Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Carl Straumsheim. Despite the talk about how massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will dramatically alter the landscape of higher education, the courses have in some ways taken academe back -- to the days of huge gender gaps, when senior scholars overwhelmingly were men. An unofficial count by Inside Higher Ed shows 8 of the 63 courses listed on edX’s website are taught by women, and an additional 8 are taught by mixed-gender groups. Of Coursera’s 432 courses, 121 feature at least one female instructor and 71 taught exclusively by them. Udacity lists 29 courses on its website, and while only two are taught by women, many of them were created by female course developers. Read more...

By Allie Grasgreen. Recent research has suggested various ways in which girls outperform boys in high school, making them more likely to go to college: stronger desire to get good grades, better social skills, greater validation from academic performance. But a new study suggests gender sorting -- a boy’s or girl’s decision to attend one school or another – could have its own effect on the college enrollment gap. In a study of public school systems in Florida, researchers found that what high school a student attends is “strongly associated” with college enrollment; girls are attending high schools that have higher rates of college-going than one would expect based on the students’ test scores – and boys, vice versa. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. President Obama’s push for a rating system for colleges and universities that would eventually influence how the federal government doles out student aid is the most ambitious higher education proposal of his administration. The last serious push to so significantly transform federal higher education policy came in 2006 under Bush administration Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. That year, a 19-member commission -- known as the Spellings Commission -- released a report on the future of higher education that called, broadly speaking, for the federal government to play a larger role in promoting accountability and transparency at colleges and universities. Read more...

By John Morgan for Times Higher Education. The cynics predicted that the creation of a market in higher education would lead to universities pointlessly splurging on marketing as competition for students increased.
But they reckoned without the "Challenger Lighthouse."
A paper titled “Developing a ‘Challenger’ Lighthouse Identity” was recently presented at the University of Essex’s governing council. Read more...