By Andy Thomason. A 200-year-old bluff oak at the University of Florida was temporarily spared the ax Thursday following a social-media campaign to save the tree, which supporters have nicknamed “Bert.” The Gainesville Sun reports that the university’s lakes, vegetation and landscaping committee told the architects of a proposed building to draw up a plan for consideration that would spare the tree and several others. More...
By Andy Thomason. LinkedIn announced Thursday it has agreed to acquire the online-learning company lynda.com for $1.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. It is the social-networking giant’s largest acquisition to date, and signals its continued expansion into the education realm. lynda.com offers more than 2,900 courses online, which include video tutorials for various skills. More...
By Andy Thomason. The University of Cape Town has voted to remove a statue of the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from campus, BBC News reports. The college’s 30-member council took the vote Wednesday following weeks of protests over the statue, which was smeared with feces last month. More...
By Andy Thomason. The contract agreement that New York University graduate-student employees cheered last month as a landmark victory for their labor movement has been ratified, the graduate students’ union announced Tuesday. More...
By Andy Thomason. Vassar College is the inaugural recipient of an annual $1-million award given to the college that most successfully admits and graduates low-income students, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation announced Tuesday. More...
By Andy Thomason. Two tenured professors at the William Mitchell College of Law have sued the college, claiming it amended its tenure policy so it would be able to cut more positions as part of a merger that is in process. The Star Tribune reports that the complaint by Carl Moy and John Radsan asks for the changes to the policy to be declared a breach of contract. More...
By Andy Thomason. Administrative bloat, not dwindling state funds, is the principal cause of skyrocketing tuition at public colleges across America. More...
By Andy Thomason. A lack of confidence in the leader of a popular conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder has cost it a $1-million donation, the Daily Camera reports. Jane Butcher, a philanthropist and chairwoman of the weeklong Conference on World Affairs, had offered to donate $1 million to help set up an endowment for the event but told the newspaper that she had withdrawn the offer because of a “lack of acceptance of CWA’s founding principles.” More...
By Casey Fabris. The education site Noodle is putting a new twist on helping colleges create online degree and certificate programs with its creation of Noodle Partners, announced on Wednesday.
Noodle Partners, the brainchild of the Princeton Review founder John Katzman, is an enabler — a company that helps colleges build online-education programs. Several other companies provide similar services, one of them being 2U, also founded by Mr. Katzman. More...
By Steve Kolowich. After years of skepticism, higher education’s upper class has finally decided that online learning is going to play an important role in its future. But what will that role be?
Recently, conversations about "elite" online education have revolved around the free online courses, aka MOOCs, which Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of other top universities started offering several years ago. But it soon became clear that high marks in those courses would not translate to academic credit at the institutions offering them (or anywhere else). More...
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