As Aaron has noted, he and a group of other professors will be taking and writing about Coursera’s “E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.” I will not be one of them – not because I wouldn’t find it interesting, but because I’ve already been down the road, having taken a World History course last semester (and…
In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes: I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world. The column, which seems to be more PR for Coursera than legitimate commentary on education, comes a day before a group…
In 2010, Republicans won the governorships and control of the legislatures in states across the Rust Belt. Because it was a census year, the GOP engaged in extreme gerrymandering that, at least at first glance, seemingly insured their control of those states for at least the next decade. In a previous post, I suggested that…
Mitch Daniels, the former Republican governor of Indiana and the new president of Purdue University, has issued a thoughtful open letter in which he recounts some of the attack leveled against higher education and details some of his core principles.
This is a guest post by Darren L. Linvill, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Clemson University. His article, “The Bias Fallacy,” appears in the newest issue of Academe. Did you know people who like mayonnaise are more likely to be good dancers? As my undergraduate research methods students are taught, correlation…
Francis Bacon wrote that people with disability develop to be “extreme bold” as a habit born of their need to defend themselves from the “scorn” of others. No doubt much has changed in the years since Bacon opined on the matter, but Stephen Kuusisto writes, in “Extreme Bold in the Faculty Ranks,” that students and…
The study released this week at the NCAA’s annual meeting showing that annual spending on sports by public universities in the six big-time conferences like the SEC and the Big 12 passed $100,000 per athlete raises some interesting questions that colleges and universities must address. It is less what the large conferences – call them…
Thus far, 2013 has been a tough year for open-education advocates. As Flat World Knowledge promised at the tail-end of 2012, the publisher no longer provides a CC 3.0 NC SA version of its textbooks for students. In response, Leslie Scott endeavored to defend the commons by crowd-sourcing an effort to harvest Flat World Knowledge’s catalog…
Over the past few years, plenty of ink has been spent discussing the question of how college changes students. They don’t just learn facts, of course—there are lots of important skills to learn inside and outside the classroom. Students also change as they grow out of their teens and into their early twenties. In the…
North Dakota State University President Dean Bresciani has announced a ban on a federal research grant to two faculty for a sex education program, after Republican legislators objected to its connection with Planned Parenthood. Bresciani claims to be obeying a state law, but that law only relates to family planning programs. Below is an open…