A major new story about Donors Trust was published over the weekend, and it has important implications for higher education. Donors Trust is a sort of money-laundering scheme for causes of the radical right. Basically, if you’re an oil company and you want to fund some climate denial science but you don’t want to get… Continue reading

I don’t usually do tools-blogging on this site, but I’m making an exception for Cerego, if only because no one else seems to be blogging it, and it’s the sort of dirt simple tool I love. Cerego is like a number of memorization tools on the market that make use of the insights of cognitive… Continue reading

This is kind of an amazing video. Cremin is famous for writing one of the definitive histories of education in the United States as well as for his book specifically on the history of Progressive Education in the United States. If you are looking for someone with the long view, this is your guy. He… Continue reading

From GigaOm: The biggest ed tech deals of the year were Pearson’s $650 million purchase of Embanet Compass, which provides online learning services to colleges and universities, and John Wiley & Sons’ $220 million acquisition of Deltak Edu, an online degree services company. Both online learning companies have been around since the mid to late… Continue reading

I really wish every person involved in online learning could watch this short video: After watching that, you might assume that I am going to rant against B.F. Skinner. Far from it. In that five minute video Skinner tackles concepts of self-paced learning, the importance of quick feedback, the basics of gamification, aspects of proximal… Continue reading

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