Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Ryan Derousseau. Professors grow weary of idea that technology can salvage higher education. After a full day of teaching at Boston College, Karen Arnold had to find time to read her students’ contributions to an online discussion board. Each was required to write at least one post, and, as usual, they seemed to have waited to do it until the night before the deadline. More...

By Justin Pope. Online courses may not be changing colleges as their boosters claimed they would, but they can prove valuable in surprising ways. A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these “massive open online courses” stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher education. Their interactive technology promised to deliver top-tier teaching from institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, not just to a few hundred students in a lecture hall on ivy-draped campuses, but free via the Internet to thousands or even millions around the world. At long last, there appeared to be a solution to the problem of “scaling up” higher education: if it were delivered more efficiently, the relentless cost increases might finally be rolled back. Some wondered whether MOOCs would merely transform the existing system or blow it up entirely. Computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of the MOOC provider Udacity, predicted that in 50 years, 10 institutions would be responsible for delivering higher education. More...

By Cornelia Grumman. The right resources and more support will lead students to make better college decisions.
Nationwide, an estimated 18 percent of high school freshmen will earn four-year college degrees by age 25. This figure surprises most, but it is a state of affairs we’ve been confronting in Chicago for nearly a decade. In 2006, the Consortium on Chicago School Research calculated the Chicago Public Schools “Degree Attainment Index” for its high school freshmen to be just 8 percent. More...

By Björn Kjerfve. Documenting change, challenges and an undeniable opportunity. The Middle East represents a diverse geographic spread of 18 countries, each with their own economies, political frameworks and social needs. However, collectively, underlying trends in higher education across the whole region point to one clear reality: Thanks to a population heavily skewed towards youth and a growing middle-class affluence in many of the markets, the higher education sector in the Middle East is now a viable target for many international institutions’ global expansion plans. More...

By Simon Marginson. California has been at the crest of modernity since the end of the second world war. The tendencies and tensions of the times often show up in California before anywhere else. More...

By Thomas Carey. Matt Read posted in the Dean Dad blog about the colleges in “The Middle”: community colleges and the public universities that are predominantly undergraduate, caught between concern about rising tuition costs and constrained state resources for higher education (and pretty much everything else). Where others see mostly crisis – including Goldie Blumenstyk, whose book American Higher Education in Crisis was the prompt for the post – Matt sees opportunity for these institutions: “If they allow themselves to be commoditized…then I foresee an ugly race to the bottom.  But with more middle and even upper middle class students feeling compelled by economics to look more closely at public options, there’s a real opportunity…”. More...