Hapgood

Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy

September 2011

  • NH to make $35 million in state agency cuts [Healthcare vs. Higher Ed., Again]

    NH to make $35 million in state agency cuts [Healthcare vs. Higher Ed., Again] After last Spring’s cuts, the State of New Hampshire provides only 5% of our operational budget at Keene State College. The word on the street is this new round of cuts will reduce it to 3%.  A lot of this is Continue reading

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  • Peer Instruction Failure

    Peer Instruction Failure I’ve been making sure to note places where experimentation shows at least partial failure of Peer Instruction. This article (“Effect of personal response systems on student perception and academic performance in courses in a health sciences curriculum”) is a good example of that. Only one of the sections fails, but it’s worth Continue reading

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  • Scholarships Go Disproportionately To White Students

    Scholarships Go Disproportionately To White Students From Yglesias, today: The issue here isn’t racial discrimination, it’s a symptom of the fact that the incentive structure of American higher education is totally screwy. Schools want to produce two things. One is rich alumni who give them money, and the other is high ratings from US News Continue reading

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  • Healthcare swallows everything

    Healthcare swallows everything Government spending as a percentage of GDP This is basically the story all over America: John Arnold, director of the Office of Strategic Planning and Budgeting, said that Medicaid and other health-care expenses are predicted to grow to as much as 40 percent of the state budget by 2015. That will force Continue reading

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  • The Edupunk’s Guide to a DIY Credential: A Review by Someone Else

    Part of the reason I started Hapgood was to try to break the habit of wasting time engaging in Big Rhetorical Debates about Stuff That Capital-M Matters. Hapgood is largely about me getting back to the research and implementation focus that grounds me, and keeping the rhetorical stuff intermittent and focused on pressing concerns. I’m Continue reading

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  • Increased Course Structure Improves Performance in Introductory Biology

    Increased Course Structure Improves Performance in Introductory Biology Lots of interesting (and maybe dubious?) methodological stuff in this. Its primary value for me was articulating a complex structured design fully, and testing that full design (rather than one or two smaller interventions). If you want to restructure your class like this, you could do it Continue reading

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  • Do pre-tests boost achievement in online courses?

    From an older paper which found that online courses involving pretests outperformed F2F instructions, but that online courses with no pretest showed no difference: There exists a possibility that a pre-test works as a moderator affecting teaching and learning processes of ODE settings. For example, a pre-test might provide information for the online instructors to Continue reading

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  • Informal Statistical Inference

    What we are trying to do in our Stat Lit class is to develop good intuitions about data, rather than create mini-statisticians. Our belief is that everyone, in almost any job or civic task, has to make inferences from data without having access to complex data crunching tools or methods, and, as such, it is Continue reading

  • Openness and Analytics

    I am sure someone has already commented on this, but it occurs to me that openness and analytics have a problematic relationship. For instance, in the Intro to Psych course we are developing on several campuses, we’d like to use analytics to do things like nationally norm percent correct on questions. So you answer a Continue reading

  • AASCU, Red Balloon & National Course Collaborations

    So this is really neat. I’m on the phone here with some American Association of State Colleges and Universities people on a conference call, and we’re hammering out how multiple state colleges and universities can best work together to build fully articulated blended and fully online courses that we share with one another. The basic Continue reading