Formation Continue du Supérieur

There’s quite a bit of chatter here at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester about the Government’s commitment to double the proportion of people from the least well-off socio-economic groups that make it to higher education. Joy Carter, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Winchester, mentioned it, for example, at the Bright Blue / University Alliance / GuildHE fringe event earlier this evening. More...

By Tony Bates. The International Council for Distance Education (ICDE) announced at the close of this year’s conference in Sun City, South Africa, that its next conference will be held at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto between 17-19 October, 2017. The host will be Contact North/Contact Nord and Maxim Jean-Louis, its President – CEO, will be the President of the Organizing Committee of the 27th World Conference.

ICDE
The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) is a global membership organization and provides leadership in open education, flexible, online and distance learning, including e-learning. Its members include stakeholders working in educational institutions, school authorities and the commercial sector, as well as individuals. ICDE has a formal consultative status with UNESCO and promotes the core value of UNESCO: the universal right to education for all. To support this ideal, ICDE relies on the unique knowledge and experience of its members around the world, in terms of development and use of new methodologies and emerging technologies.
ICDE was founded in Canada in 1938 as the International Council for Correspondence Education. Today it has worldwide members in more than 60 countries.
The ICDE Permanent Secretariat has been located in Oslo, Norway since 1988. ICDE receives funding from the Ministry of Education and Research of Norway and from membership fees.
For more information about ICDE, please visit the website at www.icde.org.

Contact North
Contact North/Contact North was established in 1986 by the Government of Ontario. A key component of its activities is to provide residents of the province equitable access to postsecondary education and training opportunities through its 112 centers of online learning, often located in remote communities without any post-secondary educational campuses.
Thus Ontario students have the ability to participate through Contact North/Contact Nord in online courses and programs, in French and English, from Ontario’s 24 public colleges, 22 public universities and 250 literacy providers, as well as access basic skills training, without having to leave their community. Contact North/Contact Nord’s headquarters are in Thunder Bay and in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
For more information about Contact North/Contact Nord, please visit its websites at teachonline.ca/home and studyonline.ca/

Further information
I first came to Canada in 1982 to attend the ICDE conference in Vancouver. It was at this conference that it changed its name from ‘Correspondence’ to ‘Distance’. These conferences enable one to get a very good oversight of the world of distance education.
I will be providing updates as more information about the conference becomes available. More...

By Tony Bates. The problem is that old, tenured faculty just won’t quit, goddammit, now that mandatory retirement at 65 has been abolished. (I retired when there was still mandatory retirement. Three years later I got a letter from the Faculty Association saying that mandatory retirement had been abolished at UBC. I was terrified: I thought I would have to go back.)
While 36 percent of all workers plan to put off their retirements beyond the age of 65, the proportion of university and college faculty who intend to delay stepping down is more than double that, according to Kaskie et al., who are from the University of Iowa. More...

By Tony Bates. Bottom Line Performance is a leading U.S. corporate training consultancy that runs a blog that is often very useful generally for those using e-learning. The above article is an interview with Alicia Ostermeier, BLP’s Senior Learning Advisor, who provides some useful guidelines for teaching soft skills through e-learning/blended learning, and in particular through the use of scenarios. More...

By Tony Bates. MIT is famous for its non-credit MOOCs, but now, for the first time, it is offering a credit program at least partially online. 
The one year Master in Supply Chain Management will consist of one semester taking online courses and one semester on campus, starting in February, 2016. This will run alongside the existing 10 month on-campus program. The online classes that make up the first semester will cost US$150, while the exam is $400 to $800. The second semester on campus will cost at least half what it costs for the yearlong program, which would mean about another $17,000. More...

By Tony Bates. Those of you with Netflix may have been watching the wonderfully funny Australian series, Dreamland (called ‘Utopia’ in Australia), about a (fictitious) Australian federal government agency, the National Building Authority, that never gets any of its infrastructure projects actually started (never mind completed). Sometimes reality though is even more absurd than fiction. More...

By Tony Bates. If you are not Canadian, please bear with me in this post, as although these articles focus on Canada, what I have to say will apply to many other economically advanced countries – and I will get to the online learning bit eventually. More...

By Tony Bates. Following on from my Contact North webinar on the first five chapters of my book, Teaching in a Digital Age, and my blog post on this yesterday, there were four follow-up questions from the seminar to which I posted written answers. More...

By Tony Bates. Contact North has organised a series of four webinars highlighting the practical advice and guidelines offered in my online, open textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age. The first webinar took place last week on September 29. It covered the first five chapters in the book, which discuss:

•     the implications of the major changes taking place in education
•     epistemologies that drive approaches to teaching and learning
•     different teaching methods and their appropriateness for developing the knowledge and skills needed in a knowledge-based society.

The aim of the webinar was not to cover the same ground as in the book,  but to provide an opportunity for participants to raise questions or comments about these issues, which was what they did. I received and answered nearly 30 different questions in the one hour. More...