OLDaily

Lessons from a big, flawed education story
Alexandria Neason, Columbia Journalism Review, 2019/09/18

This article points out how media descriptions of the state of education in the United Sates are flawed because the writers' perspetcives are not typical of the reality experienced by most citizens. "That assumption—that the series of choices available to Packer... reflects the experience of most other public school parents—is obviously wrong." Instead, "for most of them, the decision to opt out of the system altogether if their kids don’t get into the city’s very best public schools is simply not an option." As one person tweets, "It is the story of a tiny slice of wealth white parents who hold an inordinate amount of sway and who get the best public schools or pull their kids out." And CJR comments that  "the ease with which the media labels one experience as emblematic of many reflects a press corps that continues to fail at the goal of achieving meaningful racial diversity within its ranks.

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Alberta setting the stage for privatization efforts
Grant Frost, Frosted Education, 2019/09/18

It's worth keeping in mind that Canada has on of the world's best education system, delivering consistently strong performances in measurement after measurement. This is the context in which we should be viewing proposals in Alberta to reform the system. In this post, Grant Frost looks at the recently released MacKinnon Report which recommends "linking some portion of funding to school boards achieving strategic outcomes desired by the ministry." This, writes Frost, is one more example of the 'Value Added Model' advanced as wider efforts to promote privatized education. Interestingly, he ties this movement - and MacKinnon's proposals - to a  group called The Atlas Network, which he says "now boasts a partnership of over 500 think tanks world wide, all created for the sole purpose of spreading the neo-liberal gospel." He's not wrong.

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I predicted the demise of ASU’s Global Freshman Academy MOOC four years ago
Steven D. Krause, 2019/09/18

In this post Steven Krause explains the demise of Arizona State University's Global Freshman Academy MOOC and, in passing, quotes at length from his own book. Of course it was obvious the model was doomed to failure; here it is: "Students could register for and complete a MOOC for free, and if they completed the work and paid a $45 processing/identity verification fee, they could then could have their work evaluated and/or sit for a test. Then, assuming the student passed, they could pay $200 per credit to ASU for transferable academic credit." Keeping in mind that courses are three or six credits, that's one expensive MOOC. Maybe some people benefited from the free learning, but that aspect of it doesn't seemed to have been measured; success, in this case, meant converting MOOC attendees into paying customers, and nothing else. Wrong audience, wrong benefit.

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The Affordances of Content Design
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2019/09/18

I'm linking to this because I think people should see it. But it still strikes me as a very traditionalist approach to online learning. Perhaps that's appropriate - perhaps there isn't any way to advance beyond the Standard Model. Here's Feldstein describing how one product succeeds: "If you understand teaching, and if you look at the improvements made in the self-study content and the in-class teaching strategies, you quickly come to see that it's not technology magic but thoughtful curriculum design, solid product usability and utility, and hard work in the classroom that produced these gains." A lost of what he describes here is based on old-style adaptive learning, for example, where a function shows a video if you score below a certain grade. "Notice in this example that we are still starting with performance against a learning objective. We are still starting with content design."

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/us/new-mexico-free-college-tuition.html
Simon Romero, Dana Goldstein, New York Times, 2019/09/18

Cue the paid sceptic from a 'Washington think tank', of course, but I think that New Mexico's free college tuition initiative is a giant step in the right direction. As one supporter says,  “It used to be that a high school degree could allow a young adult to enter into the middle class. We are no longer in that situation. We don’t ask people to pay for fifth grade and we also should not ask people to pay for sophomore year.”

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