Author: uclafaculty

Jerry Brown Looks for an Online Course that Requires No Human Interaction

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]

Jerry Brown Suggests Master Plan is Dated

Our previous post covered the Jan. 22 meeting of the Regents’ Committee on Educational Policy.  As noted, there was discussion of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, considered a major accomplishment of Brown’s father when he was governor.

Below is a link to Brown’s comments in which he suggested the Plan was now dated. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RmjI4gVync?feature=player_detailpage]

Listen to Part of the Regents Afternoon Session of 1-22-2014

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 the governor seemed to push for courses that involved no human interaction so that there could be unlimited enrollment.  At a later point, Chancellor Block made a comment about the virtue of “residential” education which seemed aimed at the governor’s online push.  He talked about a digital divide in which better off students would have traditional in-person classes and poor students would have mainly online offerings.  There was discussion of the old Master Plan.  Heads of the three segments in the Plan – UC, CSU, and the community colleges – were part of the discussion.  Brown indicated that the Master Plan was a political compromise of an earlier era and that it needed to be questioned as to today’s needs.

The president of the UC Students Assn. spoke in support of a larger state budget allocation than the governor was proposing, an oil tax to fund education, divestment from fossil fuels, and other items.

You can hear this portion of the afternoon session at the link below:

PBS’ Hot Potato May Not Be on California Stations

As far as yours truly can tell, the major PBS affiliates in California have so far taken a pass on the hot potato program described below.  That decision could have been because the threatened pension initiative that would have swept in UC was originally aimed at the November 2014 ballot.  With it apparently off the ballot for now (see earlier posts), some stations might air the program.  On verra.

The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division

On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled “The Pension Peril.” The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds of PBS outlets all over the nation. It has been presented as objective news on  major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.

However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that “The Pension Peril” is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering…

According to newly posted disclosures about its 2013 grantmaking, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation responded to PBS’s tailored proposal by donating a whopping $3.5 million to WNET, the PBS flagship station that is coordinating the “Pension Peril” series for distribution across the country. The $3.5 million, which is earmarked for “educat(ing) the public about public employees’ retirement benefits,” is one of the foundation’s largest single disclosed expenditures. WNET spokesperson Kellie Specter confirmed to Pando that the huge sum makes Arnold the “anchor/lead funder of the initiative.” A single note buried on PBS’s website – but not repeated in such explicit terms on PBS airwaves – confirms that the money is directly financing the “Pension Peril” series.

With PBS’s “Pension Peril” series echoing many of the same pension-cutting themes that the Arnold Foundation is promoting in the legislative arena, and with the series not explicitly disclosing the Arnold financing to PBS viewers, the foundation’s spokesperson says her organization is happy with the segments airing on stations throughout the country. However, she says the foundation reserves “the ability to stop funding” the series at any time “in the event of extraordinary circumstances.” …

Full story at http://pando.com/2014/02/12/the-wolf-of-sesame-street-revealing-the-secret-corruption-inside-pbss-news-division/

Well, maybe not exactly like you!

Dig a Deeper Hole?

The plaintiffs in the case against the UCLA Grand Hotel have filed an amended brief.  You can read it at the link below.  There are actually two cases, one involving environmental and other matters and another regarding the tax issue.  The environmental case will be heard in September.  And there is legal skirmishing around the tax case.



The tax issue is basically that if the hotel is a commercial operation, it has to pay taxes just as would any other hotel.  There is also an issue of whether the Regents can run a commercial enterprise and, if that's what they are doing, whether tax-exempt bonds (which are part of the "business plan") can be used.  Note that the donation covers only about a third of the cost of the hotel so the business plan has to produce a lot of money.  Taxes and non-exempt bonds would raise the costs.  Delays would raise costs.  The environmental lawsuit claims that the required environmental review was not properly done, that there were irregularities regarding the administrative and regental process, and that there were improper conditions imposed by the donors, among other allegations.

Right now, of course, the university is busy digging a deeper hole on the site of the Grand Hotel, as the photos show.  It is confident that creating facts on the ground is the best way to proceed. It is sure it will prevail in the lawsuits.  But let's suppose that there is, say, a 10% chance the university is wrong.  Does it make sense to just bull along?  The university bulled along on the Japanese Garden affair instead of trying to work with the plaintiffs in that case, and now litigation has put that matter on hold.  The university didn't promptly apologize to Judge Cunningham who was stopped in Westwood by campus police and now has a $10 million complaint on its hands.  So maybe bulling along is not such a good strategy. This blog has pointed out in each instance that there are advantages in talking, negotiating, compromising, all to no avail.  So it is probably pointless to suggest talking-negotiating-compromising in the case of the Grand Hotel. But we do suggest it. Why chance digging a deeper legal hole?


MOOCs in the Muck

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, arguing that “the administration has not yet outlined how MOOCs will benefit Cornell students.”


Have we heard this before?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J_x9aAMqCE?feature=player_detailpage]

Tradition!

The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) has issued a report on UC and CSU funding.  LAO is usually viewed as a neutral agency.  But it is a component of the legislature.  So it tends to favor approaches that add to legislative control as opposed to, say, gubernatorial control.  This report is no exception.

LAO seems to want to return to what it terms the “traditional” approach to funding, but with bells and whistles added to monitor legislative goals.  The traditional approach seems to be one focused on undergraduate enrollment.  But in fact the tradition – such as it is – has been to forget about tradition and cut the budget during state budget crises, in the knowledge that UC and CSU can raise tuition.  Indeed, as the chart above indicates, these traditional deviations from tradition dominate tuition decisions.

The LAO is uncomfortable with the habit of the governor of just proposing dollar increases not linked to enrollment and then extracting some promises from the university to do this or that, e.g., to spend $10 million on online education.

It might be noted that since LAO chose to lump UC and CSU together, it might have discussed a sore point namely the fact that CSU, as a part of CalPERS, gets its pension costs taken care of by the state whereas the state likes to stand aloof from the UC pension and its costs.

You can read the report at http://lao.ca.gov/reports/2014/education/higher-ed-budgetary-practices/budgetary-practices-021114.pdf

In any case, there is much nostalgia for tradition, albeit with some uncertainty as to what that is.  Sounds familiar!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw?feature=player_detailpage]