By . The Obama administration on Friday set the stage for a new round in the years-long fight over its controversial gainful-employment rule, with the formal release of a new proposal that comes some 20 months after a federal judge blocked key parts of the original version. The proposal seeks to cut off federal financial aid to career-oriented programs whose graduates have high student-loan debt relative to their incomes. Read more...16 mars 2014
What We Risk if We Risk Nothing at All
By Brenda Burmeister. At the beginning of “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education,” the students in both the MOOC and the face-to-face class at Duke University were asked to write about their favorite teacher. I didn’t hesitate in my answer: Karen Hevelston. Her first day was as a substitute in my high-school art class. After dutifully giving the assigned painting project, she strolled through the grouped tables quietly making comments. I was hunched over, sardonically painting, “I don’t want to paint.” After a pause, she asked the unthinkable, “Well, what do you want to do?”
Karen Hevelston did something that is hard for any teacher, regardless of the classroom. More...
5 Tips From a MOOC Producer
By Kaysi Holman. It was the second Google Hangout On Air broadcast for the “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education.” Professors and students at three universities—Duke, Stanford, and the University of California at Santa Barbara—were engaged in conversation while dozens of viewers watched, asking questions in the Google Hangout and in the MOOC forums and live-tweeting the session. Seven minutes in, without warning, Google Hangout stopped recording and broadcasting. Viewers were left with blank screens, and there was no way to show the session later … and the seconds were ticking past. A quick Google search offered no solutions, and the interface was not responding. What to do?
This was precisely my situation four weeks ago. Here’s what I did. More...
Changing Higher Education to Change the World
By Cathy Davidson. What remains from a MOOC after the final video has ended and the last paper has been peer-assessed? The most exciting part of my recent MOOC on the “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education” was the spirited exchanges among the participants. So that is the question. How can a MOOC be more than a “one off”? What remains for the participants after the MOOC is over? What infrastructure is required beyond the MOOC platform to turn a massive learning experience into a movement in the real world?
Before I address this movement, I should mention that I had two quite different kinds of motivations for signing up to teach a MOOC offered by my university, Duke, on the Coursera platform. More...
Reactions to the Education Dept.’s New Gainful-Employment Proposal
By . The Obama administration on Friday set the stage for a new round in the years-long fight over its controversial gainful-employment rule, with the formal release of a new proposal that comes some 20 months after a federal judge blocked key parts of the original version. The proposal seeks to cut off federal financial aid to career-oriented programs whose graduates have high student-loan debt relative to their incomes. Read more...Here Come the Neurothugs! Run!
By Tom Bartlett. In this New Atlantis essay about art and science, Roger Scruton coins a word: neurothugs. Neurothugs are researchers who believe that, when it comes to beauty, there is “such a thing as the fMRI of the beholder, and this does contain the secret of the image in the frame.” Read more...New Repository Offers a Home for Data That Aren’t Numbers
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. After spending months or years collecting data from focus groups, surveys, and other sources, what are scholars doing with the mountains of information that may or may not have made it into their published research?
In the quantitative-research world, where data come as numbers that can be collected and stored in an organized way, the answer has been to share the data. More...
What Matters to Academic-Library Directors? Information Literacy
By Jennifer Howard. Whether they work at a big research university, a small four-year college, or something in between, academic-library directors share a “resounding dedication” to teaching information literacy to undergraduates. Beyond that, the priorities they set for their libraries depend on the size and nature of their institutions and how many (or few) resources they have to work with. Those findings come out of a 2013 survey of American library directors, released on Tuesday by Ithaka S+R US. That’s the consulting and research arm of the nonprofit Ithaka group, which works on “transformative uses of new technologies in higher education.” More...
National Archives Will Shutter 3 Facilities
By Lawrence Biemiller. The National Archives and Records Administration said on Tuesday that it would close three of its facilities—in Anchorage, Fort Worth, and Philadelphia—to save $1.3-million a year. Records stored at the Anchorage facility will be moved to a facility in Seattle and will be digitized so they remain available to users in Alaska, said David S. Ferriero, archivist of the United States, in a written statement. More...
This Guy Drew a Cat. You Won’t Believe What Happened 4 Centuries Later.
By Steve Kolowich. Franz Helm’s illustrated manual on pyrotechnic weapons was around for more than four centuries before it went viral. When the German artillery expert wrote the manual, in the mid-1500s, he unwittingly created a piece of media ideally suited to the tastes of 21st-century Internet culture: Cats that appeared to be wearing jet packs. Read more...
Harvard U. Students Are Silenced During MOOC Filming
By Steve Kolowich. An English professor at Harvard University turned heads last month when she instructed students in her poetry class to refrain from asking questions during lectures so as not to disrupt recordings being made for the MOOC version of the course. Elisa New, a professor of American literature, instituted the policy at the behest of technicians from HarvardX, the university’s online arm, according to The Harvard Crimson, which first reported the news. Read more...
