Interesting Reads This Week

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In between writing this post every week and discussing a couple of news items at the start of our podcast, I find myself hoarding interesting EdTech reads news to share with readers and listeners. So, what did I hoard this week?

Everything, everywhere, all at once

One of the things I do lately is ask newsletter readers that I talk to about what they want to see us cover. This week, one of those readers suggested that they would like to see some coverage of what higher education institutions are doing to rebuild public trust in higher education.

It was an intriguing suggestion, and a critical issue. So, I was quite interested to read a study which arrived in my inbox this week from Campus Sonar about how to rebuild trust in higher education. The report is based on an analysis of 13,000 online mentions of higher education from June–December 2023 (a nice change from the near ubiquitous small-n surveys). The results are grim.

Increasingly the folks don’t see the value in higher education, with only 7% of mentions frame a college degree as being worth it.

I guess that, looking at things from a glass half-full perspective, the fact that 55% of mentions are neutral means that higher education has an opportunity to rebuild trust and a belief in the value of a college degree.

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