Le diplôme est plus que jamais l’arme anti-chômage !
Chômage de masse et difficultés de recrutement
Par Paul Santelmann, Responsable de la Prospective à l’AFPA. Une note d’information (mars 2014) du Centre Européen pour le Développement de la Formation Professionnelle (CEDEFOP) apporte quelques éléments de compréhension d’un problème récurrent qui affecte le marché de l’emploi français et européen. Ce phénomène réside dans la coexistence entre un nombre croissant de chômeurs et la persistance de pénurie de candidats adaptés aux embauches. D’après de nombreuses enquêtes, analysées par le CEDEFOP, 1/3 des employeurs européens connaissent des difficultés de recrutement interprétées de façon erronée par les décideurs institutionnels comme la résultante d’un déficit de compétences des jeunes et des chômeurs. Lien : http://www.google.fr/.
Cette hypothèse d’une pénurie de personnes qualifiées face à des besoins en compétences supposées de plus en plus élevées, a conduit à une fuite en avant dans la « production » de « diplômés inexpérimentés » qui se voient en partie employés dans des postes qui exigent des qualifications moyennes ou peu élevées. Suite...
Taking the ‘No’ Out of Innovation
By Valerie Robin. Innovate: French innover, from Old French, from Latin innovāre, innovāt-, to renew : in-, intensive pref.; in- + novāre, to make new (from novus, new). ~ adapted from OED online.
I have a confession: I am afraid of the Internet. When I think about innovation in terms of my own pedagogical skill, I immediately think about the Internet, and I get scared all over again. It makes sense though: the first thing I ever heard in regard to online interactivity was that some evil hacker could steal my identity, my money, or my youthful innocence. When I began work toward my PhD in rhetoric and composition a little over two years ago, if someone had told me then that I would become interested in technology, I would have snorted in disbelief. More...
Bonds of Difference: Participation as Inclusion
By Shyam Sharma and Maha Bali. This article is the sixth in a series about pedagogical alterity. See the original CFP for more details. This is a follow-up article to “Bonds of Difference: Illusions of Inclusion”.
As teachers who consider the whole world a virtual classroom and community, many of us sometimes mistakenly assume that if we create space for representing the “voice” of the marginalized, all will be fine. But as long as the classroom or community is founded on the principles of learning/teaching from one particular context, marginal voices from beyond that context will continue to go unheard, or be heard and misunderstood, or understood but remain stereotyped and marginalized. It only takes a moment’s reflection to realize that we cannot assume the local is global without contextual considerations. More...
Hits & thoughts ain't evidence
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Hits & thoughts ain't evidence. Martin Weller. As Martin Weller summarizes, "The impact map (http://oermap.org/) has been developed largely by Rob Farrow and Martin Hawksey, and features lots of Hawksey-goodness. You can do the following on the map:
- Look at evidence for any one of our 11 hypotheses (eg. for hypothesis A regarding performance)
- Look at the flow of evidence
- Examine evidence by country
- Filter evidence by sector, polarity, hypothesis, country
- Explore the map for OER policies (a work in progress)."
This is more than I was expecting from the OER mapping project, so I'm pleasantly surprised. More...
Rebuilding a Reader
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.
Clarence Fisher. I complained at length to a Google representative today about this, so Clarence Fisher's comment is timely: "When Google declared war on RSS and the open web by killing off their reader it was a heavy blow for deep thinking and for blogging. At first, I didn’t miss it. I still had twitter after all. But over time, I began to realize that relying on twitter only for what I was going to read and learn was like relying on the remote control of my TV. It put me too much at the whim of other people and things I just happened to see." More...
MOOCs for Development - Day 2 - The Challenge of MOOCs Panel
By Stephen Downes - Halfanhour. Please see my presentation and audio here: http://www.downes.ca/presentation/339
N.V. Varghese
- view from developing countries
- largest expansion of the system in this century
- did not rely on public resources at all - shows willingness to pay
- GER (gross educational? resources) disparity worldwide
- OECD countries universalized higher ed, but developing countries still in an elite system
- social demand far outstrips brick-and-mortar solutions
- can MOOCs address this?
- enormous potential
- Tsinghua (#1 in BRICs) created a consortium of leading universities to teach Mandarin
- IIT in India relies on MOOCs for skills in IT sector
- 330 million in India will have Internet in 2015
Constraints
- technology and infrastructure
- language constraint - courses are in English
Who benefits?
- mostly the elite - already have degrees (80%)
- they are proficient in English, they are employed, they're not looking for a degree
So - MOOCs serve privileged students, not a reliable way to increase equivalent access to higher education
- private institutions and commercial interest in MOOCs
- are the MOOCs taking all the money?
- MOOCs give them a way to feel like they are contributing even if they aren't
- disparities in access are getting narrowed, but disparities in achievement are not
- argument that MOOCs are widening the disparities
- propose partnering with existing institutions as an initial step to make them more
widespread in developing countries. More...
Notes from: MOOCs for Development
By Stephen Downes - Half an Hour. The Advent of MOOCs panel session
Abdul Wahid Khan IGNOU
- MOOCs - recent, buzzword, etc - critics call it a fad, hype, etc.
- my bias - MOOCs have a contribution to make, but there are reasons to be careful
- MOOCs essentially a response to the emerging knowledge society - the value of knowledge increases
- people used to value wealth but now they value knowledge
- poor man's version of MOOCs
- mssive - nobody has defined this;
- open - a new phenomenon;
- online - this is where I deviate - in my time we had 'on air' for farmers
- eg. in support of Green Revolution in India - to address gap between the land and the lab
- radio + printed support system - has been running for 35 years
- what is the difference? It targeted a local problem, in a local language, multi-sakeholder, blended learning
- it is not technology that should determine learning, it should be the learning that determines the tech
- eg. MOOCs in Bengali, in Hindi, etc
- you don't want to put a current evaluation against the potential of the technology
- what made IGNOU possible?
- massive unmet demand,
- plus, we began to develop programs that meet the needs of industry
- encouraged active partnership between public and private sector (eg. 3,500 private sector learning facilities)
- technology can bring a multiplier effect, but the technology per se is not the action. More...
The Professor Is In: Let Us Never Speak of the Campus Strategic Plan Again
By Karen Kelsky - Chronicle Vitae. I saw the campus strategic plan on the website of a job I want to apply for, and now I wonder if I should refer to it in my cover letter. My work kind of relates to it, especially the part about prioritizing interdisciplinarity. Worth mentioning?
Clients refer to campus strategic plans in their job letters with some regularity, and this has alerted me to one of those areas of unspoken knowledge that indisputably separates insiders from outsiders. See more...