Formation Continue du Supérieur

17 juin 2013

Is This Going To Be the Summer of the MOOC?

By Robert McGuire. It was a relatively light week for MOOC developments, but that gives us time to look at a couple of interesting classes you might not know about, a lot of them starting just in time for the end of the U.S. school year. Summer of the MOOC maybe? The biggest news is that we’ll see a lot more MOOCs coming from Asia, including China. Five schools in Asia are in the list of 15 total that edX announced will be joining the consortium. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 00:10 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

17 juin 2013

School's in for first overseas campus

By Luo Wangshu. Cross-border expansion signifies China's growing clout and rising world interest in country, report Luo Wangshu in Chongqing, Cao Yin in Beijing and Wang Hongyi in Shanghai. Loke Pui Yan has been studying for her master's degree at Xiamen University in Fujian province since the autumn. The campus, which is along a beach, is a sight to behold. It is scattered with elegant historical buildings, enjoys pleasant weather and ocean breezes, and almost, but not quite, erases any feelings Loke has of culture shock and homesickness. Although the 29-year-old Malaysian has enjoyed her studies and her stay in China, she was thrilled to learn that the college is ready to establish a campus in her homeland. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 00:00 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

16 juin 2013

New Research Effort Aims to Examine Effectiveness of MOOCs

By Sara Grossman. As more and more colleges experiment with massive open online courses, or MOOCs, a new project hopes to cut through the hype and gauge the effectiveness of the courses. The MOOC Research Initiative, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will award grants of $10,000 to $25,000 to researchers seeking to explore issues such as student experiences in MOOCs and the free courses’ systemic impact. The initiative is aimed at “any group of academics who’ve ‘heard death by MOOCs’ and want to move past the hype and start looking at the actual research around open online courses,” said a co-founder of the project, George Siemens, associate director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University, in Alberta. Mr. Siemens was one of the first professors to teach a MOOC, in 2008. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:51 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

16 juin 2013

A Trinity of Languages

ByGeoffrey Pullum. Banja Luka, Bosnia — Here in the administrative entity known as the Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled part of the country properly called Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina, abbreviated “BiH” locally), they wave the Serbian flag in preference to the national flag of the country they reluctantly belong to; and the people pretend that their national language is three different languages. The mystery of the three in on. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:49 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

16 juin 2013

Rindfleischetikettierungs-überwachungsaufgaben-übertragungsgesetz

By William Germano. Sad news from Germany: the British Telegraph reported this week that the Germans are decommissioning what seems to have been the language’s longest word, the little mouthful that is the title of my post today. The term, which the Telegraph translates as “law delegating beef label monitoring,” apparently arose during the 1990s in response to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Spawned by a crisis, the R-word may now be the first linguistic fatality attributable to mad cow disease. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:44 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

16 juin 2013

Why We Fear MOOCs

By Mary Manjikian. In a 2002 book the anthropologist David D. Gilmore explored our culture’s fascination with monsters. He noted that most monsters are a sort of hybrid. They defy simple explanation because they tend to straddle categories. They might be part human and part animal (like a werewolf) or part living and part dead (like a vampire). The monster is thus a mutated version of something we are already familiar with; it is both familiar and strange. It’s the monster’s amorphous nature that we find upsetting—it blurs categories, so it upsets the natural order of things, causing chaos. I think that’s why we fear MOOCs. As hybrids, they defy easy categorization and threaten to upset the tidy categories we have for judging who is and is not college-educated. Like monsters, MOOCs threaten to disrupt our social world and bring chaos in their wake. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:31 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

16 juin 2013

Kleine EU-Staaten machen gegen studentische Mobilität mobil

Österreich will den Zustrom deutscher Studenten zügeln. Belgien klagt über Franzosen. Wie sehr leiden die Universitäten wirklich unter den ausländischen Studenten?
"Österreich schmiedet Allianz gegen Deutsche Studenten", titelt Spiegel Online. "Piefke-Alarm", schreibt die Süddeutsche Zeitung. Grund dafür ist eine Äußerung des österreichischen Wissenschaftsministers Karlheinz Töchterle, er wolle einheimische Bewerber an den Universitäten bevorzugen. Der Zustrom deutscher Studenten führe zu einer "Schieflage" an manchen Universitäten. Mehr...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:30 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

16 juin 2013

Are remote presence mobile systems the future of reference?

By Brian Mathews. It’s been a little too serious around this blog lately, so here is something fun to stimulate your lateral thinking. A good friend of mine is at InfoComm13—a tradeshow I wish I were attending. This is BEAM. It’s a mobile, WiFi powered, video-conferencing, remote presence system. The features are listed on the website, and it is an interesting concept. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:29 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

16 juin 2013

Weekend Reading: the MOOC Catchup Edition

By Adeline Koh. The latest thing that has everyone buzzing in higher education are MOOCs—Massively Open Online Courses. MOOC companies like Coursera, Udacity and Harvard edX courses offer free content to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. MOOCs have been criticized on many counts: for being an ineffective mode of instruction; for their high attrition rates; and their problematic handling assessment. Yet its supporters claim that MOOCs are an important intervention into the skyrocketing rates of college tuition, and champion the ability of MOOCs to offer much-needed instruction to impoverished people around the world. MOOCs have also thus far been limited to elite institutions. Bringing things to a head is San Jose State University’s controversial move to offer college credit for MOOC classes, which has fanned fears of a growing turn by state institutions to use MOOCs instead of regular classes. Its detractors fear that MOOCs will lead to the future unemployment of faculty at non-elite colleges and universities, leaving face to face education to be the privileged preserve of the elite. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:27 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

16 juin 2013

Why I’m a Bad Student

By Isaac Sweeney. As I’ve written, I had registered to take a MOOC through Coursera. Turns out, I’m a bad student. First I got behind, then I just stopped doing anything for the class. Much has been written about MOOCs lately, but I just want to lay out a short list of reasons why I did poorly or, more accurately, why I did mostly nothing for an English Composition I MOOC. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:25 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote