Hapgood

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

One of the fundamental differences between OCW and xMOOCs is that xMOOCs can be assessed on quality of instruction. From a longer paper by Sir John Daniel that is well worth the read: “We also agree with Bates that current xMOOCs pedagogy is pretty old hat but this will now change fast. Even if Coursera… Continue reading

One additional point about the Circuits and Electronics course stats I cited yesterday. Most of the talk about MOOC-scale has been about the number of sign-ups. But that’s the wrong end of the problem. What we care about is cost per completion. And at 7,000 completers, there’s certainly some scale to this course but it’s not… Continue reading

From IHE today: The age distribution of students who stuck it out with Circuits & Electronics favored what higher ed would call “nontraditional” students: Half of them were 26 years old or older. About 45 percent were traditional college-aged students, and 5 percent were in high school. The oldest probable-completer was 74; the youngest, 14.… Continue reading

It occurs to me that there are two types of “unbundling” of education, and for the most part people focus on the wrong one. The first type, which we will call vertical unbundling, is the one that the educational futurists talk about — the separation of content from facilitation, and facilitation from assessment. This is… Continue reading