When it comes to writing-heavy courses, students don’t want to take them and teachers don’t want to teach them. When it comes to writing assignments in non-writing-oriented courses, students don’t like them to run too long and neither do teachers.
Writing is just too much work for both sides. For every upper-division class in the humanities, 25 pages of finished out-of-class writing is a proper minimum. But for most students, that sounds like a daunting total—and an unjust one. For teachers handling three or more classes with 25 or more students, grading all those pages conscientiously (which means giving substantive feedback) keeps them up all night three weeks every semester. For those lucky teachers on a 2-2 load with 25 students or less per course, they feel the publish-or-perish mandate and all those pages of student prose turn into a road block.
Jeff Andersen on 21 May 16Dropbox 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."
