By Valerie Strauss. A comment from a post on the Web site Teachers’ Letters to Bill Gates, a place where teachers write letters to the billionaire about the effects that his massive financial support for corporate-influenced school reform is having on their classroom practice. Read more...
By Yojana Sharma. A joint degree run by New York University (NYU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS), awarding a master of laws degree from both universities, had benefited just nine Singaporeans since the one-year postgraduate degree was launched in 2007, Minister for Trade and Industry Lim Hng Kiang revealed last week. In May the universities involved announced that the course would be scrapped after 2014, when the current intake completes the course. Read more...
By Liz Reisberg. When I first worked in university admissions more than 30 years ago the word “marketing” was completely taboo. This is not to imply that admissions officers didn’t promote their institution. Admissions officers have been visiting high schools and making presentations in hotels for decades; it just wasn’t considered “marketing.” “Marketing” was considered much too commercial, too crass for higher education. Today, most admissions offices have a marketing plan, marketing strategy, marketing budget, and marketing staff. Many hire public relations firms to define and distinguish their “brand” and to gain the preference of specific market segments. Read more...
ByJames Martin and James E. Samels. As the rest of world gets on with their lives, those of us who call Massachusetts home are reminded daily of why the Bay State has always been Boston Strong. Speaking at a national interfaith service after the Marathon bombings, President Obama remarked, “We may be momentarily knocked off our feet. But we’ll pick ourselves up. We’ll keep going. We will finish the race.” On international news channels, former Chief Strategist to the White House and Director of the Institute for Politics at the University of Chicago, David Axelrod, responded by simply declaring, “Let’s just make it clear that we’re going to get the people responsible.” Read more...
Par Paul Davidson, président de l’AUCC (la version anglaise de cet article d’opinion a paru dans Embassy le 28 juin 2013). Alors que la période de la collation des grades tire à sa fin au pays, les universités ouvrent leurs portes à leurs homologues étrangers, qui souhaitent s’inspirer du Canada pour favoriser l’accessibilité et l’excellence. Elles ont récemment accueilli des visiteurs de la Chine, qui s’intéressaient à l’enseignement des sciences humaines au Canada. La Chine reconnaît que c’est un volet de son système d’enseignement supérieur qu’elle doit renforcer afin de conserver sa position concurrentielle. Le gouvernement brésilien est tellement satisfait de la qualité de l’enseignement offert aux étudiants de son pays sur les campus des universités canadiennes qu’il incite fortement un plus grand nombre d’étudiants à venir au Canada. En outre, l’Allemagne et le Canada entretiennent de nouvelles collaborations en matière de recherche, un bon exemple du système d’éducation allemand recherchant l’excellence du système d’enseignement supérieur canadien. Paul Davidson, prezidentas AUCC (versija anglų kalba op-ed pasirodė ambasados birželio 28, 2013 m.). Daugiau...
By Sara Grossman. The creators of a new mobile application are aiming to improve colleges’ engagement with students, using pop-up messages to survey students and aggregate data in real time. The app, Student Engauge, is part of a larger trend toward mobile outreach, as colleges seek ways to engage with students who often don’t respond to e-mails or online pestering, says Justin Reich, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The app follows in the path of mobile warning messages that many colleges have adopted to alert students of campus emergencies. Read more...
By Eric Hoover. OK, I’ll admit that I’ve yet to see Monsters University, the No. 1 movie in the nation. But I’ve spent a good hour tooling around the promotional Web site for the fictional institution. It’s scary good. Fascinated by how this portal both mimics and mocks real-life college Web sites, I asked Ashley Hennigan, assistant director of social-media strategy at Cornell University, to share her thoughts on the MU site—and what admissions officers might learn from it. Read more...
It's no wonder that protesters in Brazil are holding signs reading "more education, less soccer," or that there are constant teacher strikes in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico - Latin American schoolteachers are among the most miserably paid in the world.
Last week, as protesters in Brazil complained about their country's huge expenditures for hosting the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament and held signs with slogans such as "Japan: take our soccer, give us your education," a new study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that teachers in Latin America earn less, work longer hours and have less time to prepare their classes than their counterparts in other regions.
The report, titled "Education at a Glance 2013," also shows that Finland and South Korea, which consistently rank at the top of international student achievement tests, pay their teachers almost twice as much as Latin American countries. Read more...
By Audrey Watters. In a 7–1 decision, the Supreme Court issued a ruling on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, sending the affirmative action case back to a lower court. More details about the decision and how it will (or won’t) change university admissions at Inside Higher Ed. The Supreme Court has declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional in a 5–4 decision in United States v. Windsor. As The Chronicle of Higher Education. notes, the ruling will have a major effect on education, including changes to financial aid for married gay couples.
By Steve Kolowich. Colleges looking to expand their online course offerings have often enlisted help from education-technology companies. A college might buy a learning-management system from Blackboard, e-tutoring software from Pearson, and so on. Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based company that specializes in massive open online courses, recently became the latest technology firm to offer services aimed at credit-bearing online programs at large universities. Now the provosts in a consortium of major research universities are considering whether their group should build its own online infrastructure that would enable the universities to share courses, digital resources, and data without ceding control to outsiders. In a position paper, a task force of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation—a consortium of 13 research universities, mostly in the Big Ten Conference—this month proposed that its members figure out if they can work together on a common "framework" for their online offerings. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
