For those who, on the day after Thanksgiving, still have their minds into food – and for those interested in online education – we note the existence of the Harvard cooking class which seems to be a collaboration of cuisine and research. One episode is below:
Spring break has finally arrived on the UCLA campus, and many faculty are scrambling to move their classes online while sheltering in place and homeschooling their kids in response to the corona virus outbreak. The Council of UC Faculty Associations asked UC President Janet Napolitano to delay the start of spring quarter:
At the Regents meeting of January 22, 2014, Gov. Brown seems to be searching for an online course that requires no human interaction. Such a course, he reasons, could have unlimited enrollment because it is completely self-contained. He gets some pushback from UC Provost Dorr, who thinks courses should have such interaction. You can hear this excerpt at the link below. The entire meeting of the Committee on Educational Policy of the Regents was posted yesterday.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tYFLJvrE3g?feature=player_detailpage]
As we have noted in numerous prior posts, the Regents refuse to archive their meetings beyond one year. So we dutifully record the sessions in real time. Below is a link to part of the afternoon session of Jan. 22. This segment is mainly the Committee on Educational Policy. Gov. Brown was in attendance. We will separately (later) provide links just to certain Brown segments. But for now, we provide a continuous recording. There was discussion of designating certain areas of UC-Merced as nature reserves, followed by discussion of a new telescope. The discussion then turned to online ed and…
Good question! Inside Higher Ed today runs an article on MOOC offerings at the U of Texas and Cornell. At the former, there are the usual extremely low completion rates. At the latter, resident students are asking the question in the photo at the right: …”A year after UT began rolling out nine Massive Online Open Courses, the results are in,” The Daily Texan wrote in a Jan. 29 editorial… Among the “results” are completion rates ranging from 1 to 13 percent, the lack of credit granting courses and the $150,000 to $300,000 production costs… (S)tudents at Cornell voiced similar concerns,…
Some loyal blog readers may recall our earlier posts (back in September) on attempts to reform a reported frat house climate of the Harvard Business School. We carried this quote from the NY Times: (M)any Wall Street-hardened women confided that Harvard was worse than any trading floor, with first-year students divided into sections that took all their classes together and often developed the overheated dynamics of reality shows. Some male students, many with finance backgrounds, commandeered classroom discussions and hazed female students and younger faculty members, and openly ruminated on whom they would “kill, sleep with or marry” (in cruder terms). Alcohol-soaked…
An interesting analysis of MOOCs in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Stanford economist Caroline M. Hoxby suggests that heavy dependence on online ed won’t work for what she terms highly selective post-secondary educational institutions. In essence, such institutions depend in important ways on alumni loyalty which is hard to obtain if students take courses online that come from anywhere. Abstract: I consider how online postsecondary education, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), might fit into economically sustainable models of postsecondary education. I contrast nonselective postsecondary education (NSPE)in which institutions sell fairly standardized educational services in return…
