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he humanities are thriving, but not in the academy. Homo sapiens has always hungered for story and song. We are narrative and rhythmical creatures. Music and rhythmical language awaken our intelligence, as has been observed since Aristotle. We construe our meanings through plot: Who dunnit? Why? What happened next? And we sift our meanings—often the meanings we can hardly articulate abstractly—through song, poetry, images. Why else would we be glued to our screens, large and small, following the adventures of endless fictional characters, whether in video games or films, and why else would we mosey through the streets with digitized music and delirious rhymes flooding through our earphones? We hunger to make sense of our experience, we hunger to understand right and wrong, we hunger to name and plumb our feelings, whose intensities often blindside and bewilder us. Even generals and senators stumble into passion. We have not stopped being human, so we still need “the humanities.” The humanities are thriving, but not in the academy. But professors of the humanities bear some responsibility for the dropping enrollments. When we filled our books and courses with wildly specialized jargon, when we narrowed the reading lists to a coterie of approved gurus, when we prosecuted literature and the arts for not exemplifying our enlightened values—should we wonder that we lost touch with the lively minds of young people, not to mention “the general reader”? The humanities are thriving, in some places. They flourish in writing festivals and institutes where serious people of all ages gather to read and argue and write; in music “camps” where grownups flock for coaching, practice, and company; and in communities for the visual arts. They are alive and well in countless non-degree-granting programs, adult-ed sessions, and writing “studios.” But the humanities are also, in part, at mortal risk. Informal programs do not prepare scholars for the long and loving labor of interpreting works of the mind. Without the support of the Academy, such practices can be lost, and we could enter another Dark Age, without a truly literate citizenry, and cut off from the ancient tribal wisdom—both comic and tragic.

"We have no reason to be discouraged about the future of education. We just must realize that real reform is not going to occur within the established school system. It will continue to occur outside of that system. The gradual change that will occur is that more and more people will opt out of conventional schooling."

Empathy is the first step in design thinking.

"The growth in the absolute number of employed college graduates has been nowhere near enough to offset the increase in the size of the college-educated population."

Put differently, American universities are churning out so many new college graduates that even as more drop out of the labor force, the unemployment rate has stayed pretty much in line with the unemployment rate for those with less education. You'd have to look beyond the unemployment rate and to the labor force participation rate to see how "go to college, get a job" misses the full picture.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-shouldnt-go-to-college-2013-9#ixzz2e8tMpPMx

Nowadays, younger Americans are becoming less likely to take out loans to buy a house or a car. One possible reason? They're too overloaded with student debt.

That's one takeaway, at least, from some interesting new research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,flagged by Doug Henwood.

The paper starts by noting that student debt has grown dramatically over the last decade — some 43 percent of Americans under the age of 25 had student debt in 2012, with the average debt burden now $20,326. By contrast, back in 2003, just 25 percent of younger Americans had debt, and the average burden was $10,649.

What's particularly notable is that these student loans appear to be crowding out other types of borrowing. For a long time, younger Americans with student debt were more likely to own homes than those without — largely because college grads are likelier to have higher earnings. But that trend has reversed:

The same goes for auto loans — college grads and other Americans with student debt are now slightly less likely to buy cars than those without:

Why is this happening? There are a couple theories explored by Meta Brown and Sydnee Caldwell, the researchers who wrote the study:

— One possibility is that younger Americans burdened by heavy student loans are simply unwilling to take on further debt. Perhaps they're worried about their future job and income prospects, especially in this dismal economy. (Remember, students who are unlucky enough to graduate during the recession typically have lower lifetime earnings.)

— Another (related) possibility is that lenders are becoming stingier. There's decent evidence for this: The study finds that younger Americans with student debt have seen their credit risk scores plummet relative to those without. Banks and other lenders seem to be scared away from people with student loans — especially since delinquency rates are rising.

Either way, it looks like rising student debt really might be eating into the housing and auto markets. If so, that could have big implications for the U.S. economy. Auto and housing sales have been a huge driver of growth these past few years, though auto sales are still well below their peak. (Analysts are expecting around 15 to 15.5 million sales in 2013, versus an average of 16.6 million per year during the 2000s.) If younger Americans are retreating from those markets, that could help slow down the recovery.

On a related note, there have been plenty of stories written lately about how fewer young people are getting their licenses and driving nowadays — usually this trend is chalked up to cultural shifts or Facebook. But student debt could be another big factor here.

Related: Meanwhile, Karl Smith has an interesting post about seasonal fluctuations in student loan payments and how they might explain why we keep seeing the U.S. economy slow down in the spring.

A big new study from Caroline M. Hoxby and Christopher Avery finds that high-achieving kids from poorer families are much less likely to apply to top colleges, even even though they would have a very good shot at getting in and qualifying for financial aid.

And here’s the stunning part: For many of those low-income students, the top colleges would actually be cheaper than the schools they do end up going to — again, because of financial aid. So these students are paying more to go to less-selective schools.

David Leonhardt already did an excellent column on this research, but the authors offered up this graph during their presentation at Brookings that really sums up the findings nicely (click to enlarge):

Short version: Low-income and high-income students of comparable achievement have very different strategies when applying to college. Why is that? In their paper, the authors note that smart students from low-income families often don’t think about applying to “reach” schools because they’re less likely to be surrounded by people who have gone to these schools and less likely to have guidance counselors who are prepared to give good advice about selective colleges.

And, on the flip side, many selective colleges usually only seek out high-achieving low-income applicants in the biggest urban schools — which means they still miss a huge swath of bright students who could conceivably do well.

Matt Yglesias offers up some comments on possible remedies, as does Reihan Salam. It’s also worth wondering about possible technological fixes. A few years ago in the Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey wrote a great piece about the promise of online college-search programs that could improve the whole matching process by lining up students with the schools they’re best-suited for.

Google Engineer Says Vietnamese 11th Graders Know Enough Computer Science to Pass Their Interview Process With 1 million more jobs than there are computer science students anticipated by 2020, learning computer programming is as essential for the 21st century workforce as learning to read or write. But here in the United States only 10 percent of K-12 schools even offer computer science classes, which means our kids aren't being set up for success. That's a far cry from what's happening in Vietnam. Google engineer Neil Fraser, who works in the company's education department, recently headed there to check out how they're teaching computer science to students and the difference is pretty astounding. Fraser writes on his site Neil's News that Vietnamese kids begin basic programming lessons in second grade and in third grade, they start learning how to use Microsoft Windows and how to type. Depending on an individual school's access to technology, students here in the United States might learn the same thing at that age. But by fourth grade it's clear that American and Vietnamese kids are being put on different paths. "By grade 4," writes Fraser, Vietnamese students, "start programming in Logo. Starting with sequences of commands, then progressing to loops." And "By grade 5 they are writing procedures containing loops calling procedures containing loops," he says. Fraser also says 5th graders in Vietnam are so skilled, they can do the same programming 11th graders in the U.S. can do, which means that the 11th graders in Vietnam significantly outpace their American peers. Indeed, they're skilled enough, says Fraser, to succeed in Google's interview process. So what's the problem here in the U.S. with getting coding taught in schools? Fraser says: "School boards fight to keep CS out of schools, since every minute spent on CS is one less minute spent on core subjects like English and math. The students' test scores in these core subjects determine next year's funding, so CS is a threat. Teachers often refuse to teach real CS because more often than not they don't understand it. Instead, they end up teaching word processing and website construction, while calling it CS. Parents often oppose CS classes since the grade has no direct benefit on their child's academic prospects. This is compounded by a lack of understanding of the difference between their child playing video games and their child writing video games. Students intentionally tune out of CS class since there are few things worse in American high school than being labelled a nerd." Fraser says what he sees "in America is a prefect storm of opposition from every level." As a result, Google's "been spending enormous resources with frankly minimal impact." We should absolutely be lobbying for computer science's inclusion in the K-12 academic curriculum—last year parents involved in Coding for Kids in the U.K. did just that. But since bureaucratic wheels can turn slowly—and we don't even have enough educators who are trained to teach computer science in schools—using some of the free resources on the web is the way to go. Platforms like Code Year, which features short, game-based, interactive lessons are teaching novices enough coding to build a website or game in just four weeks. Of course, teaching kids how to code doesn't mean that we have to expect that every child will grow up to be a programmer. But by not teaching the vast majority of students how to code, we're denying them the ability to make the choice to pursue working in computer science. What's clear is that if we don't step up and take action, American kids will be, for the most part, mere consumers of technology instead of innovators and creators who use it to solve the challenges facing their communities. Click here to add learning to code to your GOOD "to-do" list. Electronic circuit board image via Shutterstock

If SXSW Interactive is “spring break for geeks,” SXSWedu is spring break for geeks who want to help the country turn out even more geeks.

Kicking off Monday in Austin, Tex., the conference attracts entrepreneurs, investors, school leaders, policy makers and others trying to use technology to improve and remake education. Last year, it drew about 2,000 participants and, this year enrollment has more than doubled, organizers say.

That’s still just a fraction of the more than 24,000 people who head to Austin for the celebrity-saturated consumer tech event a few days later. But the growth of SXSWedu, which is in its third year, underscores the boom-time vibe in the ed tech industry in general, which last year soaked up $1.1 billion in venture capital and spawned no less than four ed tech accelerators in the last month.

Ahead of the event, I chatted with a few SXSWedu and ed tech veterans about the topics and themes likely to inspire chatter in Austin and beyond. Whether you plan to attend or follow it from afar, here are six trends to watch.

Unlocking and mastering data

Data and analytics startups and organizations are quickly becoming darlings of ed tech. They aim to uncover new insights and support personalized classroom learning by helping educators integrate and analyze often historically disparate datasets. “We’re just getting to the point where data gets interesting,” said Heather Gilchrist, founder of the New York-based ed tech accelerator Socratic Labs. At the conference, InBloom, the new nonprofit focused on helping educators aggregate data, will provide the first demos of its platform, host codeathons and share insights from its first pilot programs with school districts. Also expect to hear about the role of big data from startups Clever and LearnSprout, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Technology, the Gates Foundation and LinkedIn . (If you’re interested in general trends in big data and the future of the field, check out the line-up at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure:Data conference.)

Supporting the lifelong learner

In the last year, massive open online courses (MOOCs) captured the attention of the public and the media. And they’re sure to spark a good amount of buzz next week. Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng and edX president Anant Agarwal will participate in a keynote conversation. But during the week, others, including professors andadministrators, will bring their perspectives to the debate. Still others will talk about the wider world of online education beyond MOOCs and how learners can track their experiences and use it for career advancement.

Encouraging the maker mindset

The maker movement will also take center stage at SXSWedu this year with a dedicated Makerspace to show off hands-on approaches to learning, as well as several DIY workshops and panels throughout the week. For example, MAKE Magazine’s editor and founder will talk about tools for bringing the maker mindset into the classroom, Khan Academy will demo universal remote-controlled robots made from everyday objects and the Digital Harbor Foundation will share their experience in helping to build maker programs aligned to Common Core standards in Baltimore.

Bridging industry and philanthropy

It’s not just startups driving innovation in ed tech. Nonprofits and philanthropic organizations, from the Gates Foundation to InBloom to open-content non-profit CK-12, are playing key roles in using technology effectively in education. Bill Gates himself will give a keynote speech on his foundation’s work in education. And Matt Greenfield, a partner at Rethink Education, said the industry is seeing more “creative alliances between foundations and philanthropy and for-profits.” At the event, companies like skills-focused startup Everfi andUniversity Ventures will also share how their models blend public and private sector players.

Making way for mobile

Just like in the consumer tech world, mobile technology is top of mind. “Mobile penetration in the K-12 classroom is happening a faster clip than we thought,” said Jennifer Carolan, who leads the NewSchools Venture Fund’s Seed Fund. Tablets like the iPad and the Galaxy Note are spawning new learning apps and, at SXSWedu, educators will talk about how mobile devices could narrow the digital divide, empower students in Hispanic communities, boost in-class engagement, and more.

The maturing ecosystem

Some might look at the recent surge in ed tech accelerators and say it’s a sign of a bubble, while others argue that it’s more evidence that the nascent industry is growing up. Thanks to the rise of emerging technology, policy changes and the successful exits of a few ed tech startups, more talent and investors are giving the space an unprecedented amount of attention. “There’s an increased number of the most talented and smart people becoming attracted to this space … it’s not the way it’s always been,” said Mark Miller, a co-founder of new Boston accelerator LearnLaunchX. In addition to accelerators that give ed tech startups the infrastructure for success, more teachers-turned-entrepreneurs are bringing their experience and networks to bear in ed tech. “The rise of the teacher-preneur is a meme I’m hearing more about,” added Carolan. “They have an idea that’s effective in the classroom and are scaling [them].”

Apple today issued a press release to announce some big numbers for iTunes U (a billion downloads to be exact), but it has now also provided an update on iPads sales in the education market. In a statement to AllThingsD, Apple said it has sold a total of 4.5 million iPads direct to U.S. education institutions. Apple previously announced around a million units sold to U.S. schools in Q2 2012. It later said sales for iPad 2 in the K-12 market doubled y-o-y in Q3 2012 thanks to a price drop to $399. It appears Apple has since been selling even more into the sector every quarter, and the iPad mini’s $329 price tag, as well as even further discounts to iPad 2, could very likely be driving growth. Like previous iPads, Apple is selling Apple 10 packs of iPad minis to education for a discount. At Apple’s New York City education event in January 2012, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller provided some updates on education. He noted that around 1.5 million iPads were in use at U.S. education institutions, and this means Apple has sold around 3 million iPads to education over the past year. Apple CEO Tim Cook has reiterated several times during the company’s earnings calls that it plans to be “very aggressive” in the education market going forward. Update: Apple has confirmed in a statement to TechCrunch that it has sold 8 million iPads direct into education institutions worldwide. That’s a total of 3.5 million outside of the US to date.

Apple has sold 3M iPads directly into US education over past year and 4.5M total (Update: 8M worldwide) | 9to5Mac

IMAGINE, as 19th-century utopians often did, a society rich enough that fewer and fewer people need to work — a society where leisure becomes universally accessible, where part-time jobs replace the regimented workweek, and where living standards keep rising even though more people have left the work force altogether. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times Ross Douthat Go to Columnist Page » Ross Douthat’s Evaluations The columnist’s blog on politics and culture. More From Evaluations » Readers’ Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (259) » If such a utopia were possible, one might expect that it would be achieved first among the upper classes, and then gradually spread down the social ladder. First the wealthy would work shorter hours, then the middle class, and finally even high school dropouts would be able to sleep late and take four-day weekends and choose their own adventures — “to hunt in the morning,” as Karl Marx once prophesied, “fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner ...” Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich. Of course, nobody is hailing this trend as the sign of civilizational progress. Instead, the decline in blue-collar work is often portrayed in near-apocalyptic terms — on the left as the economy’s failure to supply good-paying jobs, and on the right as a depressing sign that government dependency is killing the American work ethic. But it’s worth linking today’s trends to the older dream of a post-work utopia, because there are ways in which the decline in work-force participation is actually being made possible by material progress. That progress can be hard to appreciate at the moment, but America’s immense wealth is still our era’s most important economic fact. “When a nation is as rich as ours,” Scott Winship points out in an essay for Breakthrough Journal, “it can realize larger absolute gains than it did in the past ... even if it has lower growth rates.” Our economy may look stagnant compared to the acceleration after World War II, but even disappointing growth rates are likely to leave the America of 2050 much richer than today. Those riches mean that we can probably find ways to subsidize — through public means and private — a continuing decline in blue-collar work. Many of the Americans dropping out of the work force are not destitute: they’re receiving disability payments and food stamps, living with relatives, cobbling together work here and there, and often doing as well as they might with a low-wage job. By historical standards their lives are more comfortable than the left often allows, and the fiscal cost of their situation is more sustainable than the right tends to admits. (Medicare may bankrupt us, but food stamps probably will not.) There is a certain air of irresponsibility to giving up on employment altogether, of course. But while pundits who tap on keyboards for a living like to extol the inherent dignity of labor, we aren’t the ones stocking shelves at Walmart or hunting wearily, week after week, for a job that probably pays less than our last one did. One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it? The answer is yes — but mostly because the decline of work carries social costs as well as an economic price tag. Even a grinding job tends to be an important source of social capital, providing everyday structure for people who live alone, a place to meet friends and kindle romances for people who lack other forms of community, a path away from crime and prison for young men, an example to children and a source of self-respect for parents. Here the decline in work-force participation is of a piece with the broader turn away from community in America — from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship. Like many of these trends, it poses a much greater threat to social mobility than to absolute prosperity. (A nonworking working class may not be immiserated; neither will its members ever find a way to rise above their station.) And its costs will be felt in people’s private lives and inner worlds even when they don’t show up in the nation’s G.D.P. In a sense, the old utopians were prescient: we’ve gained a world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before. But human flourishing is another matter. And it’s our fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, that’s threatened by the slow decline of work.

Following a recommendation from Bond Girl on Twitter, I spent a 95-minute chunk of Saturday night on YouTube, watching the first of five Leonard Susskind lectures on cosmology and very much looking forward to the rest. By coincidence, it’s targeted pretty much at exactly my level: you need a decent grounding in Newtonian mechanics and basic calculus, but nothing too sophisticated. It turns out there are a lot of people like Bond Girl and me out there: a slightly different version of the same lecture already has well over 200,000 views on YouTube. Give people the opportunity to learn interesting material by watching lectures by the best professors in the world, and it turns out they’ll do just that. This is fantastic for the Stanford brand: it gets it out into the world in the best possible way, and will surely, at the margin, drive up demand in terms of the number of people wanting to attend the university. And it’s also fantastic for the hundreds of thousands of people who are learning new and fascinating things by watching these lectures. The free YouTube content can be considered to be an extra column on the far left side of this chart, which Barry Nolan put together after watching a Fred Wilson video: YouTube is even more democratic than MOOCs: there’s basically no structure at all, you can drop in and drop out as you please, and the yield is effectively zero, since no one ever “graduates” with any kind of credential from watching videos online. It’s 100% education, 0% credentialing. This is an important point: even if 99% of the people who enroll in MOOCs never graduate, that doesn’t mean they never learned anything along the way. What you get when you move from left to right, in this chart, is an increase in structure: some kind of organized, disciplined way of getting a group of people to basically experience the same thing at the same time. It’s not so much that the content gets better (although it might); it’s more that the formal architecture surrounding the content becomes increasingly elaborate and expensive. This phenomenon is not confined to education, of course. Think about the Metropolitan Opera. There’s the real deal, on the far right, where you pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket, sit in a darkened hall with a few thousand other opera-goers, and experience a full-on live performance. Then, one step over to the left, you have the Live in HD performances — you spend a couple of dozen dollars, sit in a darkened cinema with many others, and experience the performance on screen, over an excellent sound system. It’s not exactly the same experience, of course, but in some ways it’s better, especially when compared to the view from the cheaper seats at the Met. Take another step to the left, and you have the storied Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts — they’re still live, but you lose the visuals, and the physical architecture of the opera house or cinema. If you’re willing to break the operas up into tiny chunks, you can head over to the Met’s YouTube channel, which has over 1.5 million views already, and allows people to dip in and out at their pleasure — just like they can fire up a DVD they’ve bought or rented, watching it at home. (Netflix, sadly, doesn’t have a lot of opera available for streaming yet, although it does have Zeffirelli’s much-disliked Otello.) Fred Wilson’s advice to Wharton, then, is basically to be more like the Met: take what you do, and put it out there with varying degrees of structure and architecture, at various price points from $0 to $133,600. The more discoverable you are, the richer your brand will become — and, just like TED discovered when it started putting its talks online for free, the more you give such things away, the more demand there is for the very expensive live product. In education, the worry isn’t really about the future of schools like Stanford and Wharton, but rather about the future of smaller universities: could their full-price offerings be pushed out of the market by the cheaper versions from elite colleges? It’s possible, but it hasn’t happened yet, and it might not happen at all. After all, my intuition is that people are more likely to want to go see a performance at their local opera house after seeing a Live in HD performance from the Met. And the more Leonard Susskind lectures you watch online, the more you might want to take a proper course at your local college. It seems to me that the rise of what you might call these “diffusion lines” is the rise of a brand-new marketing platform for the asset class as a whole, be it education or opera or anything else. Up until now, it’s been hard to get many people interested in opera, because the barriers are so high, and because most of us need a bit of structure in order to be able to sit through it and appreciate it. (I love going to see live opera, for instance, but never listen to it on the stereo at home, because I’ll end up getting distracted almost immediately.) Similarly, the arguments for going to college tend to center on the value of the credential, rather than the inherent value of the education itself. Once we bring first-rate educational experiences to everybody, then the proportion of those people who want to go to college can only go up. And that, in turn, will be great for everybody, and for the economy as a whole.

Personalized learning via inBloom

https://www.inbloom.org/our-vision

The education market in the U.S. is a trillion dollar industry. The total amount of money both public and private for K–12 and universities is more than every other information industry combined. But for all the innovation and technology that has created the 21st century world we live in, the educational field has yet to fulfill its potential to equip the next generation of citizens with the skills necessary to progress our digital economy.

That’s where educational-technology startups come in. This report examines the qualities that those startups need and the types of technology they must employ in order to succeed at the university level. The report also details the promising companies that will help the existing university system improve. With a projected $10 billion in spending for IT in universities in 2013, startups with demonstrated value can make substantial inroads in this market.

Key highlights from this report include:

Successful ed-tech companies will improve the cost efficiencies of content production and the learning process as well as partner with universities and education companies.

Adaptive-learning and blended-learning platforms are changing the way students and educators interact with and employ content.

In the near term, students will have anytime access to educational tools that are personalized and project-based.

Anne Midgett has a good article about how after years of the pendulum swinging against arts education in public schools in favor of a back-to-basics approach, it's now making a comeback in some places as a great way to keep kids engaged. Perhaps the arts can help kids "develop 21st-century skills such as teamwork and innovative thinking — in sum, be the key to their salvation."

The existence of this debate strikes me as highlighting the single greatest problem with neighborhood-based public education in the United States, namely the need to try to reach some kind of collective decision about this. If restaurant owners had to decide whether it's "better" to serve Indian food or Chinese food, the result would be bad food. Not because the restaurant owners are inept or because the restaurants are staffed with "bad cooks" but simply because that's a terribly flawed way to run a restaurant. If everyone had to eat out at the restaurant that happened to be closest to their house, you'd have a lot of problems getting even very talented cooks to produce outcomes that people are happy with. In the best case scenario you'd have a neighborhood that wasn't very diverse in which people could reach a consensus about what they wanted and deliver something that most people were happy with while marginalizing minority preferences. But you'd also have a lot of senseless cycling from fad to fad, a lot of unfair complaints directed at the restaurant managers and staff for not dealing well with an impossible situation, and a situation in which really poorly-run restaurants depress local property values and become a kind of de facto affordable housing policy.

In life we generally let people do their jobs well by giving them the opportunity specialize a bit. The Moneybox blog hopes to provide excellent service to the sort of person who's interested in the kind of topics I cover, but it's totally fine if many millions of people would rather read something completely different. If I had to try to write a blog that appealed to every single person who lived in some randomly selected neighborhood, I'd fail. Not because I'm a bad writer, but because that's much too hard.

Now since education happens to children, you do get a lot of agency problems with choice. My parents are both fairly artsy people so they sent me to schools with a lot of artsy stuff happening, which I hated. I would have much rather done more math problems. But lots of kids love arts education and its presence makes them more much interested in school and learning and it brings them all kinds of ancillary benefits. There's just no reason we should be trying to force administrators and teachers to make broad categorical decisions about this kind of thing.

Providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs) tend to be based in elite pockets of the United States (Silicon Valley and Boston, for example), but their students increasingly come from all corners of the world. And to attract and accommodate a more global student body, online education startup Coursera on Thursday said that it had added even more school partners, about half of which are international, to offer more courses reflecting different languages, perspectives and disciplines.

The Palo Alto-based company said it had added 29 new academic partners, 16 of which are international, nearly doubling its list of institutional partners (you can see a full list of new schools below). With its new partners, the startup will not only offer courses in French (it already launched a course with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), but also Spanish, Italian and Chinese.

Since launching nearly a year ago, the company said it has registered almost 2.8 million users and gets about 1.45 million enrollments per month. It has also launched certificate-oriented tracks and received approval from the American Council on Education (ACE) for credit equivalency for a few of its courses to give its students more opportunities to earn degrees and find jobs.

But that fast growth has not come without some pain. In the last month, the startup has twice run into a bit of turbulence with its classes. Earlier this month, itsuspended a class after student complaints about technical glitches and the design of the class. And, this week, a professor departed a course midway through.

While those incidents throw a bit of cold water on the MOOC hype, they show that the model is still in its infancy and, hopefully, the lessons from their aftermath will be instructive for classes to come.

With its new partners, Coursera now has agreements with 62 academic institutions. You can see a full list of its new partners below:

California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Case Western Reserve University Chinese University of Hong Kong Curtis Institute of Music Ecole Polytechnique, France IE Business School Leiden University, Netherlands Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat München National Taiwan University National University of Singapore Northwestern University Penn State University Rutgers University Sapienza Università di Roma Technische Universität München (TUM) Technical University of Denmark The University of Tokyo Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Universidad TecVirtual del Sistema Tecnológico de Monterrey Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona University of California, San Diego University of California, Santa Cruz University of Colorado, Boulder University of Copenhagen, Denmark University of Geneva, Switzerland University of Minnesota, Twin Cities University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill University of Rochester University of Wisconsin-Madison

Have an idea for an ed tech startup? Now might be a good time to go forward with it, because in the last month not one, not two, but four new ed tech accelerators have launched.

Earlier this month, we reported on the launches of Boston’s LearnLaunchX and New York’s Socratic Labs. On Monday, Kaplan and TechStars announced a new ed tech accelerator and on Wednesday, Pearson announced its own incubator for ed tech companies. Until this year, Palo Alto’s ImagineK-12 was the only traditional accelerator focused on ed tech.

While Kaplan’s program will follow the model of other TechStars programs (mentorship, space and capital in exchange for a bit of equity), Pearson is taking a slightly different approach with its incubator, called Catalyst. Ten accepted startups will continue to work from their own locations and mostly receive remote access to Pearson executives and product experts. They’ll each receive a $10,000 stipend for travel and other expenses (to enable meetings with their mentors and others), and will have the opportunity to present at a Demo Day at the end of the program.

Another big difference in the Pearson model is that the company won’t be taking an equity stake in any of the companies accepted to the program. If and when the startups raise financing, Pearson could invest separately, but there are no guarantees. The company also said that Pearson could become a customer of one of the startups during the program.

Socratic Labs has already announced the startups in its inaugural class, but it will be interesting to see what kinds of companies the other programs attract and accept. Pearson’s name and position as a potential acquirer could appeal to founders, as could the fact that its program doesn’t take equity. But while Pearson’s program only provides mentorship from Pearson executives, Kaplan’s accelerator, which will be based in New York, carries the weight of the TechStars brand and offers access to a wider group of mentors. Supporters include ed tech founders Udemy CEO Eren Bali, Kaplan’s CEO Andy Rosen, and General Assembly CEO Jake Schwartz, as well as TechStars co-founders David Cohen and Brad Feld, Columbia University’s chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan and others.

Editor's note: This post was originally published on the official blog of the U.S. Department of Education.

“… My administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria — where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” - President Obama, 2013 State of the Union

The interactive College Scorecard gives students and families five key pieces of data about a college: costs, graduation rate, loan default rate, average amount borrowed, and employment.

Too often, students and their families don’t have the right tools to help them sort through the information they need to decide which college or university is right for them. The search can be overwhelming, and the information from different colleges can be hard to compare.

That’s why, today, our Administration released a “College Scorecard” that empowers families to make smart investments in higher education. As the President said last night, we want to help families get the most bang for their educational buck.

The College Scorecard – as part of President Obama’s continued efforts to hold colleges accountable for cost, value and quality – highlights key indicators about the cost and value of institutions across the country to help students choose a school that is well-suited to meet their needs, priced affordably, and is consistent with their educational and career goals.

The tool is interactive, so students can choose among any number of options based on their individual needs – including location, size, campus setting, and degree and major programs.

Each Scorecard includes five key pieces of data about a college: costs, graduation rate, loan default rate, average amount borrowed, and employment. These data will be updated periodically, and the Department plans to publish information on average earnings in the coming year.

Get started by visiting WhiteHouse.gov/scorecard.

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