Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
A California community college is partnering with out-of-state universities to offer an online path to low-cost bachelor’s degrees.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Faced with a $15 million budget deficit and the threat of losing accreditation, City College of San Francisco will return more than 60 faculty department chairs to full-time teaching.
Give credit for learning, not seat time, argues a new report. As more students learn online at their own pace, the credit hour’s day is ending.
To fix student loans, make college unnecessary, writes columnist Ed Quillen in the Denver Post.
Sending more people to college is no solution. Indeed, it would make the problem worse, for it would just drive costs up further while putting a glut of graduates on the market, thereby depressing their earnings.
Instead, we need to extend our civil-rights laws to forbid job discrimination based on educational credentials. Employers would be free to test potential employees to see if they had relevant skills and knowledge, but they could not ask for educational credentials.
If college was optional, prices would plummet, Quillen predicts. “People who wanted to study medieval French literature could still pursue degrees at schools populated by scholars seeking knowledge,” while job seekers would learn by reading, studying online, apprenticeship or whatever enabled them to pass the qualifying test.
After all, you don’t need a degree in English to ask, “Do you want fries with that?”
As learning goes online, it will increase the pressure to find ways for independent learners to prove what they know.
Shelbyville, Indiana made Time‘s Dropout Nation cover in 2006 with a 75 percent graduation rate. Learning Matters TV looks at what the town is doing to prevent dropouts, including offering online “credit recovery.”
Why do people go to yoga class instead of watching an exercise video? asks Matt Yglesias on Slate.
The prospect of online education continues to attract a lot of interest and commentary in various circles, but I think the issue that people considering this need to ponder has nothing to do with convention and signaling and everything to do with yoga. Specifically, what is it that’s driving all these people to show up in person at yoga classes.
. . . When possible, people simply prefer to do this in person with a live human being standing in front of them.
At this point, online learning is like convenience food. It’s not as good as “slow” learning in a classroom, but it’s doable when other options take too much time, transportation and money.
California’s plan to focus community colleges on student success is “pure behaviorist claptrap based on fictional students being taught in fictional ways by fictional teachers,” writes an English professor.
What works in online learning?
Short-Circuited: The Challenges Facing the Online Learning Revolution in California offers Lance Izumi’s take on the resistance to virtual, blended and tech-infused schooling.
Kristin Kipp, national online teacher of the year, talks about teaching high school English online.
“Flipping” lectures and homework is being tested at some schools, reports Ed Week.
In a Khan Academy pilot in suburban Los Altos, California (where I live), students in grades 5-8 watch Khan’s online math lessons at home and do exercises. Teachers can track students’ video watching and see how long each student takes to correctly solve 10 problems in a row for each math concept.
That’s not really a homework flip, since students do exercises at home, but it helps teachers quickly see where students are getting confused.
At Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology in Georgia, John Willis requires physics students to view recorded lectures and other materials online, then uses short quizzes to make sure they follow through. He uses class time for demonstrations and experiments. Other teachers have followed his lead to save instructional time.
Mr. Willis said that what used to be a two-class-period process to set the groundwork for a laboratory assignment has been moved online—mostly with student-made videos explaining the setup procedures and hypothesis planning.
“It allows me to improve the connections I’m making with students, because now I can get into the material in a deeper way,” Mr. Willis said.
For a recent experiment using microscopes, Dr.(Susan) Kramer and another biology teacher posted YouTube videos of scientists discussing the equipment, photos of the school’s microscopes for the students to label, and their own videos explaining common problems in setting up the experiment.
“When [the students] came in, that shaved a half hour off what we would have normally had to eat up in lab,” she said. “So at a time when we’re trying to cram more into less, they’re already coming in prepared and ready to go and that saved us a lot.”
Flipping requires students to do more work on their own. It also requires all students to have access to computers. Los Altos and Gwinnett loan out laptops when necessary. (I’d bet the average Los Altos family owns 2.5 computers.)
Does technology improve schools? That’s asking the wrong question, writes Jonathan Schorr of NewSchools Venture Fund in response to last week’s New York Times story, In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores. What kind of technology? Used how?
. . . as a nation, we have spent billions of dollars on technology that has reinforced, rather than transforming, traditional models of schooling. But taking the average of thousands of computer labs where kids learn to type their essays in Microsoft Word is very different from declaring the “classroom of the future” a failed experiment. It tells us as little as the average Yelp score of all the restaurants in town.
As a guide to the future, the better question is, are there models that make innovative use of technology and offer transformative potential? The answer is an emphatic yes . . .
“Bolting technology solutions on today’s existing education system is a bad strategy for improving student learning,” writes Michael Horn on Education Next.
The United States has wasted well over $60 billion “cramming” technology in schools in this way to little effect over the past couple decades—and predictably so, according to our research. That some schools continue to do this is unfortunate—particularly in tough budget times—and is worth reporting.
. . . Technology has the potential to transform the education system—not by using technology for technology’s sake through PowerPoint or multimedia at the expense of math and reading or something like that—but instead as a vehicle to individualize learning for students working to master such things as math and reading, thereby creating a student-centric system as opposed to today’s lockstep and monolithic one.
Upgrading technology first and asking questions later about how it will help students learn is foolish, adds Horn. And common.
Online learning can make a huge difference, argues Tom Vander Ark, who’s a big fan of blended learning and personlized online learning.
Recent Comments