…has hit 6,000! The course is free – take a look. Enroll.
If you want to look at a sample lecture, I’d recommend Lecture 11, Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden.
…has hit 6,000! The course is free – take a look. Enroll.
If you want to look at a sample lecture, I’d recommend Lecture 11, Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden.
…UD‘s poetry MOOC, for which you can sign up here. It’s free.
… is here. (Registration required.)
I now have over a thousand students.
The lecture is about T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Virginia” —
Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.
… my latest lecture for the MOOC I’m giving appears. Here it is.
It’s a reading of Charles Wright’s poem, Black Zodiac.
My MOOC on poetry is almost up to nine hundred. If you want to check it out, go here.
Title: Love, and the Arrest of Life
If you haven’t yet enrolled in UD‘s poetry MOOC, feel free.
As Berkeley makes its own MOOC moves, this distinction is crucial: Free, open-sourced MOOCS are a public service, an investigation into certain technologies, a way of broadcasting your university’s name to the world, a democratizing gesture. Monetized credit-bearing online courses have impossibly high rates of cheating, are often cheaply done and poorly staffed, with one (frequently part-time) faculty drudge (I call these people air traffic controllers) responsible for hundreds of students, etc. They are hard to distinguish from the tax-syphoning, for-profit, shames-of-a-nation. (Scroll down.)
Faculty leaders have cautioned the university against moving too quickly with the online courses. The UC Academic Senate has said it worries about the quality and finances of the UC Online project.
In contrast, some of those most concerned about UC’s plans say they support free projects like Coursera and edX.
UD is interviewed about MOOCs in the George Washington University newspaper.
… now has eight hundred students.
It’s part of Udemy’s Faculty Project, and can be found here. (Remember: You need to register.)
UD‘s friend Jonathan sent her news of the sudden resignation of the president of the University of Virginia. UD was intrigued by this part of the university’s official statement about her departure:
We also believe that higher education is on the brink of a transformation now that online delivery has been legitimized by some of the elite institutions.
There’s more stuff in the statement about needing “a much faster pace of change.”
Obviously Virginia’s MOOC policy wasn’t a central part of this decision, but UD finds it striking that the university singled it out. It suggests that all ambitious universities are – or should be? – thinking about MOOCs.
****************************
For UD‘s series of posts on her own MOOC, go here.
****************************
… in this article about MOOCs.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte