Harvard Profs Push Back
By Scott Jaschik. Fifty-eight faculty members have called for Harvard University to create a new faculty committee to consider ethical issues related to edX, the entity created by the university and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide massive open online courses. The letter urges the creation of the committee to consider "critical questions" about edX and its impact on Harvard and also on "the higher education system as a whole." And the letter calls for the new committee -- unlike two faculty panels that now exist -- to come entirely from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. That faculty, which has primary responsibility not only for teaching undergraduates but also for training Ph.D.s in a wide range of disciplines, is the largest at the university. The letter was sent Thursday and published Friday by The Harvard Crimson. Read more...
Open Learning Pioneer Heads West
By Doug Lederman. Since long before the advent of massive open online courses, Candace Thille's project to fuse learning science with open educational delivery, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, has been heralded as one of higher education's most significant and promising developments. Friday, Thille essentially launched stage two of her research-based effort to expand the reach and improve the quality of technology-enabled education, with word that she (and at least part of her Open Learning Initiative) would move to Stanford University. Read more...The Fine Print
By Ry Rivard. The Georgia Institute of Technology’s plan to offer a low-cost online master’s degree to 10,000 students at once creates what may be a first-of-its-kind template for the evolving role of public universities and corporations. When it agreed to work with Udacity to offer the online master's degree in computer science, Georgia Tech expected to make millions of dollars in coming years, negotiated student-staff interaction down to the minute, promised to pay professors who create new online courses $30,000 or more, and created two new categories of educators -- corporate “course assistants” tasked with handling student issues and a corps of teaching assistants hired by Georgia Tech who will be professionals rather than graduate students. Read more...For Artists, M.F.A. or Ph.D.?
By Daniel Grant. Earning his master of fine arts degree in photography from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004 should have been a moment of satisfaction for Matthew Liam Conboy, who knew that the M.F.A. was a requirement for getting a college art teaching position, and teaching is what he wanted to do. However, when he went to the annual College Art Association conference that year to hear about and apply for teaching jobs, “I heard rumblings that the M.F.A. may not be the terminal degree for artists anymore and that I might have to get a Ph.D."So, a few years later, he entered the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University, one of the few programs in the United States oriented toward visual and performing artists (with M.F.A.s) who are seeking a Ph.D. Read more...
Diversity Then and Now
By Gretchel Hathaway. A black and white photo taken in 1860 had been recently discovered and was a mystery at my campus, Union College in New York State. The image shows a young black man with his professor in what looks like a lab. We had a pretty good idea that the professor was Charles Frederick Chandler, who taught chemistry at Union from 1858 to 1865. But we couldn’t quite pin down the identity of the student. What we did know was that around the same time, Union College had admitted its first black student, David Rosell. According to our records, before being allowed to enroll, Rosell was subjected to, of all things, a hair examination to determine his race. An accurate chemical or genetic procedure for this kind of identification was still many years away. As a chief diversity officer, I have to marvel at how far we’ve come as a society. But I also have to consider what still needs to be done and more importantly, what we can do to get there. Read more...
Slashing Higher Ed Red Tape
By Stephen Matchett for The Australian. In a radical policy change, Australia's Tertiary Education Minister, Craig Emerson, is this week releasing a new approach to quality control that meets university demands for a lighter regulatory burden and could gut Labor's own creation, the Tertiary Education Quality Assurance Agency. While Emerson is announcing only a regulatory review, measures included in the announcement make it clear he has heard and understood the concerns of Universities Australia and the Group of Eight, and accepts that an estimated $280 million in annual compliance costs for universities to report to government is unacceptable. Read more...Scrutiny of QS Rankings
By Elizabeth Redden. Upon signing up for Opinion Outpost, a website on which users take surveys for points that can be redeemed for cash, an untenured philosophy professor took surveys related to toilet paper brands and frozen foods and other sundries. Completing the surveys at $1 to $5 a pop was a good way to make some extra pocket money, explained the professor, who preferred not to be named. Most of the surveys the professor completed through Opinion Outpost did not seem to be particularly high-stakes, but one, in retrospect, was: the QS Global Academic Survey, which counts for 40 percent of the QS World University Rankings, one of three major international university ranking systems. Read more...
The New For-Profits
By Paul J. LeBlanc. Southern New Hampshire University is probably the fastest-growing nonprofit institution in the country, driven by the expansion of our longstanding online program. When it comes to large-scale online programs, for-profit colleges dominate the list, which includes only a handful of national nonprofit players. That may change soon. Eduventures, the marketing research firm, predicts that hundreds of nonprofits will seek to move online more aggressively. A good number of them have been visiting us. Read more...Strategies for Saudi Student Success
By Elizabeth Redden. Several sessions on Wednesday at the annual NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference focused on the rapidly growing numbers of Saudi Arabian students in the United States and the unique challenges associated with these students, who often arrive on campus with low levels of English and math preparation and with cultural values that can complicate their chances for success in an American classroom. Fueling the growth in the numbers of these students has been the King Abdullah Foreign Scholarship Program, administered by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission (SACM); the program, which started in 2005, funds 12 to 18 months of language training in addition to undergraduate or graduate degree study, predominantly in science- or engineering-related fields. Read more...
State Systems Go MOOC
By Ry Rivard. Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup’s efforts to take online education to the masses. Together, state systems and flagship universities in nine states will help the company test new business models and teaching methods and potentially put Coursera in competition with some of the ed tech industry’s most established players. Read more...
