From USA Today: Nearly half of working Americans with college degrees are in jobs for which they’re overqualified, a new study out Monday suggests. The study, released by the non-profit Center for College Affordability and Productivity, says the trend is likely to continue for newly minted college graduates over the next decade. … Vedder, whose Continue reading

From The Chronicle: Textbook publishers argue that their newest digital products shouldn’t even be called “textbooks.” They’re really software programs built to deliver a mix of text, videos, and homework assignments. But delivering them is just the beginning. No old-school textbook was able to be customized for each student in the classroom. The books never Continue reading

I’m finally plugging away at a paper  have due for journal submission in a few weeks. It describes the mixable Online Open Course. And while typing it, I realized there is one thing I have never made quite clear here about how it works. Basically, it’s a centralized MOOC that allows different institutions and informal Continue reading

Kevin Carey, today, in the Chronicle: Finally, and most important, the Obama administration should expand its vision of what publicly supported higher learning can mean. The MOOC provider Coursera recently announced that it would charge students relatively small sums, on the order of $100, for verified certificates of learning. The marginal cost of making a Continue reading

I can’t really add much to the beautiful eulogies for Aaron. Except perhaps one thing. Somewhere back in the 1970s micropolitics emerged as the dominant paradigm of change. As a Generation Xer, it’s really all I’ve ever known. My parents grew up in the civil rights age, where the idea was to get hold of Continue reading

From Sue Jacoby’s Age of  American Unreason: Reverential images of self-education have been deeply embedded in the American psyche from the colonial period and persist today, in an era characterized by a mania for specialized educational credentials that Emerson could not have imagined. Yet these images have cut two ways in shaping American attitudes toward Continue reading

Dan Meyer has a great study from the early days of programmed learning linked from his latest post. This paragraph in it caught my eye: Benny has used IPI material since the second grade and is familiar with the system and seems to have accepted the responsibility for his own work. He works independently in Continue reading

One interesting omission from the current “Future of the American University” discussion is the effect that PowerSchool, now in use by over 10 million K-12 students, is having on parent and student expectation on real-time notification and assessment. If you don’t know what PowerSchool is, take a look at the above video. While it shows Continue reading

So I was going to head straight into part two, on mixability in the mOOC. But I realized I needed to outline how mixability of OER stands now, at least when used in a traditional institutional context. The answer, in short, is using OER today is like trying to compose emails to people using only Continue reading

Just a note looking through the education predictions out. For as long as I can remember, every year has brought predictions of the mobile revolution that is going to tear through higher education. And they have been wrong every single time. Now sure, if you expand the meaning of education to “All of human existence” Continue reading