Competition in the Digital Age
Last week, the Strategy Research Initiative organised a research seminar using Harvard Business School's HBX platform. This is the same platform HBS now use to deliver online courses. It was an interesting experience but as is usually the case with these things, it highlighted as much about what was missing as what was there. Let …
Continue reading "Online Research Seminars: First Impressions"
Like many this past week I have found myself extremely impressed by Vi Hart and Nicky Case’s “Parable of the Polygons.” It is basically an interactive simulation that introduces students to an old game from Thomas Schelling that demonstrates how small biases individually can aggregate up into much larger biases overall. If you have not …
The title of this post reads like the title of a typical Harvard Business School (HBS) case. Actually, if I wrote "Harvard Business School and the Online Threat (A)" that would be more appropriate. But while I toyed with the idea of writing this in that style, for example: Professor Clay Christensen …
Continue reading "Harvard Business School and the Online Threat"
With all the recent discussion of how hard it is for journalists to read academic articles, I thought I'd provide a little service here and 'translate' the recent NBER working paper by Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson and John List, "Equalizing Superstars" for a general audience. The paper contains a 'light' general equilibrium model that may …
Continue reading "Will MOOCs lead to the democratisation of education?"
The LA School District has been pioneering a roll-out of iPads to High School students. But reports today suggest that things have not gone according to plan. Following news that students at a Los Angeles high school had hacked district-issued iPads and were using them for personal use, district officials have halted home use of …
When I look at economics papers and reports, the graphical presentations have hardly changed. This is despite a sizeable change in the tools available to us to provide clearer graphs. To illustrate what I mean take a look at this animated gif presentation. It is very compelling.
MIT Strategy professor Michael Cusumano published a lengthy opinion piece where he argued that free online courses may have much higher costs and consequences than the socially minded people promoting them intended. I worry, however, based on the history of free products and services available on the Internet and their impact on the software products business …
Continue reading "Will free MOOCs destroy Higher Education?"
There is much discussion about online education but, for the most part, the incursions online have been seen as providing bundled, self-generated content in much the same way as University content is provided now. An exception is Marginal Revolution University that is allowing contributions from many academics. This week two other endeavours were brought to …
Continuing on the MOOC discussion of this week, Tyler Cowen points me to this Inside Higher Education article about accreditation and MOOCs. The clearest path to college credit for massive open online courses may soon be through credit recommendations from the American Council of Education (ACE), which announced Tuesday that it will work with Coursera …
Continue reading "Accreditation and MOOCs: How about we just don't do it"
Digitopoly 