Formation Continue du Supérieur

By David Matthews for Times Higher Education. Wealthy donors to Ivy League universities can "buy a place" for their offspring, and admissions policies at elite U.S. universities are far less meritocratic than anything that would be accepted in Britain, the universities and science minister has argued.
David Willetts made the comments in a debate with Lord Rees of Ludlow, the astronomer royal, about the future of British higher education. He said that large donations to prestigious private universities in the United States meant that favors were returned in terms of the admission of donors' children.
"You can buy a place for your child, although obviously your child has to meet a pretty high minimum standard," Willetts said. "To escape the constraints of state funding, [the Ivy League universities] have to make other sacrifices so as to achieve alternative sources of income and ... they'll trade off some choice [over admissions] in return for securing a stream of income," he added. Read more...

By John Ross for The Australian. Private higher education has hit the wall in Australia, with its once-meteoric growth stalling.
Student numbers increased just 0.3 per cent this year and fell 1.8 per cent in equivalent full-time terms, according to data from the federal Department of Innovation.
This compared with average annual growth of about 7 per cent over the past two years, and about 40 per cent between 2007 and 2009.
Private colleges' international enrollments, which had seen annual rises of between 25 and 30 per cent during the boom years of 2007 to 2009, fell 10 per cent this year. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. It seemed almost too easy. Catharine Stimpson and Ann Kirschner start from such fundamentally different perspective in their views about technology-enabled education that staging a symposium at which the two of them talk about their experiences taking online courses (or writing about such an event) seemed like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course Kirschner would be a booster, and Stimpson a naysayer. What enlightenment could possibly emerge?
The event late last month at New York University here (where Stimpson is University Professor and dean emerita of the graduate school of arts and science) followed the expected script in some ways. Stimpson, a Columbia- and Cambridge-trained feminist literary scholar who presided over the Modern Language Association and is a staunch defender of the humanities, probably surprised no one in the audience when she expressed her qualms that online learning, at least as embodied by tightly controlled courses like the creative writing class she took at the University of Phoenix, contribute to a trend in which “teaching is losing its dignity.” Read more...

By Michael A. McRobbie. With each day, the so-called fiscal cliff looms larger as Congress and President Obama work to come to agreement on a federal-deficit compromise, which so far has proven elusive. Absent such an agreement by year's end, far-reaching spending cuts will be triggered as result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, through a mechanism called sequestration.
These reductions in federal spending, expected to total more than $1-trillion over the next nine years, would reduce the country's budget deficit—but would almost certainly come at a perilously high cost to the short-term stability and long-term vitality of the U.S. economy. Read more...

By Marc Parry. During the New Deal of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration hired writers to document history across the United States. The best-known effort collected oral histories of former slaves. Those interviews became the bedrock of research for decades, contributing to a reinterpretation of slavery that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s, says William G. Thomas III, a historian at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Mr. Thomas sees something similar as possible today. He and others are trying to build a movement to gather “the people’s history.” And their project could spawn a new model for massive open online courses, or MOOC’s. Read more...

By Doug Guthrie. Like lemmings, too many American colleges are mindlessly rushing out to find a way to deliver online education, and more and more often they are choosing Coursera. The company, founded this year by two Stanford University computer scientists, has already enrolled more than two million students, has engaged 33 academic institutions as partners, and is offering more than 200 free massive open online courses, or MOOC's.
A college's decision to jump on the Coursera bandwagon is aided—and eased—by knowing that academic heavyweights like Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are already on board. As one college president described it to The New York Times, "You're known by your partners, and this is the College of Cardinals."
In our haste to join the academic alphas, many of us are forgoing the reflection necessary to enter this new medium. Our resolve to act swiftly belies the serious nature of this next phase of higher education's evolution. There are critical pedagogical issues at stake in the online market, and MOOC's have not done nearly enough to deal with those concerns. Read more...

By Jeff Selingo. The Chronicle this week published a news analysis questioning whether the current nonstop talk over innovation in higher ed is creating a system for those who can least afford a traditional education but need it the most. The piece generated plenty of reaction in the comments, which I’d group into two opposing camps:
- Face-to-face education is the established and verified mode of instruction, and any other way depersonalizes education, is uncontrolled, and most of all, is ineffective.
- Using technology to supplement and, in some cases, replace face-to-face instruction helps personalize learning for students, focuses classroom time on what they haven’t already mastered, and most important, meets students where and how they learn today. As a result, traditional brick-and-mortar colleges are doomed. Read more...

By Nigel Thrift. The British attitude to Europe often seems sad and unnecessarily destructive. The idea of withdrawing from the European Union is profoundly mistaken, promoted by a ragtag of interests and members of the national press who often seem to confuse Europe with immigrants and run stories with two variants: “They’re taking our money” and “it’s just a crazy bureaucracy.” The result is clear enough: Britain has become more and more marginalized within Europe, a stance that can only make it more and more marginal to the world at large.
Of course, the European Union is hardly perfect but, as The Economist has reported, the consequences of a withdrawal from it would be catastrophic. The magazine argues that Britain would end up as just another “scratchy outsider.” Read more...

By Robert Talbert. Paul Pintrich was the creator of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, which I used as the main instrument for collecting data for the study on students in the flipped transition-to-proof course this past semester. Now that the data are in, I’ve been going back and reading some of Pintrich’s original papers on the MSLQ and its theoretical framework. What Pintrich has to say about student learning goes right to the heart of why I chose to experiment with the flipped classroom, and indeed I think he really speaks to the purpose of higher education in general.
For me, the main purpose of higher education is to train students on how to be learners — people who take initiative for learning things, who are skilled in learning new things, and who above all want to learn new things. My goal as an instructor is to make sure that every student in my class makes some form of incremental improvement in having the dispositions and skills attendant with successful lifelong learning. I care about this a lot more than I care about covering this or that particular content topic in a course. Read more...

By Brian Croxall. At the beginning of the semester, I wrote about an experiment that I had underway to grade differently. To recap, I told my students that I would only give “straight” letter grades on the essays that they would write in my first-year writing class—no pluses, no minuses. My reasons for taking this approach were, as I explained, to lighten the feelings of conflict that I get when grading essays that fall between the margin of grades. As I wrote then, “My thinking behind this decision is that while it might be hard to know the difference between an 87 and an 88, or sometimes even between the dreaded B+/A- split, I absolutely do know the difference between an A and a B paper. I expect to see a sharp drop in the amount of stress that I feel as I grade the four essays I’m assigning this semester.” Read more...