Links for 11/9/10

Salman Khan

students are lucky to retain even 10 percent of what was "covered."

This is a grand exercise in labeling and filtering students with arbitrary grades rather than teaching them. It is a hugely inefficient use of time and resources, but no one wants to notice, because it is the way things have always been done…

Students don't retain anything because they didn't intuitively understand it to begin with.

Apologists for the lack of retention and intuition by students argue that what¬ really matters is that they are being taught "how to think." The reality is that because students have ever larger gaps in their knowledge as they progress, they learn to get by through pattern matching and memorizing. They learn to fake understanding, not to think…

There was nothing practical that anyone could do about this broken "learning" model until recently. But we can now deliver on-demand content to any student for nearly zero incremental cost…

Elliott Masie

In the early stages of online education, we are seeing too much modeling after the physical classroom. We have tried to replicate traditional classroom elements like lecture, discussion, office hours, and assignments. That was predictable; most new technologies build on the existing and familiar (early TV was radio with pictures).

But the next stage of innovation and development will come as faculty and designers ask online education to accomplish things that could never happen in the classroom:…

Robert W. Mendenhall

Technology has fundamentally changed the productivity of every industry in America except education—in education it is an add-on cost…

Sara Murray

This year’s crop of college graduates is poised to have an easier job hunt than last year’s class, a new report shows.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers’ index of college hiring climbed to 126.4 in October, compared with 86.8 at the same time last year…