By Colleen Flaherty. If you could teach one course -- any course -- before the end of your career, what would it be? Many professors might muse on that question in quiet moments, but for those approaching retirement at Carleton College, it's not just hypothetical. For some time, the college has been offering late-career faculty members the opportunity to teach a "dream course" before they leave the lectern behind. Read more...
By Michael Stratford. The top Democrat on the House of Representatives Oversight Committee on Monday asserted that more than 100 colleges may be violating federal law by either requiring students to submit fee-based forms for federal student aid or insinuating that such forms are needed to access that aid. Read more...
In a lecture she gave as part of the "History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education MOOC," Dr. Cathy N. Davidson identified the following digital literacies: privacy, security, intellectual property, safety, crap detection, collaboration, and global consciousness. Ocelot Scholars have located and analyzed films they recommend as prompts to discuss these and other literacies.
Find links to their recommendations at the Ocelot Scholars Film Analysis Index. More...
On Sunday I received an email from Coursera letting me know that the Signature Track was now available for Cathy Davidson’s MOOC, “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education.” I felt myself tense up a little.
The Signature Track, for those who aren’t familiar with it, uses multiple forms of authentication (government-issued photo ID, webcam, credit card) to verify that people taking a course are who they say they are. The signature component of the verification is a biometric technique. Your unique typing pattern, like how many milliseconds you push down on the “e” key, is recorded, and you type in a signature phrase to verify your identity. The service was announced in January 2013 in a blog post, but unlike much of the other stuff happening around MOOCs at the time, it didn’t get that much press. More...
By Bernard Lane and Julie Hare for The Australian. The number of non-full-time employees on Australian university campuses increased by 17 percent in the latest official count, as institutions hedged their bets against the uncertain student numbers of the demand-driven system. Read more...
By Ry Rivard. Colleges’ attempts to curb employee costs by hiring part-time faculty members and using grad students are being offset by administrative hires and rising benefit costs, according to a new study by the Delta Cost Project at the American Institutes for Research.
The study uses federal data to examine hiring trends going back to 1990. Read more...
By Serena Golden. In recent months, two authors with long careers in academe have published campus novels. Les Cochran and William G. Tierney have very different backgrounds: Cochran was president of Youngstown State University from 1992 to 2000, and before that provost at Southeast Missouri State University; Tierney is University Professor and Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, where he also co-directs the Pullias Center for Higher Education. Read more...
By Allie Grasgreen. Students are getting a better and more demanding education than scathing accounts like Academically Adrift suggest, but they and their instructors have plenty more work to do, a new study says. Read more...
By Doug Lederman, Michael Stratford and Scott Jaschik. The Obama administration on Thursday released hundreds of pages of formal comments on its proposed college rating system, documents that mostly underscore the deep reservations that many higher education leaders have about the plan but also highlight pockets of support. Read more...
By Colleen Flaherty. Close lots of library locations on campus, or close fewer and see services reduced at most of the remaining locations. Faced with those options in light of a budget crunch, the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley aid no to both and set out to find alternative funding sources to save the library -- all 25 locations. While the university's main library complex, referred to as Doe/Moffitt, was never in danger, professors wanted to preserve the smaller reading spaces housing specialized collections -- and the librarians who know them intimately. Read more...
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