Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief review today of a study on completion rates in MOOC courses. Critics have argued that the 10 percent completion rates for many MOOC courses are at best problematic and at worst laughable. But exactly how low are they? The answer might be a matter of interpretation and depends upon learner goals. In a new study (EDUCAUSE subscription required) by Justin Reich, a research fellow at Harvard University, decided to examine whether the people who were “failing” to complete the courses had actually been trying to complete them in the first place. According to The Chronicle article, Reich followed:

“…nearly 80,000 people taking nine Harvard MOOCs to respond to a survey about their goals. He sorted them into four categories: completers, auditors, browsers, and “unsure.” Then he tracked them.

The overall completion rate among survey respondents was 13.3 percent.

Among those who had intended to complete the course, the rate was 19.5 percent.

Among those who had not intended to complete the course, it was 5.4 percent.

None of those numbers is high by traditional standards, and it’s hardly a surprise that people who are trying complete MOOCs do so at a significantly higher rate than do those who aren’t trying to complete them. Some might even see the 19.5-percent completion rate among people intending to complete the course as more damning than lower figures that are not based on such distinctions.

In a paper published on Monday in Educause Review Online, Mr. Reich says he does not expect the findings to budge critics. He says the study’s goal, apart from providing a “useful reference point” for policy makers and university leaders, was to begin drawing important distinctions among people who sign up for free online courses. In traditional higher education, it’s safe to assume that all students want to finish courses and earn credit. Not so in MOOCs, where the lower barriers to entry attract students with a broader spectrum of goals and motivations, he says.

“This research has provided better answers to the question: Why do people come to these MOOCs?” writes Mr. Reich in his paper. “The next challenge is to get better answers to the question: Why do people leave?”

The study verifies the major concern with MOOC courses in their present design is that high attrition makes them an unlikely alternative to traditional courses. However, it does not mean that research and development (as long funders are willing) into MOOC courses should not continue.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ross Douthat has a column today in the New York Times comparing the fates of print-based and web-based media using The New Republic and Vox.com as cases in point. Douthat writes:

“On Thursday, The New Republic, a storied liberal magazine..saw its editor in chief and literary editor sacked by a pair of figures out of a Silicon Valley satire — a tech almost-billionaire, Chris Hughes, who won the meritocracy’s equivalent of the lottery when he roomed with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, and Hughes’s digital guru, Guy Vidra, whose plan for vertical integration with the singularity can now proceed apace.

Mass resignations followed; eulogies were penned for the T.N.R.-that-was. (And, admittedly, that hadn’t really existed for some time.) But the most interesting in memoriam came from Ezra Klein, Vox.com’s editor in chief, because he wrote as a spokesman for a new model of political journalism pronouncing a parting benediction on the old one.

“The eulogy that needs to be written,” Klein argued, is actually for an entire kind of publication — the “ambitious policy magazine,” whether on the left or right, that once set the terms of Washington’s debates.

With the emergence of the Internet, those magazines lost their monopolies, and the debate “spilled online, beyond their pages, outside their borders,” with both new competitors and specific voices (Klein kindly cites my own) becoming more important than before.

As Klein correctly implies, this shift has produced a deeper policy conversation than print journalism ever sustained. Indeed, the oceans of space online, the easy availability of studies and reports, the ability to go endless rounds on topics — plus the willingness of many experts to blog and bicker for the sheer fun of it! — has made the Internet era a golden age for technocratic argument and data-driven debate.”

Klein concludes, “something is being lost in the transition from policy magazines to policy websites, and it’s still an open question how much of it can be regained.”

In response to Klein, Douthat comments:

“All of this is sensible and true. But there’s one large amendment that needs to be offered. The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art.

It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine…

So when we talk about what’s being lost in the transition from old to new, print to digital, it’s this larger, humanistic realm that needs attention. It isn’t just policy writing that’s thriving online; it’s anything that’s immediate, analytical, data-driven — from election coverage to pop culture obsessiveness to rigorous analysis of baseball’s trade market. And since today’s liberalism is particularly enamored of arc-of-history arguments that either condemn or implicitly whisk away the past, this may be a particular problem for the Internet-era progressive mind.

The peril isn’t just that blithe dot-com philistines will tear down institutions that once sustained a liberal humanism. It’s that those institutions’ successors won’t even recognize what’s lost.”

They will not recognize what’s lost indeed.  It reminds me a little bit of the scene from Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge and Marley buy out their former employer Fezziwig.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial today rightly observes that the coming together of Americans of all color, races, and ethnicities over grand jury handling of the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases, may be a defining moment in the way we perceive the victimization of black males in this country. The editorial states:

“In city after city, white and nonwhite citizens have surged through the streets chanting or bearing signs with Mr. Garner’s final words: “I can’t breathe.” Others chanted: “Hands up; don’t shoot” or “Black lives matter” — slogans from the racially troubled town of Ferguson, Mo., where another grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot to death 18-year-old Michael Brown.

The viral spread of the demonstrations — and the wide cross section of Americans who are organizing and participating in them — shows that what was once seen as a black issue is on the way to being seen as a central, American problem.

The question of the moment is whether the country’s political leadership has the will to root out abusive and discriminatory policing — corrosive, longstanding problems that bore down on minority communities, large and small, urban and suburban.”

Below is the entire editorial.

Tony

———————————————————————————-

Hope and Anger at the Garner Protests

New York Times Editorial – Brent Staples – December 6, 2014

The country has historically reacted with doubt or indifference when African-Americans speak of police officers who brutalize — or even kill — people with impunity. Affluent and middle-class white Americans who were treated with respect by the police had difficulty imagining the often life-threatening mistreatment that black Americans of all walks of life dealt with on a daily basis. Perhaps those days are passing away.

You can see that from the multiracial cast of the demonstrations that have swept the nation since Wednesday, when a grand jury decided not to indict a white New York City police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man.

In city after city, white and nonwhite citizens have surged through the streets chanting or bearing signs with Mr. Garner’s final words: “I can’t breathe.” Others chanted: “Hands up; don’t shoot” or “Black lives matter” — slogans from the racially troubled town of Ferguson, Mo., where another grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot to death 18-year-old Michael Brown.

The viral spread of the demonstrations — and the wide cross section of Americans who are organizing and participating in them — shows that what was once seen as a black issue is on the way to being seen as a central, American problem.

The question of the moment is whether the country’s political leadership has the will to root out abusive and discriminatory policing — corrosive, longstanding problems that bore down on minority communities, large and small, urban and suburban.

The scope of the problem is evident from the work of the Justice Department, which has opened 20 investigations into local police departments over the last five years and is currently enforcing reform agreements with 15 departments, some of which were investigated in previous administrations.

This week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. released a particularly alarming report on the barbaric conduct of the police department in Cleveland, which has been riven with discord in recent weeks, after a white police officer shot and killed a 12-year-old black boy, Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun.

The Times reported on Friday that the officer had quit a suburban police force after his supervisors judged that he had a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to deal with the stresses of the job. The Cleveland Police Department had failed to examine the officer’s work history before hiring him. Thus an officer who had been unable to cope in a suburban district was given the power of life and death over people in a big city, where the task of policing the streets is far more demanding.

The Justice Department report describes the Cleveland Police Department as something far closer to an occupying military force than a legitimate law enforcement agency. The officers, for example, seem to take a casual view of the use of deadly force, shooting at people who pose no threat of harm to the police or others. In one case in 2013, for example, they actually fired at a victim who had been held captive in a house — as he escaped, clad only in boxer shorts.

The report cataloged numerous incidents of wanton violence, with officers beating, pepper-spraying and Tasering people who were unarmed or had already been restrained. Officers escalated encounters with citizens instead of defusing them, making force all but inevitable.

The record in Cleveland is extreme. But aspects of illegal police conduct can be found in cities all over the country, subjecting millions to intimidation and fear that they could be killed for innocent actions.

Congress will have an opportunity to discuss this issue soon, during the Senate confirmation hearings of Loretta Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who has been nominated to succeed Mr. Holder as attorney general.

Ms. Lynch’s office will oversee the federal civil rights investigation into the Garner case. Some in Congress clearly understand that the grand jury’s failure to indict the officer — despite a clear video showing him choking the man — deserves review, not just on its face, but because it goes to the heart of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Others, however, seem poised to argue that the federal government, which has a clear responsibility to enforce civil rights laws, should not be taking the lead. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, for example, asked, “Why does the federal government feel like it is its responsibility and role to be the leader in an investigation in a local instance?” That sounds like something out of the Jim Crow era, when Southern states argued that they were entitled to treat black citizens any way they wished.

Mr. Holder was on the mark when he said that the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice raised urgent, national questions about the breakdown of trust between minority communities and the police forces that are supposed to serve and protect them.

That so many are in the streets protesting police abuse shows that outrage over these injustices is spreading. Now it is up to the nation’s political leaders to confront this crisis.

Dear Commons Community,

In November, Rolling Stone published an account of sexual assault that shook the University of Virginia and horrified readers. Yesterday Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Dana, published a letter apologizing for the way the story was handled and admitted to doubts about its report of a premeditated gang rape at a fraternity party. Rolling Stone’s backpedaling came after several days of critiques that questioned aspects of its article about a woman who asked to be called Jackie, and concessions by campus activists against sexual assault that they had doubts about some parts of her account. As reported in the New York Times,

“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” In a statement, the fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi said it did not have a fraternity function on the weekend when the woman said she was raped upstairs in the fraternity house while a party raged downstairs. And while the article said the initiator of the assault was a fraternity member who worked as a lifeguard at a university pool, Phi Kappa Psi said its review indicated that no member of the fraternity worked there during the time in question.”

Below is the full text of Dana’s letter. Unfortunately, if it turns out that this story is indeed a fabrication, it will have done great harm to real victims of rape around the country.

Tony

=========================

TO OUR READERS:

Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university’s failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations.

Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone‘s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie’s account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence. 

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

Will Dana Managing Editor

Dear Commons Community,

In the wake of the Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner, protests and demonstrations were held in major cities across the United States. As reported in The Huffington Post and other media:

Atlanta, where demonstrators gathered in downtown Atlanta, roughly 100 turning out near the Five Points MARTA train station.

Chicago, where hundreds blocked Lake Shore Drive along Lake Michigan. Protesters were thwarted in their efforts to march to Soldier Field, where a Bears-Cowboys football game was scheduled. They reversed course and at the city’s Dan Ryan Expressway, about two dozen demonstrators darted onto the road and briefly blocked five lanes.

Detroit, where protesters lay down on the ground for a “die-in” at the city’s Campus Martius at midday as temperatures hovered around freezing.

Denver, where students from at least four high schools joined in protest. Students from Abraham Lincoln High School left class and walked about 6 miles to the Capitol, snarling traffic. Buses were sent to pick up the students after the protest.

Minneapolis, where demonstrators decrying police treatment of minorities stopped traffic for several hours on Interstate 35W near downtown before rallying at City Hall. Some protesters were fast-food workers demanding higher wages and union rights.

And Thursday in Boston, several thousand rallied peacefully although some blocked city streets while marching to Boston Common, where the city’s annual tree lighting ceremony was underway. Demonstrators toted signs saying “Justice for All” and “Black Lives Matter” as they chanted. They later gathered outside the Statehouse. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said he too was frustrated and discouraged by the grand jury’s decision.

A second night of protests in New York City brought out thousands Thursday. They gathered in downtown Manhattan’s Foley Square and chanted “I can’t breathe” and “No justice, no peace” before marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, carrying replicas of coffins. Another group started in Harlem. The marchers also disrupted traffic near the Holland Tunnel, the Manhattan Bridge and on the Westside Highway.”

These demonstrations will continue for days to come and hopefully will remain peaceful. The police have shown restraint in not inciting any incidents.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Following on the heels of the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, a grand jury on Staten Island voted Wednesday not to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, a black man who died after being placed in a chokehold.

Garner, 43, died July 17 while he was being arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes. In a video of the arrest, Garner screams “I can’t breathe!” multiple times until his body goes limp. A medical examiner later said that he died of a chokehold, a move that is banned by the NYPD, and ruled his death a homicide.

Garner’s attorney said Wednesday that the “family is very upset and disappointed that these officers are not getting indicted for any criminal conduct.”

Pantaleo said in a statement Wednesday that he regretted Garner’s death.

Once announced, protests began throughout New York City.

Mayor Bill de Blasio called Garner’s death “a terrible tragedy that no family should have to endure,” and said he would continue to work to decrease the use of excessive force among officers.

“This is a subject that is never far from my family’s minds – or our hearts,” he said. “And Eric Garner’s death put a spotlight on police-community relations and civil rights – some of the most critical issues our nation faces today.”

The decision in the Garner case comes just over a week after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, declined to indict officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown.

The video of Eric Garner’s death provides compelling evidence of excessive force and use of a chokehold. I don’t understand the Staten Island grand jury’s decision at all.  To quote from a New York Times editorial:

“Mr. Garner, who was 43, and left a wife and six children, cannot speak for himself. But the video, at least, speaks for him. It’s a heartbreaking, damning exhibit, showing Mr. Garner’s final moments alive, and his final words: “I can’t breathe.”

There will be major protests tonight here in New York and elsewhere over both grand jury decisions.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Patrick Suppes who was probably the most significant figure in the development of computer-based learning in the 20^th century, died at his home on Stanford University’s Campus on November 17th. I met him once after he spoke at a conference in the early 1980s. He saw computer-assisted instruction or CAI as the wave of the future for education. In 1977, while at Medgar Evers College, I was involved with building a CAI Lab based on software he developed and marketed through Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC). The CAI software was way ahead of its time but unfortunately the hardware and underlying software platforms in the 1970s especially for presenting media were problematic.  It would take a couple of decades for the technology to catch up with his vision. Below is his New York Times obituary.

Tony

==============================================================================

Patrick Suppes Dies at 92!

Almost a decade before the invention of the personal computer, Patrick Suppes, a Stanford philosopher, sketched a vision of the democratic future of computerized education.

“In a few more years,” he predicted in 1966, “millions of schoolchildren will have access to what Philip of Macedon’s son Alexander enjoyed as a royal prerogative: the personal services of a tutor as well informed and as responsive as Aristotle.”

Dr. Suppes, who died on Nov. 17 at 92, was not just prescient, however; he was also instrumental in bringing about the future he foresaw — one in which students would have instant access to vast stores of knowledge through their computerized “tutors.”

After joining the Stanford philosophy department in 1950, he went on to found, in 1967, the Computer Curriculum Corporation, which pioneered the computerized learning movement.

Dr. Suppes died at his home on the Stanford campus, not far from the university’s Suppes Center for History and Philosophy of Science, said Michael Friedman, the center’s founding director and a philosophy department colleague.

In his 64 years at Stanford, Dr. Suppes (pronounced SOUP-peas) influenced a wide range of academic fields, among them logic, physics and psychology. Educated in the same intellectual traditions of pragmatism and empiricism as his Harvard contemporary W. V. Quine, a giant of 20th-century philosophy, he helped create Stanford’s Institute for Mathematical Research in the Social Sciences, which he directed from 1959 to 1992.

The Computer Curriculum Corporation was the first company to pursue interactive computer-assisted learning in the classroom. The company commercialized earlier research that Dr. Suppes had done in teaching set theory, a branch of mathematical logic, to elementary school students.

“He was really a pioneer in the idea that computers could bring some kind of assistance to the classroom,” said Adele Goldberg, who studied with Dr. Suppes as a graduate student and worked with him as a research associate at the institute. From 1992 to 2010, he directed Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth. He taught at the university as recently as last spring.

During the 1960s, Dr. Suppes used computers in experiments that crossed income, class and color lines in an effort to accelerate classroom learning.

“In his computer-assisted learning, Pat was especially proud of its egalitarian and non-elitist character, insofar as students of any and all abilities and backgrounds had the same chance of improving their knowledge,” Dr. Friedman said.

Patrick Colonel Suppes was born in Tulsa, Okla., on March 17, 1922. His father was an independent businessman in the oil industry, and his mother died when he was 4. His stepmother encouraged him in a variety of intellectual interests, in spite of his father’s hope that he would join the family oil business.

His stepmother’s interest in Christian Science led to Dr. Suppes’s own interest in philosophy. He attended public schools in Tulsa and began college at the University of Oklahoma in 1939. After a year, he transferred to the University of Chicago, where he received an undergraduate degree in meteorology in 1943.

Called to active duty in the Army Reserve that year, he served in the Pacific as a meteorologist and had been promoted to captain by the time he was discharged in 1946. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University in 1950. In 1990, President George Bush awarded him the National Medal of Science.

Dr. Suppes was married four times. He is survived by his wife, Michelle Nguyen; five children, Patricia, Deborah, John, Alexandra and Michael; three stepchildren; and five grandchildren, the university said.

In 2002, Dr. Suppes published “Representation and Invariance in Scientific Structures,” a book that the university said represented the culmination of his work.

In 2012, Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information held a conference in honor of his 90th birthday. Scholars in a variety of philosophical and scientific fields contributed papers for the occasion, and they have been collected in a forthcoming book titled “Foundations and Methods From Mathematics to Neuroscience: Essays Inspired by Patrick Suppes.”

The university said that an advance copy of the book was to be laid in Dr. Suppes’s coffin.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a collection of articles today addressing the issue of alcohol on college campuses. They refer to the situation as: “Alcohol is an entrenched reality of campus life”. The articles describe the proliferation of alcohol at one college town from the viewpoints of a police chief, a bar owner, a party planner, an educator, and a tailgater.

Interesting read!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at the efficacy of badges and nanodegrees for job seekers and comes to the conclusion that they have a way to go before general acceptance. This is to be expected with any new concept especially one dependent upon technology. The article establishes that:

“Critics have argued that a [traditional] college degree does not say much about a candidate’s abilities apart from the ability to get into, and graduate from, a particular college. Employers themselves complain that a college degree doesn’t predict whether a graduate will make a good employee. Purveyors of alternative credentials have rushed to fill the gap, designing “badges” and “nanodegrees” that are more specific about what skills applicants actually possess.”

However, it appears that badges and nanodegrees do not say enough about job applicants either and at best would have to be used in conjunction with other credentials such as a college degree.

On badges the article quotes a professor from Arizona State University:

“Alexander Halavais, an associate professor of social and behavioral studies at Arizona State University, has been researching how employers perceive badges. He says alternative credentials have a long way to go.

“Outside of IT, there is a lot of resistance to badges,” said Mr. Halavais in an email interview. “I know that for my students, based on folks we have talked to so far, I would never recommend that they use badges within a traditional hiring process—e.g., on a résumé.”

On nanodegrees, the article quotes one hiring manager:

“…nanodegree holders applying elsewhere might not enjoy any advantage. A user on Quora, the online question-and-answer forum, recently asked hiring managers if Udacity’s nanodegrees were seen as valuable. A response came from a user identifying himself as Allan Hui, a vice president at Weather Underground, a commercial service that analyzes data from thousands of weather stations.

Mr. Hui said the value of nanodegrees in the application process probably depended on whether a company had established formal guidelines for counting them. If not, the credential might simply be ignored.”

My sense is that badges have about the same acceptance in hiring as continuing education units. Nanodegrees have value with a small handful of companies and are likened more to certificate programs than college degrees.  I agree with the article that both have a way to go to be major players in the complex and competitive world of applying for a job.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Single-sex education, common in the United States until the 19th century, when it fell into deep disfavor except in private or parochial schools, is on the rise again in public schools as educators seek ways to improve academic performance, especially among the poor. Some schools such as Charles Drew Elementary School in Broward County, Florida, about a quarter of the classes are segregated by sex on the theory that differences between boys and girls can affect how they learn and behave. As reported in the New York Times, this policy is raising concerns about gender separation among educators and policymakers:

“Advocates of single-sex classes often cite the struggles of boys, who persistently lag behind girls in national tests of reading comprehension and are much more likely to face disciplinary problems and drop out of school. Educators also argue that girls underperform in science when compared with boys and benefit from being with other girls. And school officials say that children can be easily distracted by the opposite sex in the classroom.”

On the other hand:

“Rebecca Bigler, a psychologist at the University of Texas, said that segregating by sex — or any social category — increases prejudice based on stereotypes.

“You say there’s a problem with sexism,” Ms. Bigler said, “and instead of addressing the sexism, you just remove one sex.”

That worries the American Civil Liberties Union, which this year filed complaints with the Education Department against four Florida school districts, accusing them of violations of federal civil rights law and of using “overly broad stereotypes” to justify separating girls and boys into different classrooms. The A.C.L.U. also filed a complaint in Austin, Tex., against two new single-sex middle schools, and has pending complaints in Idaho and Wisconsin and a nearly two-decade-old complaint in New York. Lawsuits in Louisiana and West Virginia have resulted in single-sex classes there reverting to coeducation.”

In response to the A.C.L.U. complaints and the growth in single-gender classrooms, the Obama administration is issuing guidance for school districts. Schools may set up such classes if they can provide evidence that the structure will improve academics or discipline in a way that coeducational measures cannot. Students must have a coeducational alternative, and families must volunteer to place their children in all-boys or all-girls classes.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It seems that both sides have the best interests of students at heart.

Tony