
A Report from DPLAFest

By Alberto A. Martinez. The high cost of college makes people think that most faculty are overpaid. Let me debunk this myth. Nearly all funds from recent tuition hikes, state-allocation increments, and record-breaking fund raising do not go to most educators. I’m a tenured professor of history of science and mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. I finished high school 25 years ago. What if instead of attending college I had worked at McDonald’s? More...
By Kevin Werbach. Ah, the life of a superprofessor. Since I started teaching a massive open online course, I’ve been called “Internet royalty” by the Financial Times and been told I had great skin on the public-radio show Marketplace. This must be what the edX president Anant Agarwal meant when, responding to concerns that MOOCs were overhyped, he asked, “What better to hype than education? For the first time, you’re going to make the teacher a rock star” (Information Week). More...
By Megan O'Neil. MOOCs are more disruptive to higher education than open-access megajournals are, in part because of structural protections in the scholarly-publishing world and because some policy makers are pushing massive open online courses as a means to increase productivity, a professor argues in a new article on open-access alternatives in higher education. More...
By Justin Doubleday. What if students received their financial-aid packages earlier in the year, giving families more time to prepare to pay for college? That would be possible if financial-aid eligibility were based on two-year-old tax data, rather than the year-old data used now. A report released on Monday by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators considers the implications of switching to the older data, called “prior-prior year” data. The report, which was supported with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explores research that was first presented at the association’s conference this past summer, and also makes policy recommendations. More...