By Jonathan Thon - The Black Hole. Early in February 2014, a member of the South Dakota State Legislature submitted a bill for consideration that would prohibit administrators of public schools in South Dakota from reprimanding teachers who chose to teach their students about intelligent design in the science classroom. South Dakota is not the first place where such bills have been introduced. However, teaching of intelligent design has largely been outlawed after the Kitzmiller v. Dover case in 2005 which ruled that intelligent design was, in effect, biblical creationism in disguise. More...
16 février 2014
The disruption to come
By R.A. THIS week's Free exchange column looks at the economics of online higher education:
Two big forces underpin a university’s costs. The first is the need for physical proximity. Adding students is expensive—they require more buildings and instructors—and so a university’s marginal cost of production is high. That means that even in a competitive market, where price converges towards marginal cost, modern education is dear.
It is also hard to raise productivity. University lecturers can teach at most a few hundred students each semester—the maximum that can be squeezed into lecture halls and exam-marking rosters. Because it is so labour intensive higher education relies on large numbers of instructors paid relatively modest salaries. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)