Gallup Poll on American's views of online courses: Mixed - "online instruction is at least as good as classroom-based courses in terms of providing good value, a format most students can succeed in, and instruction tailored to each individual. But they question the rigor of testing and grading, and whether employees will view such degrees positively..."

A history of teaching/learning initiatives from a retiring teacher. "I saw countless reforms come and go; some even returned years later disguised in new education lingo. Some that were touted as "best practices" couldn't work, given Alexandria's demographics. Others were nothing but common-sense bromides hyped as revolutionary epiphanies. All of them failed to do what I believe to be key to teaching: to make students care about what they're studying and understand how it's relevant to their lives."

MOOCs Need to Go Back to Their Roots They were supposed to be educational communities, not hypertextbooks.

Interesting idea, but a little too expensive for my situation.

William E. Kirwan, Maryland's chancellor, told The Sun, in Baltimore, that "there are two things we're seeking: new strategies that will improve learning outcomes, and lower costs." "We can't have one without the other," he said.

Back-to-College Special: Academic Contributions Aren't Just Cerebral

If you want to understand the modern academy, it wouldn't hurt to start at "impact factor." Citation cartels.

"To say that American universities are too expensive is like saying cars are too expensive. What do we mean by such a statement?  Are we talking about the cost of a Lamborghini Veneno (at 3.5M, one of the world's  most expensive cars) or a Hyundai Atos (at $9000, one of the least expensive)?  For the captain of industry, the sultan, or the magnate, there might not be enough luxury features on the Lamborghini.  For the person barely hanging on to that minimum wage job with no benefits, paying $9000 for an Atos to get across town to work at Walmart every day may be hopelessly out of reach.   "

"Feminism and Technology" is trying to take a few MOOC elements, but then to change them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course or DOCC (pronounced "dock")."

This map is an American snapshot; it provides an accessible visualization of geographic distribution, population density, and racial diversity of the American people in every neighborhood in the entire country. The map displays 308,745,538 dots, one for each person residing in the United States at the location they were counted during the 2010 Census. Each dot is color-coded by the individual's race and ethnicity. The map is presented in both black and white and full color versions. In the color version, each dot is color-coded by race.

Basic Item Analysis for Multiple-Choice Tests. Jerard Kehoe, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University This article offers some suggestions for the improvement of multiple-choice tests using "item analysis" statistics. These statistics are typically provided by a measurement services, where tests are machine-scored, as well as by testing software packages. The basic idea that we can capitalize on is that the statistical behavior of "bad" items is fundamentally different from that of "good" items. Of course, the items have to be administered to students in order to obtain the needed statistics. This fact underscores our point of view that tests can be improved by maintaining and developing a pool of "good" items from which future tests will be drawn in part or in whole. This is particularly true for instructors who teach the same course more than once.

New ways to trip up plagiarism detection software and online cheating.

How the Gates Foundation is working to remake higher education, often without the support of educators.

The roles of educators have been radically changed. From the sage on the stage to the facilitator and coordinator, teachers have been at the center of a paradigmatic shift that flickers between two instructional environments: student-centered and teacher centered.

Quandl is a repository of time-series data on the internet, tailored for researchers, students and other data professionals. Quandl allows you to: Quickly find numerical data Get that data in many formats transparency to the source of the data Quandl is open and free

Satire. In the article, the author proposes MOOAs (massive open online administrations) and posits that "By having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these problems expeditiously and economically.  Since MOOA would allow colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would generate substantial cost savings in higher education."

Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a bill into law last week to encourage the state's K-12 and higher education systems to use massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The bill Scott signed allows MOOCs, under certain conditions, to be used to help teach K-12 students in four subjects and also orders Florida education officials to study and set rules that would allow students who have yet to enroll in college to earn transfer credits by taking MOOCs.

We have developed computational methods to measure historical significance through analysis of Wikipedia and other data sources. We rank historical figures just as Google ranks webpages, by integrating a diverse set of measurements about their reputation (including PageRank, article length, and readership) into estimates of their fame, explained by a combination of achievement (gravitas) and celebrity. We correct for the passage of time in a principled way, so we can fairly compare the significance of historical figures of different eras. - See more at: http://www.whoisbigger.com/#sthash.6tN6cebp.dpuf