Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Carl Straumsheim. President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has a message for the federal government and regional accreditors: Go easy on the MOOCs. In a report released on Wednesday, the council of engineers and scientists recommends the federal government not interfere with vendors and providers experimenting with massive open online courses and other forms of distance education. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. In response to the uptick in journals with questionable editorial practices that have followed in the wake of the open-access movement, several publishing associations are banding together over a new set of principles to tell the legitimate journals from the crowd. The Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and the World Association of Medical Editors on Thursday announced the “Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.” Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Colleges and universities that offer distance education are increasingly building their courses to conform with widely accepted best practices for all of higher education, but a study by the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies shows many institutions fail to collect crucial data needed to track the effectiveness of programs. The cooperative, founded by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, regularly polls its members to understand how institutions are providing distance education. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Patricia Adler stunned her students in a popular course on deviance Thursday by announcing that she would be leaving her tenured position teaching sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Adler said that officials told her that one of the highlights of the course -- popular year after year -- had to go. That is an annual lecture on prostitution (a topic covered in deviance courses nationwide). Read more...

By Paul Fain. The U.S. Department of Education’s rulemaking session on “gainful employment” regulations ended Friday in a stalemate. A panel of department-appointed negotiators was unable to reach consensus on the proposed standards for vocational programs at for-profit institutions and community colleges. Dissent came from representatives of both the for-profit and consumer-group camps. Read more...

By John Ross for The Australian. Marketing practices employed by almost half of Australia's 4,900-odd training colleges could jeopardize their government approval to operate, a new report suggests. 
A review of about one-tenth of college websites, conducted by the national vocational training regulator, has found that 45 percent may be in breach of registration standards. Read more...

By Megan Rogers. Keene State College released its first placement survey of a graduating class this fall, with plans to annually track graduates’ post-collegiate career outcomes. Of the 235 graduates from the class of 2012 who generated usable responses from the survey, 94 percent reported being employed or engaged in further education. At Syracuse University, where outcome surveys have been administered for at least 30 years, 84 percent of the class of 2012 was working or attending graduate school. Read more...

By Allie Grasgreen. As the old saying goes, money can’t buy happiness. And yet, in measuring alumni success and satisfaction, colleges – often prodded by those seeking to hold them accountable – typically look at two things: whether their former students are gainfully employed, and whether they’re making a decent salary. A new project announced today, led by Gallup and debuting at Purdue University, aims to change that. Focusing on a set of factors that are shown to correlate with “a great life,” the survey of 30,000 graduates annually will provide data on how alumni of groups of colleges (public or private institutions in certain states, for instance, or athletic conferences) are faring and how they compare to national averages. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. U.S. consumer protection officials on Tuesday called for financial institutions to publicly disclose their agreements with colleges to market debit cards and other products to students. The arrangements -- which have increasingly come under scrutiny from consumer advocates, federal agencies and lawmakers -- often involve financial companies paying colleges to offer institution-branded student ID cards that double as a debit card or separate debit cards that students use to gain access to their federal financial aid money. Read more...