And they are fundamentally asking not “is college worth it?” but “who should go to college among those in the bottom 50%?” and “what should we pay for those people to go?” Because if education cost nothing to provide, the question would be moot. In the 21st Century, it’s notable that these same curious people are not asking “Is high school worth it?” even though high school dropout remains a problem and of course it costs money to offer high school as well. What is so magical about the 12th year of education versus the 14th? Absolutely nothing. So why is “worthiness” asked of the 14th year? Because the country simply hasn’t gotten around to providing a free public option.
Quotes
What courses rarely do is step back to help students understand why they are learning a certain subject matter in a way that gives them both insights into why someone else (i.e. their prof) would dedicate their lives to researching in that area while also giving them the meta-cognitive ability to take a much less specialized version of that knowledge and apply it elsewhere.
Cathy Davidson in “How to Get a Job at Google: Rsp to NYTimes Tom Friedman”
What College Courses Don’t Do
Higher Education… Only the naïve and uninformed considered teaching to be a simple and inexpensive proposition.
Doug Guthrie, “The Coming Big Data Revolution”
On Teaching
TeachingEven much of the not-so-good stuff out there represents a positive development because writing—specifically, writing for an audience, no matter how small—concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Ben Yagoda, “Is the Internet Good for Writing?”
On Writing
TechnologyOne of the challenges of designing an effective MOOC is turning the massive numbers of students from a problem into a strength.
Scale in MOOCs
TechnologyMOOCs are the Wal-Mart of higher education.
From “We’re All to Blame for MOOCs”
MOOCs are the Wal-Mart …
Higher EducationMOOCs are like the patronising uncle who has yet to have a child of his own. They are great fun for the nieces and nephews, they are inventive, playful, and the kids always look forward to them arriving. But this uncle secretly (and after a couple of beers, not so secretly) thinks he could do a better job at raising the kids than the parents. He may also think they prefer him to their actual mum and dad.
Love the “Uncle MOOC” metaphor.
– from The Ed Techie
MOOCs Are Like …
Higher EducationRobot graders raise all sorts of questions about thinking machines and thinking humans, about self-expression and creativity, about the purpose of writing, the purpose of writing assignments, the purpose of education, and the ethics of education technology and of robots in the classroom.
Audrey Watters, Hack Education
Auto-Grading
Higher EducationMOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools.
MOOCs Are Like TV
TechnologyYou can call it “Internal Advertising” if you want; I find that a bit old-school, frankly. I prefer the term “CULTURAL HACKING”- changing your company’s fortunes NOT by trying to directly change what the general public thinks of you, but by trying to change what YOU think of you.
Improving the company by improving the culture, by subverting the culture via counterintuitive means. Exactly.
Kate Miffitt 