Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Edward Kazarian. The National Bureau of Economic Research this month issued a working paper containing a preliminary report on a study of the learning outcomes of students in courses taken during their first term at Northwestern University. The study considers an impressively large sample, "15,662 students taking 56,599 first-quarter classes" and, its authors claim, offers clear statistical evidence that the students learned more in courses taught by non-tenure-track faculty members than in courses taught by tenured and tenure-track professors. Read more...

By Todd C. Ream. The most famous of us all are not real. True, scholars such as Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer were once recognized by almost any sector of the American public.  In fact, they were so well-recognized that Einstein’s hair and Oppenheimer’s pork pie hat were alone representative of their celebrity. A theoretical physicist, an astrophysicist, an applied physicist, and an engineer are now arguably as well recognized as the Einsteins and Oppenheimers of days past. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will this fall package some of its online courses into more cohesive sequences, just as edX prepares to roll out certificates of completion using identity verification. Seen together, the two announcements may provide a glimpse at what the future holds for the massive open online course provider. The “XSeries” sequences add a new layer of structure to MITx, the institution’s section of the edX platform. Read more...