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7 avril 2013

Accreditors Without Borders

By Elizabeth Redden. American accrediting agencies are increasingly evaluating foreign colleges and programs that are unattached to U.S. institutions. Proponents of the exportation of U.S. accreditation argue that it has a role to play in improving the quality of universities and professional programs worldwide and in promoting the mobility of students and faculty; critics contend that, without care, the accreditors could find themselves in a compromising position.
They argue that the expansion of U.S. accreditation abroad is neocolonial on the one hand and hazardous on the other: can standards built on values underlying American higher education be upheld with integrity in other cultural contexts? Read more...

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7 avril 2013

Data on whether and how students watch screencasts

By Robert Talbert. Screencasting is an integral part of the inverted classroom movement, and you can find screencasting even among courses that aren’t truly flipped. Using cheap, accessible tools for making and sharing video to clear out time for more student-active work during class make screencasting very appealing. But does it work? Do screencasts actually help students learn? We have lots of anecdotal evidence that suggests it does, but it turns out there are actually data as well that point in this direction. I’ve been reading an article by Katie Green, Tershia Pinder-Grover, and Joanna Mirecki Millunchick (of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan) from the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education in which they studied 262 students enrolled in an engineering survey course that was augmented with screencasts. Here’s the PDF. Read more...

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7 avril 2013

The Itinerant Postdoc

This is a guest post by Adrianne Wadewitz, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College. In previous posts in this series, I have discussed a day in the life of a digital humanities postdoc, digital scholarship at a liberal arts college, and the invisibility of digital work. In this last post, I would like to discuss the time management and life choices involved in a postdoc. One of the real joys of my position is that I have time to learn new skills, such as coding. I can take time out of every day to work on projects that flesh out my skills. For example, I can take real time to develop this website on the New England Primer that I have been working on only sporadically for the past few years or I can experiment with 18thconnect’s TypeWright project. However, I have to rein in my desire to start lots of new projects and focus on developing my dissertation project into a book. Read more...

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7 avril 2013

New MLA Guidelines on Digital Authorship and IT Support

By Jason B. Jones. This week, the Modern Languages Association‘s Committee on Information Technology released updates to two 2000-era guidelines that will interest many ProfHacker readers: one on authoring digital resources, and another on how institutions might support humanities IT work. The “Guidelines for Authors of Digital Resources” does not try to explain how to markup a web page, or code a mobile app. Instead, it aims to “help authors create resources that can be easily discovered and used, fairly evaluated, and adequately cited.” It reminds authors about important issues such as accessibility, privacy, and security, while also providing guidance about giving credit, providing for fair use, types of metadata to include, and more. The “Guidelines for Information Technology Access and Support for the Modern Languages” has suggestions about three related, yet distinct areas: what resources are appropriate for scholars and teachers in the modern languages, and how to govern those resources. Read more...

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7 avril 2013

How Social Media Can Enhance Study Abroad

The following is a guest post from Mandy Reinig, director of international education at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. A debate was started recently about whether social media has hurt study abroad, in part prompted by a commentary in The Chronicle. While I agree that technology has changed the way we look at study abroad and the way students interact while overseas, I don’t agree that it will lead to fewer cultural or transformative experiences for students while abroad. Social media has changed the way students interact and the way we, as international-education professionals, interact with students before, during, and after their time abroad. What I don’t think social media has done or will do is prevent those students who want a cultural experience from achieving it. As was mentioned in some of the comments following the commentary, there have been and always will be students who treat study abroad as more of a vacation and go abroad simply to travel rather than for the academic or cultural experiences. Read more...

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7 avril 2013

Stanford U. and edX Will Jointly Build Open-Source Software to Deliver MOOCs

By Jeffrey R. Young. Starting in June, colleges that want to deliver their own massive open online courses will be able to use a free software platform developed jointly by Stanford University and edX, the nonprofit MOOC provider founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The move is a merger of sorts between two previously competing software-development projects with the same goal. EdX has long said it would make the software it built to power its MOOCs freely available to anyone as an open-source package. And Stanford was working on Class2Go, its own free software for online courses. Now the two software teams will work together and focus on developing a single platform. Read more...

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7 avril 2013

Sweating the Details of a MOOC in Progress

By Karen Head. Because I grew up in a military family, the expression “boots on the ground” always informs how I look at the planning and execution of a project. No matter the situation, I believe an accurate assessment of resources and personnel is paramount to success. Like many instructors who have agreed to teach MOOCs (I’m currently working with colleagues to develop a massive open online course in freshman composition at Georgia Tech), I was eager to explore the possibilities. But in recent weeks I’ve begun to feel naïve, and even at times misled, about the necessary resources and procedures. In defense of all the universities who have signed on to create MOOCs, I don’t think any institution was, or could be, fully ready for the endeavor. There are too many unknowns. As a colleague of mine recently said, “We can’t build the track fast enough for this train to run on.” And this is where eagerness and naïveté really caught up with me—I signed on to this project assuming that the track was already there. It wasn’t, and that has meant a series of disruptions. Read more...

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7 avril 2013

Colby College Eliminates Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, Declaring Itself Climate Neutral

By Scott Carlson. Colby College has achieved what only a handful of other higher-education institutions have done so far: The college has met its goal in the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment and declared itself climate neutral. That means—essentially, with some caveats—that the college has zero greenhouse-gas emissions.
After signing the climate commitment, Colby set a goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2015—a date far sooner than most other institutions that had signed. Only three other colleges have achieved climate neutrality under the commitment: the College of the Atlantic, Green Mountain College, and the University of Minnesota at Morris. Read more...

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7 avril 2013

Report Criticizes the Citadel’s Investigation of Abuse Complaint

By Nick DeSantis. An internal investigation at the Citadel that examined how the South Carolina military college handled a sexual-abuse complaint was “inadequate” but did not represent a coverup to keep the information secret. That was the central finding of an independent review released by the institution on Friday, according to The Post and Courier, a South Carolina newspaper. The college’s investigation stemmed from a 2007 allegation that accused a former cadet of sexually abusing boys while he served as a counselor at the Citadel’s summer camp. The incidents of abuse reportedly took place five years earlier, in 2002. The former cadet, a Citadel graduate, is now serving a 50-year prison term after pleading guilty last summer to charges that he had molested boys in Charleston, S.C., the newspaper reported. The college has previously said that it regretted not doing more about the incidents, which prompted lawsuits against the institution. Read more...

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7 avril 2013

Adding Insult to Plagiary?

By Tom Bartlett. Colin Purrington wrote a funny, helpful guide about designing scientific posters. It has loads of practical tips (don’t make it too long, use a nonserif font for titles, etc.) and jokes about the mating habits of cute red pandas. The guide has been remarkably popular—he estimates it’s been viewed about two million times over the years—and he gets e-mails thanking him all the time. It has become a claim to minor fame. Sometimes people, um, borrow his guide without giving him credit. This happens fairly regularly, and when he finds out about it, he sends an e-mail asking them to take it down. Usually they do. But when he sent an e-mail to the Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research, asking that a roughly 1,200-word, near-verbatim, uncredited chunk from his guide be removed from the consortium’s materials, the response was unexpected. Read more...

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