Higher ed
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Wow, no one saw this coming. The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million . The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.
University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department, Increases Athletic Budgets. Hmm. - Forbes
Typically I teach around 100 students per year in my introductory database course . This past fall my enrollment was a whopping 60,000. Admittedly, only 25,000 of them chose to submit assignments, and a mere 6500 achieved a strong final score. But even with 6500 students, I more than quadrupled the total number of students I’ve taught in my entire 18-year academic career.
Blog » From 100 Students to 100,000
And the world is changing very rapidly. Think social networking, gay marriage, or the rise of China. Most companies look nothing like they did 50 years ago. Think General Motors, AT&T or Goldman Sachs. Yet undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time. My predecessor as Harvard president, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery.
What You (Really) Need to Know - NYTimes.com
Steven Cherry: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum ’s “Techwise Conversations.” Lawrence Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, recently had an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he made a telling comparison. He wrote, There was a time when professors had to prepare materials for their students. Then it became clear that it would be a better system if textbooks were written by just a few of the most able: faculty members would be freed up and materials would be improved, as competition drove up textbook quality.
Reinventing the Lecture - IEEE Spectrum
We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we've connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world.
Educating the 21st Century
Plan Your Free Online Education at Lifehacker U: Spring Semester 2012
Your education doesn't have to stop once you get out of school—being free of the classroom just means you have more control over what you learn and when you learn it. We've put together a curriculum of some of the best free online classes available on the web this spring for the first term of Lifehacker U, our regularly-updating guide to improving your life with free, online college-level classes. Let's get started. Whether you're in school and getting ready to head back for the spring semester, or you're out of school and just want to keep learning and growing, there are an incredible amount of free, university-level courses that become available on the web every school year, and anyone with a little time and a passion for self-growth can audit, read, and "enroll" in these courses for their own personal benefit.
Get free online courses from the world’s leading universities. This collection includes over 400 free courses in the liberal arts and sciences. Download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player. Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts – YouTube - iTunes Video - iTunes Audio - Web Site – Keith E.
400 Free Online Courses from Top Universities | Open Culture
One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. I was in Washington D.C. last week presenting at the ARPA-E conference. I spent the next day working with the National Science Foundation on the Innovation Corps , and talking to congressional staffs about how entrepreneurial educational programs can reshape our economy.
The Lean Launchpad
Stanford's open courses raise questions about true value of elite education | Inside Higher Ed
In November, Wolfram Burgard, a professor of computer science at the University of Freiburg, in Germany, administered an online midterm exam for a course in artificial intelligence to 54 students. The test-takers sat in the lecture hall, spaced at least a meter apart, with proctors roaming the aisles to make sure nobody was looking up clues or chatting online with co-conspirators. The students were from all over. Some were enrolled at Freiburg, some at the Technical University of Munich, some at the University of Hamburg, and several from outside Germany. Most were hoping to get credit for the course at their home universities, which meant they would have to return to Freiburg in mid-December to take a proctored final exam; no small chore for a pair visiting from Paris, and the one who had flown in from Finland, a distance of 1,500 miles.
Can't Pay? Don't Pay! Or, Become An Edu-Punk: Some Solutions To The Problem Of Student Debt | Dowser
A college education has become the key to entering the middle-class, but do student loans negate that possibility? Chances are, if you have a college or postgraduate degree, you also have student loans to pay back. Nationwide, Americans have around $1 trillion in education debt; each year, the cost of tuition at universities is rising (it rose 5.9 percent in 2008 at private universities and 6.4 percent at public ones). #The Nolan inquiry assumes that standards in public life need to be different and implicitly higher than in private life, or at the very least the public nature of the activity requires conduct to be more open and visible. Most people would agree with that although some, including myself, would argue that the public/private distinction is in reality extremely blurred and that so-called "private" institutions should be subject to the same principles of openness and visibility as so-called "public" institutions. So what makes an organisation "public"?
Times Higher Education - So who owns our universities then?
If tuition costs slow their fierce rise, it will be because we figure out how to take some elements of college and put them online. How's that going? Slowly. Very slowly.
Why You Should Root for College to Go Online - Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring - Business - The Atlantic
Connexions - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities
a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc . Anyone may view or contribute:Inkling redefines textbooks for iPad. Now, you can save money, do better, and study faster—all with a book you can't wait to dive into. Curious yet? Watch the video