Skip to main content

Home/ Wooster Horizon Group/ Group items tagged impact

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Jon Breitenbucher

Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Co... - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...y-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb

MOOC udacity thrun liberal-arts

shared by Jon Breitenbucher on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • "From a pedagogical perspective, it was the best I could have done," he says. "It was a good class." Only it wasn't: For all of his efforts, Statistics 101 students were not any more engaged than any of Udacity's other students. "Nothing we had done had changed the drop-off curve," Thrun acknowledges.
  • Among those pupils who took remedial math during the pilot program, just 25% passed. And when the online class was compared with the in-person variety, the numbers were even more discouraging. A student taking college algebra in person was 52% more likely to pass than one taking a Udacity class,
  • "At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment," Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor. "If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?"
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Learning, after all, is about more than some concrete set of vocational skills. It is about thinking critically and asking questions, about finding ways to see the world from different points of view rather than one's own. These, I point out, are not skills easily acquired by YouTube video.
  • Thrun seems to enjoy this objection. He tells me he wasn't arguing that Udacity's current courses would replace a traditional education--only that it would augment it. "We're not doing anything as rich and powerful as what a traditional liberal-arts education would offer you," he says. He adds that the university system will most likely evolve to shorter-form courses that focus more on professional development. "The medium will change," he says.
  • "I wish to do away with the idea of spending one big chunk of time learning."
  • Jon Breitenbucher on 20 Nov 13
     
    Some interesting thoughts on the impact of MOOCs and the relevance of Liberal Arts.
Amyaz Moledina

Study casts doubt on idea that spending more per student leads to better educational ou... - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...ds-better-educational-outcomes

highered study spending education liberal-arts survival faculty

shared by Amyaz Moledina on 25 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Research presented here by researchers from Wabash College -- and based on national data sets -- finds that there may be a minimal relationship between what colleges spend on education and the quality of the education students receive. Further, the research suggests that colleges that spend a fraction of what others do, and operate with much higher student-faculty ratios and greater use of part-time faculty members, may be succeeding educationally as well as their better-financed (and more prestigious) counterparts
  • 45 colleges and universities, most of them liberal arts colleges,
  • good teaching with high quality interactions with faculty," high expectations and academic challenge, interaction with ideas and people different from one's own, and "deep learning" through characteristics identified by the National Survey of Student Engagement.
    • Amyaz Moledina
      Amyaz Moledina on 25 Feb 13
       
      The outcomes variables are as per NSSE
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Blaich isolated 10 colleges (he said later that most but not all were liberal arts colleges) that had very similar scores on the good practices related to teaching. Their spending per student, however, ranged from $9,225 to $53,521 (with corresponding tuition rates). Others at the high end of per-student spending were at $44,429 and $34,172. Three other colleges, however, were achieving the same educational impact with spending per student of about $15,000
  • suggest that the quality of instruction from part-timers can be just as high as from full-timers, so maybe the issue is finding the best way to hire and retain them. (He suggested full-year contracts over course-by-course.)
  • Amyaz Moledina on 25 Feb 13
     
    survey shows that colleges (w.liberal arts in sample) that have more spending per students, part time faculty and higher faculty-student ratios, get similar results on the NSSE score. A NSEE variable is "good teaching with high quality interactions with faculty"
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page