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Maureen Greenbaum

Calls from Washington for streamlined regulation and emerging models | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • more of online “innovations” like competency-based education.
  • reauthorization of the Higher Education Act might shake out.
  • flow of federal financial aid to a wide range of course providers, some of which look nothing like colleges.
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  • give state regulators a new option to either act as accreditors or create their own accreditation systems.
  • “States could accredit online courses, or hybrid models with elements on- and off-campus.”
  • any new money for those emerging models would likely come out of the coffers of traditional colleges.
  • cut back on red tape that prevents colleges from experimenting with ways to cut prices and boost student learning.
  • decentralized, more streamlined form of accreditation.
  • regional accreditors are doing a fairly good job. They are under enormous pressure to keep “bad actors” at bay while also encouraging experimentation. And he said accreditors usually get it right.
  • Andrew Kelly, however, likes Lee’s idea. Kelly, who is director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Higher Education Reform, said it would create a credible alternative to the existing accreditation system, which the bill would leave intact.
  • eliminating bureaucracy in higher education regulation is a top priority
  • “Accreditation could also be available to specialized programs, individual courses, apprenticeships, professional credentialing and even competency-based tests,”
  • “The gateway to education reform is education oversight reform,”
  • broad, bipartisan agreement that federal aid policies have not kept pace with new approaches to higher education.
  • expansion of competency-based education. And he said the federal rules governing financial aid make it hard for colleges to go big with those programs.
  • accreditors is that they favor the status quo, in part because they are membership organizations of academics that essentially practice self-regulation.
  • “The technology has reached the point where it really can improve learning,” he said, adding that “it can lower the costs.”
  • changes to the existing accreditation system that might make it easier for competency-based and other emerging forms of online education to spread.
  • offering competency-based degrees through a process called direct assessment, which is completely de-coupled from the credit-hour standard.
Jim Aird

How to Improve Public Online Education: Report Offers a Model - Government - The Chroni... - 18 views

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  • patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.
  • they can improve their online-education efforts to help students find streamlined, affordable pathways to a degree.
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  • "Taken together, these steps result in something that looks less like an unorganized collection of Internet-based classes, and more like a true public university."
  • I am always miffed at the people within Higher Ed who recognize that nothing about pedagogy has changed in 50 years except computers and PowerPoint but they still rationalize that nothing needs changed or fixed.
Randolph Hollingsworth

"Promises" of Online Higher Ed: Profits - Campaign for the Future of Higher Education |... - 12 views

  • the burning questions focus squarely and exclusively on what will make money for particular companies
  • use their powerful brand reputations to get ahead of rapid technological changes that could destabilize their residential business models over the long-run
  • good credit news for elite institutions
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    on the revolutionary aspect of MOOCs to break down traditional barriers to higher ed as regularly stated by CEOs Koller and Thrun: "This rhetoric is perhaps the most glittery yet in the public discourse about online higher education. But it is also a diversion shifting attention away from the logic of profit-making. For parents, students, and the general public who focus primarily on what education means for people's futures, for social mobility, for a healthy economy and a robust democracy, a dip into the insider talk of MOOCs, their investors, and industry analysts is both instructive and disorienting."
Bill Graziadei, Ph.D. (aka Dr. G)

Imagining College Without Grades :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for N... - 1 views

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    Inside Higher Ed offers free online news and job information for college and university faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and administrators, higher education jobs, faculty jobs, college jobs and university jobs
Jeff Andersen

Four Stats That Will Impact Higher Ed in 2017 | Academic Impressions - 22 views

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    2017 has the potential to be a volatile year in higher education, and that was the case even before Donald Trump took office. Regulatory uncertainty, continued economic and demographic headwinds, and shifts in both domestic and international student enrollment trends are just a few of the rapids that higher-ed leaders will need to navigate. At Academic Impressions, as we review current research and much of the best current thinking on paths forward for colleges and institutions, we want to draw your attention to four stats that are likely to have an immediate impact in 2017-but that not many are paying heed to.
Roland Gesthuizen

Higher Ed's Ultimate Guide To Cloud Computing - Edudemic - 8 views

  • Drilling down a bit more, Google has revealed that more than half of those schools involved with cloud computing are either using or considering Google Apps. Currently, 62 of the US News and World Report’s top 100 Universities are using Google Apps for Education.
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    Higher education is jumping into the cloud with both feet. According to a new report by the Campus Computing Project, 89% of higher ed currently uses or is actively consider cloud services. I found that figure quite startling as I hadn't thought that many schools were moving into the cloud just yet. Apparently I was mistaken.
JD Pennington

Diigo in College/University - 253 views

Some questions: Is it possible to get an RSS feed of group annotated links that are no longer live pages, but are instead highlighted static pages? This way I can get a feed of a the links that ...

education diigo

Maureen Greenbaum

SNHU: How Paul LeBlanc's tiny school has become a giant of higher education. - 1 views

  • Students are referred to as “customers.”
  • t deploys data analytics for everything from anticipating future demand to figuring out which students are most likely to stumble.
  • “Public institutions will not see increasing state funding and private colleges will not see ever-rising tuition.”
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  • tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt
  • school spends millions to employ more than 160 “admissions counselors” who man the phones, especially on weekends, guiding prospective students into the right degree program
  • vast majority are working adults, many with families, whose lives rarely align with an academic timetable.
  • “College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience
  • low completion rate can be blamed partly on the fact that college is still designed for 18-year-olds who are signing up for an immersive, four-year experience replete with football games and beer-drinking. But those traditional students make up only 20 percent of the post-secondary population.
  • online courses are created centrally and then farmed out to a small army of adjuncts hired for as little as $2,200 a class. Those adjuncts have scant leeway in crafting the learning experience.
  • An instructor’s main job is to swoop in when a student is in trouble. Often, they don’t pick up the warning signs themselves. Instead, SNHU’s predictive analytics platform plays watchdog, sending up a red flag to an instructor when a student hasn’t logged on recently or has spent too much time on an assignment
  • highly standardized courses, and adjuncts who act more like coaches than professors
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    The Amazon of Higher Education- How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth.
Chris Betcher

New South Wales Teacher Education Council :: Home - 14 views

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    The New South Wales Teacher Education Council is the association of the deans of education and heads of schools of education in universities and other higher education institutions in New South Wales. It was established to promote the continued development of teacher education and meets regularly to further its goals and discuss issues of common interest.
trisha_poole

Emerging Technologies Conference 2008 | Faculty of Education | University of Wollongong - 14 views

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    Learning and teaching in higher education is experiencing rapid change, in part, as a result of the influences of emerging technologies. These proceedings are the refereed papers of the 2nd Annual Conference on Emerging Technologies conducted by the University of Wollongong's Centre for Educational Development and Interactive Resources (CEDIR) and the Faculty of Education's Research Centre for Interactive Learning Environments (RILE) between 18 - 20 June 2008. The conference provided a showcase for research into these technologies and an insight into the way they can be used to promote meaningful learning in the higher education sector. Papers have undergone a double blind peer refereeing process to Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) standards. The papers have been assessed as providing information that increases the stock of knowledge and the use of this knowledge to devise new applications; they are original and have the potential to produce results; they represent substantial scholarly activity; and they have validity through a peer validation process. Further details of refereeing are included in the Conference Program available below.
Roland Gesthuizen

6 trends that will accelerate the adoption of technology in higher education | Features... - 50 views

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    "We take a look at the six "key trends" picked out in the NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition"
Dave Fones

Japanese Real Estate Bubble Recoverry? - 0 views

  • look at economic trends
  • it is becoming more apparent that we may be entering a time when low wage jobs dominate and home prices remain sluggish for a decade moving forward.
  • looking at the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program, growth of lower paying jobs, baby boomers retiring, and the massive amount of excess housing inventory we start to see why Japan’s post-bubble real estate market is very likely to occur in the United States.
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  • both economies had extraordinarily large real estate bubbles.
  • Massive real estate bubble (check) -Central bank bailing out banks (check) -Bailed out banks keep bad real estate loans on their books at inflated values (check) -Government taking on higher and higher levels of debt relative to GDP (check) -Employment situation stabilizes with less secure labor force (check) -Home prices remain stagnant (check)
  • the United States had never witnessed a year over year drop in nationwide home prices since the Great Depression.
  • home prices are now back to levels last seen 8 years ago.&nbsp; The lost decade is now nipping at our heels but what about two lost decades like Japan?
  • the U.S. has such a large number of part-time workers and many of the new jobs being added are coming in lower paying sectors signifies that our economy is not supportive of the reasons that gave us solid home prices for many decades.&nbsp;
  • young Japanese workers, some in their late 20s or early 30s, already resigned that they would never buy a home.
  • The notion that housing is always a great investment runs counter to what they saw in their lives.&nbsp; Will they even want to buy as many baby boomers put their larger homes on the market
  • many of our young households here are now coming out with massive amounts of student loan debt.
  • Lower incomes, more debt, and less job security.&nbsp; What this translated to in Japan was stagnant home prices for 20 full years.&nbsp; We are nearing our 10 year bear market anniversary in real estate so another 10 is not impossible.&nbsp; What can change this?&nbsp; Higher median household incomes across the nation but at a time when gas costs $4 a gallon, grocery prices are increasing, college tuition is in a bubble, and the financial system operates with no reform and exploits the bubble of the day, it is hard to see why Americans would be pushing home prices higher.
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    Explains how Japan has responded to the breaking of their real estate market bubble and the effect it has had on Japan's economy
Jeff Andersen

Dropbox unveils new product aimed at higher ed | Education Dive - 40 views

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    Dropbox is broadening its sales focus from targeting mostly corporations to trying to attract paid users in higher ed, too. Officials say the intent is for those collaborating on research and potentially sharing high amounts of sensitive data and information to be able to do so in a secure environment that is controlled by the campus CIO. PC World reports the company does not see Dropbox Education as useful for "undergrads who may just need to turn in a paper or two."
Tracy Tuten

The real economics of massive online courses (essay) | Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

  • Is there a model out there, or an institution/student mix that could effectively utilize MOOCs in such a way as to get around this flaw? It’s hard to tell. Recent articles on Inside Higher Ed have suggested that distance education providers (like the University of Maryland’s University College – UMUC) may opt to certify the MOOCs that come out of these elite schools and bake them into their own online programs. Others suggest that MOOCs could be certified by other schools and embedded in prior learning portfolios.
  • The fatal flaw that I referred to earlier is pretty apparent:&nbsp; the very notions of "mass, open" and selectivity just don’t lend themselves to a workable model that benefits both institutions and students. Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.
  • In other words, as economists tell us, students themselves are an important input to education. The fact that no school uses a lottery system to determine who gets in means that determining who gets in matters a great deal to these schools, because it helps them control quality and head off the adverse effects of unqualified students either dropping out or performing poorly in career positions. For individual institutions, obtaining high quality inputs works to optimize the school’s objective function, which is maximizing prestige.
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  • We also know that there are plenty of low- to no-cost learning options available to people on a daily basis, from books on nearly every academic topic at the local library and on-the-job experience, to the television programming on the National Geographic, History and Discovery channels. If learning can and does take place everywhere, there has to be a specific reason that people would be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years of their life to get it from one particular source like a college. There is, of course, and again it’s the credential, because no matter how many years I spend diligently tuned to the History Channel, I’m simply not going to get a job as a high-school history teacher with “television watching” as the core of my resume, even if I both learned and retained far more information than I ever could have in a series of college history classes.
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    On why MOOCs are flawed
Jeff Andersen

Overtime increase won't skip higher ed | Education Dive - 9 views

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    University groups previously decried "a time of limited and sometimes shrinking budgets for higher education," and called on the Labor Department to lower the threshold and adjust for regional and sector differences. Institutions have pushed back against the significant financial burden associated with raising salaries to meet the threshold or paying overtime for additional hours worked. Though faculty members are still exempt, the status of postdocs with light teaching loads is still in question, and many support staffers are eligible for the increase.
Sharon Greenberg

50 Twitter Feeds to Follow Higher Education News | AccreditedOnlineColleges.org - 20 views

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    "50 Twitter Feeds to Follow Higher Education News"
Mark Swartz

Role and Function of Theory in Online Education Development and Delivery - 3 views

  • According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old, acquire meaningful knowledge, and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy and not the technology tha
  • According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old, acquire meaningful knowledge, and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy and not the technology that influences the quality of learning.
  • However, it is not the computer per se that makes students learn, but the design of the real-life models and simulations, and the students' interaction with those models and simulations. The computer is merely the vehicle that provides the processing capability and delivers the instruction to learners (Clark, 2001).
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  • Online learning allows for flexibility of access, from anywhere and usually at anytime—essentially, it allows participants to collapse time and space (Cole, 2000)—however, the learning materials must be designed properly to engage the learner and promote learning.
  • Cognitive psychology claims that learning involves the use of memory, motivation, and thinking, and that reflection plays an important part in learning.
  • The development of effective online learning materials should be based on proven and sound learning theories.
  • Early computer learning systems were designed based on a behaviorist approach to learning. The behaviorist school of thought, influenced by Thorndike (1913), Pavlov (1927), and Skinner (1974), postulates that learning is a change in observable behavior caused by external stimuli in the environment (Skinner, 1974).
  • Therefore, before any learning materials are developed, educators must, tacitly or explicitly, know the principles of learning and how students learn.
  • Constructivist theorists claim that learners interpret information and the world according to their personal reality, and that they learn by observation, processing, and interpretation, and then personalize the information into personal knowledge (Cooper, 1993; Wilson, 1997).
  • The design of online learning materials can include principles from all three. According to Ertmer and Newby (1993), the three schools of thought can in fact be used as a taxonomy for learning. Behaviorists' strategies can be used to teach the “what” (facts), cognitive strategies can be used to teach the “how” (processes and principles), and constructivist strategies can be used to teach the “why” (higher level thinking that promotes personal meaning and situated and contextual learning).
  • The behaviorist school sees the mind as a “black box,” in the sense that a response to a stimulus can be observed quantitatively, totally ignoring the effect of thought processes occurring in the mind.
  • Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so that they can set expectations and can judge for themselves whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online lesson. 2.&nbsp; Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have achieved the learning outcome. Online testing or other forms of testing and assessment should be integrated into the learning sequence to check the learner's achievement level and to provide appropriate feedback. 3.&nbsp; Learning materials must be sequenced appropriately to promote learning. The sequencing could take the form of simple to complex, known to unknown, and knowledge to application. 4.&nbsp; Learners must be provided with feedback so that they can monitor how they are doing and take corrective action if required.
  • Cognitivists see learning as an internal process that involves memory, thinking, reflection, abstraction, motivation, and meta-cognition.
  • Online instruction must use strategies to allow learners to attend to the learning materials so that they can be transferred from the senses to the sensory store and then to working memory.
  • Online learning strategies must present the materials and use strategies to enable students to process the materials efficiently.
  • information should be organized or chunked in pieces of appropriate size to facilitate processing.
  • Use advance organizers to activate an existing cognitive structure or to provide the information to incorporate the details of the lesson (Ausubel, 1960).
  • Use pre-instructional questions to set expectations and to activate the learners' existing knowledge structure.
  • Use prerequisite test questions to activate the prerequisite knowledge structure required for learning the new materials.
  • To facilitate deep processing, learners should be asked to generate the information maps during the learning process or as a summary activity after the lesson (Bonk &amp; Reynolds, 1997).
  • The cognitive school recognizes the importance of individual differences, and of including a variety of learning strategies in online instruction to accommodate those differences
  • The Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) (Kolb, 1984) looks at how learners perceive and process information, whereas the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1978) uses dichotomous scales to measure extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception. In the following discussion, we consider the Kolb Learning Style Inventory.
  • Attention: Capture the learners' attention at the start of the lesson and maintain it throughout the lesson. The online learning materials must include an activity at the start of the learning session to connect with the learners. Relevance: Inform learners of the importance of the lesson and how taking the lesson could benefit them. Strategies could include describing how learners will benefit from taking the lesson, and how they can use what they learn in real-life situations. This strategy helps to contextualize the learning and make it more meaningful, thereby maintaining interest throughout the learning session. Confidence: Use strategies such as designing for success and informing learners of the lesson expectations. Design for success by sequencing from simple to complex, or known to unknown, and use a competency-based approach where learners are given the opportunity to use different strategies to complete the lesson. Inform learners of the lesson outcome and provide ongoing encouragement to complete the lesson. Satisfaction: Provide feedback on performance and allow learners to apply what they learn in real-life situations. Learners like to know how they are doing, and they like to contextualize what they are learning by applying the information in real life.
  • Online strategies that facilitate the transfer of learning should be used to encourage application in different and real-life situations.
  • Constructivists see learners as being active rather than passive.
  • it is the individual learner's interpretation and processing of what is received through the senses that creates knowledge.
  • “the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action” (p.&nbsp;12).
  • Learning should be an active process. Keeping learners active doing meaningful activities results in high-level processing, which facilitates the creation of personalized meaning. Asking learners to apply the information in a practical situation is an active process, and facilitates personal interpretation and relevance.
  • Learners should construct their own knowledge rather than accepting that given by the instructor.
  • Collaborative and cooperative learning should be encouraged to facilitate constructivist learning (H
  • When assigning learners for group work, membership should be based on the expertise level and learning style of individual group members, so that individual team members can benefit from one another's strengths.
  • &nbsp; Learners should be given control of the learning process
  • Learners should be given time and opportunity to reflect.
  • Learning should be made meaningful for learners. The learning materials should include examples that relate to students, so that they can make sense of the information.
  • Learning should be interactive to promote higher-level learning and social presence, and to help develop personal meaning. According to Heinich et al. (2002), learning is the development of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes as the learner interacts with information and the environment. Interaction is also critical to creating a sense of presence and a sense of community for online learners, and to promoting transformational learning (Murphy &amp; Cifuentes, 2001). Learners receive the learning materials through the technology, process the information, and then personalize and contextualize the information.
  • Figure 1-6. Components of effective online learning.
  • Behaviorist strategies can be used to teach the facts (what); cognitivist strategies to teach the principles and processes (how); and constructivist strategies to teach the real-life and personal applications and contextual learning. There is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from the information presented during the online sessions. The use of learning objects to promote flexibility and reuse of online materials to meet the needs of individual learners will become more common in the future. Online learning materials will be designed in small coherent segments, so that they can be redesigned for different learners and different contexts. Finally, online learning will be increasingly diverse to respond to different learning cultures, styles, and motivations.
  • Online instruction occurs when learners use the Web to go through the sequence of instruction, to complete the learning activities, and to achieve learning outcomes and objectives (Ally, 2002; Ritchie &amp; Hoffman, 1997).
  •  
    From:  FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL THEORY FOR ONLINE LEARNING
Steve Ransom

Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher... - 32 views

  • Good pedagogy is the product of instructors who respect, understand, and creatively engage their students.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Hear hear!
  • make transparent
  • I am asking instructors to see the two questions that the new epistemology emblazons across the front of every classroom&nbsp;— "So what?" and "Who cares?"&nbsp;— and then to adjust their teaching accordingly.
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  • show no patience for lectures
  • Good pedagogy is the product of instructors who respect, understand, and creatively engage their students.
  • except for the occasional late bloomer, we fail miserably at creating sustained intellectual fires among the vast majority of our practical, credential-driven students.
  • better and more widely achievable educational goal should therefore be to inculcate a respect for learning and the pursuit of knowledge.
  • public scholarship
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    An excellent read for those interested... and those who need a kick in the pants re: engaging meaningfully a new culture of students, especially in higher education.
Jeff Andersen

New report says improving educational quality, completion and increasing affordability ... - 2 views

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    A Call to Reform Undergraduate Education Major study by American Academy of Arts and Sciences seeks change in curriculum and assessment, commitment to funding public higher education, new ideas about the faculty role, and more.
Maureen Greenbaum

The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views

  • proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
  • inductive reasoning
  • Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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  • subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
  • felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
  • One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
  • because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
  • adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
  • past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
  • fellow edu-nauts
  • Lectures are banned
  • attending class on Apple laptops
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
  • Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
  • “Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
  • One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
  • when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
  • Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
  • “The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
  • What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
  • methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
  • Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
  • We have numerous sound,&nbsp;reproducible experiments that tell us how people&nbsp;learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are&nbsp;ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
  • memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
  • he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
  • ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them&nbsp;understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
  • e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
  • pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
  • Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
  • a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
  • he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
  • I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • certain functions of universities&nbsp;have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
  • Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
  • MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
  • It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
  • part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
  • “hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
  • I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
  • it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
  • for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
  • Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
  • professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
  • The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur&nbsp;that retirement comes before extinction.
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