Formation continue et MOOC, l’histoire ne fait-elle que commencer ? Ces cours en ligne, ouverts et “massifs” (“massive open online courses”), en facilitant l’accès à la connaissance et le développement des compétences tout au long de la vie, ont le potentiel pour abattre les cloisons entre études et emploi. Suite...
For The Largest Not-For-Profit MOOC, edX, Experimentation Is The Path To Innovation
By Peter High. MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.
It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.
MOOC : cap sur la formation continue à l’université
Numérique : un “app store” de l’emploi et trois nouvelles mesures pour la formation
En annonçant la préparation d’un nouvel acte de la feuille de route numérique du gouvernement, le ministre du Travail, Michel Sapin, a affiché une certitude : ce ne sont pas les infrastructures qui créent de la valeur, mais les usages et les compétences. Suite...
VAE : plus de 250 000 personnes certifiées depuis 10 ans
La Dares publie une étude sur la VAE en 2012 dans les ministères certificateurs. "Environ 64 000 dossiers de candidatures à un titre professionnel délivré par un certificateur public ont été jugés recevables à la validation des acquis de l’expérience (VAE). 48 700 candidats se sont présentés devant un jury en vue de l’obtention de tout ou partie d’un titre ou d’un diplôme et, parmi eux, environ 28 700 candidats ont obtenu une validation totale. Ces chiffres sont en baisse par rapport à 2011, alors qu’ils avaient été stables entre 2010 et 2011. Depuis la mise en place du dispositif en 2002, plus de 250 000 personnes ont été certifiées par la voie de la VAE". Tableaux et graphiques présentent les certifications, les candidats et les taux de validation pour les différents ministères certificateurs.
La VAE en 2012 dans les ministères certificateurs, Dares Analyses, janvier 2014, n°002
Crowdfunding ‘could threaten government investment’
By . The use of crowdfunding to finance research could be used by the government as an excuse to cut public spending, an expert has warned.
Joe Cox, principal lecturer in economics at the University of Portsmouth, said that the practice of academic crowdfunding – whereby researchers ask members of the public to back their project by making a donation – had the potential to complement existing funding mechanisms, but that it could be viewed by government as a way to cut research spending. More...
University of London considers outsourcing careers service
By David Matthews. Institution investigates commercial options to generate surplus.
The University of London could outsource its careers service, which provides advice to students at more than 50 institutions, to a for-profit private firm, it has emerged.
But the university has stressed that no decisions have yet been made on plans to create a “commercial services business” and that outsourcing is only one option on the table. More...
Indian students' number in Australia continues to climb
By Vanita Srivastava. There has been a sharp increase in the number of Indians applying for student visas to Australia, according to the latest student visa programme quarterly report.
The latest immigration figures show 4,148 Indians made offshore applications for student visas between July and September last year - more than double the figure for the same period in 2012.
More than 90% of Indians who applied for student visas were successful, compared with 74% in 2012. More...
An Indian Ranking System for Higher Education Institutions to Emerge Shortly
Union Ministry for Human Resource Development gave green signal to the proposal of developing an India’s own ranking system which would rank the Indian higher education institutions through right parameters and would portray the proper metrics of their importance, accordingly.
The move took shape after noticing that India’s higher education institutions in past years have failed to make the cut on international ranking lists. More...