Links for 8/2/10

Jeffrey R. Young

Every semester a lot of professors' lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.

That frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.

"If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, 'I've been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I'm going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,' you'd be rightly incensed," he told me recently. "Yet there are a lot of faculty who say with a straight face, 'I don't need to change my teaching,' as if nothing has been learned about teaching since they had been prepared to do it—if they've ever been prepared to."...

Arnold Kling

But health care and education in the U.S. are arguably the most cartelized labor markets in the world. How many entrepreneurial ideas in those fields are rendered implausible by credentialing issues? If you want your innovative school to draw customers, you have to get accredited--not to mention dealing with the fact that your competition gets public funds and you do not. Your innovative health care delivery process will run afoul of medical license and practice laws.

We probably could be retraining lots of unemployed workers to serve the education and health care industries in productive ways. But the credentials bottleneck is very restrictive.

Iza Wojciechowska

Many teachers are failing at their jobs, and teacher preparation programs are not being held accountable for failing to train them well. That's the conclusion of a new report, released Thursday at the Center for American Progress…

XKCD on college websites.