"It's official: Colleges can now award federal student aid based on measured "competencies," not just credit hours. In a letter sent to colleges on Tuesday, the U.S. Education Department told them they may apply to provide federal student aid to students enrolled in "competency-based" programs and spelled out a process for doing so."

From the comments: Breaking News . . . scholars at Harvard University announced today that they have made an important discovery of a new activity they are calling, "college teaching." Although not at liberty to divulge details, one senior official indicated that this new activity may have important implications for education. Scholars believe "college teaching" has something to do with student learning but they are not at all sure what that connection is. If this turns out to be true then, as one anonymous, but really famous NYT columnist said, "This is the greatest development in modern society since the ones I reported on in my last book. Fortunately, you will be able to read about it in my new book very soon."

"We see students coming in as freshmen saying they want to be statisticians," said Robert Gould, who is on the statistics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. "That was unheard-of before the AP test." In a still-soft jobs market, rising demand for statisticians also has spurred interest in the field. There were 28,305 postings for jobs in statistics, analytics and, in the trendy phrase, "big data" at the jobs website icrunchdata last month, up from 16,500 three years earlier, according to Todd Nevins, a site co-founder.

This was published last year, but it's great - love the stars v. bylines!

Imagine when these families come into contact with MOOC-provided learning experiences/content; a domain of the MOOC discussion I haven't heard explored with empirical data before ...