online education

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Online Drones

Byuclafaculty

Inside Higher Ed today is reporting on resistance to online courses at Rutgers.  Blog readers who have followed the online ed/MOOC debates won’t see surprises except for one element: The effort to offer more graduate degree programs online at Rutgers University at New Brunswick hit a snag on Wednesday, as faculty members in the Graduate School voted to block new programs from being approved… Faculty members have to sign a separate contract with the university to create an online course, which Hughes said strips them of their intellectual property rights. A draft of the agreement states that “Due to the…

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MOOc comes to Harvard Business School

Byuclafaculty

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Harvard Business School is quietly developing its first online learning initiative, which it hopes will make HBS the world’s top provider of high quality online business education. The move has the potential to shake up the nascent online education market and give the elite business school a toehold  in the world of MOOCs, or massive open online courses.  It’s a high-stakes gamble for HBS, which has one of the world’s best-known—and carefully burnished—educational brands. John Fernandes, the chief executive of the business school accreditation group Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, called Harvard’s move a “watershed”…

Cartoon wisdom that continues to dog us online

Byuclafaculty

The cartoon above appeared twenty years ago.  According to Inside Higher Ed today, it still has much merit: …Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara, recently had an article about the medical properties of a chemical extracted from a lichen accepted for publication — by more than half of the 304 open-access journals he submitted it to. Of course, Cobange is not real, and neither is the Wassee Institute. They are both inventions of John Bohannon, the Harvard University biologist and writer who documented the study in this week’s edition of Science. “Acceptance was the…

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The Arrival

Byuclafaculty

Today, the news media seem to be focused on the first day of school.  No, not the students’ first day.  Janet Napolitano’s. From the LA Times: Janet Napolitano begins her new job as University of California president Monday, promising to “listen and learn” about the many issues facing the sprawling 10-campus university system… During her first couple of weeks, she will review budgets and operations and meet with students, faculty, staff, campus chancellors, state elected officials and others, according to UC spokesman Steve Montiel. She will greet the headquarters staff at a reception Monday afternoon. Napolitano has stressed that “her…

Yet another review questioning whether for MOOCs there is a there there

Byuclafaculty

A lengthy review of the MOOC world appears in The Nation.  The author notes that you might do better perusing iTunes and YouTube if you want to watch courses.  Lack of credit for most courses, even from the institutions offering them, is also noted.  And there is the big dropout rate. You can get a sense from the title alone: “Inside the Coursera Hype Machine.”  The article is at:http://www.thenation.com/article/176036/inside-coursera-hype-machine

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Five Seats in Search of a Regent

Byuclafaculty

The LA Times is carrying a story about Governor Brown’s seeming reluctance to fill five empty seats on the UC Board of Regents.  Speculation appears in the article about the motive.  A gubernatorial spokesperson says there is no motive.  But there could be an agenda.  The governor has been attending Regents meetings as an ex officio Regent and has noted that he is technically the president of the Board.  He has been pushing for online ed and performance standards.  (He line-item vetoed a mandate for UC he himself had inserted in the latest state budget on the promise that UC…

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The Bus Plan for Higher Ed

Byuclafaculty

The White House released the plan for higher education this morning.  As per yesterday’s post, the plan will be promoted via a presidential bus tour.  Before I get into the plan, I might note that like the Regents and governor, the President is interested in use of technology – think MOOCs – to reduce costs, etc.  And like the Regents and governor, he seems to have problems with his own use of technology.  The screenshot you see here was take 3 hours and 45 minutes after the plan was officially released, but it doesn’t show the plan.  All that was…

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Regents: Have We Got a Deal for You!!

Byuclafaculty

The image shown here is from a November 2004 video of a Santa Monica city council meeting, which appears to be the first such meeting the city videoed.  It is still on the web nine years after the event.  In contrast, the stated policy for Regents meetings is that video will be preserved for one year only.    The current policy also seems to mean that audio of the event as a file is not being made available as a public document as it was before the current calendar year.  To obtain the audio to archive under current policy –…