Making Progress is an empirical investigation into the strategies and processes first-year composition programs can use to center multimodal work in their curricula. Logan Bearden makes a unique contribution to the field, presenting a series of flexible strategies, evolving considerations, and best practices that can be taken up, adapted, and implemented by programs and directors that want to achieve what Bearden brands “multimodal curricular transformation,” or MCT, at their own institutions.
 
MCT can be achieved at the intersection of program documents and practices. Bearden details ten composition programs that have undergone MCT, offering interview data from the directors who oversaw and/or participated within the processes. He analyzes a corpus of outcomes statements to discover ways we can “make space” for multimodality and gives instructors and programs a broader understanding of the programmatic values for which they should strive if they wish to make space for multimodal composition in curricula. Making Progress also presents how other program documents like syllabi and program websites can bring those outcomes to life and make multimodal composing a meaningful part of first-year composition curricula.
 
First-year composition programs that do not help their students learn to compose multimodal texts are limiting their rhetorical possibilities. The strategies in Making Progress will assist writing program directors and faculty who are interested in using multimodality to align programs with current trends in disciplinary scholarship and deal with resistance to curricular revision to ultimately help students become more effective communicators in a digital-global age.

A colorful history of US research universities, and a market-based theory of their global success.

American education has its share of problems, but it excels in at least one area: university-based research. That’s why American universities have produced more Nobel Prize winners than those of the next twenty-nine countries combined. Economist Miguel Urquiola argues that the principal source of this triumph is a free-market approach to higher education.

Until the late nineteenth century, research at American universities was largely an afterthought, suffering for the same reason that it now prospers: the free market permits institutional self-rule. Most universities exploited that flexibility to provide what well-heeled families and church benefactors wanted. They taught denominationally appropriate materials and produced the next generation of regional elites, no matter the students’—or their instructors’—competence. These schools were nothing like the German universities that led the world in research and advanced training. The American system only began to shift when certain universities, free to change their business model, realized there was demand in the industrial economy for students who were taught by experts and sorted by talent rather than breeding. Cornell and Johns Hopkins led the way, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and a few dozen others that remain centers of research. By the 1920s the United States was well on its way to producing the best university research.

Free markets are not the solution for all educational problems. Urquiola explains why they are less successful at the primary and secondary level, areas in which the United States often lags. But the entrepreneurial spirit has certainly been the key to American leadership in the research sector that is so crucial to economic success.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

In Minds on Fire, Mark C. Carnes shows how role-immersion games channel students’ competitive (and sometimes mischievous) impulses into transformative learning experiences. His discussion is based on interviews with scores of students and faculty who have used a pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, which features month-long games set during the French Revolution, Galileo’s trial, the partition of India, and dozens of other epochal moments in disciplines ranging from art history to the sciences. These games have spread to over three hundred campuses around the world, where many of their benefits defy expectations.

“[Minds on Fire is] Carnes’s beautifully written apologia for this fascinating and powerful approach to teaching and learning in higher education. If we are willing to open our minds and explore student-centered approaches like Reacting [to the Past], we might just find that the spark of student engagement we have been searching for in higher education’s mythical past can catch fire in the classrooms of the present.”
—James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education

“This book is a highly engaging and inspirational study of a ‘new’ technique that just might change the way educators bring students to learning in the 21st century.”
—D. D. Bouchard, Choice

Moral Problems in Higher Education brings together key essays that explore ethical issues in academia. The editor and contributors-all noted philosophers and educators-consider such topics as academic freedom and tenure, free speech on campus, sexual harassment, preferential student admissions, affirmative action in faculty appointments, and the ideal of a politically neutral university. Chapters address possible restrictions on research because of moral concerns, the structure of peer review, telling the truth to colleagues and students, and concerns raised by intercollegiate athletics.

Cahn selects two key readings in each area to offer a readable introductory guide to these critical subjects for students studying academic ethics and higher education policy. In addition to the selections and a general introduction, Cahn provides study questions for use in the classroom.

Contributors include Scott F. Aikin, Derek Bok, William G. Bowen, Myles Brand, Richard T. DeGeorge, Paul D. Eisenberg, Leslie Pickering Francis, Martin P. Golding, Philip Kitcher, Charles R. Lawrence III, David Lewis, Paul J. Olscamp, Nancy Tuana, David Shatz, George Sher, Robert L. Simon, Robert B. Talisse, Stephan Thernstrom, Abigail Thernstrom, Laurence Thomas, Robert Paul Wolff, and the editor.

As recently as 2012, massive open online courses (MOOCs) looked poised to revolutionize higher education, but in just a few years their flaws and problems have made them into a less relevant model. In More than a Moment, Steven D. Krause explores MOOCs and their continuing impact on distance learning in higher education, putting them in the context of technical innovations that have come before and those that will be part of the educational future.
 
Krause writes about his own experiences as a participant in several MOOCs and the experiences of faculty who developed and taught MOOCs. Contrary to many early claims from educational entrepreneurs, they were never entirely “new,” and MOOCs and their aftermath are still at the heart of the tensions between nonprofit universities and for-profit entities, particularly online program management firms, in delivering distance education.
 
While MOOCs are no longer a threat to education in the United States, they are part of the ongoing corporatization of education and remain part of conversations about experienced-based credit, corporate training, and open education. Presenting historical, student, teacher, and administrative perspectives, More than a Moment is a well-rounded treatment that will be of interest to academics and entrepreneurs interested in distance education, online pedagogy, online program management, and public-private partnerships in higher education.