Penn in the News

Ian Lustick of the School of Arts & Sciences talks about the arrest of Keonna Thomas, a Philadelphia woman accused of being ready to travel to Syria to join the terror group ISIS. .

In free online courses offered by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teachers are increasingly the students. A study by the two universities has found that teachers are enrolling in their MOOCs in high numbers. The study examines data from some one million MOOC students who enrolled in courses at edX, the nonprofit learning platform started by Harvard and MIT.

Damon Centola of the Annenberg School for Communication writes about the regulating public opinion.

Trish Henwood of the Perelman School of Medicine is featured for her trips to Liberia to help fight the Ebola outbreak.

Adrian Raine of the School of Arts & Sciences and the Perelman School of Medicine talks about his latest research on preventing violence by increasing nutritional supplement intake.

America’s colleges and universities are terribly inefficient and excessively expensive, foster relatively little learning and ability to think critically, and turn out too many graduates who end up underemployed.

Dan Romer of the Annenberg Public Policy Center discusses the effectiveness of graphic photo labels on cigarette packs.

This article contains explicit and potentially offensive terms that are essential to reporting on this situation. Last month, a prisoner serving time at a federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Penn., was listening to a local radio broadcast when the speakers spat out a string of racist phrases. “Niggers,” one of the voices said. “Black people should be dead,” said another.

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education says, “A lot of faculty are fairly insular, and they like to hire people like them. If you have a majority white faculty, then they tend to hire people like them.”

Frances Jensen of the Perelman School of Medicine writes about the short and long-term effects of potent drugs on young minds.