Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: April 29, 2013

Katie Kormanik preparing to record a statistics
course at Udacity, an online classroom instruction
 provider in Mountain View, Calif.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.

Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.

Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.

To address both problems and keep students on track to graduation, universities are beginning to experiment with adding the new “massive open online courses,” created to deliver elite college instruction to anyone with an Internet connection, to their offerings. 

While the courses, known as MOOCs, have enrolled millions of students around the world, most who enroll never start a single assignment, and very few complete the courses. So to reach students who are not ready for college-level work, or struggling with introductory courses, universities are beginning to add extra supports to the online materials, in hopes of improving success rates.

Here at San Jose State, for example, two pilot programs weave material from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to earn credit for them.

“We’re in Silicon Valley, we breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it makes sense that we are the first university to try this,” said Mohammad Qayoumi, the university’s president. “In academia, people are scared to fail, but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of failure. And if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll figure out what went wrong and do better.”

In one pilot program, the university is working with Udacity, a company co-founded by a Stanford professor, to see whether round-the-clock online mentors, hired and trained by the company, can help more students make their way through three fully online basic math courses.

The tiny for-credit pilot courses, open to both San Jose State students and local high school and community college students, began in January, so it is too early to draw any conclusions. But early signs are promising, so this summer, Udacity and San Jose State are expanding those classes to 1,000 students, and adding new courses in psychology and computer programming, with tuition of only $150 a course.

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.’s online materials with live classroom sessions might help more students succeed. Dr. Agarwal, the president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer the blended class last fall.

The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.

“We’re engineers, and we check our results, but if this semester is similar, we will not have the traditional version next year,” said Khosrow Ghadiri, who teaches the blended class. “It would be educational malpractice.”

It is hard to say, though, how much the improved results come from the edX online materials, and how much from the shift to classroom sessions focusing on small group projects, rather than lectures.

Finding better ways to move students through the start of college is crucial, said Josh Jarrett, a higher education officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in the past year has given grants to develop massive open online courses for basic and remedial courses. 

Fast, Cheap, Dead: Shopping and the Bangladesh Factory Collapse

By Bryan Walsh    
April 29, 2013

                           MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFT/GETTY IMAGES

       Rescuers comb the shattered remnants of a textile factory near 

Dhaka, Bangladesh. Nearly 400 people havedied in the building's collapse

The collapse of a factory building near Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed at least 362 people, is almost certainly the worst accident in the history of the garment industry. It’s worse than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 that you learned 
about in American history class and which helped lead to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards. It’s worse than the 1993 Kader Toy Factory fire in Bangkok, which killed 188 people, nearly all of them women and teenage girls. It’s worse than the Ali Enterprises Factory fire in Karachi, which killed at least 262 people — and which I’m guessing nearly all of us had forgotten about, or never knew it occurred, even though the disaster happened only eight months ago.

Bangladeshi officials are still investigating the causes behind the factory’s collapse on April 24, although Sohel Rana, the building’s owner, was arrested over the weekend as he attempted to flee the country. There’s no shortage of possible reasons — building codes in Bangladesh are too rarely enforced and corruption in the country is rampant. Nor, sadly, are such disasters rare. A major fire in a textile factory in Dhaka killed over 100 people just last November. While thousands of Bangladeshi protesters have taken to the streets in the wake of the building collapse, and the political opposition has called for a national strike on May 2, there’s little hope that the catastrophe will be the last that the country’s garment workers suffer.

(MORE: Mr. Green Jeans: Levi’s Detoxifies Its Supply Chain)

The clothes that the doomed workers in Dhaka were laboring over when their factory collapsed include some Western brands, like Primark and Joe Fresh. Is there anything we as clothing consumers can or should do about these deaths? In a post written last week as the dead were still being tallied in the building collapse, Slate’s economics blogger Matthew Yglesias suggests, not really:

Yglesias was raked over the coals by, as he put it in a later piece, just about the entire Internet. (This one was particularly good.) Yglesias was guilty of, at the very least, bad taste — the economic wonkery can wait until the dead have been counted. He makes the neoliberal point, just as the sweatshop defenders did during the Nike Wars of the 1990s, that Bangladesh’s low, low cost of doing business has helped the country take needed textile jobs — including from China — and build an $18 billion manufacturing industry. But there’s a difference between accepting that workers are being paid sweatshop wages to make our incredibly inexpensive clothes — the minimum wage is $36.50 a month — and accepting that they must labor in deathtraps. And they do: according to the International Labor Rights Forum, an advocacy group in Washington, more than 1,000 Bangladeshi garment workers have died in fires and other disasters.

Even Yglesias backtracked later, emphasizing that there are on-the-ground improvements that can be made to labor standards in Bangladesh that could mean the difference between life and death. (See this interview with Kimberly Ann Elliott of the Center for Global Development for a few ideas.) And those improvements shouldn’t drastically increase the cost of clothes made in Bangladesh — which is a good thing, given our addiction to cheap and fast-changing fashion:      

International retailers can do more to advocate safer standards at textile factories that manufacture their wares, in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Customers can do their part by putting a little pressure on their favorite brands, though that would require placing as much value on the cost of a life as you might on the cost of a T-shirt.

MORE: Fashion: Why Green Is Not the New Black

Hontiveros remains cautious despite improved survey standing

By Maila Ager        
 INQUIRER.net          
Tuesday, April 30th, 2013



MANILA, Philippines – While elated by the latest Pulse Asia survey that put her for the first time in the list of possible winners, Team PNoy senatorial bet Risa Hontiveros said she would take the survey results “with a grain of salt.”

From the previous 17th to 18th in the March 16 survey of Pulse Asia, Hontiveros now ranked 12th to 17th based on the survey conducted by the same polling firm from April 20 to 23.
“I am definitely happy with the survey results, but I’m taking it with guarded optimism. Rather than being complacent, I need to campaign harder and make my message sharper and more focused,” she said in a statement on Tuesday.

Hontiveros attributed her gains in the latest survey to “alampay magic,” which she used in her latest TV ad as a device to underscore her track record in fighting abuse and corruption. “My alampay, which I have color-coded to symbolize my advocacies, is helping me tighten my message,” she said.

The Team PNoy bet also thanked her supporters and ordinary Filipinos, who she said believed that the Senate should not be an exclusive club for the very few.

“We need to wage another People Power in the ballots. An ordinary Filipina with the right principles and the right track record should have the fighting chance to get into the Senate,” she said.

Hontiveros admitted that her biggest challenge was her unfamiliar name.

“Compared to all the other winning candidates, my awareness level remains low,” she said.

“Unlike them, I don’t have a traditional, familiar surname, and I cannot match the resources that they have for their TV ads. I am relying on my track record and the support of marginalized sectors whose aspirations I carry in my heart.”

Hontiveros remained confident that Team PNoy could still make a 12-0 sweep.
“The most important ‘survey’ is on Election Day. It isn’t over until every country-loving Filipino has [cast] his or her vote. I think that Team PNoy still has a strong chance to make former Senators Jun Magsaysay and Jamby Madrigal and myself win this crucial senate race,” she added.

Read more: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/399973/hontiveros-remains-cautious-despite-improved-survey-standing#ixzz2S05Mdbq4 

Abdelaziz Bouteflika: Is Algeria’s Strongman on His Way Out?

By Vivienne Walt       
April 29, 2013

                                 FAROUK BATICHE/GETTY IMAGES

               Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika welcomes 

                          the Emir of Kuwait in Algiers on Jan.14,2013

Two days after Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was airlifted to a military hospital in Paris to be treated for a supposed “mini-stroke,” his doctors raced to reassure the country that the autocratic ruler was not seriously ill and, indeed, would soon be home — a message that seemed designed to ward off any maneuvers by his rivals to oust him during his absence. “The President is in very good health,” his doctor Rachid Bougherbal was quoted as saying in the government-aligned Ennahar newspaper on Monday, adding that the President would return to Algiers “in not more than seven days.”

Still, the doctor’s message did little to tamp down furious speculation among Algerians. Bouteflika had barely left the country when politicians and analysts began debating whether his 14-year rule was finally over, or at least how much longer he was capable of governing the oil-rich North African country, which has by far the region’s biggest military, and which has faced a long-standing Islamist insurgency. Algerian newspapers were filled on Monday with heated discussion over the country’s future. With the government notoriously secret, Algerians have grown accustomed to picking apart official statements and looking for clues about the true state of affairs. “There is something new this time, in that the announcement of the President’s illness was made by the presidency,” political analyst Rashid Grim told the Algerian newspaper al-Watan; previous bouts of illness went unexplained to the public. “This means he is sick but that his life is not in danger.” Grim also said he believed the regime had already chosen someone to step into power in case Bouteflika were incapacitated.

(MORE: With Limited Freedoms, Many Algerians Vote With Their Feet)

Bouteflika came to power after Algeria’s devastating civil war against Islamist fighters, which is believed to have killed up to 200,000 people, on the promise of cracking down hard on militants, and keeping Algeria safe from insurgency — to a large extent, at the expense of open democracy. For Western leaders, Bouteflika’s departure, if it happened, could entail a tough adjustment, especially since the Arab Spring ousted longtime allies in Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

After the 9/11 attacks, Bouteflika signed an intelligence-sharing relationship with the U.S. Bouteflika refused to join the NATO-led campaign against Muammar Gaddafi in next-door Libya in 2011, and refused to send Algerian troops to join the French-led offensive in northern Mali in January. Yet when Islamist militants seized the In Amenas gas plant in southeastern Algeria in January, killing dozens of foreign oil workers, Bouteflika allowed U.S. surveillance drones to hover overhead throughout the siege. “Algiers has been feted by Paris and Washington in the hopes of enlisting Algeria’s help in stabilizing northern Mali and performing a broader regional counterterrorism role,” says Geoff Porter, director of North Africa Risk Consulting Inc. in Washington. “If the presidency is prematurely up for grabs, Algeria would turn acutely inward. France and the U.S. would find themselves without reliable interlocutors.”

Algerians have good reason to question the statement from Bouteflika’s doctor about the President’s health. In 2005 and again in 2006, Bouteflika was flown to the same French military hospital in Paris, for what his doctors said was treatment for a hemorrhagic stomach ulcer. A year later, Bouteflika admitted that he had been “very, very ill.” But it took a few years more before Algerians learned that their President had in fact undergone treatment for cancer — and even then, they were not told by their own government. The truth emerged only in 2011, when WikiLeaks published a U.S. diplomatic cable in which then ambassador Robert Ford wrote in 2007 that a doctor close to Bouteflika had “told us in strictest confidence that the President suffered from cancer.” That was news to Algerians.

(MORE: ‘We Did Not Predict This’: Top Algerian Official Discusses January Hostage Crisis)

This time, Bouteflika, 76, has taken ill at an intensely awkward time. For months, top officials in the regime have squabbled bitterly over who might ultimately succeed Bouteflika — a subject that until recently seemed almost unmentionable. Under constitutional reforms that are currently under way, Algeria is set to appoint a Deputy President for the first time, a move aimed at paving the way for succession, after years in which Bouteflika has ruled the country with unchallenged authority.

Despite his frail health, Bouteflika has made it clear he intends to stand for a fourth term in office. That would all but ensure his victory, since the controlled process weeds out serious threats to his leadership. “The intelligence services are trying to make sure that the succession process goes their way,” says Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa analyst for the Eurasia Group in London. Given the fact that Bouteflika’s successor could rule for more than a decade, who comes next is crucial for Algeria. Despite its mammoth oil and gas reserves, the country faces declining production and high youth unemployment — both factors that could potentially spark an Arab Spring–style revolt. “There is no long-term perspective about when Algeria’s oil runs out,” Fabiani told TIME on Monday. That could happen, he says, “realistically between 10 and 20 years’ time.”

For most Algerians, the political crisis has arrived far sooner. With Bouteflika out of sight, the tone in the country’s media was impatient, and even irreverent, given the President’s fragile state. The Oran Daily, a newspaper in Algeria’s industrial city, said on Monday that it was unclear whether Bouteflika could last as President even until next year’s election, and warned that Algeria risked all-out revolt by keeping its ruler too long, as Libyans did with Gaddafi and Syrians with Bashar Assad. “We are dangerously infected with the syndrome of Gaddafi or Bashar,” the paper’s editorial said. In a more irreverent tone, a cartoonist in al-Watan showed Bouteflika’s medical team addressing a press conference, and announcing in unison: “The President will need to maintain total rest during his fourth term in office.”

(MORE: The Rising Power of North Africa’s Jihadists Rattles Algeria)

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/04/29/abdelaziz-bouteflika-is-algerias-strongman-on-his-way-out/#ixzz2RzzRrh8B

The Reign of Spain: Can Roca Ousts Noma as World’s Best Restaurant

By Lisa Abend / London     
April 29, 2013

DAVID RAMOS/GETTY IMAGES

Cooks and prepare dishes at the restaurant

 El Celler de can Roca on May 19,2011, in Girona Spain

The king is dead; long live the king. Just when it seem that the food world had moved definitively beyond the high-wire pyrotechnics of modern Spanish cooking to embrace the less adorned lichen and sea buckthorn of new Nordic cuisine, along came the 2013 list of the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants to say: not so fast. At its annual awards ceremony, held April 29 in London’s Guild Hall, the top honor went to El Celler de Can Roca, located in the northeastern Spanish city of Girona. There, avant-garde executive chef Joan Roca invents daring new dishes from things like distilled soil; one of his younger brothers, sommelier Josep, keeps a cellar where music and video images are matched to the flavors of his favorite wines; and the other, pastry chef Jordi, creates desserts that taste like the fragrance of well-known perfumes. Copenhagen’s Noma, which had held the top spot for the past three years, fell to second place.

Among Spaniards, Can Roca’s victory came as welcome reassurance that the country’s moment in the culinary sun was not over. Although Spanish restaurants have performed strongly for several years — two others, Mugaritz and Arzak, retained their positions in the top 10 of 2013’s list — it hasn’t taken first place since Copenhagen’s Noma displaced Ferran Adrià’s revolutionary elBulli in 2010. “It shows a consolidation of our position,” says Rafael Ansón, president of the Royal Spanish Academy of Gastronomy. “It’s the strongest confirmation that in the world of chef-artists, we are the best.”

(MORE: Nomanomics: How One Restaurant Is Changing Denmark’s Economy)

But the results came as a surprise to some. Says Joanna Savill, director of the festival Crave Sydney: “You have to admire Can Roca, because what they do is so beautiful, so poetic, so evocative. But that’s not the global story at the moment. The global story, the new story, is about chefs reflecting who and where they are.”

That the restaurant industry now craves novelty almost as much as Hollywood does can be attributed in part to the 50 Best list itself. Founded 11 years ago, its audacious innovation was to rank restaurants, based on the votes of the hundreds of chefs and journalists who make up its jury. That simple mechanism has made it tremendously influential, catapulting chefs to prominence and changing the economic fortunes of their restaurants. The day after Noma first won the top slot, its reservationist received 100,000 booking requests.

(MORE: When the World’s Top Restaurant Serves Up a Bug)

This year, chefs from 49 of the 50 restaurants attended the award ceremony — proof of how highly regarded it is among them. “It’s an incredible honor,” says Alex Atala, chef of São Paulo’s DOM, which placed 6th this year. “To get this kind of recognition, especially when you come from a part of the world that hasn’t been known for its restaurant culture, is incredible.”

By insisting that jurors use at least three of their seven votes on restaurants outside their own regions, the organization helps ensure a certain geographic diversity. For countries or regions that have not traditionally been part of haute cuisine’s pantheon, the sense that the centers of gravity are expanding can be exhilarating. “We’re the first restaurant from Melbourne to ever make the list, and I’ve been getting messages from people at home — maybe 200 of them — all day,” says Ben Shewry, chef of Attica, which came in at No. 21. “But there’s also a sense of pride among Australiaas a whole; I feel like the whole country is behind us.”

Yet for all the enthusiasm that surrounds it, the list is not without controversy, and not just of the “How did that place get there?” kind. Britain’s Restaurant magazine, which oversees the rankings, has been criticized for a lack of transparency. The organization never releases the number of actual votes that each restaurant receives, nor does it require proof from its jury members that they have actually dined in the restaurants they vote for.

(MORE: Noma Takes Top Spot, but U.S. Dominates World’s 50 Best Restaurants)

And of course the very premise that something as subjective as a restaurant can somehow be judged “best” in the world is itself questionable. Nevertheless, because the list tends to elevate not just chefs but the cuisines that give rise to them, it helps contribute to the sense of a hierarchy of nations — first Spanish cuisine was on top, then Nordic — and raise expectations that one cuisine will replace another (for premonitions of the next big thing, look to the unprecedented presence of six Latin American restaurants on this year’s list).

In London, a visibly moved Joan Roca was modest as he stepped on stage to accept the award for a restaurant that he and his brothers started over a decade ago. “We don’t know if we are the best, but you can be sure we will continue working with audacity, with generosity, and with creativity,” he told the audience. But as photographers crowded around to shoot photos of the world’s newest top chef, he couldn’t help reflecting on the win’s national importance. “Spanish gastronomy needed this,” he told TIME. “We needed a push like this to prove ourselves again in front of the world.”

MORE: The New Spanish Scent That’s Good Enough to Eat

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/04/29/the-reign-of-spain-can-roca-ousts-noma-as-worlds-best-restaurant/#ixzz2RzwiJsFb

Obamacare Progress

By Joe Klein        
April 29, 2013

A few weeks ago, I gave the President a tough time about the slow and messy implementation of his health care plan. But there’s been some progress in recent weeks — and I’m happy to pass it on.

One of the things that concerned me was the 21-page application form that was required for people to join a health care exchange — which, if you’re unfamiliar with the jargon, is an online health-insurance superstore (think Orbitz or Hotels.com) where individuals will have the collective market power of large corporations like, say, Time Warner.

Tomorrow morning the Administration will announce a spiffy, new three-page application for individuals (which we’ll attach here when it becomes public).* There will be a seven-page application for families (11 including the appendix), but even that one will be far better designed than the initial effort. “We did a lot of work testing words, to come up with simpler language,” an Administration official told me, “and we did time tests. Our average was seven minutes to fill out the paper version and even less if you do it online.”

(MORE: The Cost of ObamaCare’s Coverage Provisions)

This compares favorably with applications for private insurance plans, which average about 17 pages (and can go as high as 35). “We’re hoping to move as many people as possible to the e-mail application form,” a second Administration official told me. “We received a lot of [negative] feedback from insurers and individuals like you when we published the first application forms, and we’re trying to be responsive to those concerns.”

My primary concerns remain the implementation of the online superstores. I remain concerned that employees of small businesses won’t have a choice of health plans in the first year. I’m also concerned that the state exchanges run by the federal government — over the opposition of Republican governors — won’t offer as many choices as a true market should.

There are more than a few other concerns and ways the system might be improved that I’ve written about in the past. The good news about the streamlined application, though, is that it shows the Administration is alert and flexible and responsive — and, if we’re lucky, may turn out to be innovative in enacting a system that will bring health care to those who haven’t had it before, and lower costs to the self-employed masses who’ve had to go out and buy insurance on their own.

*The application form will be even simpler for higher-income individuals and families that aren’t eligible for a health-insurance subsidy but want to shop at the exchange in search of less expensive coverage.

MORE: Obamacare and GOP Governors – Is This a Tipping Point?

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/29/obamacare-progress/#ixzz2RzvXvmvR