Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Andy Gibbs. The Erasmus+ programme, which aims to boost the number of students and staff studying and working abroad across the European Union, started on January 1 2014. It will provide €14bn to 33 countries over the next seven years. The money will be used to fund students and staff to undertake education and training opportunities overseas, with an estimated €940m set to go to the UK. More...

By Simon Marginson. Australia’s decision to uncap university fees, announced in the budget last week, will for the first time expose Australian universities to unfettered market forces. It’s a decision that takes Australia’s higher education system into uncharted territory and precisely how it’s going to play out is difficult to predict. More...

By Phillip Dawson. Imagine a future where university enrolment paperwork is accompanied by the statement:

Warning: lectures may stunt your academic performance and increase risk of failure.

Researchers from the United States have just published an exhaustive review and their findings support that warning. They read every available research study comparing traditional lectures with active learning in science, engineering and mathematics. Traditional lecture-based courses are correlated with significantly poorer performance in terms of failure rates and marks. More...

By Michel Hockx. Two large Chinese funding bodies for scientific research are promoting so-called “open access” to research outcomes, according to an article in Nature. The Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China announced that researchers they fund should make their papers available in open-access repositories within a year. More...

By Martin Thrupp. “PISA shock” is the term that has been coined for the sense of political crisis and knee-jerk policy reaction that typically occurs when a country drops in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s international education rankings. Almost 100 education experts, including several of us from New Zealand, recently sent an open letter to the OECD’s chief education spokesperson, Andreas Schleicher, pointing out that the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings have become more of a problem than a solution. In many ways the concern of New Zealand educators is also around the wider influence of the OECD education programme on New Zealand educational politics and policy – perhaps as much “OECD hangover” as “PISA shock”. More...

By Cristián Bellei. Chile’s newly re-elected president Michelle Bachelet has announced a radical set of educational reforms that are set to review the country’s market-based approach to primary and secondary education. Bachelet’s reforms – aimed at dismantling a series of neoliberal policies put in place in the early 1980s – will be paid for by an overhaul of the tax system. More...

By Michael Gunn. Imbalances in the share of growth across the regions continue to be deep-rooted, the Office of National Statistics has confirmed. By 2012, the South East was the only region that had only just crept ahead of the performance that it had achieved in 2008. Four years after the recession, London had pulled even further away from all other regions in England.
With the economy and the cost of living remaining key battle grounds in the longest general election campaign in history, regional growth – or the lack of it – is back on the political agenda. More...

By Vance Maverick. I checked out a study score of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony from the local public library. It’s an early edition, maybe the first American one: © 1945, in the Leeds Music Corporation “Am-Rus Orchestra Scores series.” There’s an introduction by one Harold Sheldon, short but deeply bizarre. Shostakovich, though well established as one of the principal composers of the Soviet Union, ran afoul of the censors with the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1936), unedifying in its story and violent in its musical language. More...

By Colleen Lye and James Vernon. In the rush to online education, faculty members have been signing contracts that abrogate the ownership of their classes, erode their collective interests, and threaten the quality of higher education. No standard (let alone best) practice has yet emerged, and faculty members are largely in the dark about what is at stake. More...

By Sarah Roff. As an assistant professor of German literature at Princeton University, I once taught a class about how Germans understood World War II and the Holocaust in the postwar period. Several weeks into the course, an Orthodox Jewish student came to my office hours to tell me how troubled she was by the material, which she had not realized would be included in the course. She felt that the Holocaust should only be discussed in a sacred context and had avoided taking classes on the topic taught by secular academics. As a theological question, I cannot say whether she made the right choice, but she decided to stay and became one of the most thoughtful participants in the class. Her perspective added greatly to the education of the other students. More...