By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Task Force on Academic Freedom
Ronald J. Daniels, Robert C. Lieberman, Johns Hopkins University, 2015/04/08
Johns Hopkins University last year convened a task force on academic freedom. As reported by Inside Higher Ed, "the administration is seeking feedback on the task force’s final product." It's a short document, for some reason released only as a PDF image (to prevent it from being edited? Puh-leeese). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Your Nostalgia Isn’t Helping Me Learn
Michael Oman-Reagan, The Synapse, 2015/04/06
Michael Oman-Reagan takes a (well-argued) stand against the recent spate of stories claiming students "learn better" using notebooks and pens. More...
Von "duz"-Autorin Jeannette Goddar. Kommen Studiengebühren in Deutschland zurück? Einzelne Bundesländer weiten die Spielräume der Hochschulen aus. Geschaffen werden sie dort, wo es weniger Widerstand gibt: bei Berufstätigen und Ausländern. Mehr...Von Lena Greiner. Es ist gar nicht schwer, seine Abschlussarbeit zu veröffentlichen. Der OmniScriptum-Verlag bringt auch den letzten Mist auf den Markt - und verdient damit Millionen. Mehr...
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What will it take to redesign and reinvigorate American higher education?
Pretty much anyone you talk to in America today has an opinion about what’s wrong with our universities. Parents think they’re too expensive. Recent graduates fear being crushed by debt and ending up untrained for the current job market. Professors worry that entering students have not been adequately prepared by their high schools. Economists and sociologists point to troubling studies about a lack of diversity—in both income and race—on American campuses. In Silicon Valley, they talk about MOOCs and STEM, flipped classrooms and gamification. And in Washington, D.C., they talk about federal aid and compliance, Title IX and irresponsible lending. More...
By Rosemarie Emanuele. Economists teach that there we can find a “market clearing” price that equates the amount demanded by consumers with the amount supplied by producers. I recall one extreme case of this when I left my first job almost twenty years ago. Before leaving, I had been teaching a section of a “First Year Seminar,” a piece of the core curriculum that every department was instructed to offer each semester. Read more...
By Travis Grandy. I must confess, I haven’t always had a good relationship with grading student essays. I used to associate grading with the menace of a stack of papers on my desk (and the compulsion to run in the opposite direction). Worse yet, I often wondered whether my students even read the feedback I was laboring over (and this would be especially true when I found myself writing the same feedback over and over). Read more...
By Matt Reed. Last year, in an effort to make it easier for students to register themselves for classes, we lowered the credit threshold beneath which they had to check in with an advisor first. The idea was that students who are well on their way and know what they’re doing (there’s also a GPA requirement) shouldn’t have to check in for a perfunctory appointment before signing up for classes. Read more...By Matt Reed. In what seems like a previous life, I slogged through John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Rawls argued that we should judge policies that would treat different people differently by applying what he called the “difference principle.” Broadly, the idea was that different treatment was justified to the extent that it offered the greatest benefit to the least advantaged. Read more...By Matt Reed. In politics, the incumbent advantage refers to officeholders who have an easier time winning elections than their opponents, precisely because they’re already in office. Time in office brings with it name recognition, connections, and a track record. Those aren’t unalloyed goods, necessarily, but if you haven’t done something horrifying, they tend to help. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
