Perplexing Problem? Borrow Some Brains
It's not mentioned in this article, listed via elearningpost, but the advice here is very similar to that documented in James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. The premise is that, with some caveats, a group of people will consistently find a better answer than a single person, and often a better answer than even the best individual in the group. More...
Play and Learning in The Brain
Maish Nichani summarizes this nicely in elearningpost: "Nice article on the importance of play in learning. Learning is not all about external rewards and punishments, rather “the human brain determines our learning potential, and subjective experience is, clearly, more than just stimuli and responses. More...
Announcing the Commonwealth
In various fora I have warned of the danger that Creative Commons will commercialize. It would be too great a temptation, I argued, to create special 'business' Creative Commons licenses for commercial content, possibly charging a fee for managing the license. When the Creation Commons 'Education' licenses were proposed a few months ago, I warned that this was first step in the process (here, here, here, and here). More...
As international educators, we should consider how we can ‘walk the talk’ and reduce our own carbon footprints. A good starting point is to consult a free carbon footprint calculator on the web. Once we have determined the major sources of our carbon emissions, we can start acting to reduce them. For example, to reduce the impact of transportation, we can use digital communication tools, low-carbon transportation (eg trains instead of planes) and car-sharing platforms. More...
Core values can serve as a compass in your daily work in higher education. They can help guide you in the right direction when the landscape is complex or foggy, and being proactive about implementing policies that support core higher education values may even help your institution avoid some of this difficult terrain altogether. More...
International student recruitment is no rocket science, but just like baking, it has to be done properly. We can’t just throw things we like into the batter and hope something delicious comes out: a couple of burgers, strawberry jam and sushi rolls mixed together will not likely add up to a tasty meal. However, this is how we often approach recruitment. Often the planning only goes so far as to decide which channels to use: let’s go to a few fairs, do some advertising and open up a Snapchat account, let’s GO. More...
International rankings have become an important element in the marketing strategies of English-speaking universities such as the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. A recent research report indicates that this is especially true of Australia. According to an article in PIE (Professionals in International Education) News the Australian consulting firm Studymove has found that there is a correlation between the fees charged by Australian universities and their position in the QS world university rankings. More...
In the latest edition of the US News Best Global Universities there are few significant changes this year. This is a research university ranking that does not attempt to assess teaching or learning. There are 13 indicators: Global research reputation (12.5% weighting), Regional research reputation (12.5%), Publications (10%), Books (2.5%), Conferences (2.5%), Normalized citation impact (10%). More...
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) have released the latest in their series of regional rankings. The Arab Region rankings are generally quite stable but the first place this year goes to King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals of Saudi Arabia which has pushed the American University of Beirut into second place. The top five are completed with King Abdulaziz University and King Saud University in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates University. More...
The Cybermetrics Lab, a research group of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CISC) in Spain, has been producing global rankings of universities since 2004. Their latest contribution is derived from the Google Scholar database, which is now larger than those maintained by Clarivate Analytics and Scopus, and uses the Google Scholar Citations public profiles to rank those researchers whose h-index is higher than 100. More...
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