CapitalistImperialistPig

Humans come pre-equipped with some intuitions about physics, biology, psychology, probability and other things, says Stephen Pinker, as well as natural propensities to learn other things, like how to walk and our language. Those intuitions aren't necessarily correct for a modern society, and some critical skills are not easy to learn naturally. The job of schooling, he says, is to teach those ways in which the modern world doesn't fit our intuition and those skills not included in our natural learning program - like how to read and write. He thinks modern schooling is not exactly very well suited to its task. The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for ...

Choose your parents wisely. That's at least partly because of genetics. A new study of 300,000 individuals reported in this week's Nature found 74 variant loci associated with educational attainment. From the Abstract: Here we report the results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for educational attainment that extends our earlier discovery sample1, 2 of 101,069 individuals to 293,723 individuals, and a replication study in an independent sample of 111,349 individuals from the UK Biobank. We identify 74 genome-wide significant loci associated with the number of years of schooling completed. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with educational attainment are disproportionately found in genomic regions regulating gene expression in the fetal brain. Candidate genes are preferentially expressed in neural tissue, especially during the prenatal period, and enriched for biological pathways involved in neural development. Our findings demonstrate that, even for a beh...

University students and protest go together like beer and Pizza. A relatively privileged group with lots of time* and freedom, it's natural for students to find something get upset about and organize against it. Universities are used to this and usually take it in stride, though every once in a while a nutjob like Reagan will call out the air force to bomb the students into submission. The shocking thing about the University of Missouri protests is how quickly they brought about the University's abject surrender, with President and Chancellor resigning. This happened because and only because the football team made itself the core of the protest. The team's threatened strike brought the U to its knees. The American University is in many ways a slave to its football program, and to the financial benefits it accrues by virtue of having the free labor of its athletes. It would be surprising if football players don't take the obvious lesson from this and realize their...

Brookings has computed ratings for colleges and universities by value added. The top three four year schools are Caltech, Colgate, and MIT. Harvard, Princeton and Yale are somewhere below the top twenty.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are about two years old, at least the big three (Coursera, edX and Udacity) are. I've completed ten of them, I believe, and audited all the lectures of a few more. I may have started but dropped out of almost that many more. As long as MOOCs are free, the sensible approach is to try out anything that looks promising and drop out if they don't meet your expectation, or if you get too busy at work or home, or just get bored. Traditional educators are horrified by MOOC dropout rates, but the fact remains that a reasonably successful MOOC is completed by more students than many professors face in a lifetime. At least two giant question marks hang over the MOOC at the moment: how to pay for them, and how do the students get credit for their learning. The answer to the first is becoming clearer: the students will pay to play. Udacity has already gone to a model where the student pays $150 a month to take a course. In return students will get...

Jonathan Rees, a history prof somewhere in Colorado, has gotten rather more than his 15 minutes as an anti-MOOC blogger. He apparently coined the phrase "super professor" for those who taught MOOC courses, evidently considering the term derogatory. He has been predicting the demise of the MOOC for a couple of years now, but they roll on, despite considerable uncertainty about exactly how they are going to be monetized. The NYT has an interview with Richard C. Levin , former president of Yale and the new CEO of Coursera, the biggest of the MOOCs, a for profit enterprise. He steps gingerly around the issue, but the holy grail of the MOOC enterprise is credit for MOOC courses. Currently, Coursera offers something called "Signature Track certificates." Q. You’re an economist. How do you get from here to there? A. Right now courses are free and we’re charging for certification. We think that as the idea of using Coursera courses for professional advancement grow...

It seems to be time to return to that old time theme: why does American education suck? The current items in evidence are the 2012 scores in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), in particular, the mathematical literacy assessment. Tyler Cowen notes that even our rich kids are below average : The data was provided to The WorldPost by Pablo Zoido, an analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the group behind PISA. It shows that students’ wealth does not necessarily make them more competitive on an international scale. In the United States, for example, the poorest kids scored around a 433 out of 700 on the math portion of PISA, while the wealthiest ones netted about a 547. The lower score comes in just below the OECD average for the bottom decile (436), but the higher score also comes in below the OECD average for the top decile (554). “At the top of the distribution, our performance is surprisingly bad given our top decile is among th...

MOOC critics seem to like an echo chamber - they only want to listen to those who agree with them. Most of them would consider themselves liberals or leftists, and they frequently invoke the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the labor left, but their actual orientation here is purely reactionary. A recent article proclaimed that: The findings of a recent Gallup survey have rained on the MOOC parade by suggesting that few college and university presidents consider massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as an effective strategy for improving student learning or addressing the fiscal crisis facing many institutions. This is roughly as surprising as finding out that rabbits don't like coyotes. MOOCs pose a threat to the traditional university, its executives, faculty, and staff. It doesn't say anything about whether MOOCs are liked by students, and the enrollment numbers say they are, or are effective in educating students - TBD. My personal best guess right now is that the MO...

Despite having a large portion of our population extensively educated in terms of years and certificates, the United States lags in educational achievement. This is especially true among younger Americans. Such, at any rate, is the conclusion of a new study , some of the results of which are discussed in this NYT article. In the United States, young adults in particular fare poorly compared with their international competitors of the same ages — not just in math and technology, but also in literacy. More surprisingly, even middle-aged Americans — who, on paper, are among the best-educated people of their generation anywhere in the world — are barely better than middle of the pack in skills... In all three fields, Japan ranked first and Finland second in average scores, with the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway near the top. Spain, Italy and France were at or near the bottom in literacy and numeracy, and were not included in the technology assessment. The United States ranked near t...

I was listening to Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, on the radio this morning and was particularly struck by one point he made - the notion of replacing grades with teaching to mastery. It's a concept I had been interested in for a while, but it seems to me that computer aided instruction is what makes it really possible. It's not news to students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects that you learn more from doing the problems than listening to lectures. As a culture, though, we are so wedded to the notion creating a hierarchy (A,B,C,D,F) that we are far more likely to regard problem sets and exams as filters rather than as teaching tools. One severe constraint on education has always been the amount of time it takes to administer, evaluate, and score exams and quizzes. That fact traditionally forced schools to allocate time in such a fashion that while a few students would have thoroughly mastered the material by the time it was tim...

The flood waters in Colorado seem to have washed away my comments on yet another blog by a historian at a school (CSU Pueblo) I had never previously heard of. One thing these guys can't stand is dissent, even politely expressed. I can't really blame them. They are trying so hard to convince themselves that MOOCs can't do anything right that any contrary message excites pure panic. They, the tenured profs, have a pretty good deal, even if they aren't exactly teaching at Harvard, and they have worked hard to get it. Of course that keeps them from understanding the real weaknesses of the MOOC or guessing the shape of education a decade or so from now. Jonathan Rees, the proprietor of the blog aforementioned, likes to deride those who teach MOOC courses as "Superprofessors." It's intended as an insult, of course, but it has the ring of truth. Once upon a time, every podunk town in America had a pro or semi-pro baseball team. Television ended that, and ...

Daliah Lithwick writes of going to her child's parent night and and having no clue what the school was telling her. Ms. Lithwick is an editor and writer, a graduate of Yale and Stanford Law, and presumably no dummy, whatever her attachment to some weird religious traditions. Why exactly did she find school personnel speaking in tongues? at times yesterday I felt as if I were toggling between a business school seminar and the space program; acronyms alone—seemingly random sequences of letters like MAP and SOL and EAPE—were being deployed more frequently than actual words. To be sure, the teachers seemed as maddened by it as the parents were. Even if we can all agree about the singular benefits of “project-based learning across the curriculum," I am less than perfectly certain any of us knows what it means. “Un-levelling.” We do that now. And “fitnessgram testing?” Possibly the new un-levelling. She notes that the teachers didn't seem much clearer on the concepts than ...

Universities are jumping into the MOOC pool with different degrees of enthusiasm.  A key tell here is the certificate.  Most MOOC courses offer some sort of certification for successful completion.  Given that these certificates are hardly useful for anything, that would seem a bit of a modest risk for issuer.  So far as I can tell, all edX courses seem to offer potential certification whereas Coursera courses are all over the map, from those linked to degree programs, to there so-called "Signature" line, to the hard line approach of Duke and Yale which is basically "if anybody asks, we never heard of you." The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School goes one step further in their Financial Accounting course by pointedly noting: However, no certificate will be given from Wharton / Penn and successful completion of this course does not make you a Wharton / Penn alumnus. All I can say is that in the unlikely event that I took their course, I would make ...

I have been reading the blogs of some highly anti-MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) humanities people. Mostly they discuss how bad MOOCs must be (few seem to have completed one)and all the reasons why they can't and shouldn't be allowed to succeed. Some of these reasons are pretty good (personal interactions with the prof and other students can be valuable learning experiences) and some that are pretty bad (Americans won't value an education that's free, MOOCs are nothing but televised lectures). Humanities people always seem to claim that they teach analytical thinking, but reading their arguments is hardly persuasive. When San Jose State introduced MOOCed courses to their own curriculum, the Philosophy Department issued a widely publicized dissent. Here is a fragment: “The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary—something out of a dystopian novel... (1)There is no reason...

Having completed 5 Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), I was starting to think of myself as kind of hard core.  What a deluded putz!  It turns out that more than 900 people have completed ten or more Coursera courses, and 100 more than twenty.  A single mother of teenagers in Amsterdam has done 30 MOOCs, despite having a day job.  None of these people have taken any for credit, but they all find the MOOC addictive, like certain online games after which they were named.  Others are rushing to take as many courses as they can because they are afraid the MOOCs will disappear.

Credential, meaning something signifying worthy of faith or belief, is a word with a distinguished heritage, likely derived from the Proto-Indo-European word for "heart", "to believe," or "put one's heart." As everyone knows, except perhaps a few liberal arts profs, awarding credentials is one of the primary businesses of higher and other education. Students, parents, and legislatures put their faith, money, and heart into education so that their children and society generally, will be enriched by achieving these credentials. Coursera, the biggest MOOC, has just made a major move into continuing education for educators. This is an opportune time, I suspect, since they hope to take advantage of the big move to the Common Core standard. Teachers are one of the principal consumers of continuing education, so this is a big business area especially for State universities. Teachers are big consumers of continuing education since they pay is closely tie...

George Bush and No Child Left Behind dragged elementary and secondary education into the world of high stakes testing, albeit kicking and screaming. What about that really pricey item in the budget, higher education? So far it has been mostly immune, though there are a few clues from such things as the GRE, MCAT, LSAT and so on, but are there any institutional statistics kept for those things? I haven't heard of them, at least not of public statistics. The country spends a fortune on higher ed, so wouldn't it make sense to see what we are getting for our investment? I think that the Obama administration wants to see something along these lines, especially to rein in some of the outrageous nonsense being sold by the for profit colleges. If you are in higher ed, though, you have to be at least a little worried. Suppose you are Harvard, with astronomical tution, entering SAT scores, and resources, and it turns out that your graduates really aren't outdoing those of State ...

Fear has descended on the academy. Many are starting to see the threat posed by the MOOC. Of course higher ed, or at least the more vulnerable reaches of higher ed, haven't been happy for a while. Having tried insults and related tactics, those who perceive themselves threatened are now trying to appear to the compassion and brotherly feeling of their fellow profs who man the MOOCs. Here is a sample, courtesy of Jonathan Rees, the proprietor of a blog lately devoted mostly to anti-MOOC activism: More or Less Bunk. I know I’m late to the party on this, but that letter to Harvard’s Michael Sandel from the San Jose State (SJSU) Philosophy Department really is quite wonderful. I’m going to try to take up its implications with respect to academic freedom and shared governance over at the Academe blog as soon as I get my grading done, but what I want to discuss here is the way that those nice folks in California actually called out Sandel, not just their administrators. You can see...

A lot of learning molecular biology is looking at pictures. The last 60 years has produced very instructive pictures of the molecular machines that underlie biology - that constitute the secret of life - and the best way to get an understanding of how they work is to spend a lot of time looking at those pictures and understanding how they work. Some other branches of science are pretty picture oriented too, though I can't think of anything to match molecular biology. Fluid dyanmics comes to mind. Every would be fluid dynamicist should spend a hundred or more hours looking at pictures and movies of fluid phenomena.

The NYT has an article today on the University salaries , and the growing gap between top public and private schools. More intersting to me was this: And with stretched budgets and public pressure to keep costs down, many colleges and universities are cutting back on tenure and tenure-track jobs. According to the report, such positions now make up only 24 percent of the academic work force, with the bulk of the teaching load shifted to adjuncts, part-timers, graduate students and full-time professors not on the tenure track. “Public colleges and universities, reeling from immediate and long-term cutbacks in their state funding, have sought to reduce spending on the back of their students, increasingly substituting lower-paid contingent faculty members for more fairly paid tenure-track faculty members,” the report said... Along with the data on full-time professors’ pay that the association collects from colleges and universities each year, this year’s report includes data from a Coal...