By Steve Kolowich. MOOCs and adaptive-learning software are often billed as two of the most potentially game-changing technologies in higher education. The White House, for one, is excited to see what might happen if and when those two technologies meet. It would seem natural to combine massive-open-online-course platforms, which accommodate thousands of students, with adaptive-learning software, which responds to the needs of individual students. But so far that has not happened. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology this month wrote a letter to President Obama briefing him on MOOCs. In the letter, released on Wednesday, the group told the president that while “the jury is out” on the long-term implications of MOOCs, the scale of the massive courses could yet improve access to higher education while reducing its cost. More...

By Charles Huckabee. The Apollo Education Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, announced on Tuesday that its Apollo Global subsidiary had agreed to acquire Open Colleges Australia, one of Australia’s oldest and largest providers of distance learning. Under the agreement, Apollo Global, through a subsidiary, will purchase 70 percent of the outstanding shares of Open Colleges for approximately 110 Australian dollars in cash, or about $98.5-million (U.S.) at current exchange rates, plus contingent payments that will be principally based on 2014 operating results and could total $47-million (U.S.) more. More...

By Andy Thomason. At first blush, it might seem like an ad for another online university you haven’t heard of. But “Let’s Profit Off Each Other” is, in fact, the slogan of the fictional “For Profit Online University”—the subject of an 11-minute parody infomercial that, according to the blog Splitsider, was created by former writers for The Onion, a satirical website, and has been airing at 4 a.m. recently on the cable-television channel Adult Swim. More...

By Audrey Williams June. I’ve written about the ins and outs (and quirks) of the academic workplace for The Chronicle for the last five years. So there are some things about finding employment after graduate school that I just know to be true. Most people on the academic job market think landing a tenure-track position is a crapshoot. Many advisers can’t help their students find work outside of academe. And accurate information on Ph.D. placement is hard to come by. 
But while doing the reporting for an article about how colleges should—but often don’t—collect Ph.D-placement data, I learned three critical things about graduate students and data on their job placement. More...

By Katherine Moos. Recently, in a course on classical political economy, my students and I discussed mechanization and its effects on employment. Having read Adam Smith’s classic text, The Wealth of Nations, we examined the productivity gains from the division of labor in his well-known pin-factory example—in which he demonstrated that workers who specialize in particular tasks outproduce those who perform every task themselves.
We talked about industries in which machines are replacing workers to varying degrees of success: grocery clerks swapped out for self-checkout machines, restaurants using conveyor belts instead of waiters and waitresses, and even nursing and elder care performed by so-called “caring robots”.
This got me thinking about academia, where we’re witnessing a similar move towards mechanization. The advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is making it clear that university instructors aren’t as insulated from the effects of technological progress as we might have thought. See more...

By Frank J. Donoghue. Many of us in my generation (I received my Ph.D. in 1986) have compelling memories about the graduate seminars we took in our formative years. Those seminars, a professor and 10 or 12 students, were crucial to my graduate-school experience. They formed the threshold of my graduate career, part of the process by which I learned to think on my feet. Only by experiencing them did I reach the point where I could write a dissertation.
So I certainly don't want to argue against graduate seminars—but I wonder if they remain a viable means of delivering graduate education. Do we in the humanities need to rethink the traditional graduate seminar and educate graduate students in a different way? 
Reducing Ph.D. populations seems the only ethical move in light of an academic job market that, even in 2012, was down roughly 30 percent from its most recent high, in 2007-8, and that has been in steady decline for the last 40 years. At the same time, we in the humanities, English for example, have had no choice but to hire new faculty members to keep pace with emerging fields in our discipline—Latino/a studies, sexuality studies, Native American studies, digital media, and so on. More...

By Megan O'Neil. While studying political science at Columbia University, Zach Sims looked on with frustration as peers—graduating with lots of student debt and few workplace-ready skills—struggled to find jobs. In 2011, before what would have been his senior year, he dropped out to help start Codecademy, a free, interactive web platform designed to help teach even the most unlikely candidates programming languages likes JavaScript. Mr. Sims, now 23, and his co-founder, Ryan Bubinski, 24, a Columbia graduate, have proved particularly adept at heralding coding as a résumé must-have in a digital economy. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City declared he would learn to code via the platform. Codecademy has attracted millions of users, has drawn $12.5-million in venture-capital funds, and employs 22 people, Mr. Sims says, although it has yet to generate revenue. More...

By Matthew Hall. A partnership between American and Israeli universities, backed by New York City's government, aims to establish the leading technology educational institution in the world by combining the best know-how from academic and commercial worlds. 
A deal between Cornell University, a top-rated Ivy League college, and Technion Israel Institute of Technology has led to the creation of Cornell NYC Tech. The new university, specialising in applied sciences, opened its doors to 30 students this year in Manhattan office space donated by Google. More...

By Clifford Coonan. University College Dublin had a busy and extremely productive week in China last week. The headline event of the visit was signing a deal to set up UCD Yantai, an international university in northeast China which UCD will operate as a joint venture with the prestigious China Agricultural University (CAU). 
Ireland’s third-level institutions have been concentrating on leveraging the booming Chinese education market – Trinity College Dublin was here a few weeks ago trying to drum up funding for a Chinese Studies course, and University College Cork is a regular visitor. More...

PetiteBy Shane Phelan. UNIVERSITIES are to lose out on €3.6m in funding as punishment for making unauthorised top-ups to staff -- but the pain is to be spread across five years. The Higher Education Authority (HEA) is withholding the funding as a sanction for unauthorised allowances given to university presidents and other high-ranking staff between 2005 and 2011. The universities have not been forced to pay back the cash. Instead, they are losing out on future funding. More...