Blogs

So I enrolled in my first MOOC last week. Having exactly no experience with courses that are a) massive b) open or c) online, this is my novitiate. I did so not out of an entrepreneurial zeal; simple curiosity won me over. There hasn't been such a fuss over higher ed technological innovation since they invented chalk. So I’m enrolled in a history course with hundreds of thousands of other seekers worldwide.

I don’t know if I’m just the fluky exception or if this is indicative of a larger truth, but I don’t Google job candidates.

So, I’m teaching this course on the rather absurdly broad topic of books and culture. It’s not that easy to discuss the book industry (or, more properly, industries) with students who are 18 or 19 years old and don’t have a big stake in it. It’s all pretty new to them, but they know what they don’t know - unlike many seasoned scholars.

Academic Partnerships this week announced MOOC2Degree, a new program designed to put a sustainable revenue model behind massively open online courses. The program, which so far has 8 schools signed up for the first round of courses, underwrites the development of MOOC courses and then takes an (undisclosed) revenue share for students who enroll in the teaching institution upon completion of the free online course.

When we think about a continuous variable, that is, one that can take on any value along the number line, we note that the chance that it will take on any pre-determined value is equal to zero. For example, if we want to know whether the variable takes on a value of two, would we be willing to accept a value of 1.9 instead? How about 1.99? Or 1.999? Or 1.999 with a sequence of 9s going on into the next county but, presumably, never actually equaling two? Since it is clear that one can get infinitesimally close to any arbitrary value without actually equaling that value, we say that the probability of a continuous variable actually equaling some predetermined value is zero.

Think you'll just die if you have to finish that thesis? Then die.

Stories about how communities thrive in the resource-constrained environments that islands present may provide lessons about sustainability, but those lessons will need to be ported to the mainland if they're to have any significant global impact. Happily, sustainable mainland communities and sustainable island societies may have more in common than is immediately obvious.

Susan Crawford's New York Times op-ed "How to Get America Online" states the case and makes a clear and convincing argument that the United States, beyond a shadow of doubt, must revisit, revise and advance its broadband policy.