The Sept. 11 Education Trust has set up a new September 11 lesson plan for middle- and high school students. The plan, which includes DVDs, Google Earth terrorism mapping, discussion, and archival footage, is intended to help students learn about 9/11 in an interdisciplinary way. Schools in New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, and Alabama will participate in the program tomorrow.

To get a peak at exactly what the September 11 lesson plan offers, I visited learnabout9-11.org.

Here are some sample discussion questions that teachers might ask students:

* Twenty, fifty, or one hundred years from now how do you think the events of September 11th, 2001 will be understood as part of the larger context of United States history? What about world history? In your opinion, what other events had a similar impact on U.S. or world history?

How would you react to being told that someone you loved was “unaccounted for”? Why might it matter to a person’s relatives that the person’s body be accounted for?

Below are more details of what students will see and experience during the September 11 lesson:

The accompanying DVDs contain interviews with family members and survivors of the September 11th attacks. These help to lend a human dimension to a historic event difficult to wholly appreciate in terms of raw numbers of persons killed or property destroyed.

The lessons can be implemented in a single class session or over the course of an entire week. The individual educator has the freedom to decide how much content to include. You can decide how much print or video information to use, creating a flexible mix of content to suit the abilities of students in your classroom.

Some activities include:

Mapping terrorist activities on Google Earth

“Advocacy” addresses how citizens can shape the government’s response to a disaster.

Teachers or schools need to purchase the lesson plan. A single license costs $99; a 5-user license is $499.

Forbes has released its college rankings list for 2009. Surprisingly enough, the usual suspects–Harvard, Yale, Princeton–don’t crown the list. Instead, the US Military Academy (West Point) was rated the best college in the nation. Forbes explains how West Point beat the Ivy Leagues in a separate article.

Here’s a taste of the top schools:

Best Colleges

1. United States Military Academy, NY
2. Princeton University, NJ
3. California Institute of Technology, CA
4. Williams College, MA
5. Harvard University, MA

See the full list here.

Best College Buys

1. Berea College, Ky.
2. New College of Florida, Fla.
3. United States Military Academy, N.Y.
4. United States Air Force Academy, Colo.
5. University of Wyoming, Wyo.

See the full list here.

Luckily, the days of dragging yourself to night classes may be over. The Internet is full of free language resources whose multimedia features and social networking component make learning both fun and immersive. We scoured the Web for quality free sites, and came up with the seven websites below. Happy learning!

1. LiveMocha

LiveMocha offers free lessons in 11 languages. Through a personal homepage, you access free language courses and build a community of foreign friends. Native speakers in your LiveMocha community help correct your lessons and chat live with you. Interactive, multimedia lessons make learning fun.

2. Busuu.com

Busuu offers extensive courses for English, Spanish, German, and French students. The free version contains more than 150 image- and audio-based lessons. Their video chat application lets you connect with other students or native speakers online. You can gain access to more features, such as podcasts and PDF printouts, through a premium membership.

3. SharedTalk

This Rosetta Stone community language exchange site lets you find penpals using custom search criteria, then exchange emails with your penpal in your language of choice. You can also chat live in the “Chat House,” a chat room allowing public and private language exchanges with native speakers.

4. Word2Word

This portal links to learning resources for more than 100 languages. Some language resources are more extensive than others (for example, it’s easier to load up on Spanish lessons than Swahili). Word2Word works best for those who need survival courses or are looking for obscure languages.

5. BBC Languages

BBC Languages offers free audio and video courses, quizzes, games, phrases you can download to your mobile device, and a 12-week email course that earns you a BBC language certificate. They have lessons for fourteen different languages, and phrases for 36. An excellent resource for quick travel phrases.

6. FreeLanguage.org

Free Language is a portal that links to a wide variety of free language lessons, podcasts, video lessons, Wikibooks language pages, and other resources. You have to “do your homework,” so to speak, in order to put together a comprehensive learning system for yourself.

7. eLanguageSchool.net

eLanguageSchool offers basic resources, including words, phrases, and grammar, for ten languages. Resources, such as video with subtitles, vary by language. A good place to refresh your knowledge of a language, or start learning one. If you want immersion, however, look elsewhere.

One UK school wants its students to go veg. If they won’t do it willingly, they can be forced, via cost-conscious parents. From the UK Telegraph:

Parents whose children sign up to the ‘Vegetarian Scholarship’ could save £1,500 each year at Wycliffe College in Stonehouse, Glos. The “progressive” school was founded by a vegetarian Methodist minister in 1882, and today’s governors hope the new incentive will keep his values alive.

The school was founded by GW Sibly. He chose the school site for its clean water and proximity to a railway station, and the pupils grew their own fruit and vegetables. Vegetarianism remains an important part of school life.

I’m surprised nothing like this has happened in the US, where childhood obesity remains a major problem. Reducing tuition is a good way to push all kinds of agendas, especially during hard economic times.

From Ananova:

A university in Taiwan has opened a course to teach students how to appreciate and analyse porn movies. The Mass Communication Department of Providence University opened the course this semester, reports United Daily News.

More than 50 students registered for the course, and most of them confessed that they had watched porn videos before. Curiosity was given as the main reason for taking the course and most admitted their parents did not know what they were studying.

Applicants can use the tax credit in exchange for 100 hours of community service. It is partially refundable. As part of the bill, the Department of the Treasury also has to conduct a feasibility study on the community service requirement vis a vis higher education.

A recent Chicago Journal of Consumer Research study found that businesses can make consumers feel more special by creating multi-tiered loyalty programs, which pander to a sense of status:

Many businesses create loyalty programs to confer a sense of status to their customers. Examples are platinum, gold, and silver charge cards, or red and blue membership levels. The study provides insight for planning programs that enhance consumers’ perception of status.

“We find that increasing the number of elites in the top tier dilutes their perception of status, but adding a subordinate elite tier enhances their perceptions of status,” write the authors. “Thus, if the firm creates a larger top tier while adding a second status tier rather than persisting with a single small top tier, it can recognize more customers without decreasing the perceptions of status among its most elite.” In other words, being in the gold level is more special if there is a silver level below.

Good point. If a customer enters a loyalty program at the silver level, it’s safe to assume they will aspire to, or at least feel somewhat off-put by, the existence of a gold level. And, as the study shows, gold-level customers get a status boost through the existence of a lower tier.

Tangentially, social networking popped into my mind when I read this article. Sites like Facebook are forever looking for ways to monetize. And users of those sites are looking for status, mainly by accumulating friends. What if sites introduced loyalty tiers? For example, users with more than 200 friends would automatically qualify for a silver tier. That tier would offer certain perks not available to people with fewer friends. With that loyalty in place, sites could more easily charge for certain services, or offer exclusive partner deals.

Now, I’m off to lunch, courtesy of my extra-special platinum credit card…

Congratulations, Mr. Krugman!

From today’s New York Times:

Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday.

Mr. Krugman’s theories have explained why worldwide trade is dominated by a few countries that are similar to each other, and why some countries might import the same kinds of goods that it exports.

I’m not very familiar with the international trade theories that won Krugman his prize. I do, however, often read his columns. Here are some Krugman points from his blog and recent columns:

-Great Britain did the bailout thing far better than we do.

-Hank Paulson is acting slow and incompetent.

-We need to fix the financial crisis now (yes, even after the bailout plan), otherwise things can and will get even worse.

-Healthcare is still a big issue. It must stay regulated.

-Our leaders are weak and confused.

Krugman has been vaunted and criticized in the past for his opinion columns. But you can’t argue with some of the points he brings up today, nor with the fact that he has made the financial crisis and the field of economics itself much more comprehensible to regular Josephines and Joes.

I’m inspired.

10. Cozy Relations Between Financial Aid Offices and Lenders

The financial aid office used to be a safe haven for students in need of fair funding for their education. Not anymore. USA Today last year reported that seven universities admitted to slinging under-the-radar sweetheart deals with lenders who, in exchange for being put on financial aid “preferred” lists, gifted financial aid officers perks like trips. College aid directors received stock benefits.

From USA Today:

…seven universities have admitted that they had little-known financial deals with top lenders, in which the lenders returned millions to the schools based on loan volume the schools referred. Six schools have agreed to refund a total of $3.27 million — hundreds of dollars apiece — to students who used these lenders.

Some college call centers — where students were directed for loan advice — were actually staffed by loan company workers. Sometimes, they falsely identified themselves as part of the university financial aid office.

Top financial aid officials at [several universities] held valuable stocks in the parent company of a lender that each of the universities recommended on its “preferred lenders” list. About 90% of students look no further when seeking a federally guaranteed student loan.

I scratch your back, you scratch mine. The student, meanwhile, gets a scrap deal.

9. UC Regents Compensation Scandal

I attended a University of California campus. While I was there, the UC regents were consistently regarded with some disdain. A 2006 Oakland Tribune article highlights why:

UC’s compensation policies have been under fire since newspaper reports detailed large spending on bonuses, allowances, sabbatical agreements and other perks, much of it granted without approval by regents.

Additional news reports that former Provost M.R.C. Greenwood would retain her $301,836 sabbatical payment even after a UC investigation determined she had violated conflict-of-interest policies when she hired a business partner to an administrative post.

A year later, UC said that in response to the misallocation of money, they were administering disciplining the parties at fault. There was questionable effort to add more transparency to the system.

These folks should run for office.

8. Heather Bresch’s Fake West Virginia University MBA

Heather Bresch, a Mylan Inc. executive and daughter of the governor of West Virginia, completed less than half the credits she needed to earn her WVU MBA. Yet she still received the diploma. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports how it worked:

An independent panel concluded in April that WVU falsified Ms. Bresch’s transcript by adding courses she did not register for, pay for or complete. Grades assigned to those classes were “pulled from thin air,” the panel stated.

The scandal led to the resignations of WVU President Michael Garrison, Provost Gerald Lang and business school Dean R. Stephen Sears.

Tisk, tisk. Those B-school officials should know that any good transcript falsification requires completely covering your tracks.

7. The Oral Roberts University Money Laundering Scandal

From ABC news:

Twenty years ago, televangelist Oral Roberts said he was reading a spy novel when God appeared to him and told him to raise $8 million for Roberts’ university, or else he would be “called home.”

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding non-academic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cellphones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”

Since the suit was filed, Richard Roberts claims expenditures have been undergoing a thorough review process. Both sides claim God was involved, but in very different ways.

6. American University Spending Scandal

Another big spender meets another private university—and gets busted by the new rules of the Sarbanes-Oxley era. From the Washington Post (2005):

The American board suspended (Presdient) Benjamin Ladner in August after an anonymous letter raised questions about his personal and travel expenses. He has denied wrongdoing and insists he operated within the parameters of his contract. An independent report, commissioned by the board of trustees and disputed by Ladner, has questioned more than a half-million dollars in spending — including for his personal chef, a chauffeur and an engagement party for his son.

After an investigation, Ladner resigned, with a golden parachute to the tune of $3.75 million. That personal chef may not have to go, after all.

5. The National Diploma Mill

The Feds are investigating thousands of people who bought fake high school and college diplomas from an online diploma mill based in Washington state. Investigators are sifting through a list of people who bought from or inquired through the site. From the Washington Post:

The list, which has not been made public by the government, was compiled during an eight-month federal investigation in Washington state into an international diploma operation that was run from 1999 through 2005. It sold more than $6 million worth of phony high school diplomas and undergraduate and graduate degrees to people in more than 130 countries.

Without doing any academic work, their customers could purchase such degrees as a bachelor of arts, a bachelor of science, a master of arts, a master of science and a doctor of philosophy.

I can see getting away with a fake GED or BA, but a phony PhD? Sounds like more work proving yourself than it’s worth.

4. Duke Fuqua Business School Cheating Scandal

From MSNBC:

In (Duke’s Fuqua School of Business’s) biggest cheating scandal ever, 34 students have been punished, most for working in groups on a take-home exam that was supposed to be done individually.

A survey released in September found that 56 percent of MBA students acknowledged cheating, compared with 47 percent of graduate students in other fields.

These students share the ethics of previously mentioned university presidents and regents. Could they be the next wave?

3. Carnegie Mellon’s Fake Masters Degree

Mark Wessel, former dean of the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, resigned from his post after the university learned about the school’s approval of a master’s degree for a student who had more than the prescribed amount of independent study and transfer credits in place of regular coursework.

Wessel remains at Carnegie Mellon, but without tenure.

2. The University of Miami Ponzi Scheme

University of Miami business school grad Andres Pimstein decided that the ideal venue to host his Ponzi scheme, which made millions of dollar, would be his alma mater. From CNN:

Pimstein presented detailed flow charts and fake invoices to would-be participants, telling them his firm would be selling perfumes and electronics to Ripley, a large department-store chain in Chile and Peru.

People across the country lost an estimated $30 million in the scheme, which collapsed this year.

Lesson to con men: Never use a university as your Ponzi scheme venue.

1. Rutgers University Football Deal

Greg Schiano, football coach at Rutgers U., had one of the most lucrative coaching contracts in the nation ($2 million) when he signed an under-the-radar $250,000 agreement with Rutgers’ marketing agent to pay him for “personal services.” From The Star-Ledger:

The money was deducted from sponsorship revenues collected on the university’s behalf by the marketing firm, but the amount was guaranteed by Rutgers. It was listed as a payment for “personal services” and was made to a limited liability corporation established by Schiano.

Rutgers athletic director Robert Mulcahy said…”Look, I think I’m doing the right thing, as many other schools in the country do, by trying to find additional money to cover part of his salary.”

Rutgers wants to be a football powerhouse, so it says its behavior is excusable. This case makes me wonder why people even bother getting their MBAs, when they could have lucrative careers as football coaches instead.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Consumer advertising for prescription drugs had a negligible impact on sales of products studied by Harvard Medical School researchers — in a finding that may confound both advertisers and their opponents.

But the study also raises the question of whether the pharmaceutical industry’s $4.8 billion annual spending on such ads is a waste of shareholders’ money.

Researchers used advertisements for three drugs for their study: Enbrel, a rheumatoid arthritis drug; Nasonex, which treats nasal allergies; and Zelnorm, an irritable bowel syndrome remedy.

Their choice in drugs make the study interesting, but not groundbreaking. The reason is that these afflictions generally target adults, excluding an important pharma advertiser audience: Children. HPV/cervical cancer vaccines, now advertised on preteen social networking sites, are attempting to propulgate a vaccine of questionable urgency.

I’d like to see a more comprehensive study, involving drugs targeted at children, people with emotional issues, and perhaps the elderly, before I believe that advertising doesn’t work.