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By Peter Walker. David Willetts says higher education system lopsided, as survey shows students receiving less feedback than 50 years ago. Universities need a "cultural change" towards teaching, the universities minister, David Willetts, has argued, as a survey of UK undergraduates showed they were being set less work and received notably less tutor feedback than did their peers 50 years ago. More...

By Natalie Ilsley. When I left home for university I had no idea how difficult it would be for my parents. When I returned home after my first year at university, it seemed as if my family had coped well with my absence – a little too well perhaps. Pictures that I had painted the previous Christmas had been removed from the walls and my belongings had been relocated to the attic. However, I soon realised that they had suffered more than I realised. More...

By Anna Codrea-Rado. A €15b initiative from the European Union to encourage study and training abroad will address unemployment and social mobility, says EU commissioner. Language learning is an EU priority, Androulla Vassiliou, EU commissioner for education, culture and multilingualism, has said. Launching the revamped Erasmus+ programme, Vassiliou said languages are essential for addressing unemployment and social mobility within the European Union.
"Languages are one of our six priority topics under Erasmus+," Vassiliou said. "Whether it is for mobility for language learning, partnerships between institutions for language teaching, or policy support, it is one of our priorities."
The Erasmus+ programme will provide grants for more than four million people across the EU to study or train abroad. It comes into force in January 2014 and aims to address the language skills deficit holding back young people from international jobs. More...

By Peter Suber. Open access to research is still held back by misunderstandings repeated by people who should know better, says Peter Suber. Open access to academic research has never been a hotter topic. But it's still held back by myths and misunderstandings repeated by people who should know better. The good news is that open access has been successful enough to attract comment from beyond its circle of pioneers and experts. The bad news is that a disappointing number of policy-makers, journalists and academics opine in public without doing their homework. More...

By Sally Taylor. Failure is a fact of life for artists and academics, says Sally Taylor – must arts graduates learn to live with it too? Earlier this month the acclaimed theatre opera and film director Patrice Chéreau died. His greatest achievement is widely seen as his Wagner Ring cycle for the 1976 Bayreuth festival. Audiences at the time, however, were bitterly divided. There were death threats, bomb threats and brawls in the auditorium, reminiscent of the 1913 opening of The Rite of Spring. More...

By David Batty. Angry at soaring fees and disillusioned with established courses, artists are simply doing things for themselves. A former library in Hackney may seem an unlikely venue for London's most talked-about new art school. The 1970s Rose Lipman building lacks the architectural wow factor of Central Saint Martins King's Cross campus, but demand for places on the postgraduate Open School East in De Beauvoir town is high. The year-long programme boasts visiting lecturers, including the curator of contemporary art and performance at Tate Modern, Catherine Wood, and artists such as Pablo Bronstein and Ed Atkins. And, at a time when art MAs in the capital cost up to £9,000 a year, the students pay no tuition fees. More...

By Richard Doughty. Massive open online courses offer anyone with access to the internet the chance to study at a top university for free.
"Of all the things to factor in when running an economy, the most troublesome is people." So begins a slick animation on YouTube, produced by the Open University and introducing the University of Florida's online course, Economic Issues: Food and You. It's a Mooc, which means that it's one of several hundred courses, in all disciplines, that attract tens of thousands of students. More...

By Sophie Grubb. We're paying huge fees, but students like me aren't getting a fair amount of contact time. In first year I found having an empty timetable a novelty. It was something to be smug about as my peers went to a full day of lectures and I stayed at home and watched an entire series of Friends. But come my third year of journalism, media and cultural studies, I started to question what I was paying thousands of pounds for. Even the universities minister David Willetts reckons universities are putting research before teaching. More...

By Nico Perrino. Universities are increasingly snooping on their students and staff. Everything from emails and social media to campus whereabouts. It monitors email and social media accounts, uses thousands of surveillance cameras to track behavior and movement, is funded by billions of dollars from the federal government, and has been called "the most authoritarian institution in America". More...

By Simon Jenkins. Instead of research academics need to focus on giving students what they want for their money: that is, a well-rounded education. Money talks. After two years of tuition fees at £7,000-£9,000 universities are apparently rolling in cash, and their students are demanding value for it. Universities are expected to deliver not just education but jobs. Courses are being tailored to "employability". Research is concentrated in the elite Russell institutions. Now the universities minister, David Willetts, is calling for a "cultural change" to reverse the trend of too much time going on scholarship and not enough on teaching. Is this a new dawn in higher education, or a new darkness? More...