Formation Continue du Supérieur

By George Mills. A scheme which would see 'godfathers' helping out Spanish university students in financial difficulties has received mixed reactions from from within the education sector.
It all started with a telephone call.
In July, the Dean of Spain's Malaga University, Adelaida de la Calle, received a call from a pensioner offering to pay the course fees of one student.
From there, her proposal took shape. More...

Nell McCreadie elaborates on the findings from a recent study on the exploring the value of academic libraries in developing countries. Case studies indicated that there is a clear need for better promotion of resources, awareness raising and skills development. However, this is not just a case of internal promotion, but also a case of developing external relationships with the scholarly community to promote advocacy for the library.
A common concern that our global library partners often raise with us is that the role of the academic library in supporting teaching and research staff is not fully understood. Too often, library patrons fail to fully understand the origins of the resources that they are using and how they are able to access them. A new study released by SAGE tells a similar story, with librarians in the developing world becoming increasingly aware of the need to communicate the value of their academic libraries. The study explored opinions of both the library and academic teaching and research community to understand how the library is perceived. More...

By Brigid Laffan. Research gulf divides higher education. Higher education is in the throes of change and challenge. Across the world, governments are reforming national systems in the search for prosperity. This is evident in the proliferation of targeted strategic investments in research and education, initiatives which foster a culture of intense competition, of which rankings are one indicator. Competition and internationalisation will intensify over the next 20 years.
In May, Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn set out seven objectives for Irish higher education that had phrases such as “world-class”, “excellence in teaching and learning”, “an open and excellent public research system”, “globally competitive” and “internationally oriented”. Yet the sector is experiencing its fifth consecutive cut in funding, draining people and resources from the system. More...

By Salimullah Khan. TERTIARY education has faced a crisis all over the world since the 1960s. As one war ended another began. Education provided the royal road to social mobility for many in the former colonial world, especially among the middle classes. Demand for tertiary education intensified as social expectations steeply rose. By that time, economic growth began to stagnate. This widening gap between the number of job-seeking educated young people and the effective demand for their skills caused a crisis in education on a world scale.
After liberation, Bangladesh had only a handful of public universities. Since the turn of the century, both public and private universities have proliferated. Growth, i.e. access is in itself a good thing. Equity, or filtering down, is however quite another. Growth in itself will not take care of equity. Education does not filter down. If it did, in 1947, after a hundred years of filtering down, literacy rate in the country would not remain stuck at 6% of the population.
How are our universities doing now? More...

By Akane Otani. Many of the countries that are currently on the travel warning list are in the Middle East — which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the destination for only 1.8% of the more than 270,000 U.S. students who study abroad every year.
Concerned about political unrest in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, American universities are increasingly suspending their study abroad programs for fear of their students' safety.
Citing the U.S. Department of State travel warnings regarding Egypt, Middlebury College has suspended its Egypt program for the fall semester, saying on its study abroad website that it will send admitted students to study in Amman, Jordan, instead. More...

Harvard, le MIT et… Google ! Le géant américain vient d'annoncer son association avec ces prestigieuses universités, ainsi qu'avec EdX, plateforme éducative en ligne. Objectif annoncé : se développer dans les MOOCs.
Quel est le lien entre la plateforme éducative en ligne EdX, Harvard, le MIT et Google ? La volonté de permettre la création d'un site, que le président d'EdX n'hésite pas à qualifier de "YouTube pour MOOCs". Mooc.org doit en effet être accessible à tous, des entreprises aux gouvernements, en passant par les professeurs et leurs étudiants. More...

By George Lorenzo. Massive open online courses were never meant to be dull and lonely. But how can the courses encourage more student-to-student and student-to-faculty interaction?
In a New York Times feature article headlined "Two Cheers for Web U," A. J. Jacobs wrote about his experience taking part in some massive open online courses (MOOCs). Among a good number of critical statements about MOOCS in general, Jacobs explained how the lack of teacher-to-student and student-to-student interaction in such online courses was probably the most disappointing aspect of his experience. He wanted to be engaged in what he said looked like, at first glance, a dynamic and exiting online learning experience. Instead, he said he was disappointed, finding that professors and students were out of reach and conversations were one-sided, faculty-only affairs.
MOOCs, however, were never meant to be dull and lonely. "A MOOC is not just an online course," said Professor David Cormier, manager of Web communication and innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island. More...

By Christina Quattrocchi.Brian Greenberg, Michael Horn and Rob Schwartz team up to scale best practices for blended learning. Silicon Schools Fund CEO Brian Greenberg believes that blended learning is about “reconceiving the role of the student, the teachers, and how you define schools.” But such cosmic shifts require guidance, coaching, and encouragement. With edtech coaches and coordinators still a relatively new field, teachers often have few direct resources on how to get started. The emergence of a new blended learning MOOC, compliments of Coursera’s new focus on teacher professional development, could provide such guidance--for free. More...