An addendum to the last post. First off, since no one is going to move off the term MOOC for MANIC, here’s a replacement term: MACCs: MAssively Connected Courses.  The point here is to indicate the people that have co-opted the term MOOC have botched it. The openness is a means, not an end. The Continue reading

Hoisted from the defunct Tran|Script blog. Originally published August 11, 2011. New projects need prototypes. When twitter first came out, people often asked me what it was. And to the extent I told them it was an entirely new thing they would tune out. I realized very quickly however that there were two ways to Continue reading

Martin Snyder of the AAUP said something about Coursera-style MOOCs I agree with recently:  “If this kind of a system takes off, you might have a situation where the very wealthy students go to a campus to interact with real professors, while the rest of the world takes online courses…what appears to be a democratization process Continue reading

I don’t know what it is about college cost reporting, but it either attracts shoddy reporters, or makes good reporters shoddy. Take the recent piece by Andrew Martin and Andrew Lehren. Here’s a paragraph that actually appeared in it: Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — Continue reading

“Recent research suggests that before delving into educating students about statistical methods, statistical literacy, thinking, and reasoning training is needed. In fact, studies have shown that a knowledge base in statistical literacy, reasoning, and thinking is needed for understanding published research (delMas, Garfield, Ooms, & Chance, 2007).” Full article here. The cited article actually talks more Continue reading

This article makes some excellent points about “Pineapplegate”. On the whole the incident reflects more poorly on our media and public debate than it does on Pearson.  There’s so much wrong with the way that we test students in American education, but smirking at a trippy test question fixes none of it, and denies some Continue reading

I’ve been thinking about this a long time, but a recent tweet by @dkernohan made me think I should throw it up somewhere. There’s a saying that if you are not paying for something like Facebook, that you aren’t the customer — you’re the product. And I think this is true in many ways. But Continue reading