By Bernard Lane and Julie Hare for The Australian. Students should pay higher interest on their loans and relieve the pressure on the public purse, a committee studying how to control spending by the Australian government recommends.
“The interest rate should be increased to a level which reflects all (the commonwealth’s) costs in making the loan,” says the report by the Commission of Audit, noting that the current rate falls below the government borrowing rate. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Visiting preachers set themselves up at many campuses and spend a day denouncing students for their fornication and criticizing professors for teaching evolution. On some campuses students have been known to engage with the visitors, or to try to offend them with same-sex kiss-ins. At the University of Connecticut last week, an anthropology professor decided to get involved. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. English has taken off as a global language in higher education -- as a "medium of instruction," not just a foreign language in those countries where English is not the first language, says a report released Tuesday evening here. But in many countries and at many institutions, key issues related to the expanded use of English have not been defined or, in some cases, even discussed. The report was released at Going Global, the annual international education meeting of the British Council. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Agents to recruit international students may be like global rankings of universities, suggested William Lawton in a presentation here Wednesday. "Even if you don't like the look of them, they are here to stay," said Lawton, of the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, a think tank. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Google, pressured by privacy advocates and looming legal challenges, on Wednesday announced it will no longer scan student and faculty emails for advertising keywords, seeking to end a seven-year-long conflict that some university technology officers have said violates federal law. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. After more than two years in the cloud, Coursera’s massive open online courses will this summer make landfall at Dominican University of California, which will host the MOOC provider’s first Learning Hub at a U.S. institution. Dominican is part of Coursera’s latest wave of hubs -- physical locations scattered across the globe where MOOC students can meet in person to collaborate and, in some cases, receive in-person tutoring from course facilitators familiar with the content. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Online education criticism, administrator-faculty quarrels and quality concerns -- the troubles that faced Semester Online and its partner institutions can be summed up in one word: skepticism. One semester into Washington University in St. Louis’s one-year commitment to Semester Online -- 2U’s initiative to create a pool of credit-granting online courses that combined asynchronous content with live online sessions -- faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences there returned to the question last month. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Some California State University professors might not even know it’s there. But a little clause in their union contract, Article 10.26K, about the possibility of promotion by arbitration, recently helped one faculty member get the title he'd been counting on for years: full professor.
"This will certainly be new to some people, that this process even exists, and that it even works sometimes,” said Ramon Castellblanch, a newly appointed full professor of public health at San Francisco State University. “That’s why I’d like this story to get around.”
Castellblanch, whose research centers on health policy in state politics, started at San Francisco State in 2002. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Post-tenure review is viewed by many professors with skepticism. To some, it seems like an attack on tenure; to others, a waste of time. And recent announcements by two colleges, Ball State and Suffolk Universities, that they’re considering adopting post-tenure review policies that could in some cases lead to dismissal have brought out those skeptics. Read more...