Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Carl Straumsheim. If students in a face-to-face course emailed their provost with concerns that their professor had stopped lecturing, chances are that someone -- a department head or an administrator -- would intervene. But what if the students were scattered across different countries and time zones in a not-for-credit massive open online course?
The issue of MOOC quality control has resurfaced in the wake of the #MassiveTeaching debacle, the MOOC-turned-social experiment that last week inspired a scavenger hunt across the internet. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Scientists can devote their professional lives to a single question, but chances are that most or all of what they do will only ever be appreciated by a small circle of fellow academics. The reasons for that are complex and numerous, and usually depend on who’s counting them. Non-scientists say it shouldn’t take a machete to get through all the jargon in an article, while some scientists blame the public for being less than science-literate. Read more...

By Paul Jump for Times Higher Education. The possession by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz University of more highly cited researchers than almost any other university in the world raises questions about institutions’ ability to manipulate global rankings. Read more...

By Charlie Tyson. Self-published books are on the rise, to the dismay of onlookers who wonder what to expect from a sector where E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey – originally published as online fan fiction by a tiny Australian e-book company – appears to be the best of the lot. More than 391,000 self-published titles appeared in 2012, according to Bowker, the official ISBN-issuing agency for the U.S. The self-published titles appear to be selling. In 2012, a quarter of Amazon’s top 100 bestselling Kindle books had been self-published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. And in 2013, readers in Britain bought 18 million self-published books, a 79 percent increase in market share compared to the year before. Read more...

By Paul Fain. These are hard days for most for-profit colleges. Declining revenues and an ongoing regulatory crackdown has led to speculation that some in the sector -- including one of the major, publicly traded companies -- will go nonprofit to get out of the crosshairs. Yet that transition isn’t easy or practical for most for-profits. Just four have successfully changed their tax status in recent years, sources said. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. Some universities have started forgoing their ability to issue tax-exempt bonds, long considered a benefit of their nonprofit status. Issuing taxable bonds instead makes sense under market conditions that defy conventional wisdom and allows institutions to avoid additional regulations on tax-exempt bonds, according to officials at an annual conference of college business officers. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Another professor’s learning materials? In my course? It’s more likely than you think. The nonprofit research organization Ithaka S+R this month released its highly anticipated report on its work with the institutions in the University System of Maryland, which for the past 18 months have experimented with courseware from Carnegie Mellon University, Coursera and Pearson in face-to-face courses. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. The Common Core State Standards Initiative is supposed to prepare K-12 students for higher education -- but college and university faculty members and administrators remain largely removed from planning and rolling out these new assessments and standards. So argues a new paper from the New American Foundation, which urges colleges and universities to get involved in the Common Core to ensure the program ends up doing what it was supposed to do. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. The California State University System is replacing its distance education portal with a shared services model less than two years after its launch, as the system’s campuses decide they would rather do the work on their own. The system founded Cal State Online in 2012 in response to dual concerns. Read more...