The pressure on university students is set to grow as friends and family can now place bets on the final outcome of their degrees. Ladbrokes has launched the new service offering odds on the degree classification of any student due to enroll at 20 of the UK's universities.
Bets can be placed on any possible outcome, whether it be a first, 2:1, 2:2, or a rather pessimistic third.
A student with straight As at A level taking medicine at Oxford is 7/2 to graduate with a first, but a more likely evens to leave with a 2.1, the firm said. More...
By Andrew Denholm. GREATER protection is to be given to threatened language teaching at Scottish universities. Any institution that wants to cut languages in future will have to alert funding bosses before any decision is made.
The Scottish Funding Council - the body that distributes public funding to higher education - would then assess whether the closure was detrimental to the range of languages taught in Scotland.
The council could also look at other issues, such as the importance of a subject to Scotland's economic future.
Where a closure was deemed detrimental, the council would then seek to broker a solution with the university or universities involved to safeguard future provision. More...
By Arwyn Jones. Universities in Wales have agreed to upload lectures and research to the internet in the future so they can be freely accessed around the world.
It means students and teachers in poorer nations will be able to use expensive research work carried out by academics here.
Universities say it will put them at the forefront of a digital education revolution. More...
The education ministry on Sunday issued an order to this end
Six new private universities with reported links to the ruling party men have obtained the government’s approval.
With few months left of its tenure, the government approved those universities despite claims that most of the existing higher educational institutions in the private sector are underperforming and struggling to attract students.
The education ministry on Sunday issued an order to this end. More...
By Gerard A Postiglione and Philip G Altbach. Universities continue to position their professoriates for internationalisation. As the heartbeat of the university, the professoriate clearly has a special role in helping to drive knowledge economies. This is particularly true in developing countries with aspirations for closer integration into the global system. However, internationalisation is a double-edged sword for many countries. A university can hardly become world class without it. Yet it wildly skews the balance of ‘brain power’ in the direction of those few countries with world-class universities. More...By Warwick Anderson, The Conversation. Few things are changing faster in the research world than publishing. The ‘open access’ movement recognises that publicly funded research should be freely available to everyone. Now more than a decade old, open access is changing where researchers publish and, more importantly, how the wider world accesses – and assesses – their work.By Hiep Pham. Australia is indisputably one of the key players in contemporary transnational higher education. Over the past 10 years, the number of international tertiary students in Australia has increased substantially, from 105,764 in 2000 to 257,637 in 2009. From 2009, Australia overtook France to become the third largest recipient of internationally mobile students after the United States and the United Kingdom and, according to OECD data, it continues to remain in this position. More...By Roger Y Chao Jr. The privatisation of higher education has been advocated by governments as well as regional and international organisations as a way to fill the supply-demand gap left by the public sector, transfer the finance burden to higher education consumers – for example, students and industry – and increase the efficiency and relevance of higher education and the private returns to consumers.By Wachira Kigotho. A project backed by UNESCO and Hewlett-Packard, aimed at reversing the brain drain from African and Arab countries, believes it has contributed significantly to strengthening teaching and research in selected universities. The Brain Gain Initiative turned 10 years old this year. A partnership between UNESCO and California-based Hewlett-Packard, or HP, the project uses grid and cloud computing technology to empower lecturers and students who have stayed in their home countries, to engage in real-time scientific collaboration and research with those who have left. More.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
