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…)
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.
