It’s worth giving credit where credit is due, and the US Department of Education (ED) has fixed a problem that Russ Poulin and I pointed out where they had previously left ~700 colleges out of the College Scorecard. When the College Scorecard was announced, Russ noticed a handful of missing schools. When I did the […]
Policy
"Policy" covers legislation and regulation that impact technology enabled education initiatives.
Patents Rethought: Khan Academy Did the Right Thing
To recap what’s happened so far: Audrey Watters called our attention to a patent filing by Khan Academy. I expressed my concerns about the continuing patent problem that we have in educational technology. Carl Straumsheim explained the defensive use of patents in more detail and in the process motivated me to take a look at […]
Solving the Ed Tech Patent Problem
You may have heard that Khan Academy has filed for several patents. Audrey Watters has written a really strong piece providing the details of the filings in the context of the history of ed tech patents and showing why some academics feel that the patent system clashes with the values upon which academia was built. In the process, she excavates some of my personal history in the Blackboard patent war.
Personalized Learning and the Teacher
A few weeks ago, Jonathan Rees wrote a post calling out that, no matter what potential of so-called “personalized learning” for improving student outcomes, there is a potential—and a temptation—for it to be abused as a method of lowering (labor) costs in a way that also lowers educational quality and effectiveness. This is a serious and realistic concern, particularly as long as personalized learning is framed as a product rather than a set of teaching strategies.
Data To Back Up Concerns Of Textbook Expenditures By First-Generation Students
David Wiley has added to the conversation over use of data on college textbook pricing and student spending patterns with “The Practical Cost of Textbooks”. The key argument is to go beyond prices and spending and look at the most direct measure of asking students themselves how textbooks costs have impacted them.
Bad Data Can Lead To Bad Policy: College students don’t spend $1,200+ on textbooks
The average US college student does not spend or budget more than $1,200 for textbooks, with that number rising each year, as commonly reported in the national media. The best data available continues to show that students spend roughly half of that amount, and that number is going down over time, not up. Last spring […]
College Scorecard Article Published In Washington Post
I have written several posts looking at the new College Scorecard and its inherent flaws in the data, often starting with observations from Russ Poulin at WCET. Today Susan Svrluga, education reporter at the Washington Post, posted a new article co-written by me and Russ and titled “Hundreds of colleges missing from Obama’s College Scorecard?”. The […]