07 juillet 2013
The TechSmith Model
ByJoshua Kim. I've been a big fan of TechSmith's rapid authoring platforms for years. My institution has adopted Camtasia Relay as a simple audio/video screen recording / distribution system because the platform is elegant, robust, and comes with a licensing model that enables easy distribution throughout our community. Read more...Working with Purpose
By Dayna Catropa. The work we do in higher education is mission-driven. However, even when the mission may seem obvious, it is important for leaders to continually articulate that mission and connect their team’s work to it. In short, emphasizing purpose is an important aspect of leadership that motivates teams to do their best work. Read more...A Brilliant Plan?
By Margaret Andrews. With all the talk about MOOCs – how more students can be taught by the best faculty, how they will increase access and reduce costs – someone has come up with an idea for how to save money in the administrative area. For the past few years, there have been a glut of articles lamenting the rise of college costs, many of them pointing to the rise of the administrative class in higher education as one of the main culprits. There have been articles in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Washington Monthly. Read more...Creative Writing Is Not a Fast Food Nation
By 5 Creative Writing Professors. Creative writing has its share of detractors, those who believe that the study of and teaching of creative writing produces deleterious effects for students and for literature. For example, in "Poetry Vs. Ambition," Donald Hall worries that invention exercises (writing warm-ups which help writers find their subject) in writing classrooms "reduce poetry to a parlor game," producing "McPoems" on assembly lines. Read more...'Watered Down' MOOC Bill Becomes Law In Florida
Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a bill into law last week to encourage the state's K-12 and higher education systems to use massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The law has narrower scope than early versions of the bill but its critics remain deeply concerned. Read more...
New Report on Measuring Loan Defaults
A report issued Tuesday by Education Sector, a Washington, D.C. think tank, examines the federal government's three-year cohort default rate for federal student loans as well as alternative ways to measure how many students fail to repay their debt. The report, "In Debt and In the Dark," argues that current publicly available information on loan defaults is incomplete and doesn't represent students' total risk of default. Read more...A Statement for Diversity
By Scott Jaschik. Thirty-seven college associations on Sunday issued a joint statement on the importance of diversity in American higher education. "A diverse student body enables all students to have the transformational experience of interacting with their peers who have varied perspectives and come from different backgrounds. Read more...
Exacerbating Inequality
By Doug Lederman. The last year has brought a cacophony of proposals for "fixing" the federal student financial aid system, with debates about the sequester and the size of the federal budget raging, the renewal of the Higher Education Act looming, and a well-financed effort by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation priming the pump. Read more...Trying to Influence the Mums
ByChris Parr for Times Higher Education. In days past, parents in Britain were often uninterested bystanders when it came to decisions about where their children would go to university. Now they are so important that student recruitment advertising is targeting them directly. Online forum and social media network the Student Room has partnered with Mumsnet, the online forum for parents, to allow universities to aim advertising directly at parents and their children at the same time. Read more...No Right Answers
By Ry Rivard. Some students taking free classes from Coursera may never know the right answers. A University of Michigan professor teaching one of the company's massive open online courses, or MOOCs, told students this week he could not provide them with correct answers to questions they get wrong because doing so would reduce efficiency. The professor’s decision is prompting additional questions by critics of MOOCs about their ability to provide quality teaching. Read more...
