Will online learning destroy America’s colleges?
The American college system is staggeringly large: 2,421 four-year institutions enroll about 18.5 million college students. The proportion of Americans with a bachelor’s degree is at an all-time high —...
View ArticleThe MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution
Somehow, recently, a lot of people have taken an interest in the broadcast of canned educational materials, and this practice — under a term that proponents and detractors have settled on, massive open...
View ArticleFour short links: 19 November 2013
Why The Banner Ad is Heroic — enough to make Dave Eggers cry. Advertising triumphalism rampant. Udacity/Thrun Profile — A student taking college algebra in person was 52% more likely to pass than one...
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Visualization of the Week: MOOC completion rates
Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered through platforms such as Coursera, EdX and Udacity, are arguably helping to fill higher education needs around the world. Educational researcher Katy...
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Data science in the public interest, ‘digital media data gurus’, and a comic...
Data science in the public interest is en vogue, as collaborations between data scientists, nonprofits and human rights groups are springing up everywhere. Journalists at the Knight Foundation are...
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Finding data after the shutdown, workarounds for reporters, and teaching a...
When a government shutdown renders government data websites useless, what’s a data journalist to do? This week, reporters hoping to gather data from sites like the US Census Bureau, the USDA’s Food and...
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Semi-automatic method for grading a million homework assignments
One of the hardest things about teaching a large class is grading exams and homework assignments. In my teaching days a “large class” was only in the few hundreds (still a challenge for the TAs and...
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Learning programming at scale
Millions of people around the world — from aspiring software engineers to data scientists — now want to learn programming. One of the best ways to learn is by working side-by-side with a personal...
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