Blogs

We constantly worry about the widening experience gap between consumer and education enterprise technologies.

For the last several months, the Brazilian federal universities have been paralyzed by strikes, and, in an independent development, last week the Congress approved legislation requiring that 50% of the vacancies in these institutions should be destined to students coming from public schools, and distributed according to race.

It made the news here, but not for long -- ten percent of the world's population lost electric power in a single event.

Cal State is refusing admission to graduate students from California; it’s only taking out-of-staters, citing the need for their sweet, sweet tuition surcharges. It’s ridiculous, but it’s also sane.

Matthew Yglesias has zero to say about higher ed and the price of tuition in his excellent Kindle Single The Rent is Too Damn High. This oversight (doesn't everyone relate everything to higher ed?) should not stop us generalizing some of Yglesias' conclusions to our world.

There's been plenty of buzz lately about the ways in which online video is poised to "disrupt" education -- whether it's via the video library of Khan Academy or through the video-based lectures and lessons offered by the flurry of new MOOCs (including Coursera, Udacity, and edX). But the news today out of MIT -- one of the founding members of the edX initiative -- is a very different sort of usage of video. It's a reality TV show (of sorts) with 14 freshmen in its 5.301 Introductory Lab Techniques course.

In a recent New Yorker article, Atul Gawande compares medical—especially surgical—care to the service at the Cheesecake Factory chain of restaurants. While the analogy seems somewhat absurd at first—no doubt Gawande's point—we are soon sucked in to his comparison. The cooks and servers at Cheesecake Factory master hundreds of recipes, serving thousands of customers exactly what they ask for, night after night. Why, he asks, can't medical care work the same way? Why can't doctors deliver a measurable standard of care on a routine basis?

An Australian correspondent writes: "I'm a current postgraduate student from Australia in my first year of a two year Master of Philosophy (Masters by research) degree in an evergreen humanities discipline. I'm interested in doing my PhD in the US for reasons that are long and not really logical (though I'm stubbornly set on it). I was wondering if you (or your readers) could assist me in figuring out how competitive PhD (tuition and stipend, preferably) scholarships are over there in the humanities?"