The overuse of Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory has rightly been criticized in education circles for years. I say rightly in that judging a non-commodity public good with the same theory as disk drives is a silly notion without some extensive analysis to back up that extrapolation. As Audrey Watters wrote in 2013: Rather, my assigning […]
Forbes Fantasies: Why Hillsdale College is not in the College Scorecard (hint, boring reasons)
Richard Vedder wrote a particularly uninformed article in Forbes on Friday about the Education Department (ED) not including Hillsdale College in the new College Scorecard. Freed from the burden of facts or research, Vedder let loose the dogs of conspiracy [emphasis in original]. The Obama Administration, with much hype, released its College Scorecard recently, designed to […]
The University As Ed Tech Startup: UMUC, Global Campus, Texas, and SNHU roll their own
Today the University of Maryland University Campus (UMUC) announced its plans to spin off their Office of Analytics into a separate for-profit ed tech company. The University System of Maryland Board of Regents today approved a University of Maryland University College (UMUC) plan to spin off its Office of Analytics into a new company, HelioCampus, that […]
College Scorecard Problem Gets Worse: One in three associate’s degree institutions are not included
Late yesterday I posted about the Education Department (ED) new College Scorecard and how it omits a large number of community colleges based on an arbitrary metric. In particular, the Education Department (ED) is using a questionable method of determining whether an institution is degree-granting rather than relying on the IPEDS data source. In a nutshell, […]
Is Moodle “Bigger than Martin”?
In his recent post on why Moodle matters, Phil wrote, For a large portion of our readers who deal mostly with US higher education, it could be easy to dismiss Moodle as an LMS and an idea past its prime.[…]And yet no other academic LMS solution comes close to Moodle in terms of worldwide deployments […]
17% Of Community Colleges Are Not Included In College Scorecard
In addition to the highly-misleading usage of ‘first-time full-time’ qualification for official graduate rates reported in the College Scorecard, there appears to be another major issue with the data. In particular, the Education Department (ED) is using a questionable method of determining whether an institution is degree-granting rather than relying on the IPEDS data source. […]
College Scorecard: An example from UMUC on fundamental flaw in the data
Russ Poulin at WCET has a handy summary of the new College Scorecard produced by the Education Department (ED) and the White House. This is a “first read” given the scorecard’s Friday release, but it is quite valuable since Russ participated on an ED Data Panel related to the now-abandoned Ratings System, the precursor to the […]