The closer we look, the worse it seems.
New NBER Study on Online Education is Deeply Flawed
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”. 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.
Recommended Reading: WCET Survey Report and Tony Bates Commentary
WCET released its survey results on the price and costs of online education last week, focusing on US higher education, and it has caused quite a stir due to the headline, first-look analysis. As Inside Higher Ed described in the article “Online Education Costs More, Not Less”: The myth that online education courses cost less to […]
Vert Capital and Scriba Corp: Institutions losing course data in company’s death throes
After last year’s disastrous outage at UC Davis due to Scriba Corp’s change of data center for the Sakai LMS (branded as SmartSite at UC Davis), it turns out that there is more damage to be done as the company slowly disappears. What appears to have happened in the past few months is that Scriba has […]
Ellucian Stops Support for Brainstorm, its CBE platform
In a surprise move, Ellucian has decided to end support for Brainstorm, the competency-based education (CBE) platform it acquired from Helix Education two years ago. All Brainstorm customers are being notified of the end-of-life and aggressive measures are being used to help these customers quickly migrate to alternative platforms. Ellucian staff contacted me to share the […]
Scaling Educational Access
There’s an interesting piece in EdSurge about the potential access to education challenge that CUNY will face if Governor Cuomo makes good on his proposal to make college tuition free: According to the CUNY 2016 Student Experience Survey, 21 percent of the system’s community college students were not able to take required courses, most citing “lack […]
Understanding Learning Science and Its Value to Educators
We interviewed real, live learning scientists from Carnegie Mellon University to get a better sense of what’s real and how the research can impact classroom teaching. And you know what? They weren’t scary at all!