Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Abby Young-Powell and Libby Page. Dodgy questions at a job interview, expensive places to study, and does money really make you happy? What's the worst question you've been asked in a job interview? Students at Bournemouth uni were asked how many people they'd slept with when they were interviewed for a job at the student union bar last week. Sex-related questions were meant to relax the students before their formal interviews. According to the Tab, freshers were encouraged to make awkward confessions, such as wetting themselves and accidentally pulling members of their own sex. More...

By Louise Tickle. Louise Tickle meets four university teachers whose work in the field enriches their students' learning.
"When the film was in development, there was a point when I was really struggling to make the script work," says director John Roberts, a two time Bafta award-winner who also lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. "Later on, I set it as an exercise for my students. It was about giving them a real problem I'd had to grapple with – how would they find a creative solution that made sense?"
Roberts' new film, Day of the Flowers, is set in Scotland and Cuba and features ballet star Carlos Acosta. More...

By Gavan Naden. I don't want my son to make the same mistakes I did when choosing a subject – but I'm not sure he'll listen to me. There are 500 days until my son could leave home to go to university, wide-eyed and fully believing he's about to change the world. He's 16 years old, in the sixth form and nothing's going to stop him. Should I bite the bullet and try to persuade him that a "proper" job is where his future lies, one that is clear and defined? With almost a million 16-24 year-olds unemployed it's a tough world and a vague degree can guarantee little beyond a nasty debt. More...

By Natalie Gil. Academics sexed up their research; ministers played with the rules over student numbers, and tuition fees continued to cause concern – both for students and universities. This was supposed to be the year to find out what happens when you radically tinker with the English higher education system. It was as though a group of policy boffins had spent previous years setting up fiendishly clever experiments – £9,000 tuition fees, uncapping the number of students with top A-level grades that universities can recruit, the new Research Excellence Framework for distributing research money – and were now donning protective goggles ready to see what emerged from the petri dish. More...

By Natalie Gil. In an interview for a university course, it's important to show that you're well-rounded. When you're applying for university, the last thing you need on top of exam stress and Ucas woes is a grilling by a top academic. But these days if you want to win a place, regardless of the course you're applying for, you're increasingly likely to face an interview. Many universities are interviewing over the winter break, so here are some tips. More...

By Brian Mathews. I’ve always been interested in reaching out to students as soon as possible. Conceptually I like that space in the summer – the metamorphosis from high school senior to college freshmen. It feels like a prime time to engage and cultivate a positive relationship. 
I use to consider the traditional route. Devise a fun print piece and have that item included in a welcome packet or other mailing. Of course incoming students receive a barrage of info and you’d really have to standout. They also have immediate (deadline-driven) needs like financial aid, housing, course selection, meal plans, and football tickets. Facebook groups are another possibility to start the conversation. I wrote about making a good impression on incoming freshmen several years ago. More...

By Robert Talbert. Over three years ago, I wrote a post to try to address a fallacy that is used to refute the idea of novel ways of teaching mathematics and science. That fallacy basically says that mathematics and the way people learn it have not fundamentally changed in hundreds if not thousands of years, and therefore the methods of teaching  that have “worked” up to this point in history  don’t need changing. Or more colloquially, “We were able to put a man on the moon with the way we’ve taught math for hundreds of years, so we shouldn’t change it now.” I sometimes refer to this as the “man on the moon” fallacy because of that second interpretation. More...

By Amy Cavender. Among Google’s tools for getting work done, we here at ProfHacker have long been fans of Google Scholar. It’s a useful tool for finding good sources, it can be used to track citations to your work, and setting up an alert in Google Scholar is a great way to keep track of new publications on a topic. Google keeps developing the service, and a few weeks ago, they addd a new feature: Google Scholar Library. That blog entry and the service’s help page explain quite well how to use this new feature, so I won’t go into detail about that here. More...

By Brian Croxall. With the close of the semester, you’re probably doing what you can to get your email inbox under control now that some of your colleagues have left the campus and your students have finished their finals. Email is, of course, the gift that keeps on giving. So it’s perhaps appropriate as we approach the end of the year that I make a gift to you of a fabulous new (and free!) service I discovered that will radically reduce the number of emails you receive on a daily basis: Unroll.Me. More...

By Rob Jenkins. Lately my college, like many other two-year schools, has been making an effort to encourage students to stay for two years and earn an associate degree before transferring. That can be a hard sell, since we’re primarily a “portal” institution, and many of our students make no bones about the fact that they want to transfer as soon as possible—in many cases, after one year. Even those who stay two years often can’t be bothered to go to the extra “trouble” of applying for graduation, despite the clear advantages of having an actual degree to show for those two years. Perhaps, though, if the essay below is any indication, the word is starting to get through. This was actually a final exam essay in one of my ENGL 1101 sections this semester. The student wrote it in one hour (per departmental instruction), based on one of three prompts that I provided. More...