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Submission + - A for-profit company will soon quietly be behind the scenes of edX, upselling (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: edX, founded by Harvard University and MIT a decade ago as a nonprofit alternative to for-profit online education providers, has agreed to sell its operations to a for-profit company, 2U. Exactly what that means is only now becoming clear, but many observers have noted that in the end, 2U bought a giant source of leads for students that it can upsell graduate degrees to from its partner colleges. But turning edX into a marketing vehicle is a far cry from the high-minded language used when the nonprofit was founded to bring education to underserved students around the world.

Submission + - SPAM: Growth of online college will flatten idea of prestige so Cousera = Harvard

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: “The world we're heading into is provider agnostic,” argues Arthur Levine in his new book, The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future. “It doesn't matter if I learned what I learned at Harvard. It doesn't matter if I learned what I learned at Coursera. It doesn't matter if I learned it on Wikipedia. It doesn't matter if I dreamed it last night. What we're talking about is: Have you achieved the outcome?”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: IQ tests were once a "new" and controversial tech. And 'gifted' ed.

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Back 100 years ago, many people thought super-smart kids were a problem — social deviants. One of those smart kids became a Stanford prof and invented the Stanford-Binet IQ test, and the notion of 'gifted' education. This podcast explores his strange story and dark legacy that has suddenly sparked controversy as people look to make gifted programs more diverse.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - U. of Florida Asks Students to Use App to Report Profs Who Don't Teach In Person (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Professors at U of Florida are outraged that the university essentially put a "tattle" button on a campus safety app that lets students report if professors aren't teaching in person. Apparently more than 100 profs there have asked to teach online for health reasons but have been denied, and administrators worry that they'll just teach online anyway. Profs feel the app is akin to a "police state."

Submission + - Why students oppose low-cost textbook programs at colleges (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Colleges across the country are setting up so-called "inclusive access" textbook programs that promise lower costs. So it's surprising that the biggest opposition to the idea comes from students.

Welcome to the battle over the future of textbooks as they go digital. Many students like the current situation, where they can choose from rentals or used books, but publishers are working to eliminate the used textbook market with new subscription plans sold to colleges.

This EdSurge article and podcast explores the strange market of textbooks, where there are now lawsuits over whether these new deals break antitrust laws.

“The more you look into this program, the red flags start coming up because, you know, you realize that very few students are going to benefit,” says Yu Cheng Wang, a sophomore at the University of California at Davis.

Submission + - Calls by college students for tuition refunds are growing louder. Here's why. (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Students want their money back since their classes have moved online. Or they want partial refunds, and their calls have been getting louder. Petition movements at more than 200 campuses are calling for partial refunds of tuition, typically asking for 50 percent back. And some student protesters are now even filing class-action lawsuits to try to force colleges to return part of the tuition money.

Whether colleges should give back money depends on how you think about what colleges are selling. Is it a straight service like any other, so if students get less they should pay less? Is the most important thing simply getting into college, in which case the degree is the main thing, and students are still getting that? Or are colleges responsible for social mobility and helping students during this time by reducing tuition?

And is online education even worse than, say, sitting in the back of a large lecture hall with 300 students?

Submission + - How Tech Companies Are Selling Colleges on Mass Data Collection (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: The biggest US trade show for technology aimed at colleges was held this week in Chicago, and companies were pushing mass data collection on campuses. It is in the name of efficiency and helping students, but some worry that it's setting up an unprecedented level of surveillance on campuses.

"If colleges actually bought all the tools sold here, just about every move made by students and professors in physical and virtual campuses would be tracked and analyzed in the name of efficiency. And the vision expands beyond that, as the vision is to create data profiles of students before they even arrive on campus and to continue data tracking long after they’ve graduated."

This article looks at some of the unusual new ways companies are selling data tracking on campuses.

Submission + - When an Online Teaching Job Becomes a Window into Child Abuse (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: In the fast-growing world of live online tutoring, some teachers say they're witnessing harsh physical discipline as they peer into faraway homes. What can they do to respond? What should the companies do? A reporter for EdSurge did a six-month investigation of these questions, in an article co-published today in Wired.

Submission + - Across the Country, College Students Must Pay to Turn In Their Homework. (edsurge.com) 1

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: A professor at Arizona State U says he was let go from his teaching job in the economics department because he wouldn't embrace assigning homework software that he says “requires students to pay just to turn in homework.”

His students rushed to his defense on social media, saying that many of their courses now require them to pay for online systems if they want to submit homework.

The university says the professor is spreading misinformation and is the villain.

Details of the ASU situation are messy, but the broader issue of homework software is one that students around the country have been complaining about, while textbook companies see them as the future because they eliminate the used textbook market and lead to more sales as more students are forced to buy directly from publishers.

Publishers argue their software is sophisticated, expensive to build, and improves student grades because it is integrated with helpful bells and whistles. They want colleges to buy in bulk so all students have access.

Is the move to digital homework systems creating a new kind of digital divide at colleges?

Submission + - Hoping to Fix College Teaching, Carnegie Mellon U Open-Sources Trove of Software (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: CMU announced today that it will make an adaptive-learning software platform and dozens of related tools to improve college teaching free and open source. It will also make a national push to get other colleges to adopt them and try to bring a more "engineering" approach to college teaching.

The biggest challenge will be changing the culture. While professors care about teaching, they think they're better at it than they are, according to many studies. The work is inspired by a former CMU professor who won a Nobel Prize, Herbert Simon, who championed the idea of learning engineering in the '60s.

As he wrote way back in 1967:
"We take the traditional organization of colleges so much for granted that we must step back and view them with Martian eyes, innocent of their history, to appreciate fully how outrageous their operation is,” he wrote. “If we visited an organization responsible for designing, building, and maintaining large bridges, we would expect to find employed there a number of trained and experienced professional engineers, thoroughly educated in mechanics and other laws of nature that determine whether a bridge will stand or fall. ... What do we find in a university? Physicists well educated in physics, and trained for research in that discipline; English professors learned in their language and its literature (or at least some tiny corner of it); and so on down the list of the disciplines. But we find no one with a professional knowledge of the laws of learning, or of the techniques of applying them.”

Submission + - $1-Billion Effort to Rethink CS and AI at MIT Sparks Protest (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: MIT is spending $1-billion to build a new College of Computing, backed by a mega-gift of $350-million from billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of a private equity firm called the Blackstone Group who has been a close advisor to President Trump.The stated goal is to better weave CS across disciplines, and to focus more on the societal impact of whatever new algorithms and tools that were created. In other words, it won't just be about "we can build this cool thing," but will include "should this thing even exist?"

But critics of the effort question whether the college can deliver on this promise, especially given the donor's interests and business practices. Higher ed is now clearly part of the larger cultural debate about role of Big Tech.

"Colleges once dreamed of launching the next Mark Zuckerberg. These days, the goal is to make sure that when the next world-changing CEOs hit college, they can be trained in ethics and humanities to help avoid the Facebook founder’s missteps."

Submission + - A Crusade Against Multiple-Choice Tests in College (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: More professors are using multiple-choice tests these days to save time grading, but the format is bad for student learning. That’s the argument of two instructional designers who are encouraging professors to move away from multiple-choice. One solution, according to Heather Garcia, one of the instructional designers making the case, is for professors to give “more authentic” assignments, like project-based work and other things that students would be more likely to see in a professional environment. After all, she notes, “you’re never going to encounter multiple-choice quizzes on the job somewhere.”

But the multiple-choice format has defenders too, if done well. EdSurge looks inside the surprisingly rant-filled world of assessment design.

Submission + - This Unusual College is First to Be Kickstarted w/ a Crowdfudning Campaign (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Portland, Oregon celebrates its reputation for being “weird” (as popular slogans on t-shirts and bumper stickers there insist). And a new two-year college embraces that spirit, trying a mix of quirky approaches in an attempt to be more student-focused than traditional colleges.

The effort is called Wayfinding Academy, and it got its start with a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, raising more than $200,000. That let its leaders buy an old YWCA building and open their experimental effort. It's a two-year, nonprofit college that is seeking traditional accreditation so it can qualify for federal financial aid. But it's also a critique of the higher education system as we know it.

That curriculum is designed to flip the college priority list. Most campuses stress academics, then provide students with activities and guidance to figure out what they want to do with their lives. At Wayfinding Academy, the top priority is self-discovery, with academic content as a background feature. Wayfinding’s leaders say their academics are just as rigorous as any other college—they’ve gained approval from the state of Oregon to grant degrees, and they’ve started applying for accreditation so they might eventually qualify for federal financial aid.

Submission + - Why College (and Life) Should Be More Like Kindergarten (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Mitch Resnick has an unusual research group at MIT's Media Lab. It has invented the Mindstorms product for Lego, as well as the popular Scratch programming language for kids. In his new book, he argues that our schools and colleges (and even our workplaces) should be designed like kindergarten, which he sees as the ideal learning lab for our digital age. But the problem is that even kindergarten is getting more regimented, and Hollywood movies like Toy Story celebrate playing with glitzy toys and demonize the idea of turning kids into makers. "The most important thing for them to learn is how to think and act creatively—how to come up with innovative solutions to new situations that they confront," Resnick says.

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