The Trouble With Online College – NYTimes.com

Nice to see that NYTimes is seeing the problems, too.

First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.

via The Trouble With Online College – NYTimes.com.

Where to find Guzdial at SIGCSE Symposium 2013

I’ve already written a couple of SIGCSE Symposium 2013 preview posts (on the Dorn and Elliott Tew paper, and on the UCSD set of papers on Peer Instruction).  Here in my last preview post, I’ll give you a sense for what I’ll be up to.  I fly out to Denver Tuesday 5 March in the evening.

• Wednesday (6 March 2013), I’ll be at the SIGCSE Board Meeting all day.  If I figured it right, this is my last face-to-face Board meeting — I’ve decided not to run again and I think that the new Board starts this Fall.
• Thursday, I have no presentations, but I have the day pretty much booked meeting with people who are also going to be at SIGCSE. Should be fun!
• Friday is over-booked.
  • At 10:45 in Governors 12, Betsy DiSalvo is presenting her paper on Glitch (that I’m a co-author on), “Workifying Games.”
  • We’re having an ECEP lunch for advisors and Experts Bureau members at noon. (I didn’t realize until this weekend that there’s a plenary on Friday at lunchtime — that’s never happened before that I can recall at the SIGCSE Symposium.)
  • At 1:45 in Ballroom E, I’m on the “Passion, Beauty, Joy, and Awe” panel — I’ve decided to try to do a live coding with sound demo, which should be exciting and (maybe) fun and (maybe) disastrous.
  • At 3:45 in Ballroom E, I’m on the Panel on MOOCs, “The Revolution will Be Televised: Perspectives on Massive Open Online Education,” with both proponents and critics. (Guess which role I’ll be playing.)
  • I’m having a dinner with student volunteers at 5 pm, then hoping to find Michael Köllig to congratulate him on his Outstanding Contribution to CS Education award.
• Saturday is literally double-booked.
  • At 9 am, I’m presenting in the “Nifty Assignments” special session in Ballroom E, AND I’m a discussant in Ballroom F on the “Expanding access to K-12 Computer Science Education: Research on the Landscape of CS Professional Development.”  I’m thrilled to be on “Nifty” for the first time, but which I could stay for both.  I think I’m going to speak first at “Nifty,” then run next door to be on the “Landscape” panel.
  • At 3 pm, we start the ACM Education Council meeting (after Jane Margolis’s lunchtime plenary talk).
• Sunday, I’ll be at the ACM Education Council meeting all day, then fly home at 5, getting home at 10 pm. Monday is our PhD recruiting day and teaching, so not much recovery and decompression time.

(If I miss some days of the blog in here, I hope you’ll understand.)