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A colleague sent me a note today wondering if the news of for-profit EDU financial difficulties and the concurrent rise of the massively open online courses (MOOCs) are related. Correlation or causality?

I am opting out. Not out of my career, but out of the educational system. I have a seven year old who started second-grade this year. A few weeks into second-grade, we decided to finally act on a decision that’s been a long time coming. We decided we’re going to home-school her – at least for this year.

I was in college when I was first exposed to Economics being applied to nontraditional topics. One of my professors at the time was researching the topic of “envy.” It was many years before the book “Freakonomics” became popular, but that small exposure helped me to look at economics in a broader way. When it came time for me to write a dissertation, I drew from the knowledge that economics can be used to explain many things besides the workings of business firms to begin my research on nonprofit organizations and on volunteer labor. I thought of that professor’s research recently when I realized that, while we do not live in the most expensive part of town, there are aspects of our neighborhood that I would not trade for anything.

I don’t do book clubs. The “why” seemed obvious to me: as a literature professor, I spend much of my...

Many of the productive comments to last week’s post advanced the conversation in the way that is the big benefit of “discursive ethics,” so thank you all. Before moving on to “part two” of the question of faculty-authored textbooks, I’ll briefly mention a few things that the comments made me think about further, and comment on a further question that was raised.

After watching the debate last night, it made me think that colleges and universities should be more actively engaged in encouraging – including making it easier – for students to vote.

The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit higher education provider in the country, is closing over a hundred sites. That’s over half of its physical locations. Part of the move is driven by enrollment decline, and part by an increased emphasis on online course delivery. Although many in traditional higher ed may feel a certain schadenfreude, I was actually saddened by the news. This is hardly an unalloyed good.

What do you think of Pearson's purchase of EmbanetCommpass?