By Jean François Bouthillette. By mid-May, the first cohort of students at the Institut des sciences, des technologies et des études avancées d’Haïti (ISTEAH) will finish their first year of studies. Since the fall, 61 students on three Haitian campuses – in Cap-Haïtien, Port-au-Prince and Hinche – have benefitted from the teaching and support of foreign professors working at the new school. More...
By Cassandra Hendry. University and college presidents are increasingly using social media to engage with their constituencies, says Dan Zaiontz, who works in strategic planning and public affairs at Seneca College in Toronto.
As a capstone project for his recent master’s degree in communication studies at McMaster University, Mr. Zaiontz conducted confidential interviews with 22 presidents (11 each from Canada and the United States) about their social media use. Twitter was the most popular platform, with all 22 presidents using it, followed by Facebook with 16 users. LinkedIn was a distant third while tools such as Instagram, Google+, Reddit and Flickr barely registered. More...
By Cassandra Hendry. Circuit boards, screwdrivers and 3D printers aren’t typically found in a university’s humanities faculty, but the University of Victoria’s Maker Lab in the Humanities is no ordinary place. Opened in 2012, the Maker Lab follows the recent trend of “makerspaces” – collaborative, community-based workshops stocked with tools and materials for people to experiment with and create new things. But, what sets the UVic lab apart is blending this “makerspace ethos” with the humanities. More...
By Natalie Samson. Three researchers at Simon Fraser University report that cyberbullying is a growing concern at Canadian universities and that universities will need to address it forcefully, with clearer policies than the ones now in place. Wanda Cassidy, associate professor of education and director of SFU’s Centre for Education, Law and Society (or CELS), Margaret Jackson, professor emerita of criminology, and Chantal Faucher, postdoctoral fellow at CELS, are among only a handful of people in the world examining cyberbullying at universities. Since 2012, the three have been working on a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to investigate cyberbullying at four Canadian universities. More...
By Katherine Anderson. Is our higher education system being threatened by too many English-as-a-Second-Language students? In a recent article, professors Norm Friesen and Patrick Keeney ventured that too many students are “academically or linguistically unprepared” for academic discourse. The article, “Internationalizing the Canadian campus: ESL students and the erosion of higher education,” touched a collective nerve, with at least 20 comments so far. Some commenters called the professors’ arguments “ignorant” or “racist.”
It’s time to replace this invective with constructive solutions. More...
By Rosanna Tamburri. It is crunch time in Eastern Canada.
Cape Breton University is a long way from home for Chinese student Qiang Zhang, who prefers to go by his chosen English name “Kelex.” But he has nothing but praise for CBU, where he is pursuing a bachelor of hospitality and tourism management degree. Not even the unusually harsh winter has dampened his enthusiasm. Earlier in the day he had a job interview with a major Halifax hotel. If all goes well, he plans to stay. More...
ICDE and the LangOER network in partnership with the Nordic OER network are organizing a workshop for a small group of leading world experts in post-secondary education to be held in Oslo on Monday, 28 April. The event will seek to assess the situation for open educational resource around the globe with particular reference to less used languages.
Definitions
Less used languages are languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, Greek, Xhosa and Zulu which find themselves needing to contend with a fast evolving educational landscape currently dominated by English. Less used languages also include regional and minority languages.
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are defined by UNESCO as any type of educational materials in the public domain or with an open licence. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them.
Focus on:
Also with reference to:
The workshop will provide input to a working policy paper on OER and challenges and opportunities for less used languages in a global, European, Nordic and national perspective. More...
Students have a mixed level of identification with the notion of themselves as ‘consumers’, and they continue to value excellent teaching, research published today into the impact of policy changes on student attitudes and approaches to learning in higher education shows.
The research, by Michael Tomlinson of the University of Southampton and funded by the HEA, reveals that the majority of students in the study spoke of having greater rights and stronger grounds for appraising and questioning the provision they received, but that the notion of actively consuming higher education did not seem to capture the majority's approaches. More...
The South African Higher Education Community Engagement Forum (SAHECEF) met at the University of Western Cape, in Cape Town, on 3 and 4 April 2014. There were 60 leading community engagement advocates and academics involved across South African universities, including the advisor to the national Minister of Higher Education and Training. More...
Studies of British and American students have shown that university rankings are less important than other factors in the choice of a university. However, a recent study has discovered that this is not true for international students who are thinking about studying in the UK and Australia. /https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
