By Liz Homan. Wait! Don’t stop reading, grad student singles. Despite my potentially misleading title, this post is not only for the partnered among us. It is not only for those of us with boyfriends, girlfriends, live-in partners, or spouses. No, this post is for every graduate student, single or otherwise, who sustains a relationship with someone who means the world to them – be it a parent, a best friend, or a partner. It is for all of us. Read more...
25 novembre 2013
Dissertation does NOT mean divorce
No Access
By Megan Rogers. At a gathering for scholars interested in the intersection of health, humanities and disabilities this weekend, a professor who uses a wheelchair was asked to ring a bell to gain access to the meeting. William Peace, a visiting professor at Syracuse University, wrote in a blog post he hadn’t seen a sign directing people to “ring bell for access”— which he likened to “white only” signs — since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed 23 years ago. Read more...Competency Gains More Traction
By Michael Stratford. Two Democratic U.S. senators are giving a boost to the growing interest from members of both parties in Congress to make it easier for alternative models of higher education -- such as competency-based education -- to gain access to federal funding. Sens. Christopher Murphy of Connecticut and Brian Schatz of Hawaii said Thursday that they planned to introduce legislation next month that would create a competitive pilot program to fund innovations in higher education that would bring down costs and reduce the time needed to complete a degree. Read more...How Best to Assess?
By Serena Golden. As the Obama administration pushes ahead on a controversial plan to create a new federal system for rating colleges – with a focus on affordability, access and outcomes – the subject of how best to assess higher education learning and other outcomes was a particularly hot one here at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. Read more...Tuition Revenue Down
By Ry Rivard. After years of leaning on tuition increases to make up for declining state support, about four in 10 public universities now report tuition revenue is not keeping pace with inflation, according to a new report by Moody’s Investors Service. Moody’s surveyed 114 four-year public universities and 173 four-year privates and found that negative trends -- inability to raise prices, declining enrollments and heightened regulatory and political pressure to keep down tuition -- are “now buffeting public universities with greater intensity.” Read more...The (Off-Campus) Future of MIT
By Carl Straumsheim. Anant Agarwal has quit cold turkey -- coffee, that is. But the president of edX, the massive open online course provider co-founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is as energetic about MOOCs as ever, despite almost daily calls from traditionalists for the death of his product. Read more...Teaching to Teach
By Carl Straumsheim and Doug Lederman. "A Universe of Opportunities" -- the tagline for the Sloan Consortium's International Conference on Online Learning -- is also an apt description of the glut of different faculty development models presented here so far. Over the course of three days, attendees at the Sloan-C conference face a series of dilemmas when deciding which of the almost 500 sessions -- most of which run concurrently -- to attend. Read more...On Whose Watch?
By Elizabeth Redden. A college in Italy chartered by the state of New Hampshire and authorized by the state’s Higher Education Commission to operate is once again in hot water for allegedly failing to pay its employees. St. John International University has faced more than a dozen legal complaints over unpaid wages in its five-year history, the latest of which were filed this fall by five former employees in conjunction with the Federation of Knowledge Workers (FLC CGIL) union. Read more...The hybridization of vocational training and higher education in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland
By Lukas Graf. The post draws on a recent book: Graf, L. (2013) The Hybridization of Vocational Training and Higher Education in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Opladen/Berlin/Toronto, Budrich UniPress. Click here to download the book for free.
This guest entry looks at institutional changes in the relationship between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education (HE) in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. It is quite common for foreign observers to praise these three countries for the quality of their VET systems. All three countries are part of the “collective skill system cluster” (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2012) and are renowned for their extensive dual apprenticeship training systems at upper-secondary level. See more...
A Pedagogy of Digital Humanities?
By AnaMaria Seglie. Many of the discussions that I’ve had with scholars about Digital Humanities projects address concerns about a project’s research value. What’s the “shelf life” of this project? (Ironically, they are projects without "shelves" of course!) How will it add to and continue to grow with scholarly discussions? These are all necessary and important questions – ones that we ask of any new piece of work, theory, criticism, etc. However, Digital Humanities also highlights an equally significant and, often times, overshadowed series of questions about teaching. How can we use these projects in our classrooms? How will they enhance our discussions and our students’ experience? More...
