By Melonie Fullick. Howard Rheingold, the longtime Internet commentator and UC Berkeley lecturer, uses the term “crap detection” to describe the process of determining whether online information is credible or not. What Rheingold calls “crap detection” is also known as information literacy, and in my case it was acquired partly through a degree in communication studies with an emphasis on analysing mainstream media coverage. I thought of Rheingold’s ideas, and my own mass comms background, the other day when I came across an article by Douglas Todd from the Vancouver Sun titled “The pros and cons of foreign students.” This article is taking on what is currently a hot topic in Canadian higher education. Read more...

By George Ye. In the recent decades, one of most phenomenal change in the campuses of many universities in Western countries is the sharp increase of students from China. According to a report by the Ministry of Education of China, the number of Chinese students studying abroad has increased at an annual growth rate of over 20 percent in the past a few years with an estimated 400,000 Chinese students going abroad in 2012 alone. With the significant rise in Chinese students in Canada, the pros and cons are being debated. The central issue – as Wayne Peters, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, pointed out recently – is that “pursuing the international students is a worthy venture but we should ensure it is being done for the right reasons.” More...

By Rick Anderson. The loss of the commercially published books and recordings held in the library’s general collection is truly unfortunate - but the loss of the archive is tragic. The tragedy of the train wreck and oil fire in Lac-Mégantic, Québec is, first and foremost, a human one, with close to 50 people killed and the homes and businesses of many survivors destroyed. But a smaller tragedy has also come to light, one that should give pause to libraries and the institutions (academic and political) that sponsor them. A recent article in Library Journal reports that one casualty of the explosion and fire in Lac-Mégantic was the village’s library and its collection, “which included more than 60,000 books, CDs, and DVDs, and a local history archive.”
The loss of the commercially published books and recordings held in the library’s general collection is truly unfortunate — but the loss of the archive is tragic. More...

By Jean-François Venne. Editorial team forced to scramble when an article about Aboriginal experiments sparks a media frenzy. When historian Ian Mosby submitted an article to the editors of the journal Histoire sociale/Social History, none of them suspected that it would create a media frenzy. A sizeable management challenge awaited them.
It was no wonder that the subject matter caught the media’s attention. In his article, Dr. Mosby, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Guelph, revealed that between 1942 and 1952, some of Canada’s leading nutrition experts, in conjunction with various federal departments, conducted experiments on Aboriginals in native communities and residential schools without their consent or that of their parents. Some children’s milk rations were cut in half for two years, while others were deprived of vitamin B1, iron and iodine, in addition to having their dental care suspended. More...

The course name is Metaliteracy MOOC. It is an open learning experience that emerges from the research of Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson and the metaliteracy framework they first developed in Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy in College & Research Libraries. Metaliteracy is a comprehensive open learning model that reimagines information literacy for social media environments and online communities in the 21st century. Metaliteracy is a unified framework that promotes critical thinking, participatory learning, and metacognitive reflection as interrelated and ongoing collaborative practices. Metaliteracy MOOC connects learners from the University at Albany, Empire State College, and participants from around the world. Join us for this interactive dialogue among participants and engage in conversation with scholars during our regularly scheduled Metaliteracy MOOC Talks. More...

Aiming to take education to every doorstep, Union HRD Minister M M Pallam Raju today said they intend to leverage the broadband network by embracing the 'Massive Open Online Courses' (MOOC) programme in a big way.
"...to make education more accessible, we have in the horizon MOOC, leveraging on the broadband education platform," Raju said at a function here while harping on sustainable development through such efforts. More...

By David Holmes. Like many newfangled fields in startup world, massively open online colleges or MOOCs (catch our explainer here) are treated with a mix of starry-eyed hope and sobering skepticism. On one hand, MOOCs put powerful educational resources into the hands of anyone with an Internet connection. And with college costs on the rise and the value of a Bachelor’s Degree shrinking, there has to be a cheaper, better alternative, and why not MOOCs?
But MOOCs are plagued by their own set of problems. The completion rate is abysmally low at less than 10 percent. Meanwhile, the Chronicle of Higher Education estimates that the graduation rate of accredited universities and colleges is a little under half. And while the value of a Bachelor’s Degree has fallen, four-year college graduates are at a far greater advantage than people who stopped at high school, and most MOOCs do not offer credit toward a degree. As for the ones that do offer credit, San Jose University attempted the for-credit MOOC model through a partnership with Udacity, but suspended the program after only six months. Why? Over half the students failed the final exams.
And yet MOOCs have raised millions upon millions of dollars from VCs and universities like Harvard and MIT. So there must be gold in them thar hills, right?
Not exactly. Dave Cormier, the man who coined the term “MOOC,” told the Wall Street Journal, ““Nobody has any idea how [monetization] is going to work.” Even the eternally optimistic CEO of Udacity, Sebastian Thrun, admits the industry is in “a state of experimentation” when it comes to business models. More...

By Matt Zalaznick. U.S. universities took eight of the top 10 places in a ranking of 500 world universities by a China-based research center. Harvard, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley and MIT took the top four spots, followed by Cambridge in England, on the annual Academic Ranking of World Universities by The Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. More...

By Sherrie Negrea. Michigan State University’s first massive open online course—Metropolitan Agriculture Value Creation—attracted 400 people from around the globe interested in learning about new ways to produce food in urban areas. Launched in March 2012, the course was built on a WordPress website and students communicated with one another via Facebook and Twitter. Although the MOOC successfully expanded the university’s network of students and scholars concerned with urban agriculture, it also raised some thorny and unanticipated questions: If MSU students took the course, should they get the same credits as the 50,000 other students on the East Lansing campus? And, should MSU students get credit for earning certificates or badges in MOOCs offered by other institutions? More...

By Carol Patton. Effective succession plans require more than just leadership development programs. How can higher ed officials make that happen? Consider the following ideas from Chris Cullen, managing director of the higher education practice at Infinia Group, a brand strategy and design agency in Washington, DC. Develop a system that monitors employee innovation. “There is a myth that pleasing your immediate supervisor is the pathway to replacing him or her,” says Cullen. “The reality is that innovation and demonstrated creativity is the pathway to advancement.” Build processes that require rising stars to demonstrate their independence and accountability. More...