Here are two updates on stories we’ve covered recently at e-Literate. One is an actual update and that is a lack of update.
In our post clarifying the context of the school’s decision to remove lecture capture video from public site (not deleting the video, just putting behind domain wall), one issue I raised was that there is no agreement yet between Berkeley and the Department of Justice / Department of Education team pushing the case. (more…)
A few years ago Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO and current president of the LA Clippers, formed a group called USAFacts. Their goal was to collect comprehensive data on how tax revenues (federal, state and local) are spent in the U.S. Their initial publication, structured like a company’s Annual Report is being released today.
It should be required reading for anyone entering public office. It should also be consulted by anyone interested in how their tax dollars are being spent and more generally in how government works.
That includes those of us who work in the education field. There is a detailed information in the “Annual Report” on financial aid disbursements (p. 28), educational attainment levels broken down by various cohorts (p. 39), the size of the public education workforce – 10,979,260, or 47% of all government employees, of which 29% relate to higher education (p. 50), educational property assets (p. 57), fiscal year education spending comparisons (p. 80) and additional analysis of college enrollment and completion by income level and other attributes.
I had planned earlier to write a post or two on the UC Berkeley video kerfuffle but kept getting sidetracked with more articles in trade press and national media. And there have been quite a few articles, but many if not most seem to focus on the decision as a short-term transaction – DOJ ruling, UC Berkeley decision to remove videos from public – rather than understand the broader implications. Before commenting on these implications, I thought it would be useful to clarify some misconceptions that I have seen.
While most coverage has focused on the removal of YouTube videos created by lecture capture systems – automatically recorded and posted videos without post-production or packaging – the original DOJ ruling was based on two complaints, the first being usage of BerkeleyX MOOCs and second being usage of lecture capture videos. (more…)
For those following my two recent posts about the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper claiming to analyze “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”, there are two articles I recommend for broader coverage – both from Inside Higher Ed. The first article is “Online Ed’s Return on Investment”, where Carl Straumsheim summarized the report itself as well as early critiques from me, Russ Poulin from WCET, and Jeff Seaman from Babson Survey Research Group.
“Even a quick check with one of the databases they did use … would show they are off on their counts and should have made them rethink their assumptions,” Poulin said in an email.
Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, called the methodology “seriously flawed.” The Babson Group previously produced annual reports on the size of the online education market but began to focus more on in-depth surveys after the federal government began collecting and reporting online enrollment data.
The second article, titled “Impressions of the Hoxby Study of Online Learning”, came out today where Doug Lederman asked for impressions from a dozen higher ed observers. Most observers were critical of the data issues as we have noted at e-Literate, but there were a few with positive reactions. I think that Deb Adair (from Quality Matters) has an excellent response, concluding with the following [emphasis added]: (more…)
Earlier today I critiqued the new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) report on the “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”, calling it “a hot mess that that conflates online students, enrollments, programs, institutions and uses a bizarre and misleading data set for its analysis”. That post looked mostly at the interpretation of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data to define which institutions were exclusively online or substantially online based on the author’s definition. But this report has a bigger flaw that I initially missed – it shows historical data on online enrollments from the late 1990s and claims to analyze in detail online enrollment data from 2009 – 2014, yet IPEDS did not collect distance education data until 2011.
Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University just published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) claiming to analyze “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”. tl;dr This report is a hot mess that that conflates online students, enrollments, programs, institutions and uses a bizarre and misleading data set for its analysis.
Last month we presented two explainer videos on the growing usage of course exchanges, where multiple institutions pool resources in creating or extending online courses. ((Disclosure: Our e-Literate TV series of video case studies and explainer videos is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)) If online courses or programs breaks down the barriers of campus walls and enables anytime, anywhere education, then why not explore how collaboration can open up access and improve quality. While we tend to not write e-Literate about our consulting work through MindWires, in this case we have heard a general interest from other systems to learn more about what the California Online Education Initiative (OEI) at the community college system is doing.
The first two videos explored the concept of course exchanges in general and the required infrastructure needed to create them. In our third explainer video from this series we go back to the OEI to look at how their investment in academic infrastructure should provide benefits that go well beyond the courses and students participating in the course exchange. This extension of benefits, however, was not a surprise to those creating OEI; rather, these broader benefits represent the intended consequences of their approach to collaborative online education.
(Video source: https://youtu.be/1DdlaIZYiDI)
