Georgia Tech Takes MOOCs to the Next Level

Outstanding news!

Georgia Tech announced yesterday that it is teaming up with Udacity, one of the leading providers of massively open online education, to offer a full graduate program in computer science. For a mere $7,000 dollars—or 1/6 the cost of the equivalent program offered on campus—students who meet the prerequisites can fulfill the requirements of a master’s degree entirely through open courseware.

This is a big deal. As the Washington Post notes, even MOOC-friendly colleges like Stanford, Harvard, and San Jose State have been reluctant to actually grant credentials for their online courses, preferring to use them as a teaching aids rather than as the foundation of a program. There have been the usual concerns about quality control, as well as worries that an all-MOOC degree could dilute the value of Georgia Tech’s traditional degrees, but Georgia Tech claims it has taken these concerns into account:

Notably, the university said it hoped to admit anyone who meets its admissions requirement, which it emphasized remain stringent. It estimated it could eventually enroll 10,000 students in the program, in a field facing a shortage of workers. That’s nearly half the size of the whole student body on Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus.

“We’re turning down people that are probably capable. We just can’t handle them,” said Rafael Bras, Georgia Tech’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, who said current demand for the program outstrips supply by 10 to 1. “We’re now reaching out to the world through a different medium. There’s a lot of people out there that will have this great opportunity.”

At $7,000 per student and with these kinds of enrollment numbers, this may be not just a boon for students but a good way of significantly widening Georgia Tech’s student base: 10,000 is a lot of students, and the open nature of MOOCs makes it relatively simple to scale up without dramatically expanding staff or administrative costs.

This is the first program of its kind, so nobody knows if the students it graduates will pass muster in the marketplace. But the potential for both cutting costs and broadening the educational base is certainly there. Rest assured we will be watching to see how this experiment shapes up.

Don’t Let the Door Hit Ya On the Way Out..

IRS Acting Commissioner Resigns

President Barack Obama delivered a brief statement on the IRS scandal this afternoon. He announced that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had requested and received the resignation of Steven Miller, acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. He also warned Republicans not to politicize the scandal, which has government abusing Americans due to their political beliefs at its very heart.

Obama took no questions from the media.

He did manage to finally stop using “if” in connection with the IRS scandal.

Update: Miller’s resignation is a sham.

How To Listen When Someone is Venting

LifeHacker

I’ve noticed that when you’re faced with an upset customer, client, employee, shareholder, child, parent, spouse, or friend, it can actually feel like they’re bulging with emotion and about to explode. Your instinctual and intuitive reaction may be to try to calm them down, urge them to cool off, suggest it’s not worth getting so upset about. And sometimes that may work. But in cases where they’re really upset, you may need to drain their emotional abscess just as you would have to do with a physical abscess. In those situations, asking them to calm down before they’ve vented will be about as useful as skipping straight to antibiotics before cleaning their wound.

And yet a lot of people don’t know how to listen to someone venting. Usually, people take one of two attitudes. Option 1 is to jump in and give advice—but this is not the same as listening, and the person doing the venting may respond with “Just listen to me! Don’t tell me what to do.”

What Are You Most Frustrated About?

What Are You Most Angry About?

What Are You Really Worried About?

US shale oil supply shock shifts global power balance

BBC

A steeper-than-expected rise in US shale oil reserves is about to change the global balance of power between new and existing producers, a report says.

Over the next five years, the US will account for a third of new oil supplies, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The US will change from the world’s leading importer of oil to a net exporter.

Demand for oil from Middle-East oil producers is set to slow as a result.

“North America has set off a supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world,” said IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven.

3D-Printed Face Made This Man’s Life Whole Again

Mashable

Thanks to 3D-printing technology, Eric Moger is getting his life back.

Four years ago, doctors detected a massive tumor growing beneath the skin on his face. They successfully removed the cancerous growth, but were also forced to remove most of the entire left side of his face.

After the lifesaving procedure, the British restaurant manager had a gaping hole where his eye, cheek bone, and part of his jaw had been. Moger would have gone on to live the rest of his life with half his face missing.

This is what Moger looked like prior the surgery. This is him with the prosthetic.

3D Printing is Way Scarier Than Plastic Guns

ShellyPalmer

Ever the publicity hound, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who obviously has no idea what additive manufacturing actually is, came out big and strong against “stomach-churning” 3D printed plastic guns last week.

Ever the publicity hound, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who obviously has no idea what additive manufacturing actually is, came out big and strong against “stomach-churning” 3D printed plastic guns last week.

“Everyone’s seen the movie ‘In The Line of Fire,’ where one of the great bad guys, [played by] John Malkovich, labored at making a gun out of plastic and wood so it could get through metal detectors and he could assassinate the president…” Senator Schumer went on to say, “But that was only a movie, and just this week, it has become reality. We’re facing a situation where anyone — a felon, a terrorist — can open a gun factory in their garage and the weapons they make will be undetectable. It’s stomach-churning.”

This naive, sensationalist rant so misunderstands the issue, I almost don’t know where to start.  He goes on to inform the public that because these guns are made of plastic, they are undetectable, so he must introduce legislation that will make it illegal to possess an undetectable or an untraceable weapon.  This is like putting a “Band-Aid on a heart attack.”  Sen. Schumer simply doesn’t understand what he is dealing with.  In fact, most of us don’t.

How to Reinvent College

TheDailyBeast

An undergraduate having to pay off $120,000, and a university that has more than $165 million in debt? Paying adjuncts less but having them teach more, and instructors who give As 43 percent of the time? Nick Romeo on a new book that critiques how higher education has changed, and what needs to be done to save it.

Some colleges are just as indebted as recent graduates. North Carolina’s High Point University has more than $165 million in debt and only $105 million in annual revenue. This extravagant borrowing funds a steakhouse, outdoor hot tubs, a first-run movie theater, and a roaming ice-cream truck.

Adjuncts anxious about job security have realized that giving higher grades improves their student evaluations, which often determine whether they remain employed. The “resortification” of colleges also encourages students to view themselves as customers, and instructors as retail workers employed to serve them. The A is now the most common grade on college campuses nationwide; it accounts for roughly 43 percents of all grades given. Meanwhile, results of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a test used by more than 500 colleges to measure academic progress, reveal that 36 percent of students make absolutely no improvement in writing, complex reasoning, or critical thinking during four years of college.

Given this rather dismal state of affairs, it’s understandable that many commentators see online education as the white knight galloping to the rescue of American higher education. Though Selingo is skeptical of treating technology as a panacea, he does make a strong case that real and lasting benefits can be gained from new tools in digital pedagogy.

The Myth of the Scientific Liberal

Those who tout science should accept its findings.

Those who deny that germs cause disease shouldn’t call their opponents anti-science. But that’s exactly what HBO comedian and germ-theory-denier Bill Maher routinely calls Republicans to hearty applause.

The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.

Release the Hounds!

Holder orders FBI, Justice probe of IRS audits

Federal authorities have launched a criminal investigation into allegations that Internal Revenue Service officials targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Tuesday.

In what is the most serious escalation yet of the revelations surrounding the agency, Holder said the Justice Department and FBI would examine whether any laws were violated at the IRS, which has acknowledged that it selected groups with the words “tea party” and “patriot” in their names for special audits.

How to Tell if College Presidents Are Overpaid

Bloomberg

Universities are nonprofit institutions that get special privileges, such as government subsidies and tax exemptions, based on the assumption that they are good stewards of the public trust. Big corporations pay their leaders more, but those institutions pay taxes that partially benefit universities. They have a bottom line as well as stockholders and corporate boards that often fire leaders who perform poorly.

University presidents aren’t corporate executives. If higher education wishes to maintain its privileged position in American society, it needs to contain its spending. A good place to start is at the top.

They seem to have forgotten the “nonprofit” part…