Free Republic

Dinesh D'Souza, the Indian-American conservative political commentator, filmmaker, and survivor of the Obama virtual gulag whom President Trump later pardoned, has come up with a novel and seemingly workable solution to the problem of leftist bias in our nation's colleges and universities. He proposes a national online university utilizing a hundred or so of the country's finest educators. He states that this "Harvard-level education" could be had for around $5,000 a year while avoiding the requisite radicalization that occurs on a majority of campuses. D'Souza's outside-the-box thinking has provided a solution in keeping with the times. Thanks to the often...

In Look to Windward, a science fiction novel from the late Scottish author Iain M. Banks, perfectly clear video and audio can be instantaneously transmitted across vast interstellar distances, yet people still vie to be physically present at a concert. This is something to consider the next time your local school board assures you that the classroom experience can be recreated on Zoom. Last spring, the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic forced schools across the country to adopt “online learning,” a euphemism for teachers yelling impotently at the disembodied heads of 20 students on a flickering video screen. The...

As an adult who teaches, I got to choose an open school. Union politics have now barred millions of families from a similar privilege.I don’t blame schools for closing in March. Very little was known about COVID-19 then, so closures seemed the safest decision amid the uncertainty. Neither do I blame schools for a meager showing that semester. My own district threw together online curricula and instructional materials practically overnight. The results were dismal, but it’s the best many could have done given the situation. However, we’ve now had nine months to understand this virus, and all the evidence favors...

'The United States has reached a tipping point: The damage done to schoolchildren with scarce resources is likely to be irreparable.'As report cards begin to roll out for fall, public schools across the nation are reporting a massive increase in children failing classes, due to the majority going online and the chaos of rolling COVID closures. In Fairfax, Virginia, one of the nation’s largest districts, “the percentage of middle school and high school students earning F’s in at least two classes jumped by 83 percent: from 6 percent to 11 percent,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday. That’s nearly 10,000 children.Saint...

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) – The state-wide online education system for North Carolina students was down for part of Monday morning. Just before 9:30 a.m., Moore County Schools confirmed issues with NCEdCloud are making it difficult for students to use the system or even log in. Durham Public Schools confirmed issues as well. NCEdCloud is used to access PowerSchool and Canvas. Nearly every school in all K-12 districts began classes Monday. The system was back up just after 11:30 a.m.

"Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down." -- Stalin, interview with H.G. Wells Beginning in early K-12 and continuing to the highest levels of university education, Leftist indoctrination is the gravest dilemma that afflicts education in North America, rendering it perhaps the most powerful instrument of anti-Western bias and socialist propaganda of the modern era. Here my concern is with the abandonment of genuine scholarship, fact-based historical research, familiarity with the “Great Books” and the development of critical thinking habits, particularly in the humanities...

The Georgia Institute of Technology rocked the higher education world when it announced plans to offer a fully online master’s degree in computer science for roughly one-seventh the price of its on-campus equivalent – less than $7,000. The project is powered by a joint venture with Udacity, an online higher-education course provider that stands to earn 40 percent of the tuition revenues. The AT&T Corporation, which is providing two-thirds of the estimated ramp-up costs, expects to funnel existing employees through the program and recruit new ones at the back-end of it. Reaction to the news has been mixed. Online education...

Colleges around the country should be worried. The quality of online courses is catching up fast. Depending on whom you talk to, massively open online courses (MOOCs) will upend and democratize higher education, or are half-baked approximations of lectures that can never equal the classroom. Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation put it to the test, spending four months taking two MOOCs, from start to finish. One, a Coursera Introduction to Philosophy was everything critics dislike, he says. Too brief, and with none of the problem sets, essays, or tests that make...

This autumn more than a million students are going to take part in an experiment that could re-invent the landscape of higher education. Some of the biggest powerhouses in US higher education are offering online courses - testing how their expertise and scholarship can be brought to a global audience. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a $60m (£38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver courses online - with the modest ambition of "revolutionising education around the world". Sounding like a piece of secret military hardware, edX will provide online interactive courses which can be...

Stanford President John Hennessy and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan are coming at online education from very different angles — one is an elite institution being shaken up by experiments, the other is a widely loved upstart that’s increasingly being used in traditional schools. In conversation with Walt Mossberg at D10, Hennessy and Khan talked about the future of the education credential; the opportunities for “flipped classroom”-style education, where class time is spent on collaboration, tutoring and projects; the move away from lectures and toward social media; and the opportunity to provide practical education for kids in a sort of...

Joint partnership builds on MITx and Harvard distance learning; aims to benefit campus-based education and beyond. Harvard University and MIT today announced edX, a transformational new partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners. EdX will build on both universities’ experience in offering online instructional content. The technological platform recently established by MITx, which will serve as the foundation for the new learning system, was designed to offer online versions of MIT courses featuring video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions...

Onward Christian Schools Online Deborah Lambert, June 24, 2010 In the highly competitive online environment where everyone is seeking to develop a niche market, Christian colleges appear to be gaining ground, according to Education News. Schools like Grand Canyon University, forced to reinvent itself or go bankrupt a few years ago, went from 3,500 enrolled students in a traditional setting to 36,000 in its current online environment. And 90 percent of its students are “distance learners.” Mid-Christian University recruited some brains behind the online giant University of Phoenix to develop an aggressive five-year strategy they hope will quadruple the size...

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military. Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative...

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...

Hey! Let’s all go to MIT!I should have gone to MIT. OK, I shouldn’t have done the pub crawl the night before the SAT’s…and I might have focused on my grades a little more. But never mind that. Our time has come. MIT is now free and many of its lectures are on the internet. Well, sort of. Check out this link to OpenCourseWare.com. I listened to two physics lectures last week (video lectures) by Professor Walter Lewin. Here’s the link to Prof Lewin’s first lecture (LINK HERE)…I even understood what he was saying. Friends of mine will remember when...

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It's all free of charge. The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002

Enrollments in online courses are increasing 10 times faster than traditional enrollments. Let's see, every time someone visits a campus, takes a tour, visits a book store, eats in a cafeteria, looks at an empty gym or stadium, and then sits with a counselor for an hour or so, and then finally signs the enrollment form...10 people sign up online! Uh...gee...I wonder ...If I were a school, where should I apply my time and effort? Hard question. Schools like Arizona State University expect enrollment in at least one online course to soar from 15,000 to 100,000 within the next five...

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