Formation Continue du Supérieur

6 janvier 2013

Profit motive is threatening higher education

http://enews.ksu.edu.sa/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/UWN.jpg

By Paul Blake & CollegeTimes Editors. We were pleased to see the recent article by Richard Hall titled "The profit motive is threatening higher education" published on 18 November 2012.
Our team of editors at CollegeTimes, a website that allows students from around the world to submit uncensored reviews of their university, witnesses the corrupt and destructive influence of money on the higher education system on a daily basis. Our website has existed for more than four years, and never have we encountered any animosity between our community and traditional public, private, or non-profit institutions. However, the amount of legal threats, lawsuits, hacking attempts, domain hijacking attempts, and so forth on the part of for-profit institutions around the world (especially from the US and Canada) is something that we deal with every single day.Read more...

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4 janvier 2013

Work, Learning and Freedom

By Michael Kasenbacher, Noam Chomsky. In this often personal interview, renowned linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky outlines a libertarian perspective on work and education, arguing that freedom is the root of creativity and fulfilment.
The question I would like to ask is what is really wanted work? Maybe we could start with your personal life and your double career in linguistics and political activism? Do you like that kind of work?
If I had the time I would spend far more time doing work on language, philosophy, cognitive science, topics that are intellectually very interesting. But a large part of my life is given to one or another form of political activity: reading, writing, organising, activism and so on. Which is worth doing, it’s necessary but it's not really intellectually challenging. Regarding human affairs we either understand nothing, or it's pretty superficial. It's hard work to get the data and put it all together but it's not terribly challenging intellectually. But I do it because it's necessary. The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren't being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns. Read more...

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30 décembre 2012

Poll: academic holidays, fact or fiction?

By Nancy Groves. Is the idea that academics take a month off when their students do a myth – or do you owe it to yourselves to have a break?
"The fact that my students are now on holiday does not mean that I am." So writes Caroline Barratt, lecturer in health policy at the University of Essex. Having survived her first term in the post, Caroline has earned herself a nice lie-down till mid-January, right?
Wrong. In her blog debunking the notion of holidays in (or from) academic life, Caroline says the most she aspires to is a few days free from email. With essays to mark, chapters to read and even write, a month off would be a miracle. When we asked our Twitter followers (who incidentally increased steadily to 25,000 by 25 December), you seemed far from idle. Read more...

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22 décembre 2012

Promise and Pitfalls in Online Ed

By Doug Lederman. It seemed almost too easy. Catharine Stimpson and Ann Kirschner start from such fundamentally different perspective in their views about technology-enabled education that staging a symposium at which the two of them talk about their experiences taking online courses (or writing about such an event) seemed like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course Kirschner would be a booster, and Stimpson a naysayer. What enlightenment could possibly emerge?
The event late last month at New York University here (where Stimpson is University Professor and dean emerita of the graduate school of arts and science) followed the expected script in some ways. Stimpson, a Columbia- and Cambridge-trained feminist literary scholar who presided over the Modern Language Association and is a staunch defender of the humanities, probably surprised no one in the audience when she expressed her qualms that online learning, at least as embodied by tightly controlled courses like the creative writing class she took at the University of Phoenix, contribute to a trend in which “teaching is losing its dignity.” Read more...

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16 décembre 2012

Tue Gutes und sammle Punkte dafür

Sie unterrichten Flüchtlinge, sie gestalten Websites für Senioren, sie beraten Studienabbrecher: Beim Service Learning häufen Studenten nicht nur trockene Theorie an, sondern nutzen ihr Wissen in sozialen Projekten. Die Idee aus den USA wird allmählich auch in Deutschland populär.
In der Theorie hat sie viel gelernt. Gesa Schlösser, 26, macht gerade ihren Master an der Uni Köln und diskutierte wochenlang in Seminaren über Marketing für soziale Einrichtungen und Projektmanagement. Seit einem Semester wendet sie das Erlernte auch praktisch an: Zusammen mit ihren Kommilitonen entwickelt sie Werbestrategien für eine theaterpädagogische Werkstatt in Osnabrück. Mehr...

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11 décembre 2012

The University’s Dilemma

By Tim Laseter. In the face of disruptive change, higher education needs a new, more innovative business model.
By one, and only one, measure, the institutions of higher education around the world are remarkably successful: They reach far more people today than ever before. About a third of Americans over the age of 18 have attained a bachelor’s degree or higher — up from less than 20 percent 30 years ago. In the rest of the world, far more people than in the past are seeking higher education, especially in emerging economies, where immense numbers of young people yearn for professional careers. By all other measures, however, the 4,500 institutions currently serving more than 21 million students in the U.S., and the 6,500 other institutions around the world, collectively deserve failing grades. Read more...

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8 décembre 2012

The Slow Science Movement

By Daniel McCabe. Today’s research environment pushes for the quick fix, but successful science needs time to think. There is a growing school of thought emerging out of Europe that urges university-based scientists to take careful stock of their lives – and to try to slow things down in their work.
According to the proponents of the budding “slow science” movement, the increasingly frenetic pace of academic life is threatening the quality of the science that researchers produce. As harried scientists struggle to churn out enough papers to impress funding agencies, and as they spend more and more of their time filling out forms and chasing after increasingly elusive grant money, they aren’t spending nearly enough time mulling over the big scientific questions that remain to be solved in their fields. This slow science movement is patterned, to some extent, on the Slow Food movement, born in Italy in the 1980s. Read more...

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8 décembre 2012

Grades, the currency on campus

By Roslyn Dakin. Could an economic perspective on grades help improve university teaching?
Late can be costly in childcare. When parents arrive late to pick up their children, caregivers are forced to work extra hours – often with no compensation. One solution is to charge late parents a small fine to deter this behaviour. But when economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini did just that – introducing a $3 late fee at a group of daycare centres in Haifa, Israel – it had the opposite effect: the late arrivals more than doubled.
In recent years, behavioural economists like Drs. Gneezy and Rustichini have begun to study how people respond to incentives using controlled experiments. Their work reveals a host of psychological effects: we’re risk averse, prone to choking when the stakes are high, and we over-value the present. Different types of incentives – financial, social or moral – can have different effects. As a result, policies often backfire.
In the daycare study, the late penalty failed because it took an important social cost – the desire not to impose on others – and replaced it with a financial cost that parents found quite affordable. Instructors often use a similar policy with grades, deducting five or ten percent of the mark from late assignments. Could this have the perverse effect of encouraging procrastination?
The comparison between grades and financial incentives is not far-fetched. After all, students work for grades, and they trade them for scholarships and a spot in graduate school. Grading practices affect which courses students take and how much they enjoy them. So, do students treat grades like money? Read more...

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4 décembre 2012

Are we jeopardising the freedom of higher education?

By Peter Scott. Good intentions are turning universities into more corporate organisations, and this isn't necessarily a good thing, says Peter Scott. The Leveson report was finally published last week, following months of concerns about press freedom – part spontaneous and part orchestrated by corporate media interests. The core argument is clear; the road to hell (shackling the press) is paved with good intentions (curbing abuses such as phone hacking).
Is there a danger the same might happen – or is already happening – to academic freedom? Of course, "hell" is not a direct attack on the principle of academic freedom. No one behaves – openly – as the late Keith Joseph did when he publicly questioned whether social science could ever be regarded as science, and forced the Social Science Research Council to change its name.
Today the threats are more indirect. The sheer weight of mainstream scholarship, whether expressed through Research Excellence Framework panels or funding priorities, may give less orthodox ideas less and less room to breathe. More systematic approaches to learning and teaching have also meant losing some of the eccentricities and quirks of university teaching in the past. Read more...

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9 novembre 2012

Death by administration

By Toby Miller. I'VE had difficulty adjusting to life in British academe after two decades in New York and Los Angeles. I'm unused to a seminar with 80 masters students for three hours.
I'm unused to 90 per cent of these graduate students working in a second, third or fourth language, with many never having written a university essay in any language.
I'm unused to the requirement to take a roll, whereby I engage in surveillance to ensure attendance.
I'm unused to a vast array of meetings.
Agendas and dates are set by central administration, attendance is mandatory and an immense earnestness accompanies the use of verbs as nouns and a series of impenetrable acronyms. Entire sentences have no recognisable words apart from definite and indefinite articles and conjunctions. More...

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