Free Republic

Broadband internet is essential, not a luxury. Thank you @GovHolcomb for prioritizing #Indiana students and schools in your $250M investment so they have equitable access to participate in a meaningful digital learning experience. @ExcelinEd https://t.co/iLlqVzOqXf— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) April 23, 2021

Political Power Ann Hornaday wants readers to believe in a fabricated dichotomy in which well-meaning liberals focus on culture to change hearts and minds while conniving conservatives focus on politics. “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier,” said Baltimore satirist H.L. Mencken. As a daily reader and subscriber to the Washington Post, I sometimes fear its residual effect on my intellect. Such was the case reading WaPo film critic Ann Hornaday’s Sept. 21 column, in which she claims the left’s aggressive cultural strategy hasn’t resulted in significant political victories.The left, says Hornaday,...

It seems that teachers and students are being set up to fail. This fall, many public schools are responding to COVID-19 by offering online learning. In this pandemic era, we’ve been discouraged from taking potentially life-saving medications without “gold standard” studies supporting their use, yet it seems parents are now being told to place their children in a brand-new learning environment with no study of any kind supporting its use.In my northern Virginia school district of Loudoun County, online learning for most students is five days per week. The typical daily schedule includes three hours of whole-class instruction, one hour...

Disasters, it is said, often have silver linings, and in the case of COVID-19 pandemic, this might be a widening access to computerized learning. Now, it is alleged, as a result of school closings, thousands of youngsters, disproportionately poor and members of minority groups, will finally possess advantages of their more affluent schoolmates. In California, for example, thanks to Google’s generosity, some 4000 students will enjoy free Chromebooks while 100,000 rural households will have no-cost  Internet access for three months. Moreover, the LA schoolboard had previously allocated an emergency $100 million to provide free laptops while partnering with Verizon...

Education publisher Pearson is accelerating its move to be a more digitally focused company as students across the world are stuck at home and using online learning tools due to the coronavirus. The business said that although a global lockdown, including the closure of schools and testing centres, is hitting revenue, it expects interest in its digital products to pick up. Pearson has made many products free during the Covid-19 outbreak to help students stuck at home to continue learning, which it likely hopes will get students used to reading their text books online. “One consequence of lockdown is that...

Britain’s Pearson (PSON.L) has seen an “explosion” in demand for online learning, with traffic across its platforms quadrupling as millions of children start to adapt to home schooling during the coronavirus pandemic, its chief executive said. Pearson, a leading global education company, has made some programs available for free and expanded others to help teachers, parents and students fill the gap caused by school and college closures that have followed the spread of coronavirus from China to other parts of Asia, Europe to North America. The company has mobilized resources to train more teachers to deliver lessons online and provide...

My dream of a nation free from government schools and odious teachers unions, wherein parents responsible enough to bring another human into this world are also responsible enough to ensure that human is educated without the government’s help, is unlikely to soon become reality. However, further limiting the influence of our current, failing, monopolistic education system would move us closer to the educational vision imagined by our Founding Fathers.Teachers unions insist anyone who favors giving parents educational freedom regarding how and where to educate their children is out to destroy public education. But it’s important to note “government schools” are not...

Berkeley previously housed an online library consisting of more than 20,000 videos of lectures. These videos were free and accessible to the public. But they are free no longer: next week, administrators will withdraw access to anyone who isn't a Berkeley student or professor. Two employees of Gallaudet University—a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C.—filed a complaint with DOJ alleging that Berkeley's online content was inaccessible to the hearing-disabled community. After looking into the matter, DOJ determined that Berkeley had indeed violated the Americans with Disabilities Act Berkeley had two choices: spend a fortune adding closed captioning to the...

University of the People is a tuition-free online institution that aims to reach all students that wish to obtain a college education. It is fully accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council, a national accrediting group. It offers courses that include business administration and computer science programs.

When I mention online learning to my colleagues at Wesleyan University, most respond initially with skepticism. But based on my experience, I know that real learning can take place on the Web. I am currently teaching a massive online open course, or MOOC, on Coursera. Most MOOCs have great attrition, and mine is no exception: There were almost 30,000 students registered at the start, yet 4,000 remain active as we near the end of the semester. Unlike most MOOCs, which focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, mine is a classic humanities course. "The Modern and the Postmodern" starts off...

Enrollment in online schools has increased twelvefold in Ohio since the first internet-based school was created in the state in 2000, The Gazette Medina reports.More than 30,000 students are currently enrolled, most of them concentrated in seven statewide cyber schools. Only Arizona had more students in online schools, according to the news report.Online schools, and other forms of digital learning, are an inevitable and promising form of education for the 21st Century, unless special interest forces are able to keep technology from becoming more integrated into everyday education.Professor Gary Miron of the National Education Policy Center is a leading voice...

'Relocating' children March 29, 2012 It's 11AM. Do you know where your children are? Hundreds of Oklahoma kids carted away from school grounds without parental consent or knowledge. Jason McNew Recently, there has been a disturbing nation-wide trend of parental rights being trampled upon by public school officials, from bag-lunch inspections to electronic bracelets being used to spy on overweight kids. This week brings another example of complete disregard for parental rights, this time from Grove High School in Delaware County, Oklahoma. Grove High School transported 699 kids away from school property without first notifying parents of their intent to...

Using Khan Academy as inspiration, Sebastian Thrun decided to bring his Stanford class on artificial intelligence online. Anyone could sign up for free. And 160,000 people from around the world did. He saw the power of creating interactive lectures and distributing them for free. He left Stanford and launched Udacity, a company focused on bringing free university-level education to the world. In the interview above, Sebastian Thrun, Co-Founder of Udacity, talks about how he will help students improve their careers, whether or not the goal is to replace traditional universities, how the classes are different from iTunes U style taped...

“Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution” is a 10-week online course presented by Hillsdale College. Featuring an expanded format from the “Introduction to the Constitution” lecture series with Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn, Constitution 101 follows closely the one-semester course required of all Hillsdale College undergraduate students. In this course, you can: watch lectures from the same Hillsdale faculty who teach on campus; study the same readings taught in the College course; submit questions for weekly Q&A sessions with the faculty; access a course study guide; test your knowledge through weekly quizzes; and upon completion of...

If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, let me suggest an idea that you might not have considered: You should learn computer programming. Specifically, you should sign up for Code Year, a new project that aims to teach neophytes the basics of programming over the course of 2012. Code Year was put together by Codecademy,* a startup that designs clever, interactive online tutorials. Codecademy’s founders, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, argue that everyone should know how to program—that learning to code is becoming as important as knowing how to read and write. I concur. So if you don’t know...

The Michigan House Education Committee is considering lifting the enrollment cap on the number of families that can take advantage of publicly funded cyber charter public schools. No more than 2,000 students may enroll in these schools under current law. Below is an interview with Brian Kevelin, a parent who sends his children to one of Michigan’s two cyber charter schools — Michigan Virtual Charter Academy. Why did you seek out this alternative form of public schooling? "It started out because of a safety issue that the public school did not correct. The child brought a knife to school and...

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

In urging professors at Southern Methodist University to “teach naked,” José A. Bowen is not suggesting they doff their pants. Instead, SMU’s dean of the Meadow School of the Arts is asking teachers to shed classroom computers, tedious PowerPoints and long-winded lectures. Nor should his decision to strip computers from SMU classrooms be considered evidence of a lunatic anti-technology bias. A jazz musician by training, Bowen is a longtime champion of smart technology on campus, penning a compelling article on the topic for the National Teaching & Learning Forum (www.ntlf.com/html/ti/naked.htm). Last week, Bowen revisited the theme in an interview with...

The Jack Welch MBA by: Deborah Lambert, July 15, 2009 In the case of former GE CEO Jack Welch, you name a degree after him. The Wall Street Journal reported that Welch is “paying more than $2 million for a 12 percent stake in Chancellor University System LLC, which is converting a formerly bankrupt university into an online entity—and naming its Business Administration Program the “Jack Welch Institute.” This didn’t happen overnight. Welch, a former skeptic of online programs, had to be convinced that this one would be a high quality product, worthy of his name. The Chancellor project is...

Online learning will continue to grow for several reasons. The first reason is because of the advent of high-speed Internet. Anybody with a home PC can now take a course online. If you have a laptop, you can take your course online and take it with you to the coffice (coffee house/office). That is where I am writing this. PCs and Macs are also becoming more affordable. For the price of one credit hour at some schools, a student can now buy a good desktop Dell or Gateway PC. There is no more driving to school, finding a parking place,...