Here’s my progress in a Stanford Online course: The problem is that I didn’t really try on this. I just hit answers till I got it right, and it let me try again. I’ve been through online courses like this before — when the week gets heavy with other obligations the click-itis begins. You don’t Continue reading

It’s a Gates funded project, but it jives with how I’ve been thinking about MOOCs lately: Once they’re in, Portmont students will meet up for a one-week, one-credit intensive orientation where ideally they’ll bond with their classmates and the personal “success coaches” that are part of Portmont’s faculty, before heading back home to work on Continue reading

It’s interesting to see this on the front page of the Coursera course I’m taking: Obviously what has happened here is that Johns Hopkins and Kevin Frick have negotiated additional rights for Coursera to this OCW material, which allows them to use it commercially. Which is as it should be — that’s how CC licences Continue reading

I’m still going through the process of cleaning up some old posts damaged by the database, and tonight I found this one I wrote on OpenCourseWare from 2009: Rise of the Cohort, Educational and Otherwise Posted on January 9, 2009  “Cohort” is a term used in sociology and education that refers to a group of people that Continue reading

From The Lomborg Deception: From these and many similar statements, we can identify “Lomborg’s Theorem,” circa 2001, which asserts that the Earth and its environment are not threatened in any fundamental sense by human activity and, for the purposes of this volume, that man-made global warming is not the catastrophe that the environmental organizations claim. Lomborg’s Continue reading

I have been slowly repairing the damage the great database corruption of 2010/2011 did to my blog posts, pulling them over from Archive.org and trying to get them back into my blog. Today I came across this one from May 2010, which among other things contains this graf about what I saw on my 2010 Continue reading

I read The Fall of the Faculty a couple months ago, partially because it was cited in an ongoing discussion on our campus about what is to blame for higher educational costs. My general operating assumption is that of all influences on educational cost, cost disease has the biggest (and most relentless) impact. I was Continue reading

I was just thinking about statistics on traditional students vs. non-traditional, and realized that there are huge outflow issues in the way they are often presented. [For more on inflows, stocks, and outflows, read this short description] It’s common to talk about a decline in traditional students by saying things like “Only x% of students Continue reading

I was flipping through Mark Taylor’s book on the Crisis in Higher Education when I found this startling statistic: Though the fact is rarely noted, the traditional four-year college whose students are eighteen to twenty-two years old is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Only 16 percent of all students2 currently fall into this Continue reading

Farm Factory Wife, by csessums A book I’m reading now, Food Wars, has this to say about “Productionism”, the paradigm that dominated food policy through the 20th century: In the Productionist paradigm (Figure 1.3), health is portrayed as being enhanced, above all, by increasing production, which required investment in both monetary and scientific terms. Agriculture, the Continue reading