Georgia Tech and Coursera Stumble over a MOOC!

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the Georgia Institute of Technology and Coursera had to cancel a MOOC due to design and other technical difficulties.   Fatimah Wirth, the instructor for the MOOC aptly named “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application,” decided on Saturday to suspend the course because students were getting misleading emails and there were problems with students editing documents on Google Docs.

“One student reported that the first e-mail he got from the instructor “was not an introduction to the course per se, nor instructions for getting started, but rather an apology for the technical glitches that were, unbeknownst to me, already occurring.”

Ms. Wirth had tried to use Google Docs to help the course’s 40,000 enrolled students to organize themselves into groups. But that method soon became derailed when various authors began editing the documents. Things continued downhill from there; some students also had problems downloading certain course materials that had been added to the syllabus at the last minute. When the confusion continued, Georgia Tech decided to call a timeout.

The company on Sunday announced that it would reopen the course at an unspecified date. Richard A. DeMillo, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities, told The Chronicle he expected the course would be live again “in a matter of days.”

In the meantime, Coursera is dealing with the backlash against its first aborted MOOC since it began offering the massive courses early last year. This is the first time the company has suspended a course, said Daphne Koller, its co-founder, in an interview. “Given that we’ve launched well over 100 courses, I think that’s a pretty good track record,” she said.

There is still debate about whether MOOCs can replicate the educational experience of a traditional classroom, but in general the large-scale online courses have managed to avoid being panned outright.”

Tony

 

STEM Majors Earn the Highest Starting Salaries: New Survey!

Dear Commons Community,

Examining data from a number of sources, The Huffington Post is reporting that a new survey released by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) says STEM majors earn the highest starting salaries when compared to their peers in the liberal arts and, increasingly, business majors.

Specifically, engineers saw a healthy year-over-year increase of 3.9 percent to their average starting salaries from 2011 to 2012. Aerospace engineering majors saw the largest increase — 8.3 percent for $64,000 per year. NACE surveyed salaries of 2012 college grads in more than 90 fields, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and Job Search Intelligence, a compensation measurement company.

In a statement, Executive Director Marilyn Mackes said she’s not surprised that engineering majors dominated the list of the top earning college degrees, saying the market needs them most and has a comparatively harder time finding qualified applicants.

Forbes Magazine’s Meagan Casserly says a race for innovation within both big business and the startup economy is behind the demand.

In short, while the unfortunate truth for graduates is that the jobs shortage is going to make finding a well-paying job even harder in the coming years, for STEM graduates opportunity abounds. STEM-related jobs are growing 60 percent faster than other fields.

A college degree’s value is becoming an increasingly relative measure, as average student debt levels rise, and fewer opportunities present themselves to recent college graduates. The millennial unemployment rate was estimated at 13.1 percent in January, according to Policymic.com, and millions of college graduates are underemployed. Some 46 percent of recent college graduates work jobs that don’t require a college degree. Perhaps more shocking: about 38 percent hold jobs that don’t require a high school diploma.

In 2010, the median of earnings for young adults with a bachelor’s degree was 114 percent higher than someone who ends his or her education after high school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Students who chose these majors could count on a little more.

Tony