Mr. Thrun sounded more ambitious about the ultimate goal: “It is like a university,” he told me, “built by industry.”
.. But even if MOOCs have failed to deliver on their original promise to educate the poor, they have proved more effective with another slice of the population: Americans who may already have a higher education and a job, but who feel the need to acquire new skills to progress in their careers.
Arizona State Matches Starbucks in Its Trailblazing Ways
“In the bottom quartile of family incomes, only 9 percent of kids attain a college education,” Crow said about five minutes after I met him on Monday afternoon. “And, in the top quartile, 80 percent get a college education, regardless of academic ability.” That statistic is what he is trying to change.
Teachers: No Longer Able to Hire Top Women for Low Wages
When few professions were open to highly skilled women, schools could hire them for low salaries. Now, teaching must compete with other professions. That has made it hard to recruit the best candidates. One study found that the share of the highest-achieving women who were teachers fell by half between 1964 and 2000; another found an 80 percent drop.
The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom
Over time, a wealth of studies on students’ use of computers in the classroom has accumulated to support this intuition. Among the most famous is a landmark Cornell University study from 2003 called “The Laptop and the Lecture,” wherein half of a class was allowed unfettered access to their computers during a lecture while the other half was asked to keep their laptops closed.
The experiment showed that, regardless of the kind or duration of the computer use, the disconnected students performed better on a post-lecture quiz. The message of the study aligns pretty well with the evidence that multitasking degrades task performance across the board.