161728244
submission
jyosim writes:
As online education has become mainstream, new providers have moved to the same marketing tactics as selling any widget. Especially upstart providers like Udemy, Coursera and edX. In some cases the courses are offered by well-known universities partnering with those companies.
Students sometimes buy courses when they're on sale intending to take them, but then never get around to it. It’s the academic equivalent of signing up for a gym membership in January in the burst of new-year’s-resolution optimism and then rarely going to work out.
Is this helping to change the perception of higher ed that is leading to less trust of college, as it becomes seen as more of just any other product?
152177785
submission
jyosim writes:
edX, founded by Harvard University and MIT a decade ago as a nonprofit alternative to for-profit online education providers, has agreed to sell its operations to a for-profit company, 2U. Exactly what that means is only now becoming clear, but many observers have noted that in the end, 2U bought a giant source of leads for students that it can upsell graduate degrees to from its partner colleges. But turning edX into a marketing vehicle is a far cry from the high-minded language used when the nonprofit was founded to bring education to underserved students around the world.
141056700
submission
jyosim writes:
Professors at U of Florida are outraged that the university essentially put a "tattle" button on a campus safety app that lets students report if professors aren't teaching in person. Apparently more than 100 profs there have asked to teach online for health reasons but have been denied, and administrators worry that they'll just teach online anyway. Profs feel the app is akin to a "police state."
131014766
submission
jyosim writes:
Students want their money back since their classes have moved online. Or they want partial refunds, and their calls have been getting louder. Petition movements at more than 200 campuses are calling for partial refunds of tuition, typically asking for 50 percent back. And some student protesters are now even filing class-action lawsuits to try to force colleges to return part of the tuition money.
Whether colleges should give back money depends on how you think about what colleges are selling. Is it a straight service like any other, so if students get less they should pay less? Is the most important thing simply getting into college, in which case the degree is the main thing, and students are still getting that? Or are colleges responsible for social mobility and helping students during this time by reducing tuition?
And is online education even worse than, say, sitting in the back of a large lecture hall with 300 students?
108354188
submission
jyosim writes:
A professor at Arizona State U says he was let go from his teaching job in the economics department because he wouldn't embrace assigning homework software that he says “requires students to pay just to turn in homework.”
His students rushed to his defense on social media, saying that many of their courses now require them to pay for online systems if they want to submit homework.
The university says the professor is spreading misinformation and is the villain.
Details of the ASU situation are messy, but the broader issue of homework software is one that students around the country have been complaining about, while textbook companies see them as the future because they eliminate the used textbook market and lead to more sales as more students are forced to buy directly from publishers.
Publishers argue their software is sophisticated, expensive to build, and improves student grades because it is integrated with helpful bells and whistles. They want colleges to buy in bulk so all students have access.
Is the move to digital homework systems creating a new kind of digital divide at colleges?
107617854
submission
jyosim writes:
CMU announced today that it will make an adaptive-learning software platform and dozens of related tools to improve college teaching free and open source. It will also make a national push to get other colleges to adopt them and try to bring a more "engineering" approach to college teaching.
The biggest challenge will be changing the culture. While professors care about teaching, they think they're better at it than they are, according to many studies. The work is inspired by a former CMU professor who won a Nobel Prize, Herbert Simon, who championed the idea of learning engineering in the '60s.
As he wrote way back in 1967:
"We take the traditional organization of colleges so much for granted that we must step back and view them with Martian eyes, innocent of their history, to appreciate fully how outrageous their operation is,” he wrote. “If we visited an organization responsible for designing, building, and maintaining large bridges, we would expect to find employed there a number of trained and experienced professional engineers, thoroughly educated in mechanics and other laws of nature that determine whether a bridge will stand or fall. ... What do we find in a university? Physicists well educated in physics, and trained for research in that discipline; English professors learned in their language and its literature (or at least some tiny corner of it); and so on down the list of the disciplines. But we find no one with a professional knowledge of the laws of learning, or of the techniques of applying them.”
89279569
submission
jyosim writes:
Coursera has recruited a volunteer corp of more than 2,500 beta testers to try out MOOCs before they launch. Other free online course providers have set up systems that catch things like mistakes in tests, or just whether videos are confusing.
Traditional colleges have shied away from checking online course content before going live, citing academic freedom. But some colleges are developing checklists to judge course design and accessibility.
“It would be lovely if universities would consider ways of adopting the practice of beta testing,” says Phillip Long, chief innovation officer and associate vice provost for learning sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. One factor, though, is cost. “How do you scale that at a university that has thousands of courses being taught,” he asks.
EdSurge asks: How much beta testing makes sense for courses, and what’s the best way to do it?
80056009
submission
jyosim writes:
College students always pay attention in class and do all the readings, right? Ok, they probably never did, but today's professors can actually find out how much each student plays of a lecture and how much time they spent on readings, thanks to so-called "learning analytics." Some colleges are experimenting with using the data to re-engineer courses hoping students will learn more and retention will improve (so students graduate more quickly and won't wrack up as much debt). Professors get "dashboards" and sophisticated charts, changing their role in the classroom. MIT is an early adopter, assigning post-docs to help professors interpret this new data. As the article on the new Re:Learning project notes, though, "How much can big data actually reveal about something as personal and subjective as learning?"
77284489
submission
jyosim writes:
In what could usher a new way of doing college admissions at elite colleges, MIT is experimenting with weighing MOOC performance as proof that students should be accepted to on-campus programs. The idea is to fix the "inexact science" of sorting through candidates from all over the world. And it gives students a better sense of what they're getting into: "When you buy a car, you take a test drive. Wouldn't it be a great value for prospective students to take a test course before they apply?" said one academic blogger.
77243935
submission
jyosim writes:
The U of Cincinnati hosted what was possibly the largest-ever collegiate video-game tournament last weekend. At the university, the League of Legends club has become an official club sport, just like rugby or rowing. “What’s happening with college e-sports right now is that we’re seeing a formalization and institutionalization of what’s always been present,” said T.L. Taylor, a professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
76320631
submission
jyosim writes:
Here’s a sign of how willing companies are to consider alternatives to college courses: Some are buying services that can let employees track their informal-learning activities, such as watching a TED talk or a Khan Academy video, or even reading a newspaper article.
75697505
submission
jyosim writes:
Tech marketers brag about the world-changing impact of "adaptive learning" and other products, but they all mean something different by the buzzword. Yet professors are notoriously skeptical of companies, and crave precise language. So the buzzwords are a major obstacle to improving teaching on campuses, since these tribes (professor and ed-tech vendors) must work together, an official from the US Dept of Ed told The Chronicle of Higher Education.
71927343
submission
jyosim writes:
Studies have shown that as many as 90 percent of campus rapes are committed by repeat offenders. A new system is designed to help identify serial assaulters, by letting students anonymously report incidents in order to look for patterns. But some argue that having the ability to report someone with just the click of a button may not be a good thing. Andrew T. Miltenberg, a New York lawyer who represents young men accused of sexual misconduct, says though the system seems well intended, he is concerned about dangers it may pose to students who are accused. "We’re all guilty of pressing send on an angry text or email that, had we had to put it into an actual letter and proofread, we probably wouldn’t have sent," he says.
69911853
submission
jyosim writes:
Renegade professors now make big bucks teaching in educational marketplaces — think Uber, except people profit by sharing the knowledge in their heads. Sites that let anyone teach courses might just change the way people think about the value of education, about the nature of expertise, and about what teaching is worth.
Here comes Professor Everybody.
65903971
submission
jyosim writes:
On Tuesday, Internet2 announced that it will let researchers create and connect to their own private data clouds on the high-speed network (mainly used by colleges), within which they will be able to conduct research across disciplines and experiment on the nature of the Internet. It's thanks to a $10-million grant from the NSF. ”They will have complete visibility into [the clouds] so they can really treat this as a scientific instrument and not a black box,” the project's lead investigator told The Chronicle of Higher Education. What would you do with full control over your own cloud?
