Who would have thought the terms “competency” and “mastery” would elicit the sort of reactions they do in higher education? To some, the word competency is a threat to education itself, a way to trivialize the learning that occurs in our colleges and universities. To others, it is the salvation many thought would never come. More...

By Michael S. Roth. When The New York Times enlisted Stanley Fish as a columnist, it found a great partner in this literary critic — someone who writes with clarity about academic matters but who is at ease with everyday rhetoric. More...

By William Davies. Yes, they’re coming for our jobs. But we’ll have the last laugh.
The social-media hive mind recently took a break from circulating humorous cat videos and set out on a new path: circulating humorous robot videos. In many ways, the robots were simply picking up where the cats had left off. More...

By Kentaro Toyama. In 2011 there was a loud buzz about gamification — the use of game elements such as point systems and graduated challenges for activities not usually considered games. An online game called Fold.it allowed people untrained in biochemistry to decode the protein structure of an AIDS-related enzyme. More...

By Pamela Samuelson. The Authors Guild has lost the latest round of the copyright battle that it brought against Google more than a decade ago. And though the guild has decried the appellate court’s ruling as "damaging" to authors, it is nothing of the sort. More...

By Katherine Mangan. A New York University professor stopped on his way to conduct research in the United Arab Emirates said he wasn’t completely surprised when he learned, while trying to board a plane at Kennedy International Airport this week, that he’d been barred from entering the country. More...

By Goldie Blumenstyk. More than 150 people from education, labor, business, and public-policy organizations will gather here on Monday to kick off a process aimed at making better sense of the myriad of credentials that people use to advance their careers and employers depend upon when hiring. At issue are traditional credentials in academe and the workplace as well as newfangled ones like the badges issued by MOOC operators and certificates from other so-called alternative providers. More...