Blogs

You've selected an interesting conference in your field. Your abstract, and then your paper have been accepted. You have prepared your presentation, and you're ready to go.

This past week I had the opportunity to spend some quality time at the hospital. My younger daughter (8th grade) had her appendix out. Her loss of an appendix was my gain for thinking about some of things that higher ed can learn from hospitals.

Entrepreneurial ideas related to education have flourished of late, and business plan competitions can surface some of these initial ideas. Here are eight education-related start-up ideas appearing on several lists of finalists.

A couple of days ago, New York Times Columnist Charles Blow wrote of how big debt is the "dangerous new normal" for young graduates.

Prior to this president’s week, I had never been in Las Vegas but now based on the experience, I should have gone sooner and more often. And I think my family feels the same way.

Yesterday Ben told me a funny story about one of his professors. "He sounds like a lot of fun," I commented.

At this juncture I would like to say a few words about MOOCs. First, let’s level set: MOOC is an acronym for Massive Open Online Classroom. While distance education is as old at least as correspondence courses, MOOCs are distinguishable as using Internet technologies to bring free education to students globally. The erstwhile Stanford professor – erstwhile because his “experiment” created such an uproar and opportunity that he has since left Stanford to found his own MOOC company, Udacity, -- who spearheaded this term set off a tipping point for a generation of efforts in what is otherwise known as “distance” or “distributed” education.

Hype over research carries important risks to trust, public decision making—and funding. Overpromising is unethical and imprudent.