The Online Education Database, or OEDb, released its third annual ranking of online educational institutions this week, prompting announcements and press releases from many of those that appeared near the top of the list.
The Houston-based OEDb, a subsidiary of DomainDev, is a for-profit company that makes money by referring visitors to the many online colleges and universities that advertise with it—which is to say that a more accurate title for the company might be the Online Education Database of Our Advertisers.
But the annual rankings are a completely separate service, OEDb founder Andy Hagans told The Chronicle this afternoon. Hagans conceived of the idea when he noticed that there were no mainstream rankings for online schools. Any perceived conflict of interest, he said, should be dispelled by the site’s thoroughly transparent methodology.
OEDb ranks the colleges according to eight separate metrics. Two of the metrics—retention rate and graduation rate—are the same as the ones U.S. News & World Report uses to formulate its yearly ranking of traditional colleges and universities. Several others bear some similarity to U.S. News metrics without being identical: The OEDb rankings do not use peer assessments of colleges, but they do score how many times a particular college’s Web site is linked to from other colleges’ Web sites. The metric, referred to as “peer Web citations,” appears to use these links as a proxy for a college’s reputation in the virtual community of higher learning.
The remaining OEDb metrics are acceptance rate, student-faculty ratio, financial aid, scholarly citations (how often outside scholars have cited the institution’s research), and how many years the institution has been accredited by the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Postsecondary Education.
The most distinct aspect of the OEDb’s formula is that it weights all the metrics equally. For instance, the quality of each college’s financial-aid program is given the same consideration as how many times that college is linked to from other colleges’ Web sites.
Hagans said he decided to assign equal weight to all criteria because “any weighting we could give them would be arbitrary.” He pointed out that visitors are able to view the rankings by individual metric, in effect allowing them to ascribe their own weight to each one. “We also publish all the raw data,” he said, “so people could produce their own rankings if they want.”—Steve Kolowich
7 Responses to Behind New Online College and University Rankings
drj50 - August 6, 2012 at 3:06 pm
I agree with the advice “don’t lie.”
But to expand a little on “give them . . . what they need to know, and no more” I would add that there are lots of levels of “looking,” and you don’t have to reveal just how hard you’re looking. There’s a lot of space between “yeah, I thought I should maybe see what else is out there” and “I’m spending 6 hours a night sending out applications because I can’t wait to get out of this hell hole.” I would err on the minimalist side.
nyhist - August 6, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Don’t lie is excellent advice–to people at a place you are interested in moving to, as well as the place you are leaving. Don’t assume that people won’t talk to each other about what you said. Lies are easily exposed. Once a finalist for a position in our dept was taken off our list after he lied about the reason he was looking for a new job. All it took was one phone call by a member of our dept to a member of his current dept to expose the truth–which, if he’d told it to us at the outset, wouldn’t have disqualified him. But lying about it did.
raymond_j_ritchie - August 6, 2012 at 9:39 pm
Your referees need to know you are applying for jobs but I do not think it is necessary to tell them about every job you are applying for. It is good manners to tell them if you get short-listed for a job.
As for your workplace it is a case by case thing. My own experience is that they show no interest in whether you are applying for jobs or not. If you expect otherwise you probably overestimate your own importance. That might be different if you have a tenured position but I have no personal experience of being in that situation nor being a vassal of someone who announced they were leaving. If you have not got a permanent job they expect it. If your contract is running out you need to find out what you are legally obliged to do and what you do in addition depends on the situation. Copyright on your teaching materials vary from country to country. The addressing you use on papers you subsequently publish can also be an issue. You are expected to leave the lab clean and get rid of the dead wombat you have in the freezer. Notice can vary from a whole semester or more to shorter times. You cannot walk away from a course in mid semester because you think you only need to give 2 weeks notice. You talk about stakeholders. Your graduate students are very much stakeholders and sometimes they are left to die like pelican chicks when the desert lake dries out. That happens rather frequently and causes the most ill-feeling.
msumenglish - August 7, 2012 at 11:32 pm
College athletic coaches break their contracts on a yearly basis when something better comes along.
kokeshi - August 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
It all depends on your reasons for searching and the environment you work in. I have been in my current position for 2 1/2 years and for this position, that is longer than normal. The problem is that there have not been any opennings within my office to move up and there is no indication that there will be anytime soon. I cannot put my career and life on hold. My immediate supervisor is the one who actually started sending me positions she thought would be a good fit to my goals and a move up. I am currently looking and most people in my office know this, but my reasons have less to do with job dissatisfaction that they do with needing to move on to keep my career on a good trajectory. I guess it all depends on the culture of your office.
davi2665 - August 8, 2012 at 11:04 am
My advice is to provide NO information to anyone at your current workplace about a job search. If possible, wait until you have a contract in place, and then inform them. In most circumstances, you will be written off if the upper administration hears that you are looking for another position.
der_maverick78 - August 8, 2012 at 12:45 pm
I agree with Kokeshi completely. If you reveal you are searching due to dissatisfaction, administration, colleagues, and students will treat you like a lame duck.