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Diego Fonseca looked at the computer and took a breath. It was his final attempt at the math placement test for his first year of college. His first three tries put him in pre-calculus, a blow for a student who aced honors physics and computer science in high school. Functions and trigonometry came easily, but the basics gave him trouble. He struggled to understand algebra, a subject he studied only during a year of remote learning in high school. “I didn’t have a hands-on, in-person class, and the information wasn’t really there,” said Fonseca, 19, of Ashburn, Virginia, a computer...

It was only a matter of time before the government would enlist teachers to work in the migrant shelters sprouting up due to the crisis at the border.When people accuse me of being a glorified babysitter because I’m a teacher, I usually laugh and respond, “Who said anything about being glorified?” During the COVID-19 lockdowns, I can now add, “Who said anything about being a babysitter?” These days, teachers in many parts of the country are paid for doing next to nothing since reopening schools would expose them to the virus. For teachers who have returned to the classroom, much...

Distance learning in Los Angeles schools is definitely working better than it did last spring, but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement. Generally speaking, remote classes are still an abysmal operation in which most students lose out, and the ones with the greatest need lose most.That assessment comes not from school administrators or researchers but from the best source of all: L.A. teachers themselves, the people who are trying to transmit skills and knowledge while giving students some sense of normality in a world gone haywire. Their sentiments are especially noteworthy considering that their labor union, United Teachers Los Angeles, has...

The idea that bars should remain open yet schools remain closed runs counter to any sense of logic, not to mention good public policy.The past nine months have seen more than a quarter-million Americans die from the coronavirus. Each and every death represents a tragedy — a life cut short, an empty place at the family table this holiday season, children mourning their parents, even parents mourning their children. But a separate and ongoing tragedy has also struck at countless more than another quarter-million Americans: Children who have disappeared from school following last spring’s COVID-19 closures. A survey conducted by...

A teacher at a Northern California high school threatened to kick a 16-year-old out of a virtual class if he failed to get a “Trump 2020” campaign flag out of view. In detail: Tiffany, the mother of the 16-year-old student who goes to Colusa High School said that he left the class, said the teacher gave her son 15-seconds to take down the pro-Trump flag or move to another place where it cannot be seen in the background. A video taken from another student shows the teacher counted to 15, ABC10 reported. Tiffany’s son left the virtual class before the...

Married parents were about 20 percent less likely to be depressed than unmarried parents, and they spent more time home-educating their kids, during coronavirus lockdowns. Worry and stress rose to a historic high during the Covid-19 panic, at least since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, according to recent survey evidence from Gallup. Parents of young children had an added responsibility of teaching their children while schools and daycare were closed.Compared with parents who handled these alone, married parents spent more time teaching their children at home, according to an early June survey from the Census Bureau that tracks Covid-19’s effects...

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...

In an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Ohio State is suspending all in-person classes through at least March 30, instead moving to virtual instruction, according to a university-wide email from Ohio State President Michael Drake. Ohio State also announced a hiatus on the scheduling of "new, non-essential events" through April 20, and is encouraging event organizers for scheduled non-essential events between now and then "to immediately evaluate whether these events should continue in person." The Buckeyes' spring game is currently slated for April 11. Students, currently on spring break, will be permitted to work from their current...

Universities and colleges are slow to adjust to the new student: one who isn’t full-time and living on-campus, but the adult, working college student. At an event held by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, a college president, a director of community college policy analysis and a for-profit institution’s academic strategy president discussed the implications of the changing higher education landscape. John Ebersole, president of Excelsior College in New York, said, “It’s time for us, the public policy community, to understand the students.” It is “not typical today” for students to be full-time, enrolled students on brick-and-mortar college campuses. His...

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.

"In the online world you don't need to fill buildings or lecture theatres with people and you don't need to be trapped into a lecture timetable," says Peter Scott, director of the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute.The Open University, the UK's open access university, which allows people to study from home in their own time, has been an international pioneer of degree courses online. The university, with more than 263,000 students in 23 countries, has become a record breaker on the iTunes U service, which provides a digital library of materials for university students and staff. > But it's not...

Scholars who go against the academic grain and suffer the consequences for their apostasy have pinned some hopes for change on developing technology. “Already I have begun to encounter university colleagues, marginalized for their conservative views or for their dissatisfaction with the way things are done, who are looking for other ways of continuing the great tradition of higher learning, and of passing on to the next generation some of the knowledge that was passed onto them,” Roger Scrutton writes in the September 2010 issue of The American Spectator. “Such is the prevailing spirit in America, that I suspect the...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-president-national-broadband-plan Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release March 16, 2010 Statement from the President on the National Broadband Plan America today is on the verge of a broadband-driven Internet era that will unleash innovation, create new jobs and industries, provide consumers with new powerful sources of information, enhance American safety and security, and connect communities in ways that strengthen our democracy. Just as past generations of Americans met the great infrastructure challenges of the day, such as building the Transcontinental...

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...

Gilbert Strang is a quiet man with a rare talent: helping others understand linear algebra. He's written a half-dozen popular college textbooks, and for years a few hundred students at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been privileged to take his course. Recently, with the growth of computer science, demand to understand linear algebra has surged. But so has the number of students Strang can teach. An MIT initiative called "OpenCourseWare" makes virtually all the school's courses available online for free — lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures. Strang's Math 18.06 course is among the most popular,...

As important as school vouchers are, the greatest progress toward choice probably isn't taking place in Utah right now. I say this not to minimize the efforts being made there, but to remind reformers the solutions to traditional questions may not have traditional answers. Instead, the most exciting progress in education reform is in technology and distance learning. Education technology does not merely mean having a computer (or computers) in the classroom. It is simply a computer, the student--and, depending on the format, the tutor--all connected by Internet technology. On the surface, it might not seem very revolutionary, but the...

In another innovative move to share its intellectual treasures with the public, the University of California, Berkeley, announced today that it is delivering educational content, including course lectures and symposia, free of charge through Google Video. Because of the quality and quantity of these video offerings, UC Berkeley will be the first university with its own page on the Google Video Web site: http://video.google.com/ucberkeley , campus officials said. The campus is making more than 250 hours of content available to the public through Google Video. "Google appreciates the opportunity to partner with progressive universities like UC Berkeley to make undiscovered...

"When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course." — Peter Drucker For-profit educational services. Capitalizing off of instructional training. Bankrolling tutelage on a gravy train. Go ahead and sneer; cringe and shudder — get it out of your system. Oh the horror, running a profitable business that includes many of the facets of a traditional higher education.[1] Perhaps this is one of the reasons that a disproportionate amount of the Ivory Tower is socialistically inclined; subconsciously they may fear that the market value of their research, teaching and professional existence subsists among relatively strange bedfellows, those...

*VANITY* Hello-- I am an electrical engineer, and am thinking of advancing my career to improve my ability to get into engineering management. I have BS in EE, but I am thinking of getting a Masters. A Masters in EE doesn't do a heck of a lot for a career apart from a little more salary, but I think an MBA would really help me along. Since I have a kid and it's lots of time to go to classes, I am thinking of doing an online MBA from home. So far, I am considering Liberty University and University of...

Nearly 50 Republican state lawmakers have signed a letter calling Sen. Tom Daschle's campaign ad about the state's distance learning program misleading. The 60-second spot features a Rapid City master's student thanking Daschle for securing nearly $900,000 for a Dakota State University program in Madison. The lawmakers, in a letter signed this week, contend Daschle is taking credit for work done by former Gov. Bill Janklow and the South Dakota Legislature. The letter also notes that although Daschle added the funding during Senate appropriations hearings, he ultimately voted against the overall 2003 Omnibus Bill. ''The feeling we got is that...