On the new edition of "This Week," Inside Higher Ed's free news podcast, Harper College's Ken Ender and Patricia Melton of New Haven Promise join Inside Higher Ed editor Scott Jaschik and moderator Casey Green to discuss the nuances of the movement to provide free community college. Read more...

Higher education software provider Ellucian's plans for the next two years include transitioning to the cloud and preparing for more colleges and universities to experiment with competency-based learning. Read more...

Julia O’Sullivan, dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, is considering legal action against critics, many of them professors, who have been urging her removal, The Globe and Mail reported. Read more...

By Eszter Hargittai. Smartphones and tablets can be valuable during travel just to help pass the time, but with the myriad of apps out there, they can also improve the experience of getting from one place to the next and can ease the exploration of distant and foreign lands, especially for those attending international conferences or doing research abroad. Here, I elaborate on some issues worth considering ahead of time when planning a trip, especially to international destinations. Read more...

By Venkat Viswanathan. That is the question. Except it wasn’t really a question for me. I decided to teach a MOOC even before I taught my first college course. My friend Frank Wang (then an undergraduate at Stanford) had helped Dan Boneh teach his cryptography course through Coursera. His stories made the intellectual challenge of teaching a MOOC sound exciting. Read more...

By Patrick Iber. One year ago, I published an essay about my inability to find stable academic employment. At the time, I had a new baby, and my mother, who had come to visit her new grandson, died suddenly while I was en route to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Read more...

By Stephen J. Aguilar. To my fellow graduate students I say this: I am not an impostor, and neither are you.
You might not believe me, but before you begin pushing back against my assertion and dismantling your confidence with thoughts such as, "but peer X is a much better writer/researcher/scholar than I am, and I don’t belong here," you should read on. Read more...

By Bernard Fryshman. First they chopped off our hands. Figuratively, of course. The U.S. Department of Education, over the past decade, has made it clear that it expects accrediting agencies seeking recognition to judge student learning and institutional quality on the basis of rubrics, metrics and measured student learning outcomes. Read more...

By Dane Ward. What happens to academic libraries as they slide sideways into a new world of superabundant information? What happens to their colleges and universities?
The process of change is not easy. Inside Higher Ed has described recent campus conflicts regarding the future of academic libraries. Carl Straumsheim ("Clash in the Stacks") reported that several library directors at liberal arts institutions have lost their jobs. However, tensions about changing libraries are not restricted to one type of institution. Read more...

By Joseph E. Aoun. With the release of his new book, In Defense of a Liberal Education, journalist Fareed Zakaria became the latest commentator to join the robust debate over whether the purpose of college is to promote professional advancement or personal growth. The debate typically contrasts the self-betterment offered by the liberal arts -- usually meaning the humanities and social sciences -- against the workforce merits of applied disciplines, such as engineering. Read more...