Learning analytics is arriving on university campuses.
To universities it offers higher student retention rates and, at £9000pa per student, many are keen.  Learning analytics uses a combination of data about students and their university engagement to trigger interventions. In the simple case, if you haven’t logged on to the course homepage for two weeks expect a call from your tutor. More...

Rumours of the demise of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (established in 1992) continue to grow.
HEPI will have more to say about the Government’s overall approach to higher education – pros and cons – once the green paper is published in the next few days. More...

On Thursday, 29^th October 2015, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) publishes It’s the finance, stupid! The decline of part-time higher education and what to do about it.
This collection of essays explains the catastrophic fall in part-time student numbers, which is harming the economy and limiting people’s ability to transform their lives, and proposes a range of options for tackling the problem. More...

By Tony Bates. This is a paper about the development of ‘academic innovation centers’ in the USA. These go by a variety of names, such as ‘the Centre for Teaching and Learning’ or ‘the Centre for Learning Sciences’, but they are basically integrating faculty development, instructional design and a range of other services for faculty (and in some cases also directly for students) to provide a locus for innovation and change in teaching and learning. More...

By Tony Bates. Kiron is an international university for refugees, headquartered in Germany, providing refugees with higher education and the opportunity to graduate at a university free of charge. Because the first two years of the degree programs are online, Kiron’s students can study flexibly from all over the world and according to their own schedule. The special circumstances refugees have to face are carefully considered by offering additional services like preparation courses for university, language courses, psychological counselling, life coaching, hardware, internet access and facilities such as Kiron’s campus in Berlin. All of this is also free of charge. More...