Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Joli Jensen - Chronicle Vitae. Most scholars dream of writing an influential masterpiece, but there’s a good chance many of us won’t. What often holds us back isn’t just a lack of time, space, or energy, but our own inner demons. Among the most pernicious of these is the myth of the magnum opus—a yearning to create something magnificent coupled with the fear that it can never be good enough. It can paralyze us and lead us to punish ourselves when our work doesn’t live up to our exacting standards. See more...

By Rob Jenkins - Chronicle Vitae. In response to my recent post on the connection between corporate influence on higher education and the decline of shared governance, one reader wrote: “More ‘corporations are bad’ blather.” Another congratulated me for “taking on the corporatization of higher education.”
Both, unfortunately, missed the point. I wasn’t trashing corporations. And I wasn’t talking about corporatization; I was talking about corporatism. See more...

By Katie Rose Guest Pryal - Chronicle Vitae. Working as an academic is hard enough without adding psychiatric disability to the mix. Academics worry about whether they should disclose their disabilities to colleagues. And they also must deal with the all-too-common ableist insults that some of these same colleagues toss around without a thought. See more...

By Gregory Semenza - Chronicle Vitae. Write every day. Over the years, this is the single bit of advice I’ve given most regularly to graduate students who aim to become professors. Unfortunately, after grad school, it’s a lot easier said than done. The seminar and ABD stages present young scholars with a misleading sense that an academic schedule leaves relatively large blocks of time for writing. See more...

By David Perry - Chronicle Vitae. The humanities do not need a Neil deGrasse Tyson. We need a thousand Tysons. Better yet, we need to stop waiting for the prestige economy to churn out a celebrity to save us. Instead, why not recognize all the good work that so many people already are doing in the humanities?
It’s time to vastly broaden our approach to finding the next generation of public intellectuals. My proposal: Look for teachers, not researchers. See more...

By Audrey Watters. I just got off the phone with Mike Lee, the founder of Edshelf, a startup that recently announced it was closing its doors at the end of the month.
There’s been a grassroots hashtag campaign on the part of some educators to #saveedshelf, and while I understand the good intentions — Mike is a great guy, and it sucks that his startup isn’t successful — I’m not sure I understand why this particular startup should be saved. I’m not sure why we’d believe that an expression of support via social media would trump revenue. More...

By Audrey Watters. WTF happened to the #massiveteaching MOOC?! After what appeared to be a psychological? / pedagogical? experiment on the students (that included deleting the course), professor Paul Olivier Dehaye was removed from the Coursera MOOC “Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required." New skills indeed. See What You Should Know This Week over on EML for more links to what has to be the weirdest MOOC story to date.
“Can MOOCs Help Professors Teach Traditional Courses More Efficiently?” Efficiency! Efficiency! Efficiency! “Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians” – Jacques Ellul
Corporate MOOCs maybe not that big a trend after all. More...

By Audrey Watters. This past weekend was the 2nd Annual Reclaim Your Domain Hackathon. Or at least that’s what we’re calling it, even though we're already talking about holding another one this fall, to coincide with OpenEd. The event was a follow-up to some of the plotting that Jim Groom, Kin and I started at a “Reclaim Open" event at the MIT Media Lab last year, as well as to conversations we had earlier this year at Emory University’s Domain Incubator. In attendance this time around: Groom, Kin, Mike Caulfield, Ben Werdmuller, Michael Berman, Brian Lamb, Tim Owens, Mikhail Gershovich, Amy Collier, Erin Richey, Chris Mattia, Rolin Moe, Adam Croom, Mark Morvant, Linda Polin, and me. More...

By Audrey Watters. “Can MOOCs Motivate Personal Change?” (Parts 1 and 2) asks Harvard edu professor James E. Ryan. I’m not sure the answer as I was not motivated to read the articles.
There are now some BBC MOOCs.
Faculty use MOOC content in the classroom. Students are indifferent. Kanye shrug.
“The New American University: Massive, Online, And Corporate-Backed” (That’s ASU.)
The California State University system is “re-envisioning” Cal State Online. More...