By Heath Gilmore. Gap year is a rite of passage for many school-leavers, but taking a year off to travel the world is an unexpected casualty of the Abbott government's first budget.
The plans of Imogen Smith, 18, from Balmain, are in disarray after Tuesday's budget. She had secured year-long employment at an international school in Guangzhou, the largest city in the Chinese province of Guandong. Read more...
By . Even during China's most feudal phases, higher education has offered a reliable means of meritocratic advancement. Well into the 1990s, the limited number of university graduates meant that all of them were virtually assured places among the economic elite. More...
By Tim Lloyd. Yinzi Liu sat in the café at Washington University’s Medical School and nervously fiddled with the sleeve on her coffee cup. The 28-year old will graduate tomorrow with a doctorate in developmental, regenerative and stem cell biology. While earning her degree she spent countless hours glued to a microscope, peering into zebrafish embryos for clues that could one day lead to the early detection of human birth defects. By most accounts she should be brimming with excitement. Instead she’s loaded with anxiety. More...
By . For as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a chance to rewrite the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving high-school senior in a small town in Arkansas, became pregnant with Vanessa. More...
By Michael Plaxton. Robert Buckingham was a tenured professor and executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Public Health. He was fired on Wednesday, after publicly speaking his mind about the University’s decision to collapse the School into the Department of Medicine – part of the academic prioritization process known as TransformUS. More...
Après l'adoption du texte au Sénat, la Conférence des Grandes Ecoles (CGE) a décidé de maintenir ses plus vives réserves, et appelle à rétablir un dialogue constructif.
Le Sénat vient d'adopter la proposition de loi sur le développement et l'encadrement des stages et du statut du stagiaire. Suite à cette adoption, la Conférence des Grandes Ecoles (CGE) a décidé de faire part de ses réserves concernant cette réforme, qu'elle juge contreproductive, et qui "crée plus de problèmes qu'elle n'en résout". La CGE regrette en effet que "le texte, par une approche uniformisatrice, oublieuse des réalités de terrain et des spécificités des filières, aboutisse à rendre la mise en œuvre des stages plus complexe et plus dangereuse", souligne l'organisation dans un communiqué de presse. Suite...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are MOOCs Just Moneymaking Scams? Providers Challenged To Substantiate Grandiose Claims
Keith Button, Campus Technology.
So the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education has launched a video and campaign against MOOCs, depicting MOOCs as schemes designed to make money. This follows the release of three working papers last year "questioning the basic positive assumptions about online education." I will admit, Coursera, Udacity and EdX make good targets. But it doesn't make sense to tar all MOOCs (and all online learning) with the same brush. More on this item at Inside Higher Ed, Huffington Post, L.A. Times. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conventional Online Higher Education Will Absorb MOOCs, 2 Reports Say
Steve Kolowich, The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog.
I think that the most interesting thing about this headline is that it asserts that there is such a thing as 'conventional online higher education'. Even a few years ago the words would have choked in the Chronicle headline writer's pen. So the two reports are from Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute, which released the Bellwether report, and Teachers College at Columbia University, which released a report cited here the other day. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The MOOC Problem
Rolin Moe, Hybrid Pedagogy.
Interetsing article about the appropriation of terms like 'MOOC' and '2.0' to support marketing. The author concludes "MOOCs have been sold not only as an agent to democratize education, but also as a necessity because the real crisis is about employment and not learning." But also, this is worth noting: "in reality the MOOC as a learning system has underperformed traditional models and shows no large-scale cost benefit to education providers. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Alternative Perspective on Group Dynamics
Jenny Mackness.
In this post Jenny Mackness offers a rethink on the need for group formation. "How could it ever be right to not support the weakest member of the group? ... There were some lovely people in our walking group who shared these values, but also some who didn’t seem to understand that in a situation such as walking the West Highland Way, commitment to the group was important." It's an interesting challenge. More...
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