Their first course is Development Economics.  The class covers everything from basic facts about poverty and prosperity to the specific variables (education, migration, property rights, good water, and more) that are related to economic growth.

“We continue to be concerned about default rates and want to ensure that all borrowers have the tools to manage their debt,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “In addition to helping borrowers, we will also hold schools accountable for ensuring their students are not saddled with unmanageable student loan debt.”

The Department is in the process of switching from a two-year cohort default rate to a three-year measurement as required by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008. The national two-year rate rose to 9.1 percent for the FY 2010 cohort, from 8.8 percent in FY 2009.   Read more at the Department of Education Website

We love that Coursera is helping to “democratize” education by increasing access to education for those who can’t afford it or aren’t able to get into the Coursera partner schools. However, Coursera hasn’t yet solved one of the fundamental problems with traditional college education, which is that most college lectures are really hard to sit through. In order for Coursera to do more than simply increase access to education, it needs to address this problem. How can it do this?

To begin with, we need to think about why college lectures are, in fact, so difficult to sit through. We think there are two obvious reasons. The first is that they are too long. Most humans are incapable of staying focused on one thing for much longer than 15 or 20 minutes, especially when they’re being bombarded with emails and text messages. The second reason is that most college professors just aren’t great orators. There are, of course, some very talented professors who have a magical ability to captivate their students’ attention for long periods of time, but these people are few and far between.

So what can Coursera do to make its platform more engaging and thus, more effective? First of all, it should break up all the lectures into more manageable pieces. It seems to be doing this with some of its courses but it should do this consistently with all of its courses! This may, in some cases, require professors to change the structure of their lectures. Second, it should limit its course offerings to professors who are really good. The beauty of MOOCs is that they solve the scale problem — they allow you to give thousands of people access to one professor. Allowing every college professor onto the platform defeats the purpose. Based on our (granted somewhat limited) survey of the courses on the platform, we think Coursera can do slightly better job of filtering what professors/courses end up on the site.

All this being said, we do see some cool things happening on Coursera. For example, some courses are offering “certificates of completion.” This helps deal with the oft-discussed certification issue. We also saw some great interactive features in some of the lectures and some innovative ideas related to evaluation/grading.

We’re sure the folks at Coursera will continue to experiment and come up with more effective pedagogies than a video of the traditional college lecture. We’ll be keeping tabs on them.

An interesting bit from a NY Times article on this:

The caliber of Coursera’s partners — Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania were among the original partners — has given it credibility and cachet in higher education circles, so much so that some university presidents have begun to fret that it will reflect badly on them if they fail to sign on.

“You’re known by your partners, and this is the College of Cardinals,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State, one of the new partners. “It’s some of the best universities in the country.”

Mr. Gee, whose university will offer two courses from its College of Pharmacy, said he had some concerns about giving away content with no revenue stream in sight.

“That does keep me up at night,” he said. “We’re doing this in the hope and expectation that we’ll be able to build a financial model, but I don’t know what it is. But we can’t be too far behind in an area that’s growing and changing as fast as this one.”

Here are a few principles behind MR University:

1. The product is free (like this blog), and we offer more material in less time.
2. Most of our videos are short, so you can view and listen between tasks, rather than needing to schedule time for them.  The average video is five minutes, twenty-eight seconds long.  When needed, more videos are used to explain complex topics.
3. No talking heads and no long, boring lectures.  We have tried to reconceptualize every aspect of the educational experience to be friendly to the on-line world.
4. It is low bandwidth and mobile-friendly.  No ads.
5. We offer tests and quizzes.
6. We have plans to subtitle the videos in major languages.  Our reach will be global, and in doing so we are building upon the global emphasis of our home institution, George Mason University.
7. We invite users to submit content.
8. It is a flexible learning module.  It is not a “MOOC” per se, although it can be used to create a MOOC, namely a massive, open on-line course.
9. It is designed to grow rapidly and flexibly, absorbing new content in modular fashion — note the beehive structure to our logo.  But we are starting with plenty of material.
10. We are pleased to announce that our first course will begin on October 1.

Point 2 suggests that MRU will be more like Khan Academy than Coursera or other platforms, which by and large just take the traditional college lecture and put it online. We’re really interested to see how points 7 and 9 work as there aren’t many platforms that have experimented with user-generated content. One thing the post does not mention is certification, which remains a barrier to the adoption of free online education as a substitute for traditional forms of education. Salman Khan and John Henessey have discussed this issue and some platforms are beginning to try and tackle it (e.g. the edX certificate). Cowen and Tabarrok make no mention of certification in the announcement. It will be interesting to see if they address this at all when they launch. Stay tuned for updates on MRU.

…As a professor, I can see much that is wrong with our system – but not so much that I would advise a smart 18-year-old to skip college.  The real problem is not that our college system is failing.  The problem is that it is succeeding all to well — at ranking and sorting each cohort of school-leavers by academic performance. 

As Charles Murray has pointed out, our highly competitive admissions system has become a mechanism for selecting a “cognitive elite.” In 1997, just over a hundred elite colleges, which admitted fewer than a fifth of all freshmen, also accounted for three quarters of the ones with SAT or ACT scores in the top 5 percent.

Meritocracy in action? The problem is that this cognitive elite has become self-perpetuating: they marry one another, live in close proximity to one another, and use every means, fair or foul, to ensure that their kids follow in their academic footsteps (even when Junior is innately less smart than Mom and Dad)…

Read it all here – via the Daily Beast

My comments:   Ferguson seems uncharacteristically chary here tackling the problems in America’s higher education system.  He dips his and his readers’ toes into the issues of student loans, rising costs, and discouraging employment statistics for college grads, but doesn’t seem to like how deep the water is.   I have no clue what Ferguson was attempting to say with this article, but he ends with some statement about the ‘cognitive elite’ who are apparently squirreling away much that is good in a meritocratic system (who knew Ferguson could sound like Chris Hayes?)

Generally, I like Ferguson, but I don’t care for dismissing myriad problems in higher ed. only to make some beyond-the-point social commentary or to say that colleges and universities are simply too good at doing what they do.  Gary Becker and Richard Posner did something similar on their blog some months ago here and here, and it was equally disappointing.  At best, this kind of commentary comes off as unproductive or tepid, at worst, irresponsible.

I understand that ‘shortcomings and failures of universities’ may be a hard-to-tackle subject for those in academia, but no serious person really wants to blame faculty for the higher ed bubble or hear weak justifications from professors.  The problems are apparent.  Time and energy now needs to be spent on coming up with innovative ideas and solutions.  Top academics, like Ferguson, Becker, and Posner should be standing at the forefront of fixing ‘all that is far from well in the groves of American academe,’ rather than skirting around the issues or giving them little mind.

Also, in my opinion, a ‘smart 18 year old’ should be encouraged to consider college as an option not advised to think of it as a requisite.

For-profit college company shares fell today after ITT Educational Services Inc. (ESI) and Strayer Education Inc. (STRA) said student enrollment declined in the second quarter.

ITT Educational sank 15 percent at the close in New York to $42.78, the biggest loss since January 2008, and Strayer slid 12 percent to $79.44, the most in a year. The 13-member Bloomberg Education Index (USEDU) fell 5.1 percent.

The for-profit colleges industry has suffered falling enrollment amid student reluctance to take on more debt and federal and state investigations of recruitment and marketing practices.

ITT’s new student enrollment dropped 9.5 percent, while total student enrollment fell 16 percent, the Carmel, Indiana- based company said today in a statement. Net income declined 42 percent as revenue fell 15 percent.

Total enrollment at Strayer fell 7 percent, the Herndon, Virginia-based company said in a statement. Second-quarter revenue decreased by 11 percent, it said.

Here – via Bloomberg.com

In a sign of just how desperate things are on the law school admissions front, Paul Campos (Colorado) reports that 28 of the Top 50 law schools are still accepting applications for the IL class beginning in August, including 10 of the Top 20 schools (even though their formal application deadlines passed several months ago):

• Chicago (#5 in U.S. News)
• Michigan (#10)
• Northwestern (#12)
• Georgetown (#13)
• Cornell (#14)
• UCLA (#15)
• Texas (#16)
• Vanderbilt (#16)
• Minnesota (#19)
• George Washington (#20)

Read more here – via TaxProf Blog