Thromigal's Blog

At my business school, students end their MBA curriculum with a Capstone class. This class is intended to "bring it all together" and hence its moniker. It is a special pedagogical experience for student and teacher and one that should not be bypassed. It's always good to consolidate one's knowledge and have the pieces fall in place. Every now and then a student prefers to opt out of this end game experience, preferring the Thesis option that may be taken in lieu of their Capstone class. This is a mistake. Unless a student is highly motivated, knows exactly what he wants to do for a thesis, and has already undertaken at least a hundred hours of exploration of the subject matter of the thesis, it is a plain waste of time. And the opportunity cost is high, because the learning from the Capstone class is priceless. Yes, Capstone is a lot of work, and it is tempting at the end of the long haul towards a graduate degree to want to give oneself a break. But especially in th...

In April this year, the philosophy department at San Jose State University sent a well-reasoned letter to law professor Michael Sandel at Harvard, explaining to him why they did not need his online justice course imposed on their students by the management of the California State System. Being ordered to feed your children someone else's cooking is an affront, to put it mildly. The debate about traditional pedagogical delivery and the new kid on the block -- online education -- is alive, and the SJSU faculty went to battle, against the online upstart, and their administrative overlords. Universities are run by academics (or we professors like to think so), but state systems are run by bureaucrats. Conflict in our education system has been engineered in, sadly. Academics are never paid enough to often realize costs are an issue, and bureaucrats only care about costs. The truth is, the fight over online education is being fought on a battleground of costs. It would be sad if this wer...