What will higher education look like in 2025 or 2100? Those are two of the questions the faculty asked recently at Stanford University. They were specifically looking at the student experience and how they imagined it will change. In their own words, "A design team from the Stanford d.school worked with hundreds of perceptive, creative, and generous students, faculty, and administrators over the course of a year to explore this territory." The project culminated in Stanford2025, an online and in-person exhibit on higher education circa 2025, imagined from the perspective of the year 2100. One of the project's leaders, Kelly Schmutte, said, "The world is rapidly changing, and the types of leaders and citizens that we need to be graduating are changing. Our problems are more challenging and ambiguous." Read more here.

Larry Ferlazzo is an educationalist who strongly believes that we should be helping all students become self-regulated learners. In his new book Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and Beyond, he provides research on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and describes the four qualities that have been identified as critical to helping students motivate themselves: autonomy, competence, relatedness, and relevance. He says, "A high-quality relationship with a teacher whom they respect is a key element of helping students develop intrinsic motivation." Read more here.

Students who frequently check their grades throughout the semester tend to get better marks than do those who look less often. That’s one of the findings from a new study by Blackboard, a company that sells course-management software to hundreds of colleges. It’s probably one of the deepest data dives ever done on student clicks on college web systems, analyzing aggregate data from 70,000 courses at 927 colleges and universities in North America during the spring 2016 semester. The promise: Big data could lead to insights on how to keep struggling students on track, or at least let professors test their long-held assumptions about student habits. Read more here or listen to the podcast.