By Christopher Tucker. Some of you may have walked past those bulletin boards covered in red and white notices in search of participants to ingest this, or attach themselves to that. Perhaps you’ve gone so far as to take one of the tear-off tabs home with you. It always comes down to one question: “Can it really be that bad?”
Medical research for academic studies has so many variations and degrees of invasiveness. All of it comes down to one thing: a way to make money that requires no previous skills, education, or experience.
I’ve found myself scanning those flyers and considering the possibilities. Sometime before the winter of 2012, I decided science could have its way with me. I found out that it wasn’t free money, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever been through, either. Presented now are my experiences and reflections. Hopefully, this can help guide you in the future, when you’re standing in front of those bulletin boards wondering, “What if I did this?” More...

By Matt Reed. Textbook costs have been a major issue for decades. I remember being shocked at the cost of books when I was a student, back when they were printed on papyrus and delivered by dinosaurs. Students then sometimes had the option of trying to find used books, but that was pretty much it. In the age of electronic resources, I’ve become a booster of Open Educational Resources. I think we’re at or near the inflection point where it becomes possible for students to get through a majority of classes without actually buying books, assuming the faculty are on board. Free options have become markedly better over the last few years, and I know many professors are concerned about book costs for their students, so I’m optimistic that we’ll get there. From a student perspective, money saved on books is the equivalent of a tuition cut. Read more...

By Dayna Catropa. LinkedIn’s big announcement was covered by multiple sources (LinkedIn blog, USAToday, NPR, and TechCrunch to name a few). To summarize, LinkedIn now has “university pages” that include information about a school and its alumni base who use LinkedIn.  Profiles display helpful statistics, such as the geographies and industries in which alumni work. This has the potential to help strengthen the link between school and career for students and young alumni. It’s another great resource for information and connections. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. This past year my institution engaged in a (faculty led) LMS evaluation process.  We looked at the usual suspects.  Blackboard.  Canvas.  Moodle.  D2L.  Sakai.  
Pearson's OpenClass was not even on our radar.
That is why I was so interested that Abilene Christian University (ACU) had chosen to go with OpenClass. I'm a huge fan of ACU. Back in 2009 I wrote:  "If the MacArthur Genius Program gave awards to institutions I'd bet that Abilene Christian University would be a shoo-in."
ACU was way earlier than the rest of us in innovating around mobile learning, launching a one-to-one iPhone / iPod Touch program back in 2009 to experiment with what can happen when all student and faculty are on the same mobile platform. Read more...

By Matt Reed. How do you use the red pen? As a student, especially in K-12, the red pen was the authority indicating error. There, I learned that you measured the quality of writing by the number of errors it contained. The upside of that method was that it forced me to learn my grammar. The downside was that it tended to reward a certain predictability. (Five paragraphs, topic sentences...) In college, the red pen came very late, when it came at all. It tended to be more cryptic than in high school, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not.  But I had grown to fear it less. In grad school, the red pen was mostly used to indicate ideological objections, as opposed to “errors” in the sense that most people use the term. Read more...

By Kaitlin Gallagher. As a lab citizen, you may be responsible for supervising undergraduate senior/honors thesis projects. With all of your other work that needs to be done, this can seem like an extra burden—another project to work on with a student  you think you’ll have to micromanage because you are unsure of how well of a job they can do with their limited (no) laboratory experience. As the supervisor of an undergraduate student, your role is not only to ensure that the student does the study properly, but also to teach the student about general research practices, scientific rigour, independence, and critical thinking. When first starting out, it’s easy to take the micromanager role because we are used to things running at a certain pace. But an undergraduate project likely will not go as quickly. As a result, we may overextend ourselves into the project. This, however, is not good for your students. Not only should they be doing their own work, but they are missing out on important lessons that can be taught through these projects. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Why are we pushing ahead into mobile learning? One possibility is that we are all making a huge collective mistake. That we have drunk the iPad / iPhone / Android Kool-Aid. That we will look back on all this talk about mobile learning the same way we look back on netbooks and MOOCs (did I just say MOOCs?). We will wonder why we did not ask the mobile learning evangelists the hard questions. Why did we see mobile learning as an ends, rather than a means in which to accomplish our educational goals? Read more...

By Matt Reed. Some things that strike me as obvious apparently don’t strike others the same way, so I’m doing an ethical compass check here. Should academic advisors steer students towards, or away from, individual professors?
I’ll set some context. Let’s take a program that’s big enough to have multiple professors teaching sections of the same course. And let’s assume that the placement of students into the course -- as opposed to any particular section -- is uncontroversial. Read more...

By John Warner. Dear Parents of Incoming Freshmen, 
Congratulations! Your child is off to college. You may be experiencing any number of different emotions at this time, likely some mixture of happiness and sadness, excitement and anxiety.
If you are now empty nesters, as was the case with my parents, you may be experiencing unbridled joy, and also deciding that the house does indeed need central air conditioning and heat that your children were clamoring for over the last fifteen years. A mix of emotions is to be expected, and even respected. I won’t do you the disservice of acting like this isn’t a big deal, that the stakes are low. Read more...

Une nouvelle licence en tourisme d'affaires ouvrira ses portes à la rentrée prochaine. En apprentissage, elle permettra d'obtenir le niveau licence aux étudiants titulaires d'un bac+2.
Dès octobre prochain ouvrira la nouvelle licence en Tourisme d'Affaires, spécialité Attaché(e) Commercial(e) Séminaires et Congrès sur site événementiel. Cette nouvelle formation, proposée par l'INFA Ile-de-France et l'université Partis-Est-Créteil, sera proposée en apprentissage, pour les jeunes de moins de 26 ans titulaires d'un bac+2, à l'aise en anglais, en communication orale et écrite. Suite...