Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Barbara Fister. Earlier today a friend commented on Twitter that he hates it when librarians are called gatekeepers. But it occurred to me that's exactly what we are. Our job is to keep gates open. The rise of public libraries across the United States was at least in part about giving everyone a chance to read great literature and educate themselves as they wished. (It was also, in part, an attempt to bring immigrants into line with American cultural norms and give them opportunities to "improve themselves" that didn't involve strikes or political organizing. Nothing is ever simple.) Today we prop open gates by negotiating licenses to allow interlibrary lending and supporting open access publishing initiatives and helping students learn the confidence and skill to participate in the making of knowledge. Read more...

By John Warner. Jennifer Solheim is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
While maintaining the UIC French department’s Twitter account some days after fall semester finals, I came across this Tweet from a French major who was in two of my classes this past term. Read more...

By John Warner. I have a confession. I tried McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart Advantage software. It’s kind of fun. I’m a little scared to admit this because I’ve been hard on adaptive learning software previously, going so far as to urge others to “resist” its adoption. The LearnSmart trial module is on U.S. States and Capitals, and while the content is relatively basic, I believe the interface is consistent with how the software works for other subjects. Read more...

By John Warner. Writing in the Inside Higher Ed blog StratEDgy, Dayna Catropa reports that students want courses and degrees in entrepreneurship, but colleges and universities aren’t keeping pace. Apparently, the Millennials want to be entrepreneurs, and they believe their educations should help foster this desire. Read more...

By G. Rendell. Over the past couple of weeks, there's been a bit of buzz in the sustainability community about McDonalds' commitment to sustainable beef.  The attention was triggered, in part, by a series of three articles at GreenBiz,com, the first of which is here. In a nutshell, McDonalds has committed to begin purchasing sustainable beef in 2016, and eventually to buy nothing but. To put that promise in context, let's note that "sustainable beef" is nowhere defined, and the date by which they'll reach their final goal is anything but certain. Read more...

By Carol Levander. Why is a small, highly ranked residential university like Rice — a school that prides itself on a small student/faculty ratio and that has, according to the Princeton Review, the happiest students — elbow deep in developing MOOCS? This is the question that I inevitably get asked the minute I mention Rice’s partnerships with Coursera and Edx. And it’s a logical question, for at first glance the MOOC world, with its global delivery, open enrollment, and high attrition rates seems to be at dramatic odds with the highly selective residential four-year learning ecosystem that schools like Rice deliver to the small number of students who are accepted each year. Read more...

By Nathaniel Levy. At least with movies, the sequels rarely live up to the original.
A little over two years into the great “disruption” what, if anything, can we say about MOOCs now that the version 2.0s are here?
To find out, let’s go back to the future.
2012-2013 was called the “Year of the MOOC” by the New York Times. MOOC-related hype was everywhere. Expectations were high and outcomes were hard to predict. The courses were “experiments”—and producing them was exhausting. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Quick question. In the last 3 years how many opportunities have you had to be part of discussions about the future of your institution? How often have you been able to get a seat at the table when issues of priorities, investments, and governance have emerged? If your life is anything like my own, the last 3 years have been very different from all the preceding ones. Read more...