Credentialing in the Online Education Era
College degrees were not overly important a century ago, and that situation could recur. If technology-enabled content providers can offer higher education at a significantly lower cost and if users...
View ArticleFrom Mongolia to M.I.T.
The story of Battushig Myanganbayar, a 17-year-old Mongolian, highlights how Massive Open Online Courses provide widespread, global access to previously unavailable educational opportunities (the...
View ArticleOn the Benefits of Being a Polymath
The division of labor and its associated specialization have been huge net economic positives but not without some sacrifice. This writer argues that many scientific breakthroughs are directly a result...
View ArticleFlipped Classroom: Out of the Lab
Clintondale High School, just outside of Detroit, is giving the flipped classroom idea a real-world test. In many instances, teachers at the school are recording their own lessons to broadcast to...
View ArticleNew School Algebra
Ubiquitous touch interfaces, wide-spread broadband access, and easy-to-buy and download apps are a potent combination for creating and promoting new and interesting ways to learn. This trend is opening...
View ArticleKalamazoo Crosses the Rubicon
In an effort to improve its attractiveness against both larger state schools and more prestigious smaller colleges, Kalamazoo College (among a handful of others) began publishing test results...
View ArticleRetractions on the Rise
We recently shared an article where the author took academic journals and pop science media outlets for a ride. Of course, the journals are not the only ones responding with poor behavior to the...
View ArticleStudent Loan Bust
The rate of non-performance among federally guaranteed student loans is staggering. Despite protestations by agency officials that the overall portfolio is in good shape, the federal government seems...
View ArticleHigher Ed Rethinking
David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, recently shared his vision of a radically different future for higher education. We have explored this subject in some detail in a...
View ArticleBoilermaker Boldness
In a bold move, Purdue University – a public/state institution – will acquire for-profit Kaplan. We have long talked about the need for innovation in higher education in the Internet era, so this...
View ArticleShells, Beans, & Bars
Luis Fernando Magana, a physicist originally from Mexico’s Yucatan, reintroduced a form of math practiced by the ancient Mayans on the peninsula. Present-day schools are now using the concepts to try...
View ArticleDemocratizing Admittance
The more information a school can gather about applicants, the better the admissions department can assess fit for a particular program. It also removes the necessity to rely on shortcuts – GRE...
View ArticleOrwell’s Rules for Writing
In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell shared a set of six rules for writing: (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii)...
View ArticleSchooling the Rest
The endowment for Quinnipiac University (yes, the one that does polling) has achieved top tier results without following the endowment model. The school’s leadership has invested primarily in public...
View ArticleFrom Bad to Worse for Student Loans
Driven by lax (or no) underwriting standards and weaker-than-promised/hoped student outcomes, the fundamentals on the federal government’s student loan portfolio are worsening. Late last year, the GAO...
View ArticleTrigonometry’s “New” History
Settled history is not always settled accurately. A 3,700-year-old clay tablet has proven that the Babylonians developed trigonometry 1,500 years before the Greeks and were using a sophisticated method...
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Calculus In Its Essence
We stumbled across this math textbook, Calculus Made Easy, published in 1910. We stumbled across this math textbook, Calculus Made Easy published in 1910. As he wrote in the funny and true prologue,...
View ArticleBeer and Statistics
Student’s t-distribution is symmetrical and bell-shaped like a normal distribution but with heavier tails. It is used when the mean or standard deviation of a sample is unknown and is robust against...
View ArticleHigher Ed Hangover
Like many of you, we have kids at home participating in e-learning. While COVID-19 is unlikely to fundamentally transform primary and secondary education, at least in the short-term, it could shake...
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