Education

I look what the technical underpinnings of the Math Academy system.

I look what Math Academy students and anyone responsible for them needs to provide in the way of coaching.

I look at the technical feautures of the Math Academy system as touted by its creators.

I look at various objections Math Academy prospects might have, and how they can supposedly be addressed.

I try to figure out what Math Academy is selling and why anyone should buy it.

I start my exploration of Math Academy with a jaundiced view of its prospects.

I start a series of posts on Math Academy and its system for learning mathematics.

Yes, this is another post promoting ranked choice voting.

I explore the ideas of Judith Rich Harris as they apply to the roles of parents and schools in Howard County and elsewhere.

Following up from my previous post on my experience with Coursera, here are a few links of interest (mostly) relating to online education, with a focus on “competency-based education,” i.e., education directed specifically at teaching people to become competent at one or more tasks or disciplines: “Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution” (Michelle Weise and Clayton Christensen). Clayton Christensen is famous for his theory of “disruptive innovation,” which I think is useful not so much as a proven theory but rather as a way to structure plausible narratives about business success or failure. When Christensen fails in his predictions it’s usually because he doesn’t pay attention to things that don’t fit neatly into his preferred narratives. For example, he and co-author Michael Horn previously hyped for-profit education companies and failed to see that for many of them actually educating students was not the point. Rather those companies identified a “head I win, tails you lose” business proposition in “chasing Title IV money [i.e., government-subsidized student loans] in a federal financial aid system ripe for gaming.” This represents a second try by Christensen and his associates to forecast the future of post-secondary education. ...