Formation Continue du Supérieur

19 mai 2013

Focus on education; no, really

Everyone knows, and everyone has known for a very long time, that education is the key to lifting aboriginal Canadians out of poverty and into good-paying jobs.
Everyone also knows, and they have known it for a very long time, that spending on aboriginal education has been inadequate, and still is. The country actually spends less on aboriginal education than it does on schooling for everyone else, which, as many people have said for a very long time, is a national disgrace.
And yet there was something important that emerged from a meeting of retired political leaders and Winnipeg's business elite who gathered here Thursday to discuss the province's future.
They agreed the provincial outlook is grim unless an overwhelming effort is made to redress aboriginal poverty and, in particular, the sub-standard education system on reserves. Read more...

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19 mai 2013

Reinventing the wheel

By Liz Koblyk. This is a bit of an odd blog post, because I’m asking you not to do something: don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t need to. Many of you reading this have access to a university career centre. Chances are good that that centre competes with lots of other offices, services, events and clubs for your attention. Your attention is a finite resource and your career centre has a limited marketing budget, so there are probably hidden treasures in your career centre that few students are aware of. What tends to happen, when services fly under the radar, is that those services are re-created in miniature elsewhere on campus. Read more...

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19 mai 2013

Postdoctoral mentors and a regular reality check

By David Kent. A little while back I wrote a blog post called “Shorter PhDs and more active thesis committees,” which proposed that PhD programs finish in 4 to 5 years and that thesis committees take a more active role in the future career options of their students. The formal degree structure permits such suggestions and their broad application, but what happens when you graduate and enter the black hole of a postdoctoral fellowship? There is no degree, no formal university structure, no defined endpoint, and a huge amount of variability in the reasons people find themselves there. Read more...

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19 mai 2013

Overseas student fee payments via agents made more efficient and secure

A single secure system for handling fee payments from international students via agents has been launched by leading global transactions firm Uni-Pay. The new service aims to cut costs and bureaucracy for universities and English language colleges, as well as students and agents themselves.
It is also designed to make the fee paying process via agents more transparent, amid concerns over the activities of some rogue operators who look to take advantage of what is now a multi-billion dollar global industry.
For the first time, agents across the world will be able to use the Uni-Pay service to manage payments from students – whether they pay via the agent or direct to the institution. All parties will have visibility of the payment trail, which brings much more transparency than has ever been available before to this important stage of recruiting international students. Read more...

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19 mai 2013

Student loans system is sustainable, insists minister

By Chris Parr. Universities minister David Willetts has defended the student finance system against criticisms that it is unsustainable and will not bring in the amount of money required to fund the sector long term. Mr Willetts was responding to claims made in a Times Higher Education article by Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter, in which he claimed that an increase in the estimated proportion of students loans that will eventually be written off – the so-called RAB charge - meant the current system would struggle to survive. Currently, graduate salaries are lower than originally forecast when the new fees system was introduced, meaning that students are set to repay their loans more slowly than expected. Also, unless incomes start to rise, fewer students will earn the £21,000 required to trigger loan repayments on graduation. Read more...

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19 mai 2013

The revolution is here

By Valerie Strauss. I’ve written a lot about growing resistance to high-stakes standardized testing and other corporate-driven school reforms. In the following piece, the argument is made that the revolution against the reform movement is here. It was written by Jeff Bryant, an Associate Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and the owner of a marketing and communications consultancy. It serves numerous organizations including Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, PBS, and International Planned Parenthood Foundation. He writes extensively about public education policy at The Education Opportunity Network. Read more...

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19 mai 2013

Post-1992 universities 'offer longer teaching hours'

By Andrew Marszal. Students at newer universities spend significantly longer in lectures and seminars while those at traditional institutions are left to their own devices, new figures suggest. An average course at a post-1992 university comprises 26 per cent lectures and seminars, as a proportion of time spent on study, compared with just 21 per cent at older institutions, information from the Telegraph's University Course Finderreveals. An average course at a post-1992 university comprises 26 per cent lectures and seminars, as a proportion of time spent on study, compared with just 21 per cent at older institutions, information from the Telegraph's University Course Finderreveals. It comes as a separate study this week found that the amount of lecture and tutorial time in universities has barely changed over the last six years despite a nine-fold hike in annual tuition fees. Read more...

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19 mai 2013

Head attacks 'unreliable' university background checks

By Graeme Paton. Universities are making “unreliable” checks on teenagers’ family background and postcodes to hit controversial admissions targets, a head teachers’ leader has warned. Mike Griffiths, president of the Association of School and College Leaders, said there were fears that institutions were awarding places on the basis of social background and not objective measures of ability. In a speech, he insisted the use of “contextual data” during the admissions process was a major concern. Mr Griffiths also criticised a rise in the number of degree courses with “sexy sounding titles” – such as forensic science – which universities use to recruit students despite having poor graduate employment records. Read more...

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19 mai 2013

David Willetts: publish information on quality of university teaching

By Andrew Marszal. Universities should publish information on the type of teaching students receive, not just the number of "contact hours", says Universities minister David Willetts. The Conservative minister said he wanted universities to differentiate between time spent in lectures and the amount of tutoring in seminars or study groups students receive on degree courses. Speaking to journalists in Brighton this morning, he said universities should "include information about the type of contact, because there’s an enormous difference between sitting in a lecture hall with 200 fellow students and being in a seminar with 15 or a small study group with four."
The comments follow a major study earlier this weekwhich found the amount of lecture and tutorial time in universities has barely changed over the last six years despite a ninefold hike in annual tuition fees. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 21:19 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

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19 mai 2013

Are university exams inherently unfair?

By Rozina Sabur. University exams are refreshingly open-ended compared with A-levels, says Warwick undergraduate Rozina Sabur – but does anyone actually know how they are marked? Like many pupils, I found that A-levels restricted creativity and encouraged replica answers. This might suit those who are good at memorising and regurgitating, but it certainly doesn't encourage creative and original responses. So when I began my humanities degree, I hoped it would spell the end of rote learning tailored to narrow exam criteria. I imagined university would permit (even encourage) students to mention books that did not feature on the syllabus; that it would value answers that included your own ideas rather than those borrowed from a source. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 21:16 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

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