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What is a learner profile?  A learner profile includes three elements: Learning transcript: grades, courses (and/or learning levels), state and district achievement data Personalized learning information: supplemental achievement data, record of services received, feedback on work habits, record of extracurricular activities and work/service experiences. Portfolio of student work: collection of personal best work products.

What about children with disconnected parents? As the number of learning options expands many students and families would benefit from a chosen guide. The Donnell Kay Foundation imagines a new system of education where learners create customized paths with advocates who work with them to connect their present learning to their desired future. This role of mentor/advocate/coach could benefit all students but particularly students without the benefit of engaged parents. In some cases, parents/guardians will choose to allow designees (e.g., mentors, relatives) to manage learner profile privacy settings. Young people in the foster care and juvenile justice system may have a court (or state) appointed guide that would manage privacy settings.

Data Quality Campaign recently noted, “With access to current education data child welfare staff can help the highly mobile students in foster care achieve school success by providing support such as the following: helping with timely enrollment and transfer of credits if a school change is needed, identifying the need for educational supports, working with school staff to address attendance and discipline issues, and assisting with transition planning to post-school activities such as higher education.”

They have advanced the careers of male economists, often at women’s expense

The central problem is that employment policies that are gender-neutral on paper may not be gender-neutral in effect.

Succeed within seven years and you have a job for life. Fall short, and you’re fired.

Nest thermostat (so we can keep our room perfectly chilled, while also keeping the nursery toasty warm and manage it all from our phones), DropCam (to check in on the little guy during nap time), Dropbox and Evernote to store important documents and to-do lists (baby brain is a real thing!), my Swash laundry device (so I can "refresh" that blazer that just got baby spit up on it, before rushing out the door to host my SiriusXM radio show), the Rock-a-bye Baby channel on Pandora (you haven't lived until you've heard a lullaby rendition of Metallica), PayPal to manage all the expenses going in and out (babies are expensive!), and the Timehop app so we can compare Simi to what Asher looked like at his age -- an instant smile every day!

Zuckerberg: Work. Sleep. Family. Friends. Fitness. Pick three. And remember, you can choose a different three every day. As long as it balances out in the long run, you're ok. So don't put pressure on yourself to do all five of those things well every single day.

There is growing research showing that taking a bridge year boosts motivation, confidence and achievement and, for many, a cost savings as it decreases the timeline to graduation. 

When we enable students to step out of the classroom and focus on what really matters, they discover who they are and who they hope to become. And they do that before someone (whether a parent, benefactor or government program) makes the single largest investment of a young person’s life: a college education.

It's time to rebrand the “gap year” as what it has the potential to be -- a “bridge year” or “launch pad” -- and to make it a more encouraged, accepted and accessible option for kids from all backgrounds. 

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.