UC-Berkeley Joins Harvard-MIT Online Course Program

Inside Higher Ed pointed me to a story about UC-Berkeley’s online endeavors.  A press release related to the story is below.  Below that is a link to the Inside Higher Ed article:

UC BERKELEY JOINS HARVARD AND MIT NOT-FOR-PROFIT ONLINE LEARNING COLLABORATIVE; EDX BROADENS FREE COURSE OFFERINGS INTO PUBLIC HEALTH, COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOLID-STATE CHEMISTRY; OPENS REGISTRATION (excerpts)

EdX, the online learning initiative founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and launched in May, announced today the addition of the University of California, Berkeley to its platform. UC Berkeley, ranked No. 1 among public universities in the United States in 2012 by US News & World Report, will collaborate with edX to expand the group of participating "X Universities" – universities offering their courses on the edX platform.  Through edX, the "X Universities" will provide interactive education wherever there is access to the Internet and will enhance teaching and learning through research about how students learn, and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. EdX plans to add other "X Universities" from around the world to the edX platform in the coming months.

UC Berkeley will offer two courses on edX this Fall, and the university will also serve as the inaugural chair of the to-be-formed "X University" Consortium. Robert J. Birgeneau, the Chancellor of UC Berkeley, announced: "We are committed to excellence in online education with the dual goals of distributing higher education more broadly and enriching the quality of campus-based education. We share the vision of MIT and Harvard leadership and believe that collaborating with the not-for-profit model of edX is the best way to do this. Fiat Lux."

Meanwhile, edX announced two new courses each from HarvardX and MITx to be launched on edX this fall, along with MITx's 6.002x Circuits & Electronics. All of the courses will be hosted from edX's website, www.edx.org.

MIT launched its MITx online learning initiative in December 2011, with 6.002x as its prototype course, and more than 150,000 students worldwide enrolled. EdX was announced by Harvard and MIT in May, with each university committing to contribute $30 million toward the online partnership.

"We are very excited that UC Berkeley is joining us in this effort," said Anant Agarwal, President of edX. 

"EdX is about revolutionizing learning, and we have received a tremendous outpouring of excitement and interest from universities around the world. UC Berkeley is an extraordinary public institution known not only for its academic excellence but also for its innovativeness. With this collaboration, edX is now positioned to improve education more rapidly, both online and on-campus worldwide."

"From the outset, we have imagined edX as a platform to be shared with other educational institutions," said MIT President L. Rafael Reif. "Berkeley's decision to join the effort is great news: MIT is already seeing the benefits of its collaboration with Harvard, and we look forward to working with our remarkable colleagues at Berkeley as we explore the future of online education. Together, we are sure to learn much about how to enrich residential education even as we reach new learners far from our campuses."

In addition to the funding commitments by Harvard and MIT, edX has already garnered outside financial support, including two individual leadership gifts. MIT alumnus Philippe Laffont, founder and chief investment officer of Coatue Management, LLC, has made a gift to support MITx in honor of MIT Professor Stephen A. Ward, Laffont's thesis advisor at MIT. Harvard Alumnus Jonathan Grayer, former chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc. and cofounder of Weld North LLC, has made a gift in support of HarvardX.

Foundation support has also begun to flow in. Earlier in the summer, MIT received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Grant funds will go towards developing an introduction to computer science course on the edX platform and partnering with a postsecondary institution that targets low-income young adults to offer this introductory course in a "flipped classroom" setting, where students watch course videos at home and work together in the classroom.

"Interest from other institutions in collaborating with edX has been enormous from the outset and we are delighted that the partnership announced today by Berkeley has come together so quickly," said Harvard President Drew Faust. "Since the beginning, our goal has been to broaden edX offerings by partnering with other universities who are equally committed to both expanding access to education and improving research about teaching and learning. Today's announcement is in an important step in that direction."

UC Berkeley will bring significant, new, open source technology to the edX platform. Developers from UC Berkeley are working directly with the edX team to integrate the technology. EdX will release its learning platform as open source software so that anyone around the world can adopt and improve this shared tool. Timing of the release has not yet been determined. The (UC-Berkeley) classes to be offered on edX this fall are:

BerkeleyX – "Artificial Intelligence" is a course in the basic ideas and techniques underlying the design of intelligent computer systems, with a specific emphasis on the statistical and decision-theoretic modeling paradigm. By the end of this course, students will have built autonomous agents that reason in uncertain environments and will have developed machine learning algorithms that will classify handwritten digits and photographs. The on-campus version of the course is one of the most popular computer science courses at Berkeley. It will be taught by UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Pieter Abbeel and Associate Professor Dan Klein, a recent recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley's highest teaching honor.

BerkeleyX – "Software as a Service" teaches the fundamentals for engineering long-lived software using highly-productive agile techniques to develop Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails. The topics include test-driven development, behavior-driven/user-centric design, design patterns, legacy code, refactoring and deployment. It will be taught by UC Berkeley Adjunct Associate Professor Armando Fox, who has received teaching and mentoring awards from Stanford University, the Society of Women Engineers and Tau Beta Pi Honor Society, and Professor David A. Patterson, winner of the ACM Karl Karlstrom Teaching Award and the IEEE Mulligan Medal in Education.

For this introductory set of courses, certificates of mastery will be available at no charge for each of the courses to those learners motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.

ABOUT EDX

EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that features learning designed specifically for interactive study via the web. Based on a long history of collaboration and their shared educational missions the founders are creating a new online-learning experience. Anant Agarwal, former Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serves as the first president of edX. Along with offering online courses, the institutions will use edX to research how students learn and how technology can transform learning—both on-campus and worldwide. EdX is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard.

Full release at https://www.edx.org/press/uc-berkeley-joins-edx

The Inside Higher Ed article is at

http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/07/24/berkeley-joins-edx

There are advantages to being online:

How the Hotel Sausage Got Made

CaliforniaWatch has a story on the UCLA hotel project that recently passed the Regents.  It notes problems that this blog has pointed out:

“(Chancellor) Block noted in his presentation that the hotel and conference center would serve not only academic conference attendees, but also donors, parents and alumni coming to UCLA for activities ‘in furtherance of UCLA’s educational mission.’ But critics have noted that the Internal Revenue Service has treated alumni, for example, as members of the general public, suggesting that the university could be exposed to the unrelated business income tax. According to ‘The Tax Law of Colleges and Universities’ by Bertrand M. Harding, the IRS made this ruling clear when it considered income from alumni use of a university’s recreational golf course as unrelated to an educational purpose. An attorney from McKenna Long & Aldridge, a law firm representing the neighborhood group Save Westwood Village, noted the same IRS ruling at the regents meeting and in a letter to UCLA.”

[There then follows some pithy quotes from yours truly in the article - which modesty forces me to omit - but which point out that if you don’t fill the 250 rooms, you can’t make money and that it is costless for local hotel owners – who oppose the project – to complain to the tax authorities if transgressions in occupancy occur.]

So why did the Regents approve the project financing in July, after they originally refused to do so in March?  How did the sausage get made?

“Since (March), Regent Hadi Makarechian said, members of the (Buildings & Grounds) committee participated in three or four conference calls and a number of meetings and corresponded back and forth with UCLA officials to get answers to their questions. Importantly, UCLA secured a July 3 letter to the regents from the Luskins stating their desire to have the project on campus.”

CaliforniaWatch obtained a copy of the letter from UCLA.  One paragraph is redacted.  It is carefully crafted – masterfully written! - to close off any option to the Regents other than walking away from $50 million.  One sentence is particularly interesting:

“From the outset of our discussion with UCLA, we were focused on the development of a residential conference center on the UCLA core campus.”

Read that sentence carefully and you will see it does not quite say – as it might seem - that the Luskins originated the proposal.  It says they “were focused” on it.  Who focused them?  In fact, UCLA has never denied doing the focusing “from the outset.”  Indeed, as our post on the July Regents session noted, President Yudof was careful not to claim that the Luskins originated the hotel idea.  He said instead that they now wanted it as proposed to the Regents but that he didn’t know about the history. 

The full CaliforniaWatch article is at http://californiawatch.org/print/17171.  It is also at:

http://www.baycitizen.org/education/story/ucla-hotel-plan-moves-forward-despite/print/

The redacted letter can be read at:

Open publication - Free publishing - More ucla

No explanation is provided for UCLA’s redaction in the article.

Update: The conservative aggregator website Flashreport lists the article above and refers to UCLA going into the "hotel business." Below is a screenshot from the Flashreport website:

(And everyone, including the Regents, refers to the facility as a "hotel.")

Empowered to the People: Poizner-UCLA Extension Online Venture Launching

This blog has written in the past about online education and, in particular, a venture called “Empowered” involving UCLA Extension and Steve Poizner which seems about the launch.  Poizner, some will recall, was a GOP candidate for governor in 2010, losing the nomination to Meg Whitman in the primary (who then lost to Jerry Brown).  The program offers certificates in various management and other fields with a sticker price of $12,800, although students in the first class get a reduced price of $9,800.   An iPad is thrown in “free,” however.  

The launch comes with a slick video which – as is often the case – doesn’t load well unless you have a fast connection (which isn’t a good sign for an online program). 

Ever helpful, however, yours truly has reduced the video to a lower-grade version which should run better.  Link below:

The website for the program and launch is at http://www.empowered.com/wakeup.  Other info on the program is also at that website.  Our most recent prior post on this venture is at:

http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/07/steve-poizner-and-ucla-extension-in.html

Beyond the Headlines

The headline on a story in today’s Sacramento Bee reads:

“2 UC Davis neurosurgeons accused of experimental surgery are banned from human research”

But, as is often the case, the story that follows is more complicated than the headline suggests.  It raises issues of bioethics related to the specific procedures described and also questions about management control in medical facilities.  I mention the latter because some readers will recall the body parts scandal at UCLA and the scrambled eggs/fertility clinic scandal at UC-Irvine.

We have a comment option on this blog which is rarely used but if medical professionals in particula have views on this story, it would be interesting to see them.

The full story is at 

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/22/4648415/2-uc-davis-neurosurgeons-accused.html

UPDATE: A further story is at
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/28/4668495/uc-davis-neurosurgeon-department.html

One Suspects We Will Be Hearing More About This Issue

Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/20/12

UCLA Faculty Leader Found to Have Wronged Professor to Appease Jewish Group

By Peter Schmidt

A faculty panel at the University of California at Los Angeles has admonished the chairman of the university's Academic Senate for violating the rights of an associate professor who had been accused by an outside advocacy group of misusing his position to call for a boycott of Israel.  In a letter issued this month, the UCLA Academic Senate's Committee on Academic Freedom held that the Senate's chairman, Andrew F. Leuchter, was wrong to have told the advocacy group and the news media that David Delgado Shorter, an associate professor of world arts and cultures, should not have posted a link to a boycott-Israel campaign on a course Web site and regretted doing so.

Mr. Shorter, who had stood by his decision to post the link and had denied ever apologizing for it, on Wednesday filed a formal grievance with the Senate's Committee on Privilege and Tenure urging it to formally censure Dr. Leuchter, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. The grievance accuses Dr. Leuchter of showing disregard for academic freedom and of violating the university's ethics code himself by using his position for political purposes.  In an e-mail sent to The Chronicle on Friday, Dr. Leuchter thanked the Committee on Academic Freedom for its perspective but said, "I strongly support academic freedom." In an e-mail sent in May, Dr. Leuchter said Mr. Shorter had never been censured and the complaint against Mr. Shorter "was resolved informally, but effectively and appropriately, with Professor Shorter's department chair simply speaking to him about it."

The controversy over Mr. Shorter stemmed from his posting of a link to the boycott-Israel campaign on the Web site for course titled "Tribal Worldviews," which he taught last winter. In a letter sent to University of California officials in March, the Amcha Initiative, an advocacy group that regards some criticism of Israel on college campuses as crossing the line into anti-Semitism, asked if Mr. Shorter's promotion of the academic and cultural boycott of Israel was protected by the university's rules of academic freedom. Mr. Shorter had defended the link to the boycott campaign as one of many links he posted to direct students to resources for class discussions on cultural boycotts and related matters…

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz who is a co-founder of the Amcha Initiative, on Friday expressed frustration that the debate had become focused on the university's treatment of Mr. Shorter rather than the bigger question of whether the university's ethics code should allow professors to advocate on behalf of a boycott of Israel. She said her group had never asked for Mr. Shorter to be investigated or disciplined. "There are many Shorters," she said. "This particular incident was just an example we have brought. It is a huge issue. It is not just about a Web site. It is about what is happening in the classroom."

Full story at http://chronicle.com/article/UCLA-Faculty-Leader-Found-to/133089/

Update: LA Times story at
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/ucla-prof-wins-in-fight-over-academic-freedom.html

Listen to Audio of Special Regents Meeting of June 19, 2012

Although we have posted audio from the July Regents meeting, there was a special meeting earlier called for June 19.  Below is the agenda and audio for that meeting.

Tuesday, June 19: Special Meeting of Regents

12:30 pm Committee on Compensation (Regents Only Session)

12:45 pm Committee on Compensation (Open Session - includes public comment session)

1:05 pm Board (open session)

The three sessions above were to approve appointment of Amy Dorr – Dean of UCLA’s GSEIS - as UC Provost and EVC-Academic Affairs, $350,000 plus moving and related expenses.

1:30 pm Committee on Investments: Review of investment returns and policies for the endowment and other non-pension funds.

Agenda of the Committee on Investments at

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/regmeet/june12/invest.pdf

You can hear the audio at the link below:

Too Much?

The LA Times today features a UCLA study finding that folks in LA suffer from having too much stuff.  They just can't help themselves and overdo it, adding more than they need.  Excerpt:

About 10 years ago, Rhonda Voo's house was a mess. Shelves packed with Beanie Babies, Barbies and various other toys covered the walls in her cramped three-bedroom, one bathroom house. With three children between the ages of 5 and 11, Voo discovered that even finding a pair of shoes became a daily challenge.  "It's like all the stuff you own kind of weighs you down," said Voo, who was one of 32 families participating in a UCLA study on family life in Los Angeles. Voo wasn't the only one feeling the stress. An interdisciplinary group of researchers — archaeologists, anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists — found that mothers who described their houses as messy or cluttered experienced higher rates of a depressed mood in the evening…

Of course, our campus could never have too much stuff put on it, could it?  UCLA would never buy more/build more than it needs, would it?  (Just asking!)

The LA Times article is at

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-family-study-20120720,0,5652177.story

Even if, in the remote possibility, we did try to buy too much, luckily we have the Regents to stop us. If we didn't absolutely need a 250-room hotel, they wouldn't OK it. Right?

And if even the Regents were to overdo it, there is a morning-after remedy: