Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Richard (RJ) Eskow. Social progress is never a straightforward, linear process. Sometimes society struggles to recognize moral questions that in retrospect should have seemed obvious. Then, in a historical moment, something crystallizes. Slavery, civil rights, women's rights, marriage equality: each of these moral challenges arose in the national conscience before becoming the subject of a fight for justice (some of which have yet to be won). More...

By Meghan Drake. They have been touted as the biggest revolution in higher education since Plato opened his academy, but a growing number of educators are saying that MOOCs — “massive open online courses” offering free instruction through cyberspace — may not be ready for a cap and gown. Academic administrators at top colleges are increasingly questioning the rigor of MOOC courses, the rates of success for students and the financial viability of teaming up with private companies using aggressive marketing tactics. Read more...

By Matthew J.X. Malady. I teach introductory creative writing at the University of Michigan, and I’d just finished this agonizingly detailed response letter to the 20th student story I’d graded in the last three weeks, and then I was printing out all this stuff at once and catching snippets of these sentences in my feedback that were just totally insane, about ghost cocks and specific apocalypse plausibility and whether or not so-and-so would have randomized her email before putting a thing on Casual Encounters, and all of a sudden I was just like, what am I doing? WHAT AM I DOING RIGHT NOW? More...

By Carole Browne and Jacquelyn Fetrow. Many faculty fear that online teaching is incompatible with the liberal arts educational model, a model that focuses on small class sizes and the availability of faculty to interact with students outside of the classroom—a model which, when done well, has been demonstrated to produce outcomes of critical and creative thinking and analytical reasoning. Read more...