Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Peter Baldwin. Evaluation, not publication, should be academe’s new priority.
Imagine that, having polished a dissertation for publication or finished a second or later book, the social-science scholar sends the typescript to an independent Review Institute. The institute determines a list of five to 10 scholars worldwide who are best placed to evaluate the work, taking into account both those experts cited in it and others who, though prominent in the field, may have a different take on the subject. For a fee like the one publishers now pay outside readers, each evaluator writes a two-page appraisal of the work, avoiding any summary and dealing only with its qualities. Numbers are also assigned on a uniform scale over a range of areas: Quality of the empirical base? How well written? Novel or familiar ground? Advanced or introductory readership? Balanced or polemical? And the like. More...

Q: My uncle told me about a fairly recent development in distance education — MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, from name universities that are available free on the Web.
Now I read that the nonprofit MOOC provider organization Coursera has begun offering certificates to students who take sequences of MOOCs from its university partners. The new program, which I understand is called Specializations, is, or shortly will, offer certificates in data science, mobile app development and cybersecurity, with more types of courses to follow. The Coursera certificates will comprise three to nine courses, each costing between $200 and $500. More...

And we must also ask how well the National Development Plan articulates higher education's role. There is increasing evidence that high levels of educational attainment contribute to global competitiveness and sustainable socioeconomic development. This has resulted in a number of countries placing higher education at the core of their development strategies. In this context, one may legitimately ask how South Africa measures up and whether the government's National Development Plan (NDP), released in 2012, articulates the role of higher education in contributing to achieving the ambitious goals and targets outlined for 2030. More...

By Khy Sovuthy and Matt Blomberg. The Minister of Education will no longer place a validating signature on the country’s university degrees, and schools of tertiary education will soon be audited, and properly accredited, for the quality of their education, officials said Monday.
Universities whose courses and degrees fall below par will be shut down entirely, or ordered to take serious remedial action to improve their level of teaching, an education ministry official said. More...

Universities across the world actually benefit during recessions, wielding far greater recruiting power to attract talented graduates compared to the private sector, shows new research from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
In tough financial times the stability of the academic world wins out over the boom-and-bust cycle of the private sector, according to the latest evidence. More...