Here’s the cruel part: The students from the bottom tier are often the ones who need face-to-face instruction most of all. “The idea that they can have better education and more access at lower cost through massive online courses is just preposterous,” says Patricia A. McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. Seventy percent of her students are eligible for Pell Grants, and 50 percent come from the broken District of Columbia school system. Her task has been trying to figure out how to serve those students at a college with the university’s meager $11-million endowment. Getting them to and through college takes advisers, counselors, and learning-disability experts—a fact Ms. McGuire has tried to convey to foundations, policy makers, and the public. But the reinvention conversation has had a “tech guy” fixation on mere content delivery, she says. “It reveals a lack of understanding of what it takes to make the student actually learn the content and do something with it.”

Read full article [here].
by Scott Carlson and Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: December 17th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.