Formation Continue du Supérieur

By John Warner. In his recent address, President Obama has made it clear that he wants colleges and universities to “compete” with each other. Through a series of yet-to-be-specified metrics, institutes of higher education will be measured not on inputs (as the U.S. News and World Report rankings work), but on outcomes like graduation rates and job placement. The intention is determine the institute’s “value,” so that matriculating students can make better decisions. Ultimately, these metrics may be tied to Federal carrots like Pell Grants, with students being restricted to lower amounts for poorly performing schools. Presumably, schools will compete with others in the same category, so community colleges aren’t asked to measure themselves against the Ivy League. Read more...

By Dayna Catropa. According to Google, “Every day Google answers more than one billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages. 15% of the searches we see everyday we’ve never seen before.” By analyzing these search queries, Google is in a unique position to spot trends. Google’s Education Team recently released data related to education search. The report analyzes search volume over time using data unique to Google. They separate search queries into five categories: brand terms (includes an institution name); program terms (business, psychology); general terms (online education); degree terms (includes the level of the degree) and MOOC terms. Here are three trends they discussed. Read more...

 The Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium (HEASC) was formed to support and enhance the capacity of higher education to fulfill its critical role in producing an educated and engaged citizenry and the knowledge needed for a thriving and civil society.HEASC seeks to help higher education exert strong leadership in making education, research, and practice for a sustainable society a reality. The link address is: http://heasc.aashe.org/

By G. Rendell. Last week, Grist published a piece guaranteed to hook the attention of anyone under 40 -- its headline proclaimed that your iPhone (or equivalent device) uses more electricity than your fridge. Which is, of course, a load of bunk. Anyone writing (or editing; yes, Scott Rosenberg, I'm looking at you) for Grist should know better. Once I got past the ridiculous headline, what caught my eye was that the article was based on the conclusions of a report funded by the National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Read more...

 The mission of the Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future (ULSF) is to support sustainability as a critical focus of teaching, research, operations and outreach at colleges and universities worldwide through publications, research, and assessment. ULSF also serves as the Secretariat for signatories of the Talloires Declaration, a ten-point action plan committing institutions to sustainability and environmental literacy in teaching and practice. The link address is: http://www.ulsf.org/about.html.

By Tracy Mitrano. On August 20, Cornell sent out its annual copyright notice to students pursuant to the regulatory requirement in the Higher Education Opportunity Act.  In the message, we always include an email whereby students with questions can communicate with me.  The first year we sent out a notice -- long before the HEOA, in 2002 -- I was up most of the night answering questions!  Since then, much has changed, and so I would approximate that it was more in the ballpark of about 30 queries this year, which can be clumped into about three issues.  Staff will help me work up a FAQ for next year. Read more...