Education

Duke University has dropped out of a consortium of schools that will offer for-credit online courses. Duke faculty made the decision last week in a close vote.

In ending Duke’s participation in the Semester Online program, faculty on the Arts and Sciences Council said the decision to offer for-credit online courses had not been fully vetted by them. Some faculty members also expressed concern over the partner universities not being as highly-ranked as Duke.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project has donated its collection of extremist literature – pamphlets and flyers issued by the KKK, neo-nazis, racist skinheads, border vigilantes, and neo-Confederates – to Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The nearly 90-box collection will be housed there to allow scholarly research on the histories of extremist groups in the U.S.

This fall about 13,000 middle school students in the Guilford County Schools district will receive tablets. It’s part of a $30 million Race to the Top grant that Guilford won last year. Administrators and teachers will receive training from a company called Amplify in the coming months. 

A group of student journalists is getting a course in professional radio reporting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The class has opened a world of experience to them. One of the students, Mark Haywood, had the opportunity to report on an incident of human trafficking right in his hometown of Randolph County, North Carolina. 

A change may be coming to how local school boards and boards of county commissioners negotiate over school funding. 

Local county commissioners control the purse strings in all 115 of the state’s school districts. Often, the school boards and county commissioners disagree over the amount of money allocated to schools.