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Tag: MOOCs

Game-Changing Institutional Alliances

A couple of weeks ago, Arizona State University and EdX announced an institutional tie-up, which received a fair bit of publicity.  Basically, the deal was that EdX – a well-known MOOC platform, owned jointly by Harvard and MIT – would help ASU put an undisclosed (but judging by the rollout, somewhere between 15 and 20) number of its big first-year courses online.  There were two startling things about this announcement: 1)      The MOOCs are not time-delimited, requiring students to start and

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May 26, 2015 1 Comment

The Alternative to the End of College (Part 3)

So, if Kevin Carey is pretty much dead on about the weaknesses of current universities, and mostly wrong about where things go from here, how else might universities change over the next couple of decades? Let’s start with the key points: Money pressures aren’t going to ease up.  The cost disease will always be with us; Professors want to research, and they don’t want to do it in soviet-style academies, divorced from teaching.  They’ll fight hard for present system; Higher education is,

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March 13, 2015 2 Comments

The End of College? (Part 2)

As discussed yesterday, Kevin Carey’s The End of College pinpoints higher education’s key ills in its inability (or unwillingness) to provide students with any real signal about the quality of their work.  This serves students badly in a number of ways.  First, it makes finding job matches harder, and second, it means institutions can mis-sell themselves by investing in the accoutrements of excellence (ivy, quads, expensive residences) without its substance. Essentially, Carey believes that technology will solve these problems.  He’s not a

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March 12, 2015 4 Comments

The MOOC Conversation We Should Have (But Won’t)

In all the hype and backlash about MOOCs, it seems that we forgot to have a really important conversation about what MOOCs actually tell us about traditional higher education. The thing that freaked absolutely everybody out (some positively, some negatively) about MOOCs was the idea that a single instructor could teach tens of thousands of students around the world, simultaneously.  “Oh my God”, people panicked/enthused, “what will happen to the university once content is available freely everywhere”.  Well, not much,

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May 5, 2014 5 Comments

Coursera Continues to Confuse

The big news Monday was that Coursera, MOOC provider extraordinaire, had a bit of a re-shuffle at the top.  Founders Daphne Koller and Andre Ng, and erstwhile President Laila Ibrahim, were joined by former Yale President Rick Levin, who is now the company’s CEO.  This, needless to say, got everyone quite excited.  A Big Name Has Joined Coursera!  It must mean… well, what does it mean, exactly? Coursera is a company which – from a growth point-of-view – has two huge positives

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March 27, 2014 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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