Category: Education
MRUniversity will have a course unit especially on India
This will be a special part of our opening course on Development Economics. The topics we will cover will include:
History of the East India Company
The economics of Gandhi’s attack on the salt monopoly
Was British rule good for India?
Private education in India
Economic research on the caste system in India
The timing of Indian economic reforms and the boost in Indian economic growth, as discussed by Rodrik, DeLong, and others.
The contributions of the most famous and most important Indian economists.
Why does Kerala have such a good record when it comes to public health?
RCTs in India by Poverty Action Lab.
And much more.
Today I have a request for you. If you have any connection with India, please spread the word of this material to other people you may know who have a connection to India.
The motto of MRU is “Learn, Teach, and Share.” You can register for the course to come here. Background on MRU is here. Background on the development economics class is here.
The equilibrium (with apologies to Daniel Klein)
On September 5, the first Sleeping Beauty in Polataiko’s exhibition awoke to a kiss from another woman. Both of them were surprised. Polataiko shot photos of them laughing and looking at each other. Then he posted the images to his Facebook profile, where he has been live-blogging the entire event. Now the Sleeping Beauty must wed her “prince,” thus queering the historically heteronormative fairtytale. Gay marriage is not allowed in the Ukraine, however, so these two women will have to wed in a European country that does allow for same-sex marriage.
Here is more. I believe that none of you had solved for this equilibrium. For the pointer I thank Eapen.
There is no great stagnation (remote-controlled cockroach edition)
Built-in power supply? Check. Ability to survive anything? Check. Easy to control? Okay, anyone who’s had a cockroach as an uninvited houseguest knows that’s not the case. So, rather than re-inventing the biological wheel with a robotic version, North Carolina State university researchers have figured out a way to remotely control a real Madagascar hissing cockroach. They used an off-the-shelf microcontroller to tap in to the roach’s antennae and abdomen, then sent commands that fooled the insect into thinking danger was near, or that an object was blocking it. That let the scientists wirelessly prod the insect into action, then guide it precisely along a curved path, as shown in the video below the break. The addition of a sensor could allow the insects to one day perform tasks, liking searching for trapped disaster victims — something to think about the next time you put a shoe to one.
What’s it like trying to climb the IQ gradient with this device? There are videos at the link, and for the pointer I thank magilson.
Who will on-line education help?
Matt Yglesias has an analysis and a hypothesis:
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, proprietors of one of the finest economics blogs on the Internet, are launching a cool new venture that they’re calling Marginal Revolution University aimed at doing online economics education and launching with a course on development economics.
It’s pretty clear that big change is coming to the higher education space through digital technology, but it’s also worth asking who’s going to really benefit from this kind of change. The key winner, it seems to me, is someone who’s intelligent, focused, and motivated but whose parents don’t happen to have much money.
There is more analysis at the link. Matt makes this very good point:
Last but by no means least, some of the biggest winners here will be people living in poor countries where the basic logistical barriers to accessing quality higher education are often very high. I suspect it’s no coincidence that development economics—a subject likely to be of particular interest to that demographic—is where MRU is starting.
MR University is announced at the World Bank
As our blog posts went up (here and here), our plans for MR University were presented to an audience of World Bank economists, researchers, and practitioners, courtesy of PREM.
You can find the presentation here. The segment on MRUniversity starts at about 29:30, with the earlier part of the talk covering ideas related to The Great Stagnation.
You can sign up at www.MRUniversity.com. Our class on development economics starts October 1, and we are pleased to have been able to present it at the World Bank, and to you all, to start it off.
Introducing MRUniversity (spread the word)
That’s Marginal Revolution University, MRU, or I suppose to some “Mister” University.
We think education should be better, cheaper, and easier to access. So we decided to take matters into our own hands and create a new online education platform toward those ends. We have decided to do more to communicate our personal vision of economics to you and to the broader world.
You can visit www.MRUniversity.com here. There you can sign up for information about our first course, Development Economics, which is described by Alex below.
Here are a few of the principles behind MR University:
1. The product is free (like this blog), and we offer more material in less time.
2. Most of our videos are short, so you can view and listen between tasks, rather than needing to schedule time for them. The average video is five minutes, twenty-eight seconds long. When needed, more videos are used to explain complex topics.
3. No talking heads and no long, boring lectures. We have tried to reconceptualize every aspect of the educational experience to be friendly to the on-line world.
4. It is low bandwidth and mobile-friendly. No ads.
5. We offer tests and quizzes.
6. We have plans to subtitle the videos in major languages. Our reach will be global, and in doing so we are building upon the global emphasis of our home institution, George Mason University.
7. We invite users to submit content.
8. It is a flexible learning module. It is not a “MOOC” per se, although it can be used to create a MOOC, namely a massive, open on-line course.
9. It is designed to grow rapidly and flexibly, absorbing new content in modular fashion — note the beehive structure to our logo. But we are starting with plenty of material.
10. We are pleased to announce that our first course will begin on October 1.
Please help spread the word via tweet, facebook and post and of course please join us at MRU.
MRU’s First Course: Development Economics
The first course from Marginal Revolution University is Development Economics and it will be taught by Tyler Cowen and myself. Development Economics will cover the sources of economic growth including geography, education, finance, and institutions. We will cover theories like the Solow and O-ring models and we will cover the empirical data on development and trade, foreign aid, industrial policy, and corruption. Development Economics will include not just theory but a wealth of historical and factual information on specific countries and topics, everything from watermelon scale economies and the clove monopoly to water privatization in Buenos Aires and cholera in Haiti. A special section in this round will examine India. There are no prerequisites for this course but neither is it dumbed down. We think there will be material in Development Economics that will be of interest to high school students in the United States and Bangladesh and also to PhDs in economics, even to those who specialize in this field.
Development Economics covers all the major topics of a sit-down class but because we have built it to be on online course from the ground up–no videos of us talking to a classroom–it will take less than half of the time of a sit-down class, plus no need to search for parking!
Our motto at MRU is “Learn, Teach, Share” so we will be inviting the world not just to learn but also to teach and share their knowledge. GMU is a very entrepreneurial university and we think we can be a world leader in online education.
Please do go to MRU and submit your email to be notified about our start date and registration which will allow you to contribute in our forums and online events. Development Economics is free to the world.
Stay tuned for more!
Not From the Onion: Harvard Cheaters
The NYTimes reports that Harvard is investigating “what could be its largest cheating scandal in memory.” Attention is focused on about 125 students in one course but Harvard would not say which course. The Harvard Crimson, however, has revealed that the course is “Introduction to Congress”!
I say give the cheaters an A and fail the rest.
The next transformational technology?
Noah Smith writes:
Addendum: I seem to be the only person talking about Desire Modification as a transformational technology. Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge have written books in which this technology plays a central role. In my “spare time” I’m writing a couple of sci-fi short stories based on the idea. It’s a really big deal, and I’ll write a post about it soon.
The coming disruption in education
From a new article about on-line educational start-ups:
To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executive responds. Quizlet has no sales force, a very small marketing department, and more than seven million monthly unique visitors. (There are about fifty million public school students in the United States.) Quizlet, in its busiest months, during the school year, is among the top 500 most visited sites on the entire Internet. Now they’ve expanded beyond flash cards. You can create study groups, convert your content into multiplayer games, and search for cards and games that other people have created. We think we can get to 40 million users, then 100 million, says the executive. The question that drives the company, he says, is this: How can we create amazing learning tools for one billion people? This is the way most of the people in the valley talk.
Matt Yglesias adds useful comment.
A new RCT look at educational vouchers
From Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson (pdf):
In the first study using a randomized experiment to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment, we examine the college-going behavior through 2011 of students who participated in a voucher experiment as elementary school students in the late 1990s. We find no overall impacts on college enrollments but we do find large, statistically significant positive impacts on the college going of African American students who participated in the study. Our estimates indicate that using a voucher to attend private school increased the overall college enrollment rate among African Americans by 24 percent.
Hat tip goes to Michael Petrilli, via ModeledBehavior.
Boo hoo
Is Arnold Kling quitting blogging?
Sorry for being abrupt, but this is something I have been thinking about for months.
In the future, I plan to do my writing in essay format.
As far as blogging goes, I am opting for exit rather than voice, as it were.
Did he just get too fed up? Any chance he will pull a Michael Jordan?
The Hispanic high school graduation rate is increasing
The number of young Hispanics enrolled in college, which surpassed black enrollment for the first time in 2010, jumped to almost 2.1 million last year, from about 1.3 million in 2008. That is partly a product of a swelling Hispanic population, as well as the increased rate of college attendance.
But it also reflects a fast-rising high school graduation rate. In the 1990s, fewer than 60 percent of Hispanics 18 to 24 had a high school diploma, but that figure hit 70 percent for the first time in 2009, and 76 percent last year.
Here is a bit more.
Education as loss leader?
And then there is the Walt Disney Company. It is building a chain of language schools in China big enough to enroll more than 150,000 children annually. The schools, which weave Disney characters into the curriculum, are not going to move the profit needle at a company with $41 billion in annual revenue. But they could play a vital role in creating a consumer base as Disney builds a $4.4 billion theme park and resort in Shanghai.
Here is more, mostly on whether media companies enjoy any synergies in education markets, interesting throughout.
The benefits of learning a second language
Bryan has had a few recent posts criticizing the notion of multilingualism for (most) Americans. As a general advocate of learning foreign languages, I have a few points in response:
1. There is a sizable literature on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism. I get nervous when I see the topic discussed without reference to the main claimed benefits.
2. I believe that good fluency in a second or third language significantly expands one’s ability to see and understand and also articulate other points of view. And most of the very great thinkers of the past were fluent or semi-fluent in multiple languages. By teaching other languages at an early age, we can make our most productive thinkers deeper and more productive.
3. Ideally foreign languages can be taught to individuals when they are young, well before high school, thus very much lowering the opportunity cost of such instruction. Just toss out some of the other material, making sure to keep mathematics and English literacy. Most of Western Europe does this quite well, and I hardly think of those children as miserable. I don’t see why this has to cost anything at all.
4. I am reasonably sympathetic to the “we’re so uncommitted to this notion we’ll never see it through so let’s not bother trying” response to my attitude. (In particular it is harder for Americans to get within-culture reinforcement for language learning in the way that Europeans so often do, either from American popular culture or from crossing a nearby border.) Yet that’s a far cry from believing it would actually be a mistake to invest resources in that direction, if indeed we would see it through.
Here is one stimulating discussion of the topic, in English of course.