By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Martha Cleveland Innes from Athabasca University (yeah!!!) talks about MOOC.
MOOCs are part of educational reform.
She looks at the drivers for higher education and change, and looking at those will (hopefully) make. This is a liveblog from EDEN research workshop 9. Read more...
By Inge Ignatia de Waard. So, this is it. My thesis is submitted and it will now be wrapped and sent out to my examiners. For anyone interested, you can read the thesis here. The full title: self-directed learning of adult experienced online learners enrolled in FutureLearn MOOCs. Read more...
By Inge Ignatia de Waard. The eLearning Guild is organizing a two day online seminar on 21 - 22 September 2016 on the opportunities for data and analytics within the eLearning industry. The standard rate is 395 $, but there are discounts available (e.g. academics, non-profits, government: 35% discount). When looking at the full summit program you will see that the organizers provide a nice balance between technology, usability and theoretical frameworks on the subject. Read more...
A new paper by the Higher Education Policy Institute considers the most controversial aspects of the new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and proposes substantial changes to make sure it works. Tackling Wicked Issues: Prestige and Employment Outcomes in the Teaching Excellence Framework (Occasional Paper 14) includes two essays, written by three authors with long experience in the higher education sector. More...
There are some universities that are excellent at research and others that are excellent at teaching. There are some that are excellent at both, where insights from new research brighten the lectures and vice versa. But the incentives for universities have been out of balance, with good research favoured over good teaching. More...
A new HEPI report, The invisible problem? Improving students’ mental health, shows a majority of students experience low wellbeing, that depression and loneliness affect one-in-three students and that the number of student suicides has risen. The report calls for extra support from universities and the NHS. More...
A lot of nonsense has been expressed on both sides in the debate on grammar schools. But it can still be summed up like this: one side claims to have all the evidence while the other flounders when asked to provide any. More...
By Alex Usher. You’ll remember a couple of weeks ago I took the Ontario NDP to task for an absurd meme about the provincial government “profiting” from student loans. But it occurred to me later than though there is no way the charge sticks against the provincial government, it arguably might about the federal government’s Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP), which both borrows more cheaply and lends more dearly than the provincial government. So I decided to find out. More...
By Alex Usher. Written exams are such a major part of our schools and universities that we forget sometimes that they are not actually native to the western system of education. How did they become so ubiquitous? Well here’s the story:
Originally, the Western tradition eschewed exams. Universities offered places based on recommendations. More...
By Alex Usher. It’s a reasonably common occurrence for academics to diss non-academic professional staff. “They’re taking over”. “They’re not like us”. “They’re ruining the university”. Book-length whinges (not very good ones, mind) have been written about this. More...
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