice, we pay for permission to use each of these copies again next year, and pay for them all again the next year, and then again the next…

These commercial online curriculum licenses are perhaps the single biggest waste of taxpayer dollars in all of government spending, and that’s really saying something. Our students and schools pay for tens of thousands of copies, and pay for them again and again, year after year, when simply producing one copy owned by the public would suffice.

Commercial online curriculum providers understand the new economics of creating and distributing digital content via the Internet – that you can create one copy and sell access to it millions of times with no reproduction, warehousing, or shipping costs. These commercial providers take lucrative advantage of the fact that our governments, universities, and school districts do not understand these new economics. And it’s their prerogative to continue to pillage the villagers as long as we remain ignorant.

Rather than remain in the dark about the new economics, our governments, universities, and school districts should do their homework, wise up, and use taxpayer dollars to create a collection of online educational resources that the public can pay for once and then own and reuse indefinitely. Understanding and leveraging these new economics to the public’s advantage will save our cash-starved education systems a significant amount of money that can be redirected to other worthy areas.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) provide an excellent model. Some years ago they recognized that because taxpayers pay for the research they fund, the results of that research should be freely available to the public. Under the old paradigm, taxpayer money went to NIH, which funded research, which was then published in copyrighted journals, which universities and others had to pay to read. So taxpayers actually paid for this research many times over – once to fund it, and then again and again for every public education institution in their state who subscribed to the journals. And the public still had no access to those research results (since the vast majority of the public are not affiliated with a university).

Rather than continue to waste taxpayer dollars so egregiously, paying for research several times over, the NIH Public Access Policy (which became official in April 2008, also known as the “NIH mandate”) now states that each and every one of the final, peer-reviewed journal manuscripts reporting NIH funded research must be placed in a publicly accessible (free) digital archive (see http://publicaccess.nih.gov/). As a consequence, taxpayers no longer pay multiple times over for access to the results of research they funded in the first place.

Education should take the same path. Any and all curriculum materials whose development is funded with taxpayer dollars should be freely and openly available to the public. We paid for them, they belong to us, and it is nothing short of stupid for a university or school district to pay for them a second, third, or 500,000th time. Publicly-funded educational materials should belong to the public, and there is no reasonable justification for claiming otherwise. Congrats to the Department of Education for getting this right, and here’s to the rest of government following their enlightened lead!

(1) The US Federal Government has, for decades, provided grants to higher education to produce new research and educational content. To say it is “dangerous for [the Federal Government] to be in the product business” is irrelevant. The Department of Labor (DOL) is exercising rational, responsible public policy that more efficiently uses public tax dollars to improve educational opportunities.

The DOL has put forth a simple, effective public policy: Taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. 

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.

Information that is designed, developed and distributed through the generosity of public tax dollars should be accessible to the public that paid for it — without undue restrictions or
limits.

If you think about this open policy, it makes sense. We, the American taxpayers, should get what we paid for.

(2) Karen Cator is correct: the commercial publishers (textbook, journals, etc.) should be embracing and supporting this new public policy. When publicly funded digital content (courses, textbooks, data, research, etc.) is openly licensed with a CC BY license — http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 — everyone can use and modify the open content to meet their needs — including the commercial publishers. 

Moreover, the CC BY license does not restrict commercialization of the open content. To be clear, the commercial publishers can take all $2B of content created in this DOL grant, change it, make it better, add value, and sell it. The consumer (states, colleges, students) will then have a choice: (a) use the free openly licensed version(s) or (b) purchase the commercial for-a-fee version. If the commercial content / services are worth paying for, people will pay. If not, they won’t.

Next step? We should applaud the Departments of Labor and Education for their work
and encourage all US Federal agencies to follow suit: require CC BY licenses on all content produced with federal funding.

Cable Green
Director of Global Learning
Creative Commons

A little late to this conversation, though I saw the original post on a local email list this week and responded there.

@bhughes316, the free puppy / free beer analogy applies in some fields, but not all.  What annual updates are there (really) to Algebra, Calculus, or the History of Western Civilization?  Yet publishers force students to buy new (not used!) editions every other year.  

@RWEJD:disqus makes some very cogent points, especially regarding interoperability (hello, folks – IEEE1484, anyone?  Anyone? Beuller?)

But…

On the scale of US government spending, $100M is very nearly a rounding error.  NASA spent more than twice that much for a launch tower for the now-canceled Ares rocket.  

Yes, $100M was the market  cap of PLATO when I worked there in the mid-to-late 90′s. But that was a publicly-traded company controlled by MBAs with a clear market and profit motive, as opposed to a loose collection of universities, colleges, and departments controlled by Ph.D.s whose market is ill-defined and constantly shifting, who are new (and usually hostile) to the idea of treating education as a business, and who are waking up from a long sleep of freely-flowing funding to new and harsh fiscal realities.

As to high-quality, easily-found, editable, open resources, Google this phrase: “free college algebra textbook”  Stitz and Zeager didn’t even use IEEE1484 metadata.  Google’s getting pretty smart.

@tom4cam:disqus  made the same point I did in my response to the list – the publishers need to realize that they’re in the business of creating content, not printing books.  Newspapers got that wake-up call a few years ago.  It’s been painful and ugly for the ones who have not been able to adapt.

And as  @wayne macintosh pointed out, these are still early days for Open Content.  Just as with the dawn of the automobile, the airplane, and the moving picture, there will be slow and incremental progress (punctuated by the Great Leap of Insight) together with wasted effort and spectacular crashes.

Except that it will all happen at Web 2.0 speeds.

 That is a little self serving don’t you think? Creative Commons has been lobbying federal and state governments to make it the official license model.  That is reflected in CC public comments on several request for comments.  This is not to put down in any way Creative Commons and the value it has brought to the table and the void it has filled between copyright and public domain, but why mandate a specific license program from a specific organization. Maybe there are other license models or standards that will emerge.  Maybe some government developed or supported content should just be public domain as it has been done long before Creative Commons was formed.   Rather than prescribe a specific license category produced by an independent non-government entity that is not accountable to taxpayers, the government should specify what content is covered and how it may be used and made available.  Suggesting Creative Commons as an example yes, mandating a specific organization’s licensing model, no.

As one who has taught in both settings, I second your recommendation.

College teaching is the best career in the world, but only if you’re lucky enough to be employed full time and receive benefits.  Right now,  upwards of 70% of college teaching is done by “contingent” faculty or adjuncts, some of whom are paid so poorly they need food stamps to get by.  I would think twice about steering my child in this direction.  Public schools at least offer full-time employment.

But…we have to treat our adjuncts better. I made that career decision, but I know many in my position would have kept the full time job, benefits, retirement, and pay. My adjunct life was stressful because of that lack of stability. The job itself was awesome.

In most school corporations, teachers don’t get summers “off.” They are ten-month employees and don’t get paid for their summers. In many cases when they are “paid” over the summer, this is because they have elected to have their paychecks paid out over twelve months rather than ten.

I forgot to mention that when my dad was at home, he spent a great deal of time creating unique tests and quizzes and grading papers…all unpaid time.  

As an adjunct in a community college state-wide system that is trying to develop a union for adjuncts and an ex-teacher from within the high school arena, I wouldn’t go back to the secondary system for anything. Daily, I felt like I was taking my life in my hands.

Yes, being an adjunct right now is really tough… please read this article sent to me by our union field rep about how many of us with post grad or terminal degrees are beginning to need Food Stamps, Aid to Families and Children, WIC, Medicare and other governmental assistance programs  just to get by.  As the article said, who knew the path to a Ph.D. job would lead us to a welfare level of income.

But even now, the overwhelming students I deal with today need developmental classes that aren’t even at high-school level. They are studying basic levels of math including adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing and learning 5th to 8th grade vocabulary. I love my students, I love my job but I can’t figure out how they got out of high school in the first place.

I taught high school and middle school for 10 years, and have now worked at the college level for two. I do not share the author’s pessimism about the high school teaching profession. Although some of the external factors he notes are real, and can be a hassle, what happens inside the classroom can still be profoundly rewarding.

Teenagers are much maligned in our society, but I found they taught me plenty, made be laugh quite a lot, and inspired more hope in me for the future than do many of the adults I encounter in life. Although I enjoy my current job, I miss the degree of impact I could have on a 9th grader having some of the first original ideas of her life, or the refugee student adjusting to a completely new lifestyle. High school is an incredibly important and fascinating time in life, and whether or not society chose to be thankful for the work I did there, every day I felt like I was doing something worthwhile.
Now, by virtue of my position in higher education, work conditions are better in some ways … but sometimes, for a fleeting moment, when I finding myself spending more & more time in meetings and playing other elements of the game of academia I actually (shock!) wish I was back with a group of 25-30 teenagers.

That’s probably because most of them don’t send their children to public school. On the other hand, just try to get them to put real money where their mouths are and raise teacher pay. I think you will find the cheap sentiments evaporating and the long knives coming out. 

illusions, not dilusions. Hope you weren’t teaching English, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you were. American public screwl teachers graduate in the bottom third of their graduating classes, nationwide. I agree with your last paragraph completely, the “education” major is for the barely educated and produces teachers who know nothing of a subject and thus are capable of teaching nothing. Education depts. at colleges and unies are nothing more than a racket…a legalized racket. 

 Veritatus–Your inspiration has no end.  In fact, it doesn’t have much of a beginning either.

As a teacher educator, I find a mixture of student abilities, attitudes, and aptitudes at any level (for over 10 years I have been teaching novices, upper-level undergrads, and in-service teachers, with the occasional aspiring administrator thrown in for good measure). Much of what our programs teach are the techniques of educating the young, and techniques change and vary due to technological advances, societal changes, and public mood. While teaching is tough business these days, and the environment within which teachers work is admittedly somewhat hostile, the real reason most of our young adults seek entry into the field is due to their love of children, rather than their love of learning, which requires some intellectual elbow grease). While I generally avoid playing the blame game, what is most crucial for educational reform, I believe, is a change of culture. As Postman said, we (the public) are generally engaged in “amusing ourselves to death.” Our culture is not based on textual literacy, but rather on the interplay of images. We eschew deep learning, since whatever we need to know can generally be accessed via new technologies, new websites, new search engines, etc. We are fast-paced and superficial, have a history of mocking our literati as elite snobs, and in general avoid intellectualism like the plague. Why do we expect schooling to fix this? Teachers, parents, administrators, teacher educators, etc., are all caught in the same trap: a culture that prefers amusement to academic rigor can never get this story right.

I spent 1967 in Vietnam. From 1974 to 2003 I served in a middle school classroom. I’d go back to SE Asia in a second if someone told me I had to spend another year in a public school in the US, especially today. Parents, if you love your children, don’t let them grow up to be teachers, at least not in the United States. And parents, if you find education lacking in the US, you have nobody to blame but yourselves.

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Not in my state, taken over by conservatives who publicly call public schoolteachers “thugs.”

The thuggish behavior of my conservative governor and legislators is getting them recalled.

And yet, my youngest just graduated three days ago with an education degree — and she was back in her classroom of first- through third-graders the next morning, unpaid, to complete her student teaching.  The first thing that she heard about that day was the firing of teachers, now that their union has been gutted by the governor.  So she, an unpaid student teacher, was asked to step in and take over a kindergarten class for the remaining four weeks.

Fortunately, her thuggish college profs intervened and told the school district’s administrative thugs to think again.

Interesting. I’m into my second term at a 2yr, and have thus far not encountered a single parent. (I understand that, in some situations, I would be able to refuse to talk to them, due to privacy laws.) What are your encounters like?

I only check in on these websites/exchanges on an occasional basis. However, I am always amazed at how often the people who bitch the most about their lives and academic situations (e.g., Henry Adams, Robert Lopez) somehow find the time to constantly post/respond to just about every thread/article that gets posted on the CHE website. Maybe if they spent more time on their work their academic lives would be better?

I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I feel like there’s an organized pr campaign undermining public school in an effort to either A) keep our kids ignorant, compliant and fit for low wage corporate jobs or B) to manipulate parents into enrolling our kids in for profit charter and online schools because we think we have to avoid public schools to give our kids a chance. (Is Wal Mart in the charter/online school business yet?) 

Even without having been high school teachers, the idea that”only” coping with 25-30 teenagers might be preferable would have been highly credible to me in my time on some college committees.

 You are not alone with conspiracy theories – check this out!
http://mobile.salon.com/2011/09/12/reformmoney/

just as Micheal said I’m dazzled that anyone can get paid $5387 in 1 month on the computer. did you look at this web site N u t t y R i c h   d o t   c o m

A tongue-in-cheek article, I would say. I have done this kind of bashing myself. And I am a college-level teacher.

In England we also have ‘Ofsted’- the federal inspector of schools.Feared and loathed by many teachers! Another reason to stay away from teaching as a career!

I agree. I just wish more teachers who no longer have the passion nor skills would leave it. Is it a profession? Are professionals treated in the manner in which they are treated? That is debatable. Of course most professionals cannot decide they do not want to collaborate with others or wear jeans to work daily. Nor do professionals get told what to teach, when to teach, etc.

I am strongly recommending that my children are not K-12 teachers.

I agree completely. I even see the lack of respect, lack of administration professionalism, and simple bashing at a two year college I adjunct at; even adjuncts get the full scale of the aforementioned. 

You mean teaching is worst than being a journalist in a war zone?

Your every blog amazes me.
p.s.  will you change your “late” paper policy next term?

If our students and their families REALLY REALLY REALLY understood the way faculty are paid for and allocated (including, perhaps especially, those who do not teach) they would want to tear down the entire edifice and start over.

Or they might just pick up their skateboards and forget about it.

As one who currently is teaching in both and would like fix that by getting a full-time CC job, I also concur. 

Who was causing the damage you speak of in your comment?  The teachers calling in sick to protest ?  I do not know much about the situation and this is why I ask.

Why do you read CHE if you believe it is Stalinist?   Please give me the sources of your claims that  ”American public screwl teachers graduate in the bottom third of their graduating classes, nationwide”  

Shanna, your name sounds like you might be female — as, it happens, am I. Isn’t it time the country stopped using the nasty, extraordinarily sexist female-dog metaphor to describe someone who complains unfairly?

Well – I can’t say that I disagree…however – prior to accepting a position as an ESL teacher working in the Middle East, I worked for 3 years as a substitute teacher in southern California. In some ways, it is considered a battle ground. I worked at 1 high school for the entire period not because I was a permanent site substitute but because I liked the school and the school liked me. I grew to really love the students there and god knows, the school day was the only stability that many of these kids knew. Yes – there were the trouble makers and yes – I did have students who smoked pot in the class. (they were tried and convicted, swiftly. Read suspended or expelled and given a police record) This being said, I would have stayed working at that school but for 2 reasons. 1) I could not get a permanent position because of the current state of the economy and 2) NOW…I would have to make a minimum of $75K to come anywhere close to equaling my current wage in the Middle East. Mystarting salary in that district with my MA would have been $49.6. After taxes – well, suffice it to say that teachers are grossly underpaid.

Hi. I think I will change it, but I’m not sure how yet. There’s got to be a happy medium for that late policy.

Getting someone to join the army is a hard sell. The average age of a person in the military is 19 years. These kids don’t have college educations and they are likely from low-income families.  The US Army has spent a lot of money on advertising campaigns to try to communicate the positive elements of a thankless, dangerous job working for one of the most poorly managed organizations in existence.  Perhaps the NEA should contact some advertising companies and begin a PR campaign in earnest to recruit new teachers.

Perhaps the wrong way to deal with the problem but it does demonstrate very commendable
 initiative and cojones on the part of students who will get off their skate boards to take some action. The petition was polite and stated a reasonable case and perhaps “Bland College” should consider this adjunct for something permanent and find more adjuncts – in English should not be too difficult unless they are in one of the awful parts of the Nation – of which there are a few.

  excellent article 

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Well, it may be true that SEC universities do not hire PhDs from the Ivy League (a “lesser” conference).  But is that because the Ivy League is a lesser conference, or perhaps, because the Ivy PhDs go elsewhere?  Perhaps in some case of conference correlations of faculty hiring, lesser is more?

John Thelin
University of Kentucky (an SEC member university)

Most top football schools “hire” players with considerable “scholarships,” who have very different profiles from those of the genuine scholars who attend. Their graduation rate is abysmal, partly because their preparation is in football and not academics, partly because of the time and energy they expend in football, and partly because their ambition is to become professional football players, not lawyers or doctors or scientists or English teachers.
Robert Hutchins had it right. Some years after he had closed down the University of Chicago’s Big Ten football program, some reporters asked him if he planned ever to reinstate football. He replied, “If I ever do, I’ll buy the Chicago Bears.”

The longer I think about the place of athletics in academia and the more I research the
topic the more complex the issues seem to be. One way I have come to simplify
the situation is to admit to the fact that, as Mr. Bissinger notes, college
athletics is a tiered system.  For state universities the place on the athletic tier and the place on the academic tier are often very compatible and often comes down to money.

So, as an initial way to consider the place of college athletics and football in particular is to follow the money and see where it comes from and where it goes. Consider the admittedly few financially successful schools. Let’s take just two from the Big Ten for example – Michigan and Ohio State. Both have self-sustaining athletic programs driven primarily by revenues associated with football and men’s basketball. Michigan sponsors 13 men’s sports and 14 women’s sports. Ohio State sponsors 17 men’s sports and 18 women’s sports. Clearly proceeds from two sports are enabling a large number of students to attend each university who might otherwise not have the opportunity or interest and perhaps the case can be made that this contributes to the academic reputation of the institution. By this criterion there is little defense for the decision that has been made by the University of Maryland.

This observation does lead to the proposition that the work of a few men is generating
big bucks for the schools and supporting other athletes and that those men are being exploited. For the sake of argument I reject that position. Not only are hose men getting access to a valuable education but, and I’ve not seen this discussed, they are getting specialized training and a chance to develop physical skills that will enable them, if they are talented enough to make a living playing the sport. This is not nearly as true for basketball as it is for football, but does anyone really believe that Tim Tebow was physically ready to play pro ball when he came out of Nease High School? I saw him play his senior year – even superman needed some development and U of Florida provided that chance in a high caliber physical facility under the tutelage of skilled trainers and coaches.

However, I question the model for universities at the next level both in terms of the reputations for athletics and academics .  Let’s consider the University of Central Florida. In terms of student enrollment it is one of the 3 largest universities in the country and it seems to want its athletic program to fit in with schools like Texas and Ohio State. In 2010 44% of its operating income for athletics came from student fees with an additional 6% coming from the university and from FY 2005-2006 through FY 2009-2010 the UCF athletic program received yearly direct support from the state of between $345,000 and $600,000. Despite these subsidies the athletic program had a cumulative deficit of $2.9 million dollars when operating revenues are compared to operating expenses.  UCF supports 6 men’s sports and 8 women’s sports. As we move to a lower tier then it seems that the opportunities for student athletes also diminish although students are being called on to bear more of the cost of the program and in the case of UCF state funds that could otherwise go to the academic budget are being spent on athletics.  If anything I think that this hurts the academic reputation of this type of school.

That is not entirely true. It is true that student-athletes have access to academic staff, advisors and tutors that help them manage their time and help them with readings, paper drafts, etc. However, non-athletes have access to a different pool of departmental and general tutoring services that student-athletes don’t because of their travel and practice schedules. When you take into account the academic negatives associated with sport (missed class for travel, no time in afternoon to meet faculty or TAs,  lack of energy after practice) and add in the fact that a certain percentage of these student-athletes have far lower academic indexes than general student body, I don’t think the academic support provided does much more than level the academic playing field. Even 3.7 gpa pre-med student-athletes struggle because of the burdens of their sport. Student-athlete grad rates (with excpetion of men’s basketball) are impressive despite this academic support.

Yet again V-P Fant evinces unfamiliarity with English.   For example, he writes ADVOCATED FOR THE ELIMINATION rather than ADVOCATED THE ELIMINATION.   He writes ARGUING AGAINST THE FLAGSHIP SO MUCH AS HE IS ARGUING THAT rather than ARGUING AGAINST THE FLAGSHIP SO MUCH AS ARGUING THAT.

Perhaps at his “university” grammar counts for nothing.   Clearly, Mr. Fant’s professional success at Union University has not been impeded.   But his employer, not to mention the CHRONICLE, should politely suggest to him that he master basic English, which I assume is the sole language he commands.

And please:   SYNERGY is so overworked a term that the use of it makes anyone sensitive to treit talk blush.

DS