Hapgood

A couple good posts from others today that support the future I’ve been calling “Residential Online” — a future where students take a mix of face-to-face and online classes, but do it within the relatively traditional frame of being a residential or commuter student. First, here’s Tyler Cowen: You will find two critiques of my… Continue reading

Been playing around with this idea of “touchstone values” in statistical literacy — values that would enable you to quickly sanity check a statistic handed to you. Here’s a list of touchstone values for population. The numbers are brutally rounded. There’s redundancy and weirdness in the choices. The idea is not necessarily that you’ll remember… Continue reading

I jumped the other day into a fairly specific discussion of some problems that residential online could solve, and was reminded by some that these were not universal problems. So I want to back up, and talk bigger picture. I believe there are multiple possible futures for education, and that many of these futures will… Continue reading

It’s pretty common in higher education for students not to get the courses they need to graduate on time. Here’s a quote from a recent report from UT Austin on graduation rates: Research conducted by the task force also revealed that for many students an impediment to graduation is availability of courses needed to graduate. It… Continue reading

(from npr.org) A quick thought here. The institution I’m at charges $13,000 or so a year in tuition. EdX, the new MOOC darling, costs zero. Or at least that’s what you hear. But that’s a rotten comparison, really. If you planned to use EdX for an undergraduate education, you’d have to feed and clothe yourself during… Continue reading

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