By Eric Hoover. At nearly three dozen colleges that do not require applicants to take the ACT or SAT, researchers have found only “trivial differences” between the long-term performance of college students who submitted test scores and those who did not. According to a report released on Tuesday, the cumulative grade-point averages of non-submitters was .05 lower than of submitters (2.83 compared with 2.88). The difference in their graduation rates: 0.6 percent. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. The University of Puget Sound, a private institution in Tacoma, Wash., has received a $10,000 Bitcoin donation that could be the first to a college in the United States. The digital currency was transferred to the university last week and converted into dollars using the e-commerce processor BitPay. The gift was made by Nicolas Cary, chief executive of the Bitcoin site Blockchain and a Puget Sound alumnus. He said he had always wanted to give back to the university and had used Bitcoin because it’s the main currency in his life and career. Read more...
By Lawrence Biemiller. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have released a set of open-source visualization tools for working with a rich trove of data from more than a million people registered for 17 of the two institutions’ massive open online courses, which are offered through their edX platform. Read more...
By Megan O'Neil. 2U Inc., an online-education platform that counts the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California among its clients, filed plans on Friday for an initial public offering of up to $100-million in common stock. The company did not disclose the stock’s IPO price. The money will be used to expand student enrollment and to fund technology and content development, the company said. 2U develops and services cloud-based education software used by colleges to deliver courses, and sometimes entire degrees, online. Read more...
By Megan O'Neil. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that he would propose new rules to safeguard what is known as “net neutrality,” or the equal treatment of information flowing across the web. The announcement came a month after a federal appeals court struck down some of the existing rules, adopted in 2010, while affirming the FCC’s ability to regulate Internet-service providers in other ways. Read more...
By Jonah Newman. This is the second in a series of posts about the data that are likely to appear in the Obama administration’s proposed college-ratings system. For the first post, about graduation rates, click here.
Search for a college on the White House’s College Scorecard, and the first number you’ll see is the institution’s average net price, under a gauge that shows whether the number is low, medium, or high in relation to other colleges. The scorecard was supposed to be a source for prospective students to “compare schools based on a simple criteria—where you can get the most bang for your educational buck,” according to President Obama, who introduced it in his 2013 State of the Union address. More...
By Peter Baldwin. Evaluation, not publication, should be academe’s new priority.
Imagine that, having polished a dissertation for publication or finished a second or later book, the social-science scholar sends the typescript to an independent Review Institute. The institute determines a list of five to 10 scholars worldwide who are best placed to evaluate the work, taking into account both those experts cited in it and others who, though prominent in the field, may have a different take on the subject. For a fee like the one publishers now pay outside readers, each evaluator writes a two-page appraisal of the work, avoiding any summary and dealing only with its qualities. Numbers are also assigned on a uniform scale over a range of areas: Quality of the empirical base? How well written? Novel or familiar ground? Advanced or introductory readership? Balanced or polemical? And the like. More...
Q: My uncle told me about a fairly recent development in distance education — MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, from name universities that are available free on the Web.
Now I read that the nonprofit MOOC provider organization Coursera has begun offering certificates to students who take sequences of MOOCs from its university partners. The new program, which I understand is called Specializations, is, or shortly will, offer certificates in data science, mobile app development and cybersecurity, with more types of courses to follow. The Coursera certificates will comprise three to nine courses, each costing between $200 and $500. More...
And we must also ask how well the National Development Plan articulates higher education's role. There is increasing evidence that high levels of educational attainment contribute to global competitiveness and sustainable socioeconomic development. This has resulted in a number of countries placing higher education at the core of their development strategies. In this context, one may legitimately ask how South Africa measures up and whether the government's National Development Plan (NDP), released in 2012, articulates the role of higher education in contributing to achieving the ambitious goals and targets outlined for 2030. More...
By Khy Sovuthy and Matt Blomberg. The Minister of Education will no longer place a validating signature on the country’s university degrees, and schools of tertiary education will soon be audited, and properly accredited, for the quality of their education, officials said Monday.
Universities whose courses and degrees fall below par will be shut down entirely, or ordered to take serious remedial action to improve their level of teaching, an education ministry official said. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
