Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting today on the second of a series of papers challenging optimistic assumptions about massive open online courses.   As reported in The Chronicle:

“The coalition of faculty-advocacy organizations asserts that online instruction “isn’t saving money—and may actually be costing students and colleges more,” but that “snappy slogans, massive amounts of corporate money, and a great deal of wishful thinking have created a bandwagon mentality that is hard to resist.”

The paper, “The ‘Promises’ of Online Higher Education: Reducing Costs,” was released by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, whose backers include a number of faculty unions. Drawing on news articles and public-opinion surveys, it says that while the business model supporting MOOCs is “still a work in progress,” the trend is to offer courses free but charge for “a degree or a certificate or anything from the MOOC that carries real value.”

Merely having taken one of the courses, the paper says, is “virtually valueless in the marketplace.”

“The bottom line for students? The push for more online courses has not made higher education cheaper for them. The promise has always been that it will—but that day always seems to be in the future,” the paper says.

MOOCs may also cost colleges money, the paper says, citing an agreement between Udacity and the Georgia Institute of Technology to offer an online master’s degree in computer science.

“Udacity gets the intellectual content for a master’s program of 20 courses at an upfront cost of $400,000,” the paper says. “It borrows Georgia Tech’s reputation as its own, at a huge discount (no training of graduate students, no support for labs, no decades of accumulated know-how through which Georgia Tech earned its reputation).  It acquires these courses for a proprietary platform: Georgia Tech cannot offer these OMS CS courses, created by its own faculty, to a competing distributor.”

The paper continues: “Udacity expects Georgia Tech faculty members to maintain and update course material, and can use their latest version. While requiring that Georgia Tech not compete with it, it can take Georgia Tech-created courses and offer them to tens or hundreds of thousands of nonregistered students—and sell a program certificate for those courses.”

The full paper goes into more detail and is well worth a read.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.  As reported in the New York Times:

“With the Treasury Department warning that it could run out of money to pay national obligations within a day, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday evening, 81 to 18, to approve a proposal hammered out by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders after the House on Tuesday was unable to move forward with any resolution. The House followed suit a few hours later, voting 285 to 144 to approve the Senate plan, which would fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.

Mr. Obama signed the bill about 12:30 a.m. Thursday.

Most House Republicans opposed the bill, but 87 voted to support it. The breakdown showed that Republican leaders were willing to violate their informal rule against advancing bills that do not have majority Republican support in order to end the shutdown. All 198 Democrats voting supported the measure.

Mr. Obama, speaking shortly after the Senate vote, praised Congress, but he said he hoped the damaging standoff would not be repeated.”

Amen but I am afraid we will be revisiting this fiasco again in January!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post is reporting that a new Pew study is revealing that older Americans who are holding tight onto television and print in order to consume their news may be on an entirely different schedule than those younger Americans who have moved to the Internet, World Wide Web and mobile computing.

Nearly three in four young Americans ages 18-29 now cite the Internet as their main source of news, over television, newspapers and radio, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

The study, which outlined “12 trends shaping digital news,” found that 71 percent of young Americans in 2013 said the Internet was where they consumed the majority of their news. However, this was not so true of older generations. Of adults ages 30-49, 63 percent chose the Internet as their main source of news, tied with television. Among Americans older than 64, television and the newspaper remained as the top preferred news sources above the Internet.

But there is another major difference between how younger and older Americans consume the news that is even more telling. Just about eight in ten Americans (79 percent) ages 18-29 said they “graze” the news, meaning they check the news from time to time rather than at regular times throughout the day. However, this number dropped significantly among people ages 50 and above, who still said they got their news on a regular schedule every day.

In terms of content, news about Washington and politics was desired considerably less by young Americans than older adults. But there is one thing that brings younger and older generation Americans together: both follow weather news more than any other news content.

Tony