“Radical Survival Strategies for Struggling Colleges,” by Jon Marcus, in the New York Times

“These include ramping up money-saving accelerated programs through which students can get both undergraduate and graduate degrees more quickly than it would take them elsewhere, such as a five-year combined B.A. and M.B.A. […]

“ ‘What a president does these days has very little to do with academic programs. It has a lot to do with business, finance, labor law, marketing fund-raising,’ said Mr. Davis, who took over in July at Linfield and before that was a business-school dean and a managing consultant and principal for EDS, now part of Hewlett-Packard. ‘You need people who can think entrepreneurially.’ ”

Why does this matter to the future of learning?

We’ve been saying this a lot lately: higher ed represents a lot of leading indicators for K12 independent schools. For example, if the K12 independent school business model is broken (and we would argue that it is), what if students could graduate having earned 15-30 college credits?

For schools to make such shifts, they will need leaders who are entrepreneurial. Because what got you here won’t get you there.

H/T to Noodle Talbot for sharing this article.

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”MOOC Pioneer Coursera Tries a New Push: Selling Courseware to Colleges,” by Jeffrey Young, in EdSurge News

“Coursera started with a mission to give the general public free access to courses from expensive colleges. Now it is selling all the course content developed for those free courses to colleges that want to use the materials in their own campus programs. […]

“Meanwhile, Coursera is opening up its technology platform to any college to use for free to deliver course materials on their own campuses. That means that colleges could use the Coursera software as an alternative to their learning-management system. Belsky argues that Coursera’s system is better designed for delivering online courses and interactive lessons than most LMSes.”

Why does this matter to the future of learning?

Coursera’s strategy reflects a world in which curation and assessment are far more valuable than expertise.

Innovation is almost always combinatorial. Maybe teachers should take a lesson from early hip hop mix-masters who used sampling to create a new genre. Access to tremendous volumes of high quality content and a technology platform for delivering that content means that teachers can mix and remix the best of what’s available.

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”Modern high school math should be about data science — not Algebra 2,” by Jo Boaler and Steven Levitt, in the Los Angeles Times

“The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, measures how effectively countries are preparing students for the mathematical demands of the 21st century. Last week, PISA released a mathematics framework that guides the assessments. Data literacy is central to the framework. In contrast, U.S. high school students learn algebra and geometry — and are woefully underprepared for the modern world. […]

“The Los Angeles Unified School District is leading the way in updating the way math is taught. In 2013, the LAUSD secured approval from the University of California to recognize data science as a statistics course that students can substitute for Algebra 2 in the college pathway. Over 2,000 students are taking advantage of this option. The classroom we observed was full of critical thinkers who see data everywhere and appear comfortable interpreting, analyzing and questioning it.”

Why does this matter to the future of learning?

One major way to create change in education? Alter assessments.

This is true at the macrocosmic level (international and national tests and college admissions standards) and at the microcosmic level (individual course expectations).

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Question of the week:

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