Blogs

As a former High School English teacher, I have experienced the overwhelming tsunami of having to provide feedback on a weekly basis to ~150 students. Between that experience and my more recent experiences teaching online students, I've thought a lot about providing feedback on student writing and student products.

It's the end of the semester, so it's time to get trivial!

Central to the subject of Economics is the idea of “utility maximization.” This concept proposes that people choose the optimal assortment of work, goods and leisure given the constraints they face. As calculus is applied to compute such choices, it is assumed that the economic agent is strictly self-interested, an assumption I find myself thinking about as we celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend.

In which I find being confined to an 8 x 12 room (with breaks for lunch) totally liberating.

What’s New at UVenus: Anamaria Dutceac Segesten at UVenus at The Guardian Not for love or for money – why...

The determined effort to ensure that everyone has a post-secondary credential of some kind spawns a wide range of new educational products. Traditional suppliers of higher education seek an appropriate response. Should they try to commercialize their brand by also publishing courses online? Should they partner with an aggressive and effective for-profit or foundation-funded not-for-profit enterprise to leverage faculty intellectual property into credential producing products for large audiences? Should they offer academic services to validate learning acquired through non-traditional means leading to credentials or college degrees?

Last night was the last session of the online Strategy and Competition in Higher Education (SCHE) course. That’s the ending. And it’s now been almost a week since edX was announced. That’s a very big beginning, and a great example of why we are both so optimistic about the future of higher education.

Yesterday’s post about adjuncts on food stamps had as its subtext a sense that the current economic models for higher ed are unsustainable. To my mind, the right questions are not “how do we restore a Golden Age?” or “how do we create hundreds of thousands of new faculty positions without raising tuition?” Those simply aren’t going to happen. The right questions involve finding new economic models for higher education that could actually survive.