By Maina Waruru. Kenya’s higher education regulator, the Commission for University Education, or CUE, wants professional bodies barred from accrediting graduates in key professions and wants to take over the role, to avoid frequent stand-offs between the associations and universities. Read more...
By Wagdy Sawahel. Somalia’s higher education sector has been growing rapidly. However, lack of government oversight, low quality, high levels of poverty, political instability and security challenges have been hindering reforms. A new prime minister has raised hopes – but is likely to be distracted by numerous other pressing problems. Read more...
By Liudvika Leisyte. Impartiality in peer review has been a focus of recent debate as a number of studies have shown that peer review is not as impartial as it is assumed to be (e.g. Lamont, 2009). Studies have shown that peer-review in academia is biased against many characteristics of the author such as prestige, affiliation, content orientation (such as conservatism), interdisciplinary biases, the social characteristics of peer-reviewers, and the composition of the peer-review team. I find it especially interesting that language, as well as nationality, are a strong source of bias in peer review. More...
By Anne Cushing, Erin Mackey Kistler, and Philip Lovejoy. In the spring of 2014 HarvardX and the Harvard Alumni Association launched HarvardX for Alumni.
If HarvardX is new to you, as it was to many of our alumni, it is a University-wide strategic initiative to enable our faculty to build and create online learning experiences that would also transform residential learning and enable groundbreaking research in online pedagogies. Much of the HarvardX online offerings are distributed by edX, the Harvard and MIT founded MOOC platform. More...
By Rachel Roberts. I used to think all instructors thought about the learning environment they were creating for their students, regardless of the class being in person or online. A logical reasoning, given that instructors are educators, right?
After designing a research project to investigate the how instructors intentionally invites students into online learning communities, I now question this reasoning.
To begin, I identified nearly thirty MOOC course providers, nineteen of which were offering active courses for free. More...
By Oronte. We all have at least a passing familiarity with the characters of Arthurian legend – noble king Arthur; his knight, Sir Lancelot; and, of course, Arthur's queen, Guinevere. From Tennyson to Sinclair Lewis to Dorothy Parker and even Tolkien, poets and writers have been retelling and revising these characters’ stories for centuries. In her latest collection, Guinevere in Baltimore, Shelley Puhak continues this tradition in a slightly different manner, through a series of dramatic monologues by these characters, who seem both familiar and new. Read more...
By Tracy Mitrano. On Friday, we learned that Google quietly signed the Student Privacy Pledge – almost a week after President Obama called them out by name to ask why not. That is a good thing. Why did it take so long? Hubris first. Google thinks itself above association with other companies when such association is not intrinsically within its business interest. Joining the Pledge when it was first announced three months ago would have seemed unseemly. Read more...
By Laura Tropp. My grandmother passed away this week. She was 95 and had led a long life and her death was not unexpected. During the funeral, we were all sharing our memories and I was struck by how my stories lessened over time. My grandparents moved from New York to Florida in their retirement years and while I had weekly visits during my childhood, I saw them significantly less in their later years. Read more...
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. I am about to end a call today that was not initially about, but inevitably circled around to, our shared experiences at the MLA. We were both there, in another life it seems for both of us, at the same time, but unaware of each other’s presence or even existence. At least, we weren’t then. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. For many months, a task force has been drafting and circulating a new document to replace the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, which were adopted in 2000 and, like all ACRL standards, had come up for review. Read more...
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