By Barbara Fister. I’ve been around long enough that I remember the first e-mail I ever sent (mistakenly putting the entire message in the subject line because I had no idea how it worked; the person I was trying to reply to kindly called me on the phone and talked me through it). I remember the first time I joined a professional Listserv and how amazing it was to be in conversation with several hundred professionals around the world who were interested in the same things as me. Being at a small institution where you represented a subdiscipline felt pretty lonely. You could read the literature and attend a conference once a year, if you could afford it, but otherwise shoptalk was rare and precious. Having a daily conversation with like-minded folks was wonderful. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. My goal is to read a book a week. You?  The majority of my book reading is audio, and nowadays my preferred reading platform is an iPhone 5 and the Audible app. The Audible app is interesting because it demonstrates both the advantages and limitations of a mobile and app-centric approach. There may also be some lessons in how Audible has designed the app, and how audiobook listeners interact with the app, for mobile learning. The most important advantage of the Audible app is that I can utilize the device (the iPhone) that I always have with me. Consuming audiobooks from my phone means I never need to remember to take another device, never need to worry about syncing, charging, or managing yet another piece of technology. Read more...

By Cristina Bonasegna Kelly and Daniel Levy. A Few Final Comments on the Dropout Problem, Cristina Bonasegna Kelly
Ana Fanelli has written a most thoughtful response to my piece and she adds very interesting and valuable data. I was aware that, since students take longer than the scheduled five years to graduate, the best way to count the drop-outs would be to compare the number of enrollees and graduates of each cohort. But since the figures are unavailable,  I figured that I could establish a reasonable estimate of the graduation rate by comparing  the number of enrollees with the number of graduates each year, given that the level of enrollment remains more or less stable at public universities.  I know it is a very simple methodology but it compensates for the fact that in Argentina it is not uncommon for students to  take 10 years to graduate, or even longer. Read more...
Complexities in Understanding Argentina’s High Dropout Rate, Daniel Levy
The blog Argentina at the Top — For Its Dropout Rate! highlights an alarming fact: Argentina’s dropout rate. It is put at 73%. Beyond being alarmed and saddened, however, what are we to make of the situation, its causes, and what might be done? As I reflect on the blog’s quite reasonable interpretations, and offer some additional interpretations, I’m impressed by how uncertain such interpretations are. Read more...

By Herman Berliner. In my last blog, I noted my high regard for the ratings and more importantly the objectivity of Consumer Reports. But there are so many goods and services not ranked by Consumer Reports or any other objective judge that in many cases we are left to our own improvised rankings or, and even worse, questionable third party judgments. I have for many years used my own ratings system for rankings of hotels. Within a particular star category, I judge a hotel by the orange juice available at breakfast.  If the juice tastes like it comes from watered down concentrate, I immediately downgrade the hotel; if the orange juice tastes fresh squeezed, the hotel rises in my opinion.  Bathrooms are also often good proxies for the quality of a hotel.  In a recent trip, the bathroom provided was so small that even my 15 pound dog would find the accommodations tight.  Chocolate on the pillow, on the other hand, has turned out not to be a good proxy for hotel quality, though I do believe that providing chocolate mints is a good indication that the provider doesn’t understand and appreciate the richness and quality of chocolate. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. What is your web presence? Can colleagues, bloggers,  journalists, or potential employers find you online? What would they find if they searched for you? Is your CV updated and viewable online? Do you have one place that brings together your employment history, professional accomplishments, educational background, and links to your writing and presentations? 
If you are like me, the answer to all these questions would be no.
This past weekend, with some pushing and guidance from my brother Max, I finally changed that and created my own professional web page. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Derek Bok can hardly be accused of being unwilling to criticize American higher education. His 2007 book, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, lived up to its title. But in his new book, Higher Education in America (Princeton University Press), Bok appears impatient with the cottage industry producing books saying that colleges are doomed to fail, cost too much, are too liberal (politically), are too conservative (in terms of unwillingness to change) and any number of other criticisms. Bok -- the former president of Harvard University -- notes very real problems in American higher education. But he writes that "the principal problems with many of the criticisms ... is not that they are wrong, but that their sweeping nature diverts attention from significant weaknesses that can and should be remedied." Read more...

By David Matthews for Times Higher Education. Some British universities still lack clear policies on whether international students may use proofreaders or translators to help them with their work, it has emerged. The issue has flared up amid concern that English-language entrance requirements are set too low, with one former proofreader saying that she often had to tidy up a "mish-mash of translation, 'paraphrasing' and Wikipedia citations." Ros Hampton, head of conduct and appeals at the University of Wolverhampton, wrote on the public academic discussion service Jiscmail that she was "looking at the advice (or lack of it) that my institution provides with regard to the use of translators and proof readers." Read more...

By Justin Draeger. This week, the U.S. Department of Education announced changes to the PLUS loan underwriting standards that may help previously denied PLUS loan applicants obtain loans. This will be welcome news to previously approved loan applicants who found themselves unexpectedly denied last year. But federal PLUS loans can be risky business for graduate students and parents of undergraduates who can use them to borrow up to the full cost of attendance at college. Much more can be done to protect consumers from getting too deeply into debt. The Department of Education recently added PLUS loan underwriting standards to its list of items to potentially consider during negotiated rule-making, the process where students, advocates and colleges work with the federal government to hash out new regulations. Read more...

By Jon Marcus. Educators cannot assume that all young people are old hands online, research shows. Academics and university administrators may be struggling to keep up with social media, but research shows that the digital divide is not just generational. It is racial, ethnic and socio-economic, and there are even differences in the way that men and women communicate online.
That imbalance could affect efforts to recruit, retain and teach under-represented students, according to the US academic who led the work.
“There’s an assumption that all students are equally great with technology,” said Rey Junco, an associate professor at Purdue University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. More...

By Chris Parr. The first courses on the UK’s first massive open online course platform Futurelearn will be unveiled in mid-September, it has been announced.
Specific details of the first Moocs to be made available are thin on the ground, although Futurelearn has confirmed that they will cover topics including literature; history; social sciences; computing and IT; and physical science, and be designed to work on mobile devices.
Times Higher Education revealed in December last year that the University of Warwick’s Business School was planning to offer a behavioural science Mooc on Futurelearn, although it has not been confirmed that this will be one of the first courses to go live. More...