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16 décembre 2012

Der Leistungsdruck lässt die Examensnoten steigen

Der Leistungsdruck lässt die Examensnoten steigen
Der Notendurschnitt an Unis ist in den letzten Jahren ständig gestiegen. Mit sinkenden Standards habe das nichts zu tun, meint Leserin Katharina Pöter.
Der Wissenschaftsrat berichtete im November, dass im Prüfungsjahr 2010 fast 80 Prozent der Studierenden ihren Abschluss mit "gut" oder "sehr gut" bestanden haben. Deren Anteil sei im Vergleich zum Jahr 2001 um zehn Prozent gestiegen.
Eine erfreuliche Nachricht? Scheinbar nicht: Eine "Aufweichung der Bewertungsstandards" und "schleichende Noteninflation", diagnostiziert der Bericht des Wissenschaftsrats. Dieser Trend dürfe so nicht weiter gehen, wird Wolfgang Marquardt, der Vorsitzende des Wissenschaftsrates, in verschiedenen Medien zitiert. Mehr...

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16 décembre 2012

US uni says tick box if you are GLBT

By AFP. THE University of Iowa has become the first public US university to include optional questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on its application, a move hailed by advocates hoping to improve the college experience for gays and lesbians.
University officials say the move sends a strong signal that they value the diversity that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students bring to campus. They say that knowing some students' sexual orientation will allow them to track their enrolment and graduation rates and promote housing, student groups and programs that might improve their social and academic success.
"This is a question whose time had come,'' university admissions director Michael Barron said.
Iowa's decision was praised by Campus Pride, an advocacy group that has been lobbying colleges to ask the questions so schools can track the progress of LGBT students. Elmhurst College, a private liberal-arts school in suburban Chicago, became the first -- and is still the only other -- college to do so last year. Read more...

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16 décembre 2012

Free journal access for postdocs in between positions

By David Kent. Further underscoring the acute strain on human resources in academic circles, Elsevier has just announced a unique program to help out researchers who find themselves in between positions (thanks for the heads up C!). While many parents are no doubt crying about how their clever child with a PhD bounces from one short-term contract to the next, this is actually good news for those who find themselves trapped by funny employment rules, grants that have expired, or other circumstances that prohibit their normally institutionally supplied access to scientific papers. The announcement can be found here, but note the deadline: December 15, so get moving! You’ll need a letter from your previous employer too, so that makes it a little tougher. Read more...

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16 décembre 2012

Bridging the inter-generational student gap

By Léo Charbonneau. Each year University Affairs offers two internship placements of one or two weeks’ duration to Carleton University journalism students. I coordinate these internships and it is always an enjoyable experience for me to work with the students. Since last week, fourth-year journalism student David Meffe has been with us reporting on and writing stories for the magazine. He was also invited, and accepted, to write the following guest blog post for us on the issue of student stress, which has been in the news recently. We welcome his point of view. Take it away, David!
Despite what shopping mall speakers are trying to make me believe, this is not the most wonderful time of the year, not yet at least. As usual, there’s one giant roadblock standing between students and a winter break filled with spiked eggnog and endless consequence-free procrastination: the almighty and universally dreaded exam period. As per the season, Globe and Mail columnists Margaret Wente and Gary Mason fired shots back and forth last week, debating whether today’s universities are breeding a generation of self-entitled students incapable of dealing with pressure or the inevitable challenges of “The Real World.” This, coupled with hundreds of panicked news stories about record-breaking levels of student stress has once again given rise to the ever-circular debate over today’s lazier-than-ever students and our culture of mediocrity in the face of challenges. Read more...

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16 décembre 2012

Reading the future: Digital books and what's to come for literature

Far from killing off the physical page, the rise of ebooks has enhanced our understanding of the written word and the people around it, says Gaby Wood.
Do we read differently now? Amid the fear and excitement of digital publishing – the panic over what it might mean for makers of books, and the exhilaration over what the gadgets can do – it seems to me that one of the most intriguing questions is whether, and how fundamentally, digitisation has altered the way we read.
Recent news that sales of printed books have plummeted in almost all markets across the world, while in the UK sales of ebooks have soared, comes on the heels of Jonathan Franzen’s alarming pronouncement at the Hay Festival Cartagena that ebooks are damaging society. But in the United States, sales of digital books have slowed. To anyone trying to read the runes of this fairly new market, it seems like a case of hearing the bad news before the bad news: either printed books are dead, or no one is reading at all.
I don’t think either of those things is true. Reading has always been extremely personal – people are fast or slow, immersive, digressive or meticulous, they like dog-eared paperbacks or first editions. Read more...

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16 décembre 2012

UK universities to launch free degree-style online courses

By Andrew Marszal. Twelve top British universities have signed up to Futurelearn, a new programme offering free degree-style online courses to the public in direct competition with US-led rivals Coursera and edX.
Twelve top British universities including Bristol, St Andrews, Kings College London and the Open University will offer free online degree-level courses to students around the world, it was announced today. The new company, called Futurelearn, is being launched by the Open University. It will operate in direct rivalry with established American course platforms such as Coursera and Harvard-based edX, which offer massive open online courses (Moocs) to students around the world for free. “Moocs represent an enormous development in higher education, one that has the potential to bring about long-lasting change to the HE [higher education] sector," said Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor of the Open University. Read more...

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15 décembre 2012

Why is no one defending teaching at our universities?

Your undergraduate experience depends upon the quality of teaching staff - yet universities continue to put research first, argues Gervas Huxley.
Much as we wish it weren’t so, Christmas shopping really boils down to one simple rule – the more you spend, the more you end up with under your tree.
The same does not seem to apply to our university system. Students are typically taught in tutorials of 15 or more students these days, whilst their parents (if they went to university) studied in classes less than half this size and of course paid no fee.
How can this be fair? For all the talk about market forces and value for money supposedly reshaping our university system, it doesn’t take an Economics lecturer to see there’s something amiss. Read more...

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15 décembre 2012

Open University launches British Mooc platform to rival US providers

By Chris Parr. A UK-based platform for massive open online courses (Moocs) to rival established providers in the US has been launched by The Open University.
Futurelearn will carry courses from 12 UK institutions (see list), which will be available to students across the world free of charge.
It will follow in the footsteps of US providers including Coursera, edX and Udacity, which offer around 230 Moocs from around 40 mostly US-based institutions to more than 3 million students.
The new platform will operate as an independent company, majority owned by The Open University, although details of other investors have yet to be confirmed.
Simon Nelson, a key player in the development of BBC's online offerings, including the iPlayer, has been recruited to head up the new company. Read more...

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15 décembre 2012

Report highlights huge growth in overseas student numbers

International students make up 12 per cent of the total student population at UK universities, a sharp rise from 8 per cent eight years earlier.
That is one of the findings in a Universities UK report, Patterns and trends in UK higher education, published yesterday.
Paul O'Prey, vice-chancellor of Roehampton University and chair of UUK's Longer Term Strategy Network, says in his foreword to the report: "Since 2001 the number of students gaining a first degree has risen by 17 per cent, while the number achieving a postgraduate qualification has risen by 27 per cent. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:44 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

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15 décembre 2012

Be here now, or else: lamentable effects of student 'presenteeism'

Forcing undergraduates to attend class retards their capacity to develop as mature, independent learners, warns Bruce Macfarlane.
Academics frequently complain that their freedom is being infringed by the scrutiny imposed on them by developments such as teaching observations, research assessments and annual appraisals. But we rarely reflect on the increasing surveillance to which students are also subject and the effect this has on their academic freedom.
There was a time when being a university student meant "reading" for a degree. Attending lectures and seminars was a matter of choice, and skipping classes barely raised an eyebrow. Now, attendance policies and class registers are the order of the day. Some lecturers even use draconian measures such as excluding students who are not punctual.
But the surveillance culture goes much deeper than that. There are an array of assessment-related proxies aimed at getting students to attend, including oral presentations, short tests and quizzes, cunningly scheduled for the beginning of classes including lectures, smaller group tutorials and seminars. Read more...

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