Create, Innovate & Evaluate in Higher Education

By Richard Vedder

Although difficult to measure, it is unlikely that higher education has had any productivity advance in the 50 years since I finished college. Economists like Princeton's William Baumol have argued that rising college costs are inevitable, given inherent limitations on reducing the cost of disseminating knowledge -only so many people can fit into a room to hear a lecture.

A Cautious Word about MOOCs (by J.M. Anderson):

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2012/12/a_cautious_word_about_moocs.html

If you haven’t heard of MOOCs, you no doubt will, because these Massive Open Online course are becoming all the rage, tagged as the biggest thing in public education since, well, the dawn of public education. (It wasn’t long ago that the Khan Academy was). My colleague Nick Anderson reported about the emergence of the MOOCs movement as a disruptive force in higher education. But there are reasons to think MOOCs are being hyped, and below, former schools superintendent Larry Cuban explains why. Cuban is a former high school social studies teacher (14 years, including seven at Cardozo and Roosevelt high schools in the District), district superintendent (seven years in Arlington, VA) and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, where he has taught for more than 20 years. His latest book is “As Good As It Gets: What School Reform Brought to Austin.” This appeared on his blog.

The company, Coursera, plans to announce on Wednesday the start of a pilot project to check the identities of its students and offer “verified certificates” of completion, for a fee. A key part of that validation process will involve what Coursera officials call “keystroke biometrics”—analyzing each user’s pattern and rhythm of typing to serve as a kind of fingerprint.

A brief, but in-depth look at the pedagogy, form and use of MOOCs | Virtual Strategy Magazine is an online publication devoted entirely to virtualization technologies.

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