Penn in the News

President Obama wants college students at Missouri and elsewhere to organize and protest when it's important, but he's also worried about something else: students being too quick to shut down the other side and not listen. In a wide-ranging interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, he argued that on college campuses, students are too eager to avoid debate and discussion:

Starting in the mid-20th century, academe became idolized, in good times, as embodying everything right about America, and demonized, in bad times, as embodying everything wrong. It’s neither, and both — a crazy, amorphous amalgam of interests and histories that couldn’t have been planned and won’t become extinct. It was ragtag and subpar until World War II, then enjoyed a 30-year golden age.

Steven Berkowitz of the Perelman School of Medicine offers his advice on how to discuss the violence in Paris with children.

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education writes about the college experience for African-American students at HBCUs.

Are you part a MOOC at your school? Have you taught, developed, TA’d, facilitated, designed, filmed, edited, assessed or communicated about an open online course at your college or university? The most vocal opinions on MOOCs seem to belong to those who have never worked on a MOOC.  Let’s give the practitioners a chance to talk about their experiences. Here are 5 ways that I have observed how creating and teaching MOOCs can impact residential teaching and learning:

EdX, provider of massive open online courses, hosts an assortment of offerings on Chinese history. There's The Study of Folklore from Peking University, a look at international politics from Seoul National University and a five-part series on everything from aristocratic culture to neo-Confucianism from Harvard University.

The Department of Education announced Tuesday that it would expand its program to forgive federal student loan debt to thousands more students who attended programs of Corinthian Colleges, once one of the nation’s largest for-profit education companies. Earlier this year, the department said that tens of thousands of students who had attended Heald College, Corinthian campuses mostly in California, were eligible for immediate processing of requests for debt relief.

Adrian Raine of the School of Arts & Sciences and the Perelman School of Medicine is featured for studying neurocriminology.

Fewer students are earning a college credential within six years of first enrolling in college, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The nonprofit clearinghouse is able to track 96 percent of students nationwide. It found an overall national completion rate of 52.9 percent for students who enrolled in the fall of 2009. That rate was down 2.1 percentage points from that of the previous year's cohort of students, according to the clearinghouse, and the rate of decline is accelerating.

Namni Goel of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on the effects of sleep deprivation on the body aside from fatigue.