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In 2010, a book called DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education envisioned a wholesale shift in how people learned. More than a decade later, how has that panned out? This week’s episode features a conversation with Anya Kamenetz, the author and journalist who in 2010 tapped into an emerging set of issues around student debt, rapid technological change and political upheaval to lay out a portrait of a world in which individuals could learn when and how they wanted and be far less dependent on instructors and institutions. She discusses the current landscape and what she got right and wrong 12 years ago.  This episode was made possible by Kaplan .  Follow Us On Apple Podcasts     Google Podcasts     Stitcher     Spotify    Section:  The Key Podcast Ad keyword:  Spon_Kaplan_20221003 Event's date:  Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - 6:15pm Insider only:...

Image:  Bloomfield College will become part of Montclair State University under a merger agreement the two institutions announced today. Their Boards of Trustees authorized the move to create Bloomfield College of Montclair State University on or before June 30, 2023.  Until then, Bloomfield College will operate independently, though in close collaboration with Montclair State. Students enrolled at Bloomfield at the time of the merger will be allowed to continue their education at no additional cost, and Montclair State “will make every effort” to provide jobs for current Bloomfield employees, according to a press release announcing the news. About a year ago, Bloomfield College president Marcheta P. Evans made the frank announcement that without an institutional partner or philanthropic support, Bloomfield would be forced to close its doors. Montclair State stepped up to provide financial support until the two could finalize the merger announced to...

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Nearly a quarter century ago, Warren Leon, the director of interpretation at Old Sturbridge Village, and Roy Rosenzweig, the Mark and Barbara Fried Chair of History and founding director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, published  History Museums in the United States , a pioneering critical assessment of the way that history museums, historic houses, historic sites, and open-air living history museums.  Fifteen scholars and museum staff members examined the versions of the past that these institutions offered the public and evaluated the extent to which they reflected the latest historical scholarship and incorporated the perspectives of those people – women, Blacks, Native Americans, Latino/as, immigrants, and workers -- whose history had previously been ignored or caricatured. Their conclusions were indeed highly critical: Financial and institutional considerations too often resulted in a bland, insip...

Donald Gronbeck has been indicted on 50 felony and misdemeanor charges that include nine counts of rape, WBNS reported. He was the campus physician at Antioch College from 2015 through 2019 and maintained a medical practice in Yellow Springs, where college is located. Antioch President Jane Fernandes, in a statement released when Gronbeck's medical license was suspended in January, said the college would be working with local authorities to “provide information and help ensure that a full accounting is made of any harms done" from Gronbeck's work at the college. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost  called the allegations against Gronbeck “an incredibly graphic and brutal betrayal of trust.” He said one of the victims recorded a portion of the acts committed by Gronbeck. Gronbeck is currently in jail. His lawyer, John Paul Rion, said, “There is definitely another version of the events as told by the prosecutor's office." Ad keywords:  administrators stu...

The federal government should at least do no harm when it comes to helping students attain a college degree. Instead, through student loans, our tax money is used to prop up institutions that are more predatory than educational—for-profit educational institutions. These institutions charge their mostly low-income students so much for so little that the federal government’s involvement amounts to exploitation. Too often, these institutions aim to make money ahead of their duty to educate students. Their aggressive sales tactics convince vulnerable individuals to sink into debt for a degree that is less usable—and more expensive—than an equivalent degree from a community college or four-year institution. That is, if students attain a degree at all. The fact is, most don’t. Only 30.7 percent students entering four-year, for-profit institutions complete their degrees in six years . Their education is often a failed promise. By contrast, 48.7 percent of students at public fo...

Blog:  Learning Innovation Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change by W. David Marx Published in September 2022. In one of the blurbs for Status and Culture on Amazon, Douglas Rushkoff says that the book " ... is both a rigorous social analysis and a delightful guilty pleasure ." How many books can you read where you both learn about the rise and fall of Vanilla Ice while engaging with grand cultural theorizing? Marx, a Tokyo-based writer, has identified the pursuit of status as the prime mover of individual behavior and cultural change. For Marx, status hierarchies are not the result of social structures and competition for scarce resources but their cause. Pick any social phenomena you wish to examine, from the banal (such as the precipitous decline of Vanilla Ice's career following the release of his 1991 movie 'Cool As Ice') to the existential (such as the rise of right-wing n...

Pennsylvania State University called off an event featuring Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes Monday night. In a statement today, Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi blamed the threat of violence, not the views of the Proud Boys. "Campus police were concerned about escalating violence and public safety," she said. The event was to have featured McInnes and Alex Stein, "who are provocateurs known for their abhorrent views and rhetoric. From the start, Penn State’s administration firmly denounced the two speakers. However, they were invited to speak on campus by a registered student organization and as an institution of higher education, we support the fundamental constitutional right of free speech and free expression of all members of our community. It is precisely because of this unwavering commitment to free speech that provocative individuals target our campus to deliver speeches." Bendapudi said, "I am so proud of our students who organized an altern...

I failed organic chemistry. Twice. First at Brown, then at Yale. They are distinguished defeats, I’m proud to say. The first time, I began with confidence, having succeeded in biology and regular chemistry. I felt rapport with hybridization and resonance structures and even the cycloalkanes. I embraced the beautiful notion of the covalent bond, and as a big-picture gal, I appreciated its wondrous ability to create an infinitude of carbon-based molecules. I drew them with relish, rotating them on the page, shading the orbitals in colored pencil. Everyone wanted to borrow my lab diagrams. But on the tests, I couldn’t solve the problems. I didn’t know where to begin, what knowledge to apply. I started one question and skipped to the next, and the next, my blue-book pages a diary of confusion and panic. I was the last to finish the first exam, the first to complete the midterm, having given up halfway through. I scored a 48. Afterward, my professor went over the exam with me. If he h...

Blog:  Just Visiting I was both surprised, and I suppose flattered, to be named in a recent article that I am among the people who are “doing ungrading right.”  I was also more than a little chagrined because  most of my writing on ungrading  has been to document my  myriad struggles  in implementing an approach to student-level assessment that was consistent with my pedagogical goals. In Susan Blum’s edited collection  Ungrading: Why Rating Undermines Learning (And What to Do Instead) , I explicitly describe how I identify with Wile E. Coyote’s attempts to snare the Roadrunner, given the challenges of developing a system of alternative grading. I am uncomfortable being identified as someone doing ungrading right because framing it as something that can be done correctly suggests it is a schema or program that can be applied regardless of context or conditions, and once fixed, you’re good to go. This has not been my experience. The effective...

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Emotions are on the bestseller list – and for good reason. Much as an earlier understanding of dinosaurs – as slow moving, dimwitted creatures doomed to extinction – has been overturned, triggering renewed public interest in the Mesozoic era, so, too, are older ways of thinking about emotions undergoing radical challenges, making it evident that emotions have a history, a politics, a sociology, and a gendered, racial, and class dimension.   Two recent books that have received widespread attention underscore a much broader emotional or affective turn in humanistic and social science scholarship. The first volume,  Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking  by the physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow, not only offers an up-to-date overview into the science of emotions, but self-help advice that views a rethinking of our relationship to our feelings as the key to a happy life and better connections with others. Far from ...

The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, or BOLI, is preparing to fine Pacific University $843,000—and potentially more depending on additional complaints, OPB reported. Seven people have filed complaints that Pacific has not given them their full personnel file, as required by state law. “I feel a huge amount of vindication on behalf of my clients who have been fighting to get their personnel files produced to them as required under Oregon law by Pacific University,” said Robin DesCamp, a lawyer representing former university employees. Jennifer Yruegas, Pacific’s general counsel, said Pacific has complied with BOLI, but sees inconsistencies in BOLI’s notice. “Several discrepancies within the assessment are really concerning,” Yruegas told OPB. “And [it] really looks as though information wasn’t reviewed that was provided before making the assessment.” At this point, the university has provided all of the records that it can to all seven complainants. She said some records ...

September 2022 was apparently the month artificial intelligence essay angst boiled over in academia, as various media outlets published opinion pieces lamenting the rise of AI writing systems that will ruin student writing and pave the way toward unprecedented levels of academic misconduct. Then, on Sept. 23, academic Twitter exploded into a bit of a panic on this topic. The firestorm was prompted by a post to the OpenAI subreddit where user Urdadgirl69 claimed to be getting straight A’s with essays “written” using artificial intelligence. Professors on Reddit and Twitter alike expressed frustration and concern about how best to address the threat of AI essays. One of the most poignant and widely retweeted laments came from Redditor ahumanlikeyou, who wrote , “Grading something an AI wrote is an incredibly depressing waste of my life.” As all this online hand-wringing was playing out, my undergraduate Rhetoric and Algorithms students and I were conducting a little experiment in...