BY JONATHAN REES Guest blogger Jonathan Rees teaches at Colorado State University-Pueblo Do you remember Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs)? 2012 was supposedly the “Year of the MOOC” because they were going to revolutionize higher education. By teaching at scale, matching a few superstar professors with thousands of students at a time, the argument…
BY AARON BARLOW When I was in Peace Corps in West Africa, I could always tell where the butcher’s stand was by the vultures circling overhead. Today, I am seeing similar carrion feeders, ones hoping to snatch up the offal from the COVID-19 situation… The COVID-19 college closures are being seized upon by the EdTech…
BY PAUL-OLIVIER DEHAYE Guest blogger Paul-Olivier Dehaye is a former assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Zurich. Surveillance capitalism, described by Shoshana Zuboff, is the logic of accumulation of data leading to commodification of a facet of the global digital life. As remarked by Oliver Stone, Pokemon Go fits in this logic, as it…
BY MARTIN KICH In “The Path to Debt Free College: More School Choice,” an article written for U.S. News and World Report, Wesley Coopersmith argues that “to solve the debt crisis in higher education, lawmakers should let students have many more options.” Brushing aside proposals to increase Pell Grants, to reduce interest rates on student…
Education Dive [http://www.educationdive.com/] is a very good source of news about innovations and initiatives in digital education, but it does have a very pronounced bias in favor of the pedagogical potential of digital technologies. Sometimes that bias leads to analyses that border on the absolutely ludicrous. Each item from Education Dive includes a bulletted summary…
Kevin Carey, writing in The New York Times last July, said this of American colleges and universities: “These organizations are not coherent academic enterprises with consistent standards of classroom excellence. When it comes to exerting influence over teaching and learning, they’re Easter eggs. They barely exist.” This is humbug. It’s an attempt to channel the…
A recent international study has thrown a bucket of cold water on the heated frenzy for computer-assisted and online education. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has an authoritative program for assessing school education quality in its 34 member countries, has published a report demonstrating that increased computer use in classrooms may…
Here is the weekly newsletter from Education Dive, which focuses largely on digital innovations in higher education: The first article somewhat blithely acknowledges that “instructor availability” is one of the major concerns of students enrolled in MOOCs, as if it is a problem that can be resolved with more “innovation,” rather than one of the…
By 1970, almost everyone who had worked to create “programmed instruction” during the 1950s and 1960s had moved away from the idea of teaching machines as the centerpiece of education. These tools, they had realized, were only widely effective when in the hands of master craftspeople—that is, trained teachers who understood both the limits and…