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The supposed value of a humanities degree from Harvard?
OMG…this was my first thought on reading this article “Harvard Asks Alumni for Help With Humanities MOOC” published in yesterday’s Chronicle of Education. [I've just read it as I'm a little behind in my reading.]  Wow is my response….and I’d agree with  ssaulvolk, one of the commentators on the article called who wrote 10 hours ago “Good news for adjuncts who thought they were at the bottom of the academic barrel! Harvard has come up with an even lower category. Kudos to the university with the GNP-sized endowment.”
YES! Clearly Humanities graduates either need to be underpaid, undervalued and they are cheap i.e. free for service. What Harvard has indirectly stated is that people with degree in the humanities have little or no value. Why? Well, they’re clearly willing to work for nothing according to Harvard!! One has to wonder what value does a PhD in the humanities have? Clearly, not much. Way to go Harvard in setting the bar for the manner in which people with Humanities PhD and degrees ought to be treated. You’d hope that perhaps the university would be far more politer, less judgmental to its faculty and students, and alumni but obviously they’re’ worthless. If this is the case…what about the rest of us??  (I didn’t get my PhD from Harvard just in case you’re wondering.)

By Ry Rivard. Universities must slow the rising cost of higher education or risk losing the support of the American public, the president emeritus of Princeton University, William Bowen, argues in his new book. To do that, college administrations should turn to online courses to combat the “cost disease,” a term explained several decades ago by Bowen, a labor economist. The disease is simple: higher education prices are hard to bring down because labor prices rise while productivity remains the same. Bowen says that in academe, like a string quartet, there’s traditionally been little chance for colleges to reduce the number of laborers or the time it takes to finish the work. The cure, Bowen writes, may be online education. He argues online education can reduce costs without undermining students’ education. While he goes out of his way to make sure nobody thinks online education will be a silver bullet, Bowen's argument is likely to receive attention because of his time at Princeton and at ITHAKA studying new technologie. The book, Higher Education in the Digital Age (forthcoming from Princeton University Press), frames the current and coming debates instead of answering questions about the future of online learning. About a third of students now take at least one class online. Read more...

A new report from the European Commission examines the effect of the financial crisis on education budgets. The report shows that nearly half of the 28 countries for which data were available cut their spending on tertiary and adult education from 2010 to 2011, with the greatest decline observed in Slovakia (nearly 15 percent), and reductions of more than 5 percent in the Czech Republic, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, and Northern Ireland. In 2012, even larger cuts took place in Cyprus and Lithuania (more than 30 percent), and Greece (25 percent).

New Database of Complaints on Student Loans
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday unveiled a new database on consumer complaints on various financial services and products, including student loans. “By sharing these complaints with the public, we are creating greater transparency in consumer financial products and services,” said a statement from Richard Cordray, director of the bureau. “The database is good for consumers and it is also good for honest businesses. We believe the marketplace of ideas can do great things with this data.”

By Paul Jump for Times Higher Education. The endless demands on modern academics' time are such that many feel they are doing the work of two people at once. Yet one Canadian academic apparently felt able to perform the roles of two professors 4,000 miles apart. Jonathan Hart was appointed professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Alberta in 2004. In 2011, he was also appointed professor of English studies at Durham University, in Britain. Neither was a part-time position, and it appears that neither institution knew about Professor Hart's dual roles until the facts came to light at the end of last year.
A spokeswoman for Durham confirmed that it no longer employed Professor Hart but declined to comment further on an "individual staffing matter."
A spokeswoman for Alberta said the institution had "become aware" of the fact that Professor Hart had also taken a position at Durham and was "looking into" the matter. Read more...

By Robert Talbert. In my series of posts on the flipped intro-to-proofs course, I’ve described the ins and outs of the design challenges of the course and how the course was run to address those challenges and the learning objectives. There’s really only one thing left to describe: How the course actually played out through the semester, and especially how the students responded.
I wasn’t sure how students in the course would respond to the inverted classroom structure. On the one hand, by setting the course up so that students were getting time and support on the hardest tasks in the course and optimizing the cognitive load outside of class, this was going to make a problematic course very doable for students. On the other hand, students might be so wed to the traditional classroom setup that no amount of logic was going to prevail, and it would end up like my inverted MATLAB class did where a small but extremely vocal minority simply refused to try anything that wasn’t lecture. Read more...