Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Audrey Watters. My friend, the amazing Tressie McMillan Cottom delivered a fabulous talk yesterday at the Harvard Berkman Center: “Democratizing Ideologies and Inequality Regimes in Digital Domains.” (You can find her notes and slides here, a live-blog from PhD student Nathan Matias here, and a collection of Tweets from the talk here; it’s my understanding that the center will be posting the video-recording soon.)
As the title of her talk suggests, Tressie’s work deals with ideology, inequality, and higher education, with a specific focus on for-profit education through the lens of race, class, and gender. More...

By Audrey Watters. I want to pick back up on some of the ideas I started to flesh out yesterday, based on Tressie McMillan Cottom’s recent talk on ideologies and identities in digital domains. Again, not sure where I’m going with this…
Tressie highlighted the ways in which new educational technologies – MOOCs for example – assume a student free of place, free of context. "Free." That’s a deeply ideological assumption, no doubt, one that erases race, class, and gender for starters. I tried to link her arguments to a tweet by Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira, who defending his company from parent-privacy activists, tweeted that Knewton “can help students understand their learning history without knowing their identity.” There, I argued, we see this nod to “identity-less-ness” – a notion that with the right engineering, the right algorithms ed-tech can be personalized to your academic needs without knowing your person. More...

By Audrey Watters. “Reports of MOOCs’ demise have been greatly exaggerated,” writes Craig Weidemann, vice provost for online education at Penn State. Clearly, because people are still writing stories with bullshit headlines like “Will Free Online Courses Ever Replace a College Education?”
“What 6.9 million clicks tell us about how to fix online education” (the “us” here is MIT’s AI Lab): things like we need to make “‘YouTube for MOOCs’ that seeks to reinvent how online learners watch videos.” More...

By Cathy Davidson. Expertise is a slippery business.  We teach a course, from the presumed position of, well, knowing it all.   However, when you have command of your syllabus, your reading list, your schedule, your requirements, and your testing apparatus, you leave yourself, as a prof, very little room for revealing all the things you may not know.  Face it, you may even be able to trick yourself into believing that you are the teacher because you have nothing left to learn. More...

By Cathy Davidson. In writing an essay for a collection on the need for educational change, I came to the conclusion that one of the biggest challenges facing those committed to change is to differentiate the necessity of educational transformation from profiteering. How can we underscore the need to change what is antiquated about our current system if we operate under the shadow of ed-tech purveyors who may be committed less to improvement than to the profits to be made at the expense of the 15 million students currently in our colleges and universities--and their teachers? Being clear about our motives and our personal stake in change is essential if we wish to be trusted as leaders of change. More...

By Cathy Davidson. The single most common question I receive when I now address audiences, whether CEO's or parents, is about the Common Core. The politics have become so intense that I now call the Common Core the "ObamaCare of 2014."  By that I mean that, given that the numbers so far on the Affordable Care Act surpassed even optimistic predictions,  it becomes harder to blame everything terrible about American healthcare on the ACA. So now the Common Core is both a real issue--and irrational political hyperbole. More...

By Cathy Davidson. The Graduate Center, City University of New York, co-leader of CUNY's newly created Big Data Consortium, announced today it will establish the CUNY Center for Digital Scholarship and Data Visualization. The consortium has been awarded $15 million from the State of New York in the CUNY 2020 grant competition. More...