More accidental dismissal news and a modest proposal to the admissions office

Posted on May 9, 2012 by | 14 Comments

There’s a pretty good article in annarbor.com that goes into some more detail about the whole “you’re kicked out– not” email debacle of last weekend, “EMU reassessing dismissal practices after mistakenly sending notices to 7,700 students.”  The short version is that the cause appears to be (and this is a quote from EMU Director of Communications Walter Kraft) “some sort of operational issue” with this GradesFirst company.  Here’s another passage that really jumped out at me:

The 133 rightly dismissed students were sent additional emails and hard-copy letters confirming their dismissal.

EMU currently has a $15,000-per-year contract with the Alabama-based company.

“Their role is to help us get out communications like this and help us manage the list of people who would receive messages about their academic standing,” said Kraft, who added: “They contacted us fairy early as this was happening on Friday and apologized.”

The article also tries to address the “just how big of a deal was this” debate that has been going on here too, with some students calling the news “devastating” and others seeing it as an obvious mistake.  But really what gets me is this contract EMU has with GradesFirst.  A regular annarbor.com commentator who goes by “Cash” put it this way:

Just wondering….133 students were academically dismissed at the end of winter term, correct?

That couldn’t be handled internally? really?

You are paying $15,000 annually for someone to send out a couple hundred emails for the whole year?

Obviously the list of failing students came from your own internal system, not the vendor’s system.

So how hard is it to send out 133 emails?

Holy smokes.

Please let me know when this gets bid. I’d be glad to send out 133 emails twice per year for $15,000.

I couldn’t have put it any better myself.  And unless GradesFirst is empowered/allowed to go through EMU’s systems to find those 130 or so students who fail to make grades in the first place (I suppose that’s possible, but even if that is the case, how hard is that?), it does kind of sound like we’re paying some entity a lot of money to do something that one would assume would be the job of someone at EMU.

So, I’m with Cash on this:  if this really is the case, I’d like to know how I can get in on that action.  I think I’m qualified.  In my day-job and at the height of the busiest times of the fall and winter semester, it is not at all uncommon for me to receive and deal with 50 email messages a day.  As a program coordinator in my department for writing majors, I routinely send out messages via blind carbon copy or mailing lists to dozens of students at a time.  And since I actually also happen to be a faculty member at EMU who advises lots of students, it even would be kind of legit if I were to contact these students on behalf of the institution.  It’d certainly be better than some anonymous operation in Alabama, right?

So if there’s any way I could pick up this up as a side business, that’d be great.  If someone from the administration admissions wants to contact me at emutalk@gmail.com, I’d be happy to talk terms.

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Posted in Academics, Administrator Life, In the media..., Student Life

Oh Ypsi, Ypsi….

Posted on May 9, 2012 by | 3 Comments

Well, this is kind of a bummer.  This morning I read in annarbor.com “Ypsilanti voters reject Water Street deb retirement milage and income tax,” and by a wide margin.  In my view, it’s a sad day because what it says is that voters in the city aren’t willing to invest in it.  Granted, I’m not crazy about raising taxes either, but given the situation the city is in, it’s difficult to see what other choice we have.  The “no taxes” crowd certainly don’t have an answer.

I suppose these issues are not related, but I can’t but help make the connection with the proposal that is floating around where EMU (along with DTE and Washtenaw County) would give loan incentives to employees who want to live in Ypsilanti.  A loyal reader sent me that article, but I’m also reminded of the piece in annabor.com from last week, “New program could offer EMU employees up to $10,000 to purchase homes in Ypsilanti.”   As is the case with the “no taxes” article, the comments here are negative both about EMU and Ypsilanti.

It’s depressing, really.  I mean, I don’t have any specific or deeply-felt personal loyalty to EMU or to Ypsilanti.  I work at EMU and it’s a fantastic job, but as my Dad told me many years ago, you can love your job but your job will never love you.  I live in Ypsi and have lived in the Normal Park neighborhood for 13 years now.  It’s a great neighborhood and I love living close enough to work to walk or ride my bike.  But I’m not really an “Ypsi proud” kind of guy, largely because even after living in Michigan for as long as I’ve lived anywhere else, I’m not really from here, and if I were buying a house right now– even with the EMU incentive– I’d probably buy in Ann Arbor.

That said, I grow weary of the bashing and even self-loathing of both EMU and Ypsilanti.  The comments on the annabor.com story on incentives to buy a house in Ypsilanti are quite disgusting, and it’s sad that a majority of Ypsilanti citizens would rather drive the city further into the ditch and/or into the hands of an emergency manager than to pitch in to pay the bills to keep the community going.  Sad indeed.

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Posted in Administrator Life, In the media..., Ypsilanti

How many students did we kick out (accidentally) last week?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Here’s a good reason as to why EMU needs to stay out in front the story about how many students we (or GradesFirst?) accidentally dismissed last Friday: in my EMU news feed tonight, there were links to two different stories about it all. The first was from The Republic of Columbus, Indiana, “Bad grade notifications sent to 7,700 Eastern Michigan University students; meant for 100.” The second story, from the UK’s Mail Online, “University accidentially Emails all 23,000 students ‘kicking them out for bad grades’” is inaccurate and makes the problem worse than it actually was.

It still is a bit of a mystery as to what went wrong, too.

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Posted in Blogosphere, College Fun, Faculty Life, In the media..., Student Life

The online/open education revolution, or not

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 4 Comments

There’s been a lot in the news lately about online education and open education, which are two slightly different things.  Curt Bonk has a nice post that rounds up a lot of recent articles here; but I have been reading some slightly different things as of late.  I don’t know if there’s a clear connection between all these things or not, but I see at least a vague connection in my own mind:

So, what to make of all this?

For starters, I think that Blake (and others who would take this ala carte approach) are missing at least two of the points of university degrees in terms of both teaching and credentialing.  First, in order to know what classes to not take because they would be a waste of time, one has to have quite a bit more life and educational experience typical of people starting college degrees.  It’s really easy to take a course and then after the fact say “well, that was a waste of time.”  Not so easy before you take the class.

Academics debate the point and amount of general education all the time, as we did vigorously a few years ago at EMU.  But I think the prevailing wisdom is it’s a good educational experience for everyone with a college degree to have at least some introduction to other fields of study– that is, other than a “major” or a “minor”– and there are some basics that most colleges believe students ought to know something about:  writing, math, “the humanities,” and so forth.

As for all of these hyperbolic claims about the revolution of online education and how it is going to change all the rules: we’ve seen this sort of thing before.  Many years ago, I did some research on late 19th/early 20th century correspondence courses– you know, through snail mail.  Without going into details about all that now, there were a lot of people back then who thought that courses through the mail were going to bring education to the masses and largely replace conventional college degree programs.  That turned out not to be the case.  So I’m not saying that online and open education aren’t going to change the way universities work– and I’m all for that.  I’m just saying that I don’t think college degrees are going to become any less important anytime soon.

After all, even Shaq thinks it’s important!  After finishing his undergraduate degree and finishing an online MBA from the University of Phoenix, and now this doctorate.  Why?  I’m not questioning O’Neal’s intelligence or sincerity in pursing a degree, but it’s not like someone is (or isn’t ) going to hire him because of this degree, and he could have just studied and learned on his own.  But the reason for him seems to be similar to a lot of others:  besides having a credential, a college degree represents a personal goal and achievement that is significantly more tangible than participating in a free and relatively anonymous educational “experience.”

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Posted in Academics, College Fun, Faculty Life, In the media..., Student Life

Is the end of football approaching?

Posted on May 6, 2012 by | 8 Comments

The other day, a loyal reader sent me this article from the sports section of The Wall Street Journal,“Why College Football Should be Banned, by Buzz Bissinger.“  After asking myself “the Wall Street Journal has a sorts section?” I read on.  It’s mostly the arguments we’ve heard before; for example:

Football only provides the thickest layer of distraction in an atmosphere in which colleges and universities these days are all about distraction, nursing an obsession with the social well-being of students as opposed to the obsession that they are there for the vital and single purpose of learning as much as they can to compete in the brutal realities of the global economy.

Who truly benefits from college football? Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their alma mater based on the quality of the football team. Coaches such as Nick Saban of the University of Alabama and Bob Stoops of Oklahoma University who make obscene millions. The players themselves don’t benefit, exploited by a system in which they don’t receive a dime of compensation. The average student doesn’t benefit, particularly when football programs remain sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing budgets to the bone.

And so forth.  Now, where I think it really gets interesting is if we think about this in relation to Junior Seau’s suicide and other former players’ bad health.  Maybe we are nearing the end of football as we know it.  Here’s how the excellent blog Daring Fireball put it, quoting from this article from the site Grantland, “What Would the End of Football Look Like?”

This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players — or worse, high schoolers — commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE. Technological solutions (new helmets, pads) are tried and they fail to solve the problem. Soon high schools decide it isn’t worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it’s mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies.

Seems ridiculous?  Well, here’s a quote from that Grantland article to put it in perspective:

Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

Indeed, and I am willing to bet that most of us have no idea who is the World Heavyweight champion right now or even who won the Kentucky Derby yesterday.

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Posted in Blogosphere, In the media..., Sports

Oops! EMU dismisses and then undismisses a bunch of students

Posted on May 5, 2012 by | 31 Comments

Last night, I was sitting around with my family, watching a movie and minding my own business, with the intent of staying off the computer through the weekend.  Then I get an email on my phone from a concerned graduate student informing her she has been dismissed from EMU, a student I knew for certain could not have possibly been kicked out of school because of bad performance.  Here’s a screen shot of what that email looked like:

So, I fired off an angry message to the supposed sender of that email– Molly Weir, the associate director of advising– and I cc-ed a bunch of suits, assuming that this horrifying error was limited to one student.  Then I get an email from another student, followed by emails from Walter Kraft and Susan Martin (and others) apologizing.  Here’s what Martin wrote:

I deeply apologize for the incorrect email many of our students received this evening indicating they were dismissed from the University.  This message was a terrible mistake and I regret the undue alarm and concern it caused. I care deeply about student success and for Eastern to send an alarming message to you indicating you were dismissed is an inexcusable mistake that I personally regret.  We will investigate and determine why this happened and make sure it never happens again.  Please disregard the message or any letter you may receive.  Again, my heartfelt apology for this error.

And then a loyal reader sent me this article from the Freep, too.

Checking my email just a few moments ago this morning, I see another loyal reader sent me screen images of Facebook posts, including the screen shot of the dismissal letter I include above.  These posts were subsequently removed from the EMU page, I assume because it’s not exactly good publicity.  Anyway, this loyal reader claims that 7,700 students received this message.

WTF, EMU?

This loyal reader hypothesized this was a security breach of some sort, but this sure doesn’t look and feel like one of the spam messages.  I am assuming that there will be an investigation and at least some public statement as to who did this and how they managed it, but none of the possible reasons for this are exactly comforting.  If it was this big of a security breach which might also expose student records and all kinds of other confidential things– wow, that’s a big problem.  But if it was some knucklehead in advising sending out messages through the automated GradesFirst and accidentally pushed the “fail everybody” button, that’s obviously kind of a problem too, right?

So, anyone know anything else?  Any readers get dis’ed last night?

Update:

Here’s the email Walter Kraft sent around Saturday afternoon:

To EMU Students, Faculty and Staff,

First and foremost, we reiterate our sincere apologies for the email students received last night that indicated that due to academic issues they were in the process of being dismissed from Eastern. This was a terrible mistake and we know it caused undue concern for many.The purpose of this email is to update you on our investigation into the cause of the issue. The investigation is under way and we have not yet determined the exact cause, but there are some things we do know.

First, this was not a matter of a security breach, hacking or anything of that sort. There was no inappropriate access to any records or student information. We have confirmed that this was an operational error in our notification system from Academic Advising to students who are subject to dismissal for academic performance. We also have confirmed that Academic Advising prepared the message last night in order to notify approximately 100 students of academic performance issues. For some reason, which remains under investigation, the message went out to the entire student body. An outside company that we contract with for this notification process, GradesFirst, sent the dismissal message to the entire student body instead of the file of 100 or so students who were supposed to receive it. GradesFirst has offered an apology for its role in this matter.

Make no mistake about it, we consider this matter very serious and we take full responsibility. We will continue to investigate to determine exactly what went wrong and take whatever steps are necessary to make sure it never happens again. We will have additional updates as we learn more. Please feel free to contact me with any additional questions or concerns.Sincerely,WalterWalter Kraft

Vice President for Communications
102 Welch Hall
Eastern Michigan University

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Posted in Administrator Life, College Fun, EMU President, EMU Technology, In the media..., Security and Safety, Student Life

Help “Protect our Jobs” and collective bargaining in Michigan

Posted on May 4, 2012 by | 1 Comment

EMU-AAUP sent around the following email to faculty, but I’m assuming these are petitions that can be signed by any legal voter in the state:

We really need your help.  It is important that we support the Protect Our Jobs campaign.  Protect our Jobs is the campaign run by the AFLCIO with all the other unions in the State to get the right to have collective bargaining in the State’s constitution.

The MIAAUP has a seat at the Labor Table which is running the campaign.  The campaign needs to gather 500,000 signatures from Michigan citizens.  Without collective bargaining at EMU, you would not have the benefits you have.  Many of you have been helped by the union – please give back.

The EMU-AAUP has promised to collect 700 signatures – one signature per member.  The MIAAUP has hired a student to intern for us and help organize this campaign at the local level.  His name is Daniel Routley and he is an Economics major at EMU.

We have a goal of 12 signatures per faculty member – which is getting one petition completed.  Daniel will be at the following locations and would like you to come get a petition on Monday, May 7th, and then return the petition on Wednesday,May 9th.  We only have until July 1 to complete this campaign.

For next Monday, May 7th, Daniel will be at the following locations:

8:45-9:45 Pray Harrold
9:45-10:45 Porter-Marshall
10:45-11:45 Library
5:00-6:00 COB

He will return to the same places and same times Wednesday, May 9th to collect the petitions.

I think I signed this earlier, but I’ll definitely try to take a look at it again.  Of course, the timing is kinda bad since lots of people who would be around at these times a couple weeks ago aren’t around now.  Anyway, if you see this petition and you believe in the right for workers to organize, take a few minutes to read it and sign it– faculty-type or not.

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Posted in EMU-AAUP, State Government

“Harvard and MIT Put $60-Million Into New Platform for Free Online Courses”

Posted on May 3, 2012 by | 4 Comments

I heard this story on the radio too, but as reported on the CHE web site, “Harvard and MIT Put $60-Million Into New Platform for Free Online Courses.” Here’s a few paragraphs from the opening of the article:

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced a partnership that will host online courses from both institutions free of charge. The platform, its creators say, has the potential to improve face-to-face classes on the home campuses while giving students around the world access to a blue-ribbon education.

The new venture, called edX, grew out of MIT’s announcement last year that it would offer free online courses on a platform called MITx. The combined effort will be overseen by a nonprofit organization governed equally by both universities, each of which has committed $30-million to the project. Anant Agarwal,  director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who led the development of MITx, will serve as edX’s first president.

Students who complete the courses on the edX platform will not receive university credit, although they could earn certificates.

That last paragraph is the kicker for me:  if students don’t get credit that actually leads to a degree, then it seems to me that this is “an education” in only the most abstract of terms.

And I also suspect that these “massively open online courses” will ultimately emerge as a fad that are largely recognized as ineffective.  I’m participating right now in Curtis Bonk’s MOOC about online teaching and learning, and I’m blogging about it a bit on my own site, too.  So far, it seems to me that while it is an interesting discussion and interaction opportunity, it isn’t really an educational opportunity per se.  There really isn’t a lot of teacher/student interaction, and without that or credit, it’s learning for learning’s sake.  There’s a lot that can be learned with these experiences, but there’s a lot that can be learned from things like wikipedia, too. That’s a noble thing, but it certainly isn’t the same as learning in order to gain credit that goes towards a college degree.

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Posted in Academics, In the media...

I’m still voting yes, though

Posted on May 3, 2012 by | 4 Comments

Ypsilanti’s Carmon “trustygetto” Getto posted to his blog last night, “Why I believe voting NO on Tuesday, May 8 is the right thing to do.”  This links to an op-ed Getto wrote for annabor.com and to the no taxes group argument, which I am guessing Getto helped write.

I’m still voting yes.  I think Licorice’s comment before sums up the reasons for me, and it also seems to me that some of Getto’s arguments fall short.  Taxes in the city of Ypsilanti are already significantly higher than in the township, so if that’s the point of comparison, then what I think we really ought to do is everything we can to dissolve the city and merge with the township.  And I am actually not against that– though I think the township is.

All the things that the “no” folks are suggesting about saving money have either been considered or are not mutually exclusive from the mileage and income tax proposal.  That is, there’s no reason why we couldn’t do more things to merge city and township services (I don’t know, maybe we don’t need a city clerk of that stuff can be handled under the name of the township) and raise funds to pay off the stupid (but we’re stuck with it) Water Street project and to try to raise funds from the only resource we have left (because of the small footprint of the city), the income of people who work in Ypsilanti.  And a very modest income tax at that.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Ypsilanti

When Wurst is Best

Posted on May 2, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Here’s a link to a nice PR piece about Ypsilanti’s Wurst Bar, “When Wurst is Best” via concentrate media.  I haven’t been for any of the evening festivities the piece mentions, but I’ve lunched there several times and they do have great food.

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Posted in Blogosphere, College Fun, Ypsilanti