By Stefanie Botelho. As a result of changes to healthcare benefits stemming from the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and in an effort to better control costs, many higher education institutions are passing more of the cost of healthcare along to their employees. More...

By Stefanie Botelho. Do you remember all the way back in 2013? You know, the year North West was born, the Harlem Shake made its debut, and selfies changed phone texting rates. More notably, there was the bombing at the Boston Marathon, our climate proved that abnormal would be the new normal, and our planet lost Nelson Mandela. But for those of you who attend education conferences, you also likely remember 2013 as the year that showed 5-10 MOOC sessions on every program or agenda. Some will say 2012 was the Year of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), but 2013 was where all of the publicity started to catch up to the hype. And as someone who goes to 30 conferences a year, for me it was the year of MOOC overload. More...

By Stefanie Botelho. First American’s 5th Annual Peer Discussion event at the Seattle Space Needle during NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers) was facilitated by David Helfand, former Columbia University professor and current president of Quest University – the first private university in Canada, which opened in 2007 with an innovative approach to higher education. Helfand shared his insights on the current education system in America and his mission to redefine it in Canada. More...

By Barbara Fister. It’s funny how much the popular image of libraries is highly traditional, considering how fascinated by the future librarians typically are and how quickly librarians embrace new technologies. References to shushing never seem to go away, and in an era when most of the library’s budget goes to licensed content, the firm belief that libraries are still mostly about books is hard to shake. We could fold into this the gendered nature of the image of librarians, who are imagined to be prim women of a certain age who wear buns and sensible shoes while doing hyper-clerical work whereas IT folks are inventive, adventurous young men with a deep knowledge of secret arts.  Yet despite the image (and I can’t wait to read a new book about it) librarians’ work is deeply tied to technology. Likewise, librarians seem to continually try to predict the future in terms of technological change, as they do in a special Horizon Report about library futures. Read more...