Global Education

Follow this link to read an excellent article from Inside Higer Ed. The article discusses why community colleges need to internationalize their curriculum. As an Economist the following comment jumped out at me.

“The employability impact of what can happen to you if you don't have
international experience is real,” said Harder, adding that students who do not
have global exposure are considerably less valuable to an employer than students
with such experience. “Community colleges cannot afford for their students not
to compete in a global labor market.”

Higher Education Going the Way of Manufacturing

Is Higher Ed going the way of manufacturing? Will the U.S. higher education system fall behind the rest of the world? Here is an interesting interview on this topic.

Unemployment

I like the title of this video. An economist would have titled it "Imports equal Exports" or "globalization and employment". It is a very good video.

Holiday Gift Ideas With A Capitalist Twist

It is December and Christmas is around the corner. I heard about the following group called Kiva They are a non-profit group. They let you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world.
This is not a charity but it gives a helping hand to people around the world who are trying to change their circumstances and thereby their environment. If you look to the right you can see some examples of businesses being funded through this program.
I was thinking that we could make a loan as a Department. If any of you think this is a good idea go to Kiva and lets organize and pick a business through this blog.

Did You Know?

I got the following email from Ms. Brock. I posted the video here. I think that I have already posted a different version of this video on the blog back on September 10. Anyway this is a great video and deserve a reposting.

Excellent Video From Think:Lab Blog

I got tired of reading discussion postings from my online class, and started to look at other peoples' blogs. I found an excellent video on a possibly an excellent blog called Think:Lab. This was the first time for me on this blog and I have not looked at all of their postings. This video explains why I worry for the future of our students.

Free Education? Click Here to Watch

By clicking on the title you can watch Richard Baraniuk from Rice University giving a speech at the TEDtalk. He is talking of doing to publishing what has happened to the music industry. This is an excellent talk and has given me a crazy idea. Can you guess what?

Skill To Focus and Summarize

Yesterday during the workshop they introduced various games to play and cooperative learning activities to conduct with the students. In one of the activities we were given 7 questions regarding globalization. Next we were divided into 7 groups. Each group was to become an expert on a question. After 20 minutes we were asked to mingle and find experts to answer each of these questions. It was an interesting experiment and I may use this technique with some topics to get my classes moving. After one teacher asked "what is the objective of this exercise?'
Our facilitator Dr. Chiara Gratton Lavoie an economist replied to this question with "They get the skill to focus and summarize".
She did not talk about the economics of the exercise but about students needing the skill to focus and summarize. She complained about students who write 2 or 3 pages of nothing and expecting a good grade.
She likes short precise answers. Later talking to her at lunch I learned that her speciality is in Microeconomics.
This is something that I knew instinctively but had not verbalized it. This is an important skill for our students.

Extra Credit Crazy

I attended the workshop on Globalization at Cal State Fullerton. It was all High School teachers and I was the only one from community college. These were a dedicated group of teachers and I was impressed by their interest and enthusiasm for the dismal science. I met some teachers from the school districts that feed into Rio Hondo. I targeted these teachers and during the breaks I would speak and listen to them. One of them complained about economics not being tested by the state and Economics being taught to seniors making this class prime target for teachers with seniority who sees this class as easy to teach.
These are the teachers who play the stock market game over and over again.
Another teacher complained about administrators wanting teachers to make these classes easy so their students can graduate with higher GPA. They accomplish this by assigning extra credit which explains why our students are extra credit crazy!

Globalization Workshop

This weekend I will attend a workshop on Globalization. This workshop is sponsored by Center for Economics Education. Their goal is to educated high school economics teachers. I am curious as to who are these guys? Is economics still being taught by the guy called "Coach"?

The workshop is supposed to discuss how the globalization can be integrated more into principles of economics class.

Outsourcing Educators?

The following article is from Reuters and I had posted it on my old blog (the dismal educator). This article makes me think of Friedman's book "The World is Flat". In this book he discusses how technology is breaking down geographic barriers and making workers around the world competitive. As long as a person has the skill sets they can compete anywhere in the globe without having to move and thereby gaining a comparative advantage.
As online classes become more popular will there ever be a day that our jobs could be outsourced? Will our barriers to entry (our credentials) hold back this trend?
As untenured faculty I am very nervous about the Law of one price.
Story--Courtesy Reuters
U.S. homework outsourced as "e-tutoring" grows

By Jason Szep Thu Sep 28, 10:43 AM ET

BOSTON (Reuters) - Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour -- in India.

"It's made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before," said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.

Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 "e-tutors" mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.

Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English -- a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.

"I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks' coffee," Robison said. "We did our own form of summer school all summer."

The outsourcing trend that fueled a boom in Asian call centers staffed by educated, low-paid workers manning phones around the clock for U.S. banks and other industries is moving fast into an area at the heart of U.S. culture: education.

It comes at a difficult time for the U.S. education system: only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics, according to government statistics.

China and India, meanwhile, are producing the world's largest number of science and engineering graduates -- at least five times as many as in the United States, where the number has fallen since the early 1980s.

Parents using schools like Taylor's say they are doing whatever they can to give children an edge that can lead to better marks, better colleges and a better future, even if it comes with an Indian accent about 9,000 miles away.

SLANG & AMERICAN ACCENTS

"We've changed the paradigm of tutoring," said Krishnan Ganesh, founder and chairman of TutorVista, which offers subjects ranging from grammar to geometry for children as young as 6 years old to adults in college.

"It's not that the U.S. education system is not good. It's just that it's impossible to give personalized education at an affordable cost unless you use technology, unless you use the Internet and unless you can use lower-cost job centers like India," he said over a crackly Internet-phone line from Bangalore. "We can deliver that."

Many of the tutors have masters degrees in their subjects, said Ganesh. On average, they have taught for 10 years. Each undergoes 60 hours of training, including lessons on how to speak in a U.S. accent and how to decipher American slang.

They are schooled on U.S. history and state curricula, and work in mini-call centers or from their homes across India. One operates out of Hong Kong, teaching the Chinese language.

As with other Indian e-tutoring firms such as Growing Stars Inc., students log on to TutorVista's Web site and are assigned lessons by tutors who communicate using voice-over-Internet technology and an instant messaging window. They share a simulated whiteboard on their computers.

Denise Robison said Taylor had trouble understanding her tutor's accent at first. "Now that she is used to it, it doesn't bother her at all," she said.

TutorVista launched a British service in August and Ganesh said he plans to expand into China in December to tap demand for English lessons from China's booming middle class. In 2007, he plans to launch Spanish-language lessons and build on Chinese and French lessons already offered.

A New Delhi tutoring company, Educomp Solutions Ltd., estimates the U.S. tutoring market at $8 billion and growing. Online companies, both from the United States and India, are looking to tap millions of dollars available to firms under the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act for remedial tutoring.

Teachers unions hope to stop that from happening.

"Tutoring providers must keep in frequent touch with not only parents but classroom teachers and we believe there is greater difficulty in an offshore tutor doing that," said Nancy Van Meter, a director at the American Federation of Teachers.

But No Child Left Behind, a signature Bush administration policy, encourages competition among tutoring agencies and leaves the door open for offshore tutors, said Diane Stark Rentner of the Center on Education Policy in Washington.

"The big test is whether the kids are actually learning. Until you answer that, I don't know if you can pass judgment on whether this is a good or bad way to go," she said.

Does Our Textbooks Cover The Important Trends?

The dollar fell against the Euro. The Chinese have a trillion U.S. dollars. Will monetary policy be run out of Beijing or Washington. We should teach our students that pretty soon the chinese will have veto power over our monetary policy. This is an idea that I do not see in the main parts of many textbooks.

Is Macro Policy as We Teach it Becoming Irrelevant?

We should include International Trade and effects of International trade in our lectures. Our Fiscal Policy Monetary policy chapters may become useless soon! Read the following article from business week. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_47/b4010001.htm
"No matter which party you belong to, or which Big Idea or school of economic policy you subscribe to, one thing is clear: Globalization has overwhelmed Washington's ability to control the economy. Whether you're a Republican supply-side tax-cutter, a Wall Street deficit hawk of either party, or a Silicon Valley techie type, your preferred levers of economic policy just don't work as well as they once did.

As recently as 10 years ago, the U.S. economy was still relatively self-contained. Then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan--often called the most powerful man in the world--could be sure that the U.S. economic machine would eventually respond when he called for higher or lower rates. Tax and spending decisions made in Washington could set the course for growth, while economic events in the rest of the world, such as the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s, were felt as minor bumps.

That has changed. Since 1995 imports have risen from 12% of gross domestic product to about 17%. And foreign money finances about 32% of U.S. domestic investment, up from 7% in 1995. In other words, the U.S. is more open to the global economy than ever before, and the links run in both directions. Now many of the levers affecting the U.S. economy are located not in Washington but in Beijing, London, and even Mexico City."