Thought du Jour

This is a exciting news. MIT is launching MITx, a not-for-profit virtual university, with a wide range of free, open-access courses. For a small fee, students will be permitted to sit an exam at the conclusion of a course and, if they pass, receive a certificate of successful completion.

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far. ….

Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they’ve learned the material, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. ….

[This] could make the university the global nexus of online higher education, which is the way most people are likely to access higher learning in the future. In the hunt for the best and brightest students around the globe, MIT won’t need to guess who’s in the top 1 percent of 1 percent—it can simply pick them out of the millions of students who will enroll in MITx.

Meanwhile, it will be fascinating to watch MITx mint a brand-new form of academic currency. What happens when it enters circulation? Will other universities accept it as transfer credit, or employers as proof of skills? How will those credentials affect the fast-growing market for online credits and degrees, much of which is driven by the expensive for-profit sector?

Kevin Carey, “MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency“, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 January 2012.

MIT is the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is physically located in Cambridge, Mass. The university answers common questions about MITx here.

One question that I had was “Will MITx offer MIT degrees?” The answer is “No. MIT awards MIT degrees only to those admitted to MIT through a highly selective admissions process.”

A follow-up question I had was “Will MIT accept MITx credentials as transfer credit toward a degree?” The MIT FAQ does not answer this question. Kevin Carey seems to answer it when he writes “there should be little confusion between credentials issued by MIT and MITx. The latter won’t dilute the value of the former.” By implication, the answer is “Don’t count on MIT accepting MITx credentials for credit!”. This makes the experiment all the more fascinating.

HT: The Browser

Timothy Taylor explains that grade inflation has real effects, pulling students away from subjects where instructors give low grades to subjects where instructors give high grades for similar effort and ability. Here is the conclusion of a very informative post:

[G]rade inflation in the humanities has been contributing to college students moving away from science, technology, engineering, and math fields, as well as economics, for the last half century. It’s time for the pendulum to start swinging back. A gentle starting point would be to making the distribution of grades by institution and by academic department (or for small departments, perhaps grouping a few departments together) publicly available, and perhaps even to add this information to student transcripts. If that answer isn’t institutionally acceptable, I’m open to alternatives.

Timothy Taylor, “Grade Inflation and Choice of Major“, Conversable Economist, 14 November 2011.

Guest post by Christopher Willmore.

Fate of the World is an incredible macroeconomic simulator. You’re put in charge of a fictional, giant NGO that receives funding from most governments, and whose mandate it is to increase the global Human Development Index (HDI) while keeping an eye on the environment, scarce resources, political maneouvering, migration and natural disasters. The game is based on real research, uses standard models, and you’re given tons of statistics. Oh! And it’s currently on sale at 20% off (US$15.19). You can purchase the game at Steam, at the game’s own web site, and at many other sites.

The on-sale bundle of the game includes 126 pages of designers’ notes as a PDF file. These take you through the (often boring) process of how a small group of non-academics managed, in a short time, to put together a real-time interactive model of the world’s ecology and economy, using real-world data and incorporating state-of-the-art climate modelling.  I’m of the strong opinion that economists should include this kind of modelling in their toolkit – not as a replacement for more rigorous models, but as a way to quickly see the implications of their assumptions and directions.

There are neat discussions of how the designers chose the number and boundaries of regions to divide the world into, and numerous graphs showing how they built their model iteratively, based on features and assumptions as they popped up. They also spent a long time thinking of their target audience and how to make the game accessible for them. A lot of economics seminar presenters would do well to do the same!

Note: TdJ does not receive commissions on sales, nor does it have a horse (or friend) in this gaming race.

The New Inquiry, an online journal, has published an interesting dialogue between “Teach”, a philosophy instructor, and “Cheat”, who has authored more than 100 papers for pay. The following comment from “Teach” caught my eye.

[In some] cases I was alerted to plagiarism by the sudden appearance, in a paper that is otherwise a morass of grammatical errors, of a series of flawless sentences with complicated structures. The correct use of a semicolon is a big red flag for me. As is the use—and often misuse—of specialized jargon or technical language that I’ve not discussed with them in class. Then I type those sentences into Google, and they all wind up being smoking-gun cases of plagiarism.

“The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers“, The New Inquiry, 22 June 2011.

The New Inquiry is New York-based and was founded in 2009. HT: The Browser.