education

Excellent piece on MRU (endorsed by the profs, no less)

The pedagogical principles in MRU’s course look to be grounded in the learning theory ofconnectivism developed by Downes and Siemens. Connectivistm is based on the concept that knowledge is not acquired but constructed and adjusted by the learner through connections that occur when the learner interacts with nodes in a network. Nodes can be a video, online discussions, Webinars, or conversations on Twitter, Facebook or through blogs. MRU emphasizes connected and dynamic learning, and their motto embodies it –learn, teach and share which also mirrors principles of the connectivist model.

And this:

In other words, the professors of MRU are taking themselves out of the equation. They infer that the course content is the catalyst for further exploration

There’s always this tension between learning in a group and “feeling stupid” in a group. This is one reason why I like online courses. You get the interaction in a semi-anonymous environment. Your ego is safe.

Nice people.

When I give A’s, students are happier and complain less, I get to feel like a nice person, and I give my own students (whom I generally have somewhat warm feelings toward) a benefit in their future lives….

I remember looking at grading records for undergraduate classes back when I taught at Berkeley in the early 1990s. There was lots of variation in average grades by instructor, even for different sections of the same class. I didn’t do a formal study, but I remember when flipping through the sheets that average grade seemed to be correlated with niceness. The profs who were generally pleasant people tended to give lots of A’s, while the jerks were giving lower grades.

More here with an interesting discussion about grade inflation. Via MR.

A self-motivating child? Jackpot.

According to his mother, he says, he “didn’t have any interest in it at all” in the piano aged five and only resumed playing a year later after he discovered that his friends were taking lessons.

“I had no great desire to practice, but then some friends at school started playing and I was spurred on to work by the thought of them catching me up. It was a competition,” he remembers.

Grosvenor likes to relay memories of his formative years in competitive terms: He admits that he didn’t care much for the music as a child, but rather saw playing the piano as a “challenge” that needed “overcoming.”

It’s the wish of every achieving parent to have a kid that is desperate to be awesome. Doesn’t always work out.

I’m starting to believe that competitive pride is the most valuable resource in the universe. How much progress would we have if we didn’t care about besting our neighbors?

Great new article on the possible pending disruption of higher education. Here are some quotes.

First what some ideas are:

That preppy-looking guy near the barbecue? He’s launching a company called Degreed, which aims to upend the traditional monopoly that colleges and universities hold over the minting of professional credentials; he wants to use publicly available data like academic rank and grade inflation to standardize the comparative value of different college degrees, then allow people to add information about what they’ve learned outside of college to their baseline degree “score.” It’s the kind of idea that could end up fizzling out before anyone’s really heard of it, or could, just maybe, have huge consequences for the market in credentials. And that woman standing by the tree? She’s the recent graduate of Columbia University who works for a company called Kno, which is aiming to upset the $8 billion textbook industry with cheaper, better, electronic textbooks delivered through tablet computers. And then there’s the guy standing to her right wearing a black fleece zip-up jacket: five days ago, he announced the creation of the Minerva Project, the “first new elite American university in over a century.”

And on what scale is possible:

To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executive responds. Quizlet has no sales force, a very small marketing department, and more than seven million monthly unique visitors. (There are about fifty million public school students in the United States.) Quizlet, in its busiest months, during the school year, is among the top 500 most visited sites on the entire Internet. Now they’ve expanded beyond flash cards. You can create study groups, convert your content into multiplayer games, and search for cards and games that other people have created. We think we can get to 40 million users, then 100 million, says the executive. The question that drives the company, he says, is this: How can we create amazing learning tools for one billion people? This is the way most of the people in the valley talk.

And finally:

I can go online right now and get everything I need to learn—courses, textbooks, videos, other students to study with—for free. And if I need to know what someone else has learned, I can look at their Linked-In profile or their blog to find out.

At a certain point, probably before this decade is out, that parallel universe will reach a point of sophistication and credibility where the degrees—or whatever new word is invented to mean “evidence of your skills and knowledge”—it grants are taken seriously by employers. The online learning environments will be good enough, and access to broadband Internet wide enough, that you won’t need to be a math prodigy like Eren Bali to learn, get a credential, and attract the attention of global employers.

Here’s Yglesias:

The way it works is that you charge the same price for all the courses. When I tookPatrice Higonnet‘s five-person seminar on Vichy France, I didn’t need to pay a premium tuition over what I paid to take his 150-person lecture survey course on the French Revolution. Part of the way the college works is that the large courses generate profits that subsidize other activities, including the small seminars. The seminars themselves happen in part because some of the faculty wants to do them, and in part as an investment in the value of the brand. But while it would be very difficult to replicate the value of the small Vichy seminar, it’s pretty easy to imagine a French Revolution MOOC that’s both higher quality than your average French Revolution lecture-format survey course and radically cheaper