Formation Continue du Supérieur

20 avril 2013

A Better Factory Model

By Clive Belfield and Davis Jenkins. Economists are often criticized for treating colleges as if they were factories: using models that evaluate college efficiency in creating outputs (student completions) for a given input (cost). In fact, in many ways a college education is like the factory production process: students start at the beginning and then, after a sequence of “inputs” in the form of courses and support services, some graduate successfully at the end. Unfortunately, economic analyses of college efficiency typically do not look at college as a process. Economic models have traditionally tried to understand college efficiency through a simple input-per-output equation. For example, they may look at a graduation rate in 2012 and compare that to the resources available in the college in 2012. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

New Survey Indicates Educational Institutions are Increasingly Using Social Media to Reach Donors, Alumni and Students

By Pam Russell. Institutions See Value of Social Media as a Strategic Tool. Schools, colleges and universities worldwide are increasingly using social media in campaigns to raise funds and steward current and potential donors and to connect more often with current students, prospective students, parents, faculty and staff. The fourth annual CASE/Huron Education/mStoner social media survey, conducted in February and March of 2013, asked advancement professionals at education institutions about their use of social media. More than 1,000 respondents provided feedback on the tools they are using, how they use them, challenges they face and what they expect as return on investment. Facebook continues to be the most popular platform with 96 percent of respondents using it versus 82 percent on Twitter, 75 percent on LinkedIn and 71 percent on YouTube. However, the use of platforms other than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube has decreased as compared with results from the 2012 survey—blog and Flickr use have both declined by 13 percent. The decrease in use of other platforms is due to an increased focus on strategy and an intentional approach to the investment of resources in new channels. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

The Real Precipice

By Richard Holmgren. Although massive open online courses have been gathering substantial recent attention, future histories of education will likely only note them as a harbinger of change or transitional step into an educational model that is organized around learning. In most cases, MOOCs operate on a grand scale but use a traditional form in which a faculty member (or two) is responsible for most aspects of course design, delivery, and assessment. The real threat to traditional higher education embraces a more radical vision that removes faculty from the organizational center and uses cognitive science to organize the learning around the learner. Such models exist now. Consider, for example the implications of Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Medvedev Defends Heavily Criticized Education Policies

By Natalya Krainova. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told the State Duma on Wednesday that he would not fire Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov in response to fierce public and parliamentary criticism of the minister over education reforms.
"I believe that a minister whom everybody likes is a person who most likely doesn't cope very well with his duties," Medvedev said while presenting his first annual report as prime minister on the government's work, Interfax reported.
Officials serving in the positions of education and science minister and health minister have always been criticized and "that's life," Medvedev said. However, Livanov should "communicate directly" with lawmakers, the prime minister said.
Medvedev was responding to a Liberal Democratic Party deputy's question about whether "the time has come" for Livanov to resign. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Demystifying Dissertation Writing

Peg Boyle Single is the author of Demystifying Dissertation Writing: A Streamlined Process from Choice of Topic to Final Text and an academic writing coach. She provides individual and group coaching to dissertation writers and faculty members through her Web site. Before pursuing writing full-time, she was the director of faculty mentoring, director of the Henderson Doctoral Fellowships for Equity and Diversity, and a research associate professor at the University of Vermont. Her hope is that doctoral programs offer writing seminars, doctoral students join writing groups, and dissertation writers learn habits of fluent writing. Her dream is to be the Potions Master at Hogwarts and to slip writing tips in between lessons on mixing Felix Felicis and Polyjuice potion.

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20 avril 2013

EdX Rejected

By Ry Rivard. After months of wooing and under close scrutiny, edX was rejected this week by Amherst College amid faculty concerns about the online course provider's business plans and impact on student learning. Amherst professors voted on Tuesday not to work with edX, a nonprofit venture started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide massive open online courses, or MOOCs. In interviews, professors cited a wide range of reasons for rejecting edX -- which currently works with only 12 elite partner colleges and universities -- starting with edX's incompatibility with Amherst’s mission and ending with, to some, the destruction of higher education as we know it. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Enthusiasm and Caution in Myanmar

By Elizabeth Redden. In the wake of President Obama’s historic visit to Myanmar in November, American universities have begun to engage with the country’s higher education institutions. A report released Friday by the Institute of International Education, which led a delegation including representatives from 10 U.S. universities to Myanmar in February, describes the extensive needs of the country's higher education system and offers recommendations for universities interested in forming partnerships.
“The climate for partnership is more favorable than it has been for 30 years,” Meghann Curtis, the deputy assistant secretary for academic programs at the U.S. State Department, said in a conference call coinciding with the report’s release. Curtis accompanied the delegation, as did representatives from the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

New Ranking Rules

By Scott Jaschik. Quacquarelli Symonds, one of the major groups conducting international rankings of universities, has banned universities from recruiting people to participate in the peer review surveys conducted for the evaluations of institutions. QS accepts academic volunteers to participate in its rankings reviews. Up until now, QS has permitted universities to recruit volunteers, provided that the institutions don't suggest how they should evaluate the universities. The action by QS, as the company is known, follows the news that the president of University College Cork sent a letter to all faculty members urging them each to ask three people they know at other universities -- people who would understand the university and its need to move up in the rankings -- to participate in the QS process. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Reframing the Conversation

By Carl Straumsheim. It’s a cliff! It’s a tsunami! No, it’s the future of higher education, say grant recipients of the Teagle Foundation, who warn that language framing the discussion in a negative light is impeding efforts to change academe to fit the 21st century. The debate was on display here last week as the foundation, which supports undergraduate education in arts and sciences, invited nine grant recipients to discuss how institutions can take innovative teaching technologies and research on cognitive science to change how their faculty spend their time in the classroom. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Foreign Student Safety in Spotlight

By Elizabeth Redden. Professionals in international education have long had to counter stereotypical depictions of the U.S. as a crime-ridden, pistol-packing kind of place, but this week issues surrounding perceptions of international student safety have been especially prominent: not only was Secretary of State John Kerry quoted as saying that prospective Japanese students are deterred by fears of gun violence, but one international student died, and at least three others were injured, as a result of the Boston Marathon bombings. Boston University has been left mourning Lu Lingzi, a graduate student in mathematics and statistics who was described by The New York Times as “a woman whose aspirations took her from a rust-belt hometown, Shenyang, to Beijing and then the United States.” One other Chinese student was reported injured, as were two Saudi Arabian students, one of whom was initially misidentified by some media outlets as a suspect, leading a Saudi embassy official to tell The Boston Globe, “We’re concerned about the backlash against students based on a false story.” (Officials at the Saudi Embassy did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.) Read more...

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