By Léo Charbonneau. The American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, held this year in San Jose, can best be described as an international science and technology extravaganza, attracting some 8,000 leading scientists, engineers, educators and policy-makers, along with hundreds of media. More...
22 février 2015
Higher Education Community Statement on the Innovation Act
The undersigned higher education associations support narrowly tailored legislative efforts to rein in the abusive litigation practices of patent trolls. Universities have no sympathy for those who abuse the patent system to extract unjust and sometimes exorbitant settlements. Unfortunately, the Innovation Act is not narrowly tailored. It is instead so broad that it would have the unintended consequence of debilitating the U.S. patent system, which is critical to the nation’s economy. More...
Higher Education Community Details Concerns about the Administration's Proposed College Ratings System
The higher education community has anxiously awaited the release of more specific information about the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS) since President Obama announced the proposal in August 2013. The goals articulated by the President – enhanced access to accurate, timely and actionable consumer information and strengthened institutional accountability for the receipt of public funds – are laudable ideals that we strongly support. Our concerns with PIRS, therefore, are not with the purposes motivating the effort, but instead with the feasibility of the approach and the serious danger of unintended consequences.
In view of the Administration’s stated goal of implementing PIRS by the start of the 2015-2016 academic year, we had hoped that the framework unveiled in December 2014 would provide a concrete and sufficiently specific presentation of the Department’s proposed approach to allow institutions to evaluate the plan’s strengths and weaknesses and to assess its likely impact. Unfortunately, the document released on December 19th is so incomplete, tentative, and amorphous, that it is impossible to offer the type of critique that this undertaking would otherwise require.
Download Higher Education Community Details Concerns about the Administration's Proposed College Ratings System
21 février 2015
US Falls Further Behind in Higher Education
The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education has released a 45 year trend report that examines equity issues in American tertiary education. Among its highlights is an analysis of the low number, relative to other countries, of US students attending and graduating from colleges and universities. More...
20 février 2015
Waterloo shines a light on Canadian innovation at AAAS
18 février 2015
Guyana must not allow its only institution of higher learning to fail
More Guyanese need to be aware of, and understand the critically important role that is expected of our only national university in the cultural, economic, industrial, political and social development of Guyana, and why Guyana as a young developing nation must not allow our only institution of higher learning to fail. When the University of Guyana (UG) was established in 1963, three years before Independence, it was the intention of the founders that the institution would fulfil the following four stated purposes. More...
16 février 2015
From Concept to Reality: Considering Free Community College
By Charles Dull - EvoLLLution. A lot of attention over the past few months has been given to free tuition at community colleges. However, there has been little talk about the budget growth necessary to support the infrastructure and wrap-around support services that free tuition dollars will require as a result of greater student populations. Moreover, there has been little attention paid to how the move would change the public value for higher education. In this piece, I will address both issues. More...
Why Do Research? Or, Why ‘The CUNY Map of NYC” Matters #FuturesEd
By Cathy Davidson. In his “The CUNY Sociodemographics Map of New York City: Part I – Race and Ethnicity” , Michael Dorsch compares the ethnicity of each of the communities surrounding each of CUNY’s campuses to the ethnicity of the students attending. He has also published detailed racial and ethnic demographics for each campus, so you can gain a quite intriguing and complex picture of both the individual colleges and CUNY as a whole from this excellent research. Read more...Flat World and CBE: Self-paced does not imply isolation
By Phil Hill. Several weeks ago Flat World announced their latest round of funding, raising $5 million of debt financing, raising their total to $40.7 million. The company started out by offering full e-textbooks (and was previously named FlatWorld Knowledge), developing 110 titles that included 25 of the 50 most-used lecture courses. More...
California Community College OEI Selects LMS Vendor
By Phil Hill. The Online Education Initiative (OEI) for California’s Community College System has just announced its vendor selection for a Common Course Management System (CCMS)[1]. For various reasons I cannot provide any commentary on this process, so I would prefer to simply direct people to the OEI blog site. More...
e-Literate TV Case Study Preview: Middlebury College
By Michael Feldstein. As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Phil and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. Both our preview posts and the series itself start with Middlebury College. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. More...
