Tag Archives: Alternative education

Massifying Higher Learning

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last few years, you know that there has been a massive change in education recently. Sure, some of the hyperbole has abated, but there are a lot of people who are still thinking about how a single person might teach more than a classroom. In some cases, […]
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What does the university offer?

The answer is obvious: courses. But you can get courses anywhere. I’ve written about this before (Dealing Out the Uni), but Jim Groom’s effort to get a new server for his course via Kickstarter has me thinking again. Earlier this week, in the context of discussing what the traditional university provided that crowdsourced and open […]
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Rank Teacher Ranking

There has been a little discussion on an informal email list at my university about the Op-Ed by Bill Gates in the New York Times that argues against public rankings of teachers. It’s a position that in some ways constrains the Gates Foundation’s seeming interest in quantifying teaching performance. It led to questions we have […]
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A farewell to academia

There is a scathing elegiac on modern higher ed written by a departing mid-career professor that appears in Inside HigherEd. After too many years at this job (I am in my mid-40s), I have grown to question higher education in ways that cannot be rectified by a new syllabus, or a sabbatical, or, heaven forbid, […]
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