Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Anne Curzan. We’re nearing the end of the year, which has me thinking about the annual Word of the Year vote at the American Dialect Society meeting in January. We’ll be in Minneapolis this year, and Grant Barrett (Vice President of Communications and Technology for ADS) is soliciting nominations for a list of possible contenders. I asked students last week if they had suggestions, and they came up immediately with twerk, turnt, and insta (as a noun and verb, < Instagram). More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. For three-quarters of an hour one afternoon a week ago, the British House of Lords was entirely occupied with a discussion of pronoun grammar. The discussion had been requested by a former judge, Lord Scott of Foscote, and the impetus was a promise by the previous government that future laws would be framed in gender-neutral language, at least “so far as it is practicable, at no more than a reasonable cost to brevity or intelligibility.” Predictably, Lord Scott defended what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls “purportedly sex-neutral he”: the old-fashioned notion that saying “anyone who thinks he deserves it” doesn’t exclude females. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I don’t have Siri, and so my experience of Apple’s virtual personal assistant is limited to eavesdropping on my friends’ iPhones. But it has struck me as fascinating that the voice for several years was a woman’s, at least in this country. Despite the impression that a female avatar would be “less knowledgeable,” than a male, according to the Stanford researcher Clifford Nass, Apple’s initial roll-out was given a female voice because female voices are preferred in the “helper or assistant role.” The exception, at least at first, was in France and in Britain, where users apparently go for knowledge over subservience. But the female avatar is ubiquitous enough to have spawned at least one Hollywood movie, Spike Jonze’s new “neo-classic boy-meets-operating-system romance,” Her. More...

By Kathryn D. Blanchard. Recently I participated in one of the many Saturday admissions events hosted by my small college each year. This particular event was a kind of “department fair,” involving a large lobby full of tables, well-dressed admissions officers, and not-so-well-dressed faculty members. All of us were there to greet the 60 or so high-school students, together with their families, who had come to visit the college and speak with faculty members in their projected majors. More...

By Steve Kolowich. Massive open online courses could help increase access to higher education while driving down its costs, but President Obama should not intervene in order to push the MOOC movement in that direction. That’s the advice the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has offered the president in a letter, made public on Wednesday, that focuses on education technology—and MOOCs in particular. More...

By Steve Kolowich. MOOCs and adaptive-learning software are often billed as two of the most potentially game-changing technologies in higher education. The White House, for one, is excited to see what might happen if and when those two technologies meet. It would seem natural to combine massive-open-online-course platforms, which accommodate thousands of students, with adaptive-learning software, which responds to the needs of individual students. But so far that has not happened. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology this month wrote a letter to President Obama briefing him on MOOCs. In the letter, released on Wednesday, the group told the president that while “the jury is out” on the long-term implications of MOOCs, the scale of the massive courses could yet improve access to higher education while reducing its cost. More...

By Charles Huckabee. The Apollo Education Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, announced on Tuesday that its Apollo Global subsidiary had agreed to acquire Open Colleges Australia, one of Australia’s oldest and largest providers of distance learning. Under the agreement, Apollo Global, through a subsidiary, will purchase 70 percent of the outstanding shares of Open Colleges for approximately 110 Australian dollars in cash, or about $98.5-million (U.S.) at current exchange rates, plus contingent payments that will be principally based on 2014 operating results and could total $47-million (U.S.) more. More...

By Andy Thomason. At first blush, it might seem like an ad for another online university you haven’t heard of. But “Let’s Profit Off Each Other” is, in fact, the slogan of the fictional “For Profit Online University”—the subject of an 11-minute parody infomercial that, according to the blog Splitsider, was created by former writers for The Onion, a satirical website, and has been airing at 4 a.m. recently on the cable-television channel Adult Swim. More...

By Audrey Williams June. I’ve written about the ins and outs (and quirks) of the academic workplace for The Chronicle for the last five years. So there are some things about finding employment after graduate school that I just know to be true. Most people on the academic job market think landing a tenure-track position is a crapshoot. Many advisers can’t help their students find work outside of academe. And accurate information on Ph.D. placement is hard to come by. 
But while doing the reporting for an article about how colleges should—but often don’t—collect Ph.D-placement data, I learned three critical things about graduate students and data on their job placement. More...

By Katherine Moos. Recently, in a course on classical political economy, my students and I discussed mechanization and its effects on employment. Having read Adam Smith’s classic text, The Wealth of Nations, we examined the productivity gains from the division of labor in his well-known pin-factory example—in which he demonstrated that workers who specialize in particular tasks outproduce those who perform every task themselves.
We talked about industries in which machines are replacing workers to varying degrees of success: grocery clerks swapped out for self-checkout machines, restaurants using conveyor belts instead of waiters and waitresses, and even nursing and elder care performed by so-called “caring robots”.
This got me thinking about academia, where we’re witnessing a similar move towards mechanization. The advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is making it clear that university instructors aren’t as insulated from the effects of technological progress as we might have thought. See more...