Digital Learning News in ‘Inside Higher Ed’ This Week

Inside Higher Ed explored several topics of relevance to “Inside Digital Learning” readers this week. They included:

• Virginia’s largest community college and a prominent public research university have co-partnered with an educational management and student support service provider to improve academic outcomes for transfer students. The arrangement involving Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason University and InsideTrack is part of a larger strategy to improve and streamline the process for students who want to transfer from NOVA, as the community college is often called, to George Mason. InsideTrack will provide training on academic coaching, tailored for specific student demographics, to staff at both institutions and will also coach a subset of students to tailor the methodology and model best practices. The company also will be working with institutional leaders to develop the infrastructure to build a sustainable professional coaching system.
• Nationalized “nudge” campaigns that shower students with emails and text messages to encourage them to apply for federal financial aid do not budge enrollment rates, as education researchers may have hoped based on the past success of smaller-scale outreach, a study found. Nudges have been used in multiple contexts, academic and otherwise; this study focused on attempts to encourage applications for federal financial aid and suggests that students respond less to nudges the further removed they are from people or institutions they know.
• Federal legislation that would expand eligibility for Pell Grant money to programs as short as eight weeks would, as written, exclude for-profit colleges, in a move designed to win over liberal critics of the idea. While most for-profit institutions haven't been pushing to overturn that proposed ban, given their focus on other pressing regulatory issues, that may be starting to change.
• Southern New Hampshire University will award college credit to students who complete Salesforce training. The university is the first to offer credit for completing training on a free online learning platform called Trailhead, which prepares people to use Salesforce as administrators or developers.