Dear Commons Community,

On Thursday, I was invited to be part of a panel at Hostos Community College (along with Eva Fernandez (Queens College) and Helen Robinson (CSI)) to discuss online and blended learning.  I thought the discussions and give and take were quite good.   Yesterday in my email box was an alert to a policy brief entitled,  Online Learning: Does It Help Low-Income and Underprepared Students? issued by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College.   It covers a number of important issues raised during our discussions at Hostos and is based on a review of 36 studies conducted in the United States and Canada.   Among the findings:

“In terms of course completion, studies conducted in the community college setting strongly suggest that students are more likely to withdraw from online courses, even after controlling for a variety of student characteristics. Moreover, perhaps due to those high withdrawal rates, some tentative evidence suggests that taking online courses may discourage students from returning to the community college in subsequent semesters and from moving on to subsequent courses in their program sequence.”

There are a number of other interesting findings and comments.

This Brief is based on CCRC Working Paper No. 26, part of the CCRC Assessment of Evidence Series, which is available for download free of charge at http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Publication.asp?UID=879

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Gail Collins has a fun piece in the NY Times today on Donald Trump and the weirdness of his campaign for president in 2012.  His basic platform right now is asking for President Obama’s birth certificate.   Ms. Collins has some real zingers for Mr. Trump including:

“In a potential Republican field that includes Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, it’s hard to come up with a line of attack loopy enough to stand out from the pack. But darned if Trump didn’t manage to find one. “  “If he wasn’t born in this country, it’s one of the greatest scams of all time,”

AND

“Trump’s main argument for why he should be taken seriously as a presidential contender is his business success. Has Obama ever hosted a long-running reality series? Owned a bankruptcy-bound chain of casinos? Put his name on a flock of really unattractive high-rise apartment buildings? No!”

AND

“Celebrity Apprentice” is widely regarded as terrible and cheesy programming, but, actually, it has its moments. I recently saw an episode in which a former top model had a serious discussion with a fellow competitor about whether this was the 20th century or the 21st.”

Great fun for a Saturday morning.  Thank you Ms. Collins!

Tony