Formation Continue du Supérieur

Mark November 2013 as the first crack of the current 2011-2013 EdTech Hype Bubble.  In the same 30 day span that saw Chegg chip away at its eggshell with an amended S-1 filing in its eventual emergence as a public company, Chegg’s co-founder Osman Rashid was dismissed from his follow-up act Kno as its financial investors turned it over to strategic investor Intel for “pennies on the dollar”.  This now brings to three the number of casualties amongst the current, over-hyped Silicon Valley EdTech Darlings. 
Regular correspondents of Educated Ventures will be familiar with my highlighting of the “Seven Sisters” of EdTech (originally just “Five Horseman” before the addition of two MOOCs), but for new readers, there are seven start-ups which have each raised capital from at least two of the top decile returning venture funds: Grockit (Benchmark / Atlas); Knewton (Accel / Bessemer); 2U (Bessemer / Highland / Redpoint); Edmodo (Benchmark / Greylock / NEA); Altius Education (Charles River Ventures / Spark); Coursera (KPCB / NEA); and Udacity (CRV / Andressen). More...

Recent Pedagogy Ideas 
Our Mission & Values
To help the higher education sector, in Canada and around the world, glimpse the future and prepare for the challenges and opportunities ahead with solid data, collaborative insight, and good humour.
Intellect
We honour intelligence and creativity, and value clarity, logic and measurement as a solid foundation for strategic thinking. We respect the work of researchers, artists, teachers, and students.
Objectivity
Our consulting is collaborative, politically neutral and culturally sensitive, and our recommendations are strategic and evidence-based. Our research is conducted honestly and without preconceptions.
Collegiality
We’re education-sector specialists, colleagues and peers with our clients, sharing information in collaborative dialogue and maintaining client confidentiality at all times.
Excellence
We take pride in the quality of our organization and our work, and we value excellence, originality, accuracy, consistency, and attention to detail.
Currency
We stay abreast of ever-changing youth culture, emerging communication technologies, design trends and campus news, and consider its relevance to our work and our clients.
Creativity
We bring creativity and innovation to our work in many forms – qualitative insights, strategic thinking, new media and tactics, original language and design approaches. We value creativity that is focused, serving a strategic purpose, data-driven, and continuously improved based on results.
Utility
We provide actionable and effective solutions to our clients, and promote lasting change in their organizations by freely sharing useful information, tools and techniques.

It’s a conversation that begins with propriety and manners, moves into legalese and institutional policy, and ends up with moralizing. What should or shouldn’t professors (and other college instructors) say about their students on Facebook (or other social media)? I am less interested in the answers to that question than I am in the ways that our attempts to answer reveal something about what faculty understand the rhetorical space of social media to be. For some reason I’ve seen this conversation in a variety of places of late, including the writing program administrators listserv. There are really three basic positions:

• abstinence: faculty shouldn’t remark about their students
• positive-only: faculty should only say nice things about their students
• in private: faculty who complain should severely limit access to those posts

That last position is really conciliatory (no one really thinks there is such a thing as “private” on facebook) but it recognizes the fourth, unrecommended position: to just fire away on facebook. More...

Postsecondary tax credits cost the federal and provincial governments billions of dollars each year, but are not distributed equitably and may have no proven effect in boosting enrolment, according to a report released today by the C.D. Howe Institute. In “What You Don’t Know Can’t Help You: Lessons of Behavioural Economics for Tax-Based Student Aid,” author Christine Neill finds flaws in the design of postsecondary tax credits  and recommends they be better-targeted at low-income families that need them most. 
Canada’s federal and provincial governments spend a lot of money subsidizing postsecondary students, notes the author. Tuition and education/textbook tax credits, in particular, cost the federal government alone around $1.6 billion in 2012 – a sum greater than the net cost of the Canada Student Loan Program. 
For the report go to: http://www.cdhowe.org/what-you-dont-know-cant-help-you-lessons-of-behavioural-economics-for-tax-based-student-aid/23461. Read more...

By John O’Leary. Students with professional parents are about three times more likely to go to the top public universities in England, Australia and the United States than those from working-class families, according to research published today. At the most selective US private universities, the gap is even wider. 
The report, by Dr John Jerrim, of the Institute of Education at the University of London, was commissioned for a Sutton Trust summit on advancing access to leading universities around the world. The two-day meeting will be opened by Dr Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. More...

Les discriminations à l'embauche sont punies par la loi. Pourtant, lors d'un recrutement, le critère du sexe est rarement neutre. Le supposé manque de disponibilité des femmes n'est pas seul en cause. Tout un ensemble de traits de personnalité encore assignés « naturellement » aux hommes et aux femmes peut venir biaiser la sélection. Les propos de recruteurs, des deux sexes, montrent que les stéréotypes ont la vie dure...

Étudier la discrimination à l’embauche à partir d'interviews de recruteurs, c’est prendre le risque d’obtenir des discours très formatés. En effet, lorsqu’on les interroge au sujet des politiques en faveur de la diversité, de l ’égalité, des CV anonymes…, leurs propos sur les discriminations que pourraient subir les candidats qui se présentent à eux sont très édulcorés. Qu’il s’agisse de leurs origines (étrangères), de leur lieu de résidence (quartiers « sensibles »), de leur sexe, de leur âge, voire de leur éventuel handicap… rien ne semble faire obstacle à leur embauche potentielle.

Tout semble au contraire se passer comme sil es individus, quelles que soient leurs caractéristiques individuelles, avaient tous les mêmes chances lors des différentes phases de recrutement. Pourtant, dès lorsqu'ils décrivent leurs pratiques effectives d'embauche, la réalité est tout autre. Les stéréotypes, au premier rang desquels les stéréotypes sexués, ont la vie dure.

C'est ce qui ressort du volet qualitatif d'une étude sur les discriminations à l'embauche menée pour le compte du Fonds d'expérimentation pour la jeunesse. Lire la suite dans Bref n°315. Suite de l'article...

Trois jours d’échanges  
La manifestation se tient au Centre des congrès de Biarritz, du mercredi 29 au vendredi 31 janvier 2014. Trois jours d’échanges, d’interactions, de conférences-débats, de tables rondes et d’ateliers.
A quelles conditions la formation peut-elle contribuer à créer de la valeur ? 
Le programme de cette 13e édition de l’université d’hiver de la formation professionnelle s’inscrit pleinement dans ce questionnement. Aujourd’hui la formation n’est plus seulement un ensemble de dispositifs pour les entreprises et les personnes, elle est une véritable valeur. 
La formation, l’acquisition des compétences prennent aujourd’hui une place majeure dans la mise en œuvre des politiques économiques, de l’emploi et des stratégies des entreprises. Elles sont devenues au fil des réformes un enjeu de taille pour l’emploi et l’individu, nouveau champ des possibles pour l’économie et la collectivité. A l’heure où la compétitivité et l’emploi se retrouvent au centre des préoccupations, l’UHFP 2014 est au coeur de la prochaine réforme de la formation professionnelle. L’ANI du 11 janvier 2013 propose un nouveau paradigme de la formation au service de la compétitivité des entreprises et de la sécurisation des parcours professionnels des salariés. Il amorce ainsi un véritable changement du rapport au travail et à l’économie.
Depuis plus de 20 ans Centre Inffo permet, grâce à ses universités d’hiver, de réunir les acteurs et décideurs de l’action collective pour la formation. A cette occasion il les invite à se réunir pour comprendre, analyser et débattre des évolutions en cours.
Cette année, nous vous attendons à Biarritz, au carrefour de ces nouveaux enjeux. 
Voir le programme.

More than five hundred mayors, city education executives and experts from more than 100 countries met in Beijing, China, from 21 to 23 October, at the International Conference on Learning Cities to discuss ways to make cities more responsive to the learning needs of citizens.

The conference, which was co-organized by UNESCO, the Ministry of Education of China and Beijing Municipal Government, was opened by Ms Liu Yandong, Vice Premier of China, Mr Yuan Guiren, Minister of Education of China, Mr Wang Anshun, Mayor of Beijing Municipal Government, and  Ms Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO. Numerous other senior international figures addressed plenary sessions and regional panels. Discussions focussed on the stages of development required to turn cities into learning cities.

The main outcome document of the conference, the Beijing Declaration on Building Learning Cities affirms the vital importance of education for the future of all human communities. It concludes with a ‘Call to Action’, urging UNESCO “to establish a global network of learning cities to support and accelerate the practice of lifelong learning in the world’s communities. The Beijing Declaration also invites foundations, private corporations and non-governmental organisations to become active partners of the global network of learning cities, and calls upon cities and regions in every part of the world to join this network.

Press release: "We need Learning Cities for a Better Future for All," declares UNESCO Director-General in Beijing