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By Elizabeth Redden. A theme at this year’s Association of International Education Administrators conference was the need to do a better job of integrating international students on American campuses in order to maximize the potential for global learning. The overarching message: student mobility alone won't cut it. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Three elite universities’ debates about whether they should join -- or stay with -- the massive open online course providers Coursera and edX have brought familiar concerns over revenue and intellectual property rights to the surface, even though those issues overshadow many faculty members’ and most administrators' pragmatic approach to distance education.
For Cornell, Princeton and Yale Universities, MOOCs represents a shiny new toy in the toolbox that is their online education offerings. Yale, for example, has run Open Yale Courses, a catalog of free introductory courses. Princeton publishes free lectures through iTunes U, YouTube and its Media Central, and creates programming through its alumni association. Cornell has extended its reach through eCornell, a spinoff that offers corporate training and online certificates. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Scores of colleges are gearing up to offer new competency-based degrees. But some college leaders are confused about whether the U.S. Department of Education remains supportive of a new form of competency-based education that does not rely on the credit hour standard. This approach is called direct assessment -- as in directly measuring student knowledge and learning, rather than linking it to seat time and grades. Read more...

By Amy E. Slaton. At best, so-called competency- and proficiency-based higher education is a world of good intentions and uncritical enthusiasms. At worst, it seems to be the fulfillment of conservative cost-cutting visions that will put our most enriching higher education experiences still further out of reach for many Americans. In the U.S. these programs are aimed at sidelining the familiar credit hour in favor of personalized and flexible learning experiences for enrollees. They push the idea that some students will achieve mastery with fewer instructional hours than others and should thus be spared that expenditure of time and money. Read more...

By Alexander W. Astin. In the early spring of 1989, not long before the Tiananmen Square protests, my wife and I were visiting China on behalf of the U. S. Agency for International Development to consult with Chinese higher education officials about educational reform. This was a unique time in China, when political discourse was relatively open and when many educators were emboldened to be openly critical of governmental policies. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. In one of those cases where satire cannot trump cold hard fact, the power brokers and heavy thinkers who gathered at an Alpine resort in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum last month expressed great concern about the danger that growing inequality poses to social stability everywhere. As well they might. Strictly speaking, "widening income disparities" was only one of 10 issues flagged by the Forum's Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014 report, along with "a lack of values in leadership" and "the rapid spread of misinformation online." But a couple of concerns on the list -- "persistent structural unemployment" and "the diminishing confidence in economic policies" -- were variations on the same theme. Read more...

By Elaine Tuttle Hansen. As Inside Higher Ed has observed, few issues have risen to national attention as quickly as “undermatching,” the problem of high-achieving low-income students choosing to attend non-selective colleges. Now, in the study by Bastedo and Flaster summarized by Inside Higher Ed,  we are beginning to see the first critiques of the methodology and assumptions underlying the original undermatching studies. In response, the earlier researchers argue that the quality of this new work is low.  Other scholars defend the new critics and suggest that undermatching is indeed “overrated,” because it looks at only a small minority of low-income students -- the smartest and luckiest ones. Read more...

By Carolyn Foster Segal. As Inside Higher Ed reported last week, the newest round of curricular mayhem instigated by Bruce H. Leslie, the chancellor of the Alamo Colleges, is to replace his district’s second three-credit humanities course requirement with a class based on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (Leslie might have suggested Machiavelli’s The Prince, which seems closer to his style of governance. The FranklinCovey Company plans to release a textbook specifically for EDUC 1300, Learning Framework, which will be required for every student taking the course. Read more...