The shortage of foreign language skills in the UK is now a permanent preoccupation, with some sources placing the estimated cost of the deficit as high as £48 billion a year. Britons are now seen as a “nation of monoglots” and ridiculed when attempting to communicate in international contexts. But part of the problem is […] … learn more→

In a recent opinion piece by William J. Bennett in the Wall Street Journal, “The Conservative Case for a Common Core,” with an unfortunate double-entendre title that misfires, one statement makes good sense: “Nearly all Americans agree that to prepare a child for civic responsibility and competition in the modern economy, he or she must […] … learn more→

In small online courses, instructors have the luxury of participating in frequent personal interactions with students in online discussions. But doing this with more than 15 students can be difficult. Fortunately, there are ways to maintain instructor presence and participation in online discussions without becoming overwhelmed. In an interview with Online Classroom, Heidi Ash, online […] … learn more→

This is a story about ethical violations in academe—about why they go undiscovered for so long, why they rarely lead to serious punishment, and why the whistle-blowers seem to get as much blowback as the accused. In this case, I am the whistle-blower. I am going to do my best to chronicle this true and […] … learn more→

Whole class feedback … you know, when the teacher returns a set of papers or exams and talks to the entire class about its performance, or the debriefing part of an activity where the teacher comments on how students completed the task. I don’t believe I have ever seen anything written about this feedback mechanism, […] … learn more→

I came across a CNBC article on trends in business education. At first, I misread the article’s title and mistakenly thought that someone was proposing a 25-year MBA program. That seemed to me, of course, a shocking inversion of the current trends, one which would give a whole new meaning to the phrase the “career […] … learn more→

When the world ends, it may not be by fire or ice or an evil robot overlord. Our demise may come at the hands of a superintelligence that just wants more paper clips. So says Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who founded and directs the Future of Humanity Institute, in the Oxford Martin School at the […] … learn more→

The other day I received an email from a stranger. A final year PhD student wrote to my to thank me for the piece on PhD “survival strategies” that I wrote recently for the Guardian and to which many others contributed. I have to admit that this kind of feedback, as well as the comments […] … learn more→

I teach theory and practice of social media at NYU, and am an advocate and activist for the free culture movement, so I’m a pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor, but I have just asked the students in my fall seminar to refrain from using laptops, tablets and phones in class. I came late and […] … learn more→