Massive Open Online Courses are all the rage. A truly exciting and massive one (over 24,000 students enrolled!) is the Learn Creative Learning MOOC organized by MIT Media Lab, which will run from February- May 2013 . Since MOOCs are so new, still much ground needs to be broken about what they are, what they mean, and how to organize them. Having enrolled in this course which is so close to my heart, I decided to keep a diary of observations as “an average MOOC student”. I hope they help myself and others make better sense of what this phenomenon means, what deep impact it could have on learning in a globalizing society, but also how to practically organize and “tinker” such courses to realize the vision. Would be interested to hear your own experiences and comments! Read more...

By Louis Betty. At 30 years old, I definitely consider myself part of the Facebook generation. Zuckerberg’s brainchild hit the ‘net when I was a senior in college, and by then I was already well acquainted with e-mail, chat rooms, text-messaging, and all the multifarious precursors to today’s social media. I text, I post, I chat, I even snapchat: in these respects, I’m an utterly unremarkable member of my society.
But I also happen to be a college professor and a molder of young minds. And, far from indulging the technology-driven spirit of the times, I make my students work as students have always worked.  They read Seneca, Pascal, Tolstoy, and Schopenhauer. They are obliged to turn in papers by hand; they must come to office hours to speak with me about their grades; they are even, and this is most anachronistic of all, required to attend class.  Physical presence is key to every aspect of their learning experience, be it my hovering, breathing presence in the classroom or the office, the cohort of 30 or so warm bodies that shows up for lecture twice a week, or the more abstract form of embodiment conveyed by the weight of a book.
To believe certain commentators, however, this embodied notion of learning is on its way out in American higher education. Writing for The American Interest’s January/February 2013 edition, the recent Yale graduate Nathan Harden offers the following ominous prognostications about the future of university instruction in our digital age. Read more...

By Curt Rice. Note from the editors: Today we start a new offering on our blog: every few months we will have a theme that we ask guest bloggers to write about for University of Venus. These themed blog posts will run month after month on the last Monday of the month. For January, February, and March, our guest bloggers will be writing about gender equality in science fields, and we’re kicking off our series with a post by Curt Rice, the Vice President for Research and Development at the University of Tromsø in Norway.
It's your thing!: How the European Commission Is Trying to Attract More Women to Science
Dream jobs, 6 reasons science needs you and Profiles of women in science are three of the areas on a website launched last year by the European Commission to encourage teenage girls to consider science as a career—a website called Science: It's a girl thing! Read more...

Despite promises from the government, the number of rules and the cost of employing foreign researchers have increased.
Universities wanting to employ foreign researchers are still facing significant immigration barriers, Information newspaper reports.
After the current centre-left government assumed power in 2011, it stressed that attracting and keeping highly skilled foreigners was a vital pre-requisite for Denmark’s ability to compete internationally.
But despite promises to ease immigration restrictions, the government has actually made more it expensive and more difficult for universities to hire foreigners. Read more...

By David Matthews. Students from the European Union in the UK are currently on an equal financial footing with their domestic counterparts: they are charged the same tuition fees and can access student loans.
All this would (probably) change if the UK decided to cut its ties with Brussels. EU students could be charged the higher fees faced by their international peers, in theory bringing a windfall for UK universities.
Writing in Times Higher Education this week, Alison Wolf, director of the new International Centre for University Policy Research at King's College London, says that some university finance directors would be "grinning widely" at the prospect of leaving the EU.
"If we left ... we could charge these students more money," she writes.
But if fees went up, would as many continue to come? Read more...

By Chris Parr. EU should place spiritual values above potential profit in funding considerations, Chris Parr hears.
Universities in the European Research Area have lost touch with the spiritual ideals of the European Union's founding fathers and should aim to restore such values to their scientific research, it has been claimed.
According to academics leading the Restoring Spiritual Values to European Science research project, policymakers in the ERA focus more on the potential for financial gain than on what research might achieve more widely. They want European science funding programmes to consider "spiritual" values when allocating grants.
John Wood, the principal investigator and former chief executive of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, said that the values of EU architects such as France's Robert Schuman and Germany's Konrad Adenauer, with their "Christian Democratic roots", "are not being reflected today in how science is undertaken". Read more...

By John Morgan. Hefce uneasy over University of Law deal and process for private applicants. John Morgan reports.
The government decision to approve the UK's first for-profit university was hurried through to help meet a deadline in its sale to a private equity firm, a document obtained by Times Higher Education suggests.
According to a paper given to THE under the Freedom of Information Act, the University of Law's application for university title was approved by correspondence without a full board meeting of the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
The move helped to meet a deadline set by the government so that the institution's £200 million sale to Montagu Private Equity could be completed. University title was a crucial part of the sale package. Read more...

Von Stefan Bach. Der Doktor ist in Deutschland mit zu viel Prestige aufgeladen, kritisiert der Wirtschaftsforscher Stefan Bach in einem Gastbeitrag. Er fordert: Schluss mit dem Titelwahn.
Der Doktortitel erfreut sich in Deutschland anhaltender Beliebtheit in allen Schichten und Ständen. In den öffentlichen Verwaltungen wird seit jeher betitelt was das Zeug hält. Bei den gehobenen Managementeliten der Wirtschaft, wo es schon zu viele Doktoren gibt, macht sich der Professor breit. Zumeist in Form einer Honorarprofessur oder auch in Österreich oder anderen Ländern verliehen, was dann in einer Fußnote oder Klammer vermerkt wird.
Da wo der Doktortitel herkommt, in Wissenschaft und Forschung, wird er dagegen kaum als Namensbestandteil verwendet. Naturgemäß ist die Promotion Voraussetzung für die wissenschaftliche Karriere. Ergo haben alle promoviert oder vergleichbare internationale Abschlüsse wie den Ph.D. Die Hierarchien und Hackordnungen orientieren sich primär an wissenschaftlichen Leistungen und Rankings. Mehr...

Von Philipp Alvares de Souza Soares. Die Gebühr ist gerecht, kommentierte Ruben Karschnick. Nein, entgegnet Philipp Alvares. Es gebe nur eine Lösung: Der Staat muss die Ausbildung aller Bürger unterstützen.
Sind Studiengebühren gerecht? Ein gern genanntes Argument der Befürworter lautet: Akademiker verdienen in der Regel mehr und haben bessere Jobchancen als Menschen in Ausbildungsberufen. Diese müssen ihre Fortbildungen, zum Beispiel einen Meister, allerdings aus eigener Tasche zahlen. Da sei es nur gerecht, von Studenten ebenfalls einen Beitrag zu verlangen. Mehr...

By Graeme Paton. More pupils from top private schools are winning places at elite universities despite a Government drive to widen access to higher education, according to research. More than three-quarters of applications made by pupils from Britain’s best independent schools last year resulted in the offer a place, it emerged.
The success rate was up from just over seven-in-10 in each of the previous two years.
Some 95 per cent of applications to one Russell Group university – Exeter – led to the award of a place, while numbers were well over 80 per cent at other leading institutions.
The disclosure – in data published by two of the leading private school organisations – comes despite the introduction of tough new targets designed to force top universities to take in more pupils from “under-represented” groups. Read more...