A few links shared from my Evernote notebooks:
- The big story was that Udacity's Sebastian Thrun announced that they are changing course, turning it into a e-learning corporate training company. There was a lot written about this in EdTech circles, but the Ed Techie blog makes a number of good points:
After all that hype. All that "Napsterisation of higher education", the "end of universities", the "10 global providers of education" nonsense, what do we have? A corporate e-learning company.
… Thrun seems to have 'discovered' that open access, distance education students struggle to complete. I don't want to sound churlish here, but hey, the OU has known this for 40 years. It's why it spends a lot of money developing courses that have guidance and support built into the material, and also on a comprehensive support package, ranging from tutors, helpdesk, regional study centres and so on.
- In another much-hyped field, Lant Pritchett argued on the CGD blog that the use of RCT's in development should be considered in terms of the emerging technologies hype cycle (which is interesting to look at anyway).
- David McKenzie had an excellent three-part series post on the Development Impact blog on the intersection between industrial organisation research and development.
- Johan Fourie warned of the dangers of Sangomanomics. Also check out the comments.
- Reuters had an interesting article on how Mugabe and ZANU-PF has destroyed manufacturing in Zimbabwe.
- Via Marginal Revolution blog I found this interesting story on how corrupt police officers in Kenya receive bribes via their mobile phones and M-Pesa accounts.
