Here is a shocking idea. People get college degrees because graduates are valued. This leads to parents sending more kids to college who get degrees. Eventually higher education reaches the point where the overabundance of graduates decreases the value of a degree. Weak students have been admitted for years. Universities struggle to identify who will…
The state gives employees 15 holidays in addition to the generous accrual of sick and vacation. Where I work only schedules 12 of the holidays. So we get 3 to take whenever we wish. I poorly planned and ended up having to take two this month or lose them. Today ended up being one of…
At the request of my boss, I added this disclaimer. Positive things I say here about Blackboard are okay. Negative things require distancing my employer from me so the defamation lawsuit comes to me not them. 🙂 This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.
Yesterday Gina, a coworker, joined me for lunch. She asked about where GeorgiaVIEW‘s attention is focussed since we recently completed our upgrade to Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise 8. She pointed out students are the most affected by and most important constituent for any decisions we make. Yet the student point of view is almost…
I’m surprised I have not blogged here about the student lawsuit against Turnitin.com? An anti-plagiarism service, Turnitin has students or faculty members upload papers into the database. By comparing new papers to the database, it gives ratings as to whether it is likely a student plagiarized. Now the search goes out for any student who…
On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating. In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification: By matching…
When I saw online school enrollment soars in summer in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I thought Duh! Our traffic this summer is way up. Normal enrollment pattern is Fall term peak, 90-95% of Fall term in Spring, Â 60% of Fall term in Summer. By contrast, our online system usage until 2008-2009 had a Spring term…
I missed the story about brothers convicted of harvesting emails the first time. Well, I noticed a followup. Back around 2001, the CIO received complaints about performance for the web server. So, I went log trolling to see what the web server was doing. A single IP dominated the HTTP requests. This one IP passed…
About this talk from the TED site: Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education — one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.…