Monday, December 15, 2014

and where all children are above average

About this year's incoming Georgia Tech Students:

"looking at the makeup of the 2014 freshman class, it’s still no easy task to become a Yellow Jacket. The average SAT score (including the written test) of this year’s enrollees was 1450, the ACT 30, and the GPA a solid “A” average"

I especially like that the average is solid “A”.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

The Suits take our coursera SOOC off Coursera, final episode 2

[for the previous installment, click here]
[for the current course website, click here; to read about the motivation for this course click here].

The Coursera.org course announcement went online August 21 2015.

Georgia Tech Professional Education Dean XXX has stopped the course twice. First time -without informing me about it- it was taken down for three weeks in October. Then it was reopened on Coursera.org, and was kept there until December 11, when it was taken down for good, again without a warning, this time with a 10 line email signed by XXX, and 3 points explanation:
"[the course] diverges in significant ways from other Georgia Tech MOOCs both in terms of production quality and pedagogical style and it is unlikely to meet the requirements that have been set for Coursera MOOCs.  There is also an overt marketing appeal for your Chaos Book that is inconsistent with our approach to MOOCs."
Georgia Tech "Professional Education" ways are mysterious. I have, in the entire year of working on the course, had only one 15 minute conversation, subsequent to shutting down the course. And why should Georgia Tech advanced graduate curriculum be approved by GT Professional Education?

We have split up the semester-long course into two consecutive 8-weeek courses. I was counting on about 50-100 off-campus students. 8,000 signed up. Assuming linear growth over the October lock-down period, and ignoring the acceleration towards the end, some 10,000 would have signed up: