Promoters of MOOCs and online courses make big promises about the value of this latest trend in higher education. MOOCs and online courses, we are told, will both expand access to higher education and reduce its costs for just about every “stakeholder”–for institutions lacking the resources to provide needed courses, for governments hard-pressed to provide…
It has been well established that two-year students face enormous problems when they decide to complete a four-year degree. By one estimate, only 11 percent of those who indicate their intention to acquire a degree on the day they start in a two-year program actually do so. There are many reasons for this failure. Certainly,…
This week, several Far Right media outlets have reported that actor/comedian Rob Schneider had declared himself a Republican. Yes, Schneider, the star of Big Stan, The Animal, The Hot Chick, Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo, and Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo, has decided to endorse Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly. Said Schneider, “The more I am with…
I don’t expect the sources from which I get my news to sugarcoat it or to avoid the unsavory aspects of life for uplifting human-interest stories. But sometimes the bad news does seem to have almost completely crowded out any good news. Consider the following headlines from a late August news summary from Channel 10,…
Here’s a visual representation of some of our work related to big data and writing studies, which is based on our observations of teachers’ comments on approximately 120,000 student essays over the past three years:
Most Progressives, especially in the “Rust Belt” states, have had much reason to regret the failure of the national Democratic Party to generate voter turnout in 2010. During that census year, Republicans secured the governorships and large legislative majorities in many of those states and then gerrymandered districts that have allowed them to maintain 2:1…
The first item is from Newsmax, a Far-Right news service: _________________________ Dear Newsmax Reader, On October 1st, the first major milestone of ObamaCare began. So-called “health exchanges” are now open across the United States. In the past your employer would handle your coverage, or you could deal directly with a private insurer. Not anymore. Millions…
After all of those horror stories about senior citizens who are still paying off their student debt and parents who co-signed loans from private lenders and are now obligated to pay off the student debt of their deceased children, how nice to finally get an “upbeat” story on student debt. Erik “Silo” Dahl, a computer-science…
The last time that I did a post on a digital advertisement distributed by the National Review, I was chided by one of my readers, presumably someone on the Right, for trying to base a political argument on an analysis of ephemera—on an analysis of a piece of e-mail that was, after all, “just spam.”…
with Zachary Dixon Recently, through the Brookings Institute, Darrell West and Joshua Blieberg wrote about the promise that “big data” holds to improve the feedback loop and the quality of student writing assessment. Equally important was West and Bleiberg’s recognition that “[r]eal world demonstrations of how big data would fit into the classroom environment have…