Formation Continue du Supérieur

Par Leïla de Comarmond. Les chiffres de l'alternance sont en baisse. Le nombre de contrats enregistrés par le ministère du Travail a baissé de 6% au premier semestre par rapport à l'année précédente à la même période.

La formation en alternance donne des signes de faiblesse. Sur le premier semestre, le nombre de contrats a baissé de 6% par rapport à la même période de l'année précédente, avec 106.446 contrats contre 113.313, selon les dernières statistiques que vient de publier le ministère du Travail. Si l'on ne considère que les contrats ciblés sur les jeunes de moins de 26 ans, la baisse est même légèrement plus forte, à -6,3%, avec 93.356 contrats contre 99.699 sur les six premiers mois de 2011. Voir l'article...

By Leila de Comarmond. The number of contracts registered by the Ministry of Labour has fallen by 6% in the first half compared to the previous year to the same period. See the Article... More...

By Graeme Paton. Foreign languages are being gripped by a eurozone-style crisis as rising numbers of teenagers shun the subject at school and college, senior examiners warned today.
Traditional A-level disciplines such as French and German are in “freefall” following a record decline in entry rates over the last decade, it emerged. Britain’s biggest exam boards called for a bail-out package similar to that used to rescue ailing European economies to restore confidence in language courses.

By Patrick Collinson. Thousands of 18-year-olds are planning to study abroad, where courses are increasingly taught in English and tuition costs are a fraction of what they would have to pay at home
Welcome to the £9,000 tuition fee refugees. The number of British students applying to Dublin's Trinity College has jumped by 20% to nearly 2,000 this year. At University College Dublin (UCD), applications from students with British A-levels have surged 37% from 800 to around 1,100. The University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where many courses are taught entirely in English, has seen the number of applicants from Britain quadruple in the last two years alone.
British 18-year-olds are fleeing the prospect of a £50,000 bill for studying at home – and finding they can save as much as £25,000 over three years by studying abroad as well as enjoying a life-changing experience.
In Denmark, tuition fees for students from within the EU are zero. In the Netherlands, they are around €1,700 a year (£1,330), and it's even possible to access Dutch state grants worth around €500 (£390) a month (see page 5). Irish institutions such as Trinity and UCD, ranked among the top universities in Europe, charge just €2,250 a year (£1,760) to EU citizens.

By Jeffrey R. Young. Students taking free online courses offered by the startup company Coursera have reported dozens of incidents of plagiarism, even though the courses bear no academic credit. This week a professor leading one of the so-called Massive Open Online Courses posted a plea to his 39,000 students to stop plagiarizing, and Coursera's leaders say they will review the issue and consider adding plagiarism-detection software in the future. In recent weeks, students in at least three Coursera humanities courses have complained of plagiarized assignments by other students. The courses use peer grading, so each student is asked to grade and offer comments on the work of fellow students.

By Nicholas B. Dirks. No one doubts that globalization is one of the most important trends of our day. Nor does anyone question that it affects what we study, how we teach, and whom we seek to reach. Beyond that, however, there is little consensus.
As American universities expand their global footprint with branch campuses in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere, many faculty are concerned about oppressive governance, human-rights violations, and lack of academic freedom abroad. Meanwhile administrators grapple with how these new ventures—and globalization in general—will change teaching and research in the United States. As higher education seeks new audiences, will it be able to maintain the significance and character of the liberal arts, which have played such a crucial role in the educational mission of the American university?
Similarly educators increasingly agree that all undergraduates ought to pursue some study abroad. But should it involve language study and full cultural immersion? Or short-term travel and networking through internships and other kinds of programs?

By Robert Zaretsky. The distant but growing sigh rising across the nation is the sound of humanities professors writing—or tweaking—their syllabi for fall classes. Like Labor Day, the writing of the syllabus has become an empty ritual of late summer—a thoughtless activity that has overtaken (or shunted aside) the practice it is meant to sustain.
Strictly speaking, a syllabus is a course outline that tells the student what books to read and when to read them, what papers to write and when to hand them in, and what subjects will be discussed and when students need to be ready to discuss them. In a word, it is a checklist. It is also the dark side of teaching—or, more accurately, of the telling of the past.

By Steve Kolowich. As mayor of Rancho Mirage, Calif., Scott Hines is in charge of a town of about 17,000 people in the Coachella Valley. As the chief operating officer of World Education University, a new company that says it “will forever alter the landscape of post-secondary education” by offering free courses online, Hines is now in charge of the personal information of about 50,000 prospective students and more than $1 million in seed funding.
But as World Education University continues to raise money and populate its database with the personal information of curious students, some observers in the higher education community wonder whether the company, which is not authorized to award degrees and has no formalized academic program, may be a mirage -- an idyllic fantasy that is more likely to dissolve into the landscape than alter it.
The company’s official unveiling earlier this month was timely. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have created huge buzz in higher education and beyond by offering anyone the ability to take online courses from professors at top universities -- including Stanford, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- at no charge. Coursera, which has signed deals to host MOOCs from professors at more than a dozen institutions, last week announced that it had exceeded 1 million registrations. Udacity, a competing MOOC provider, has also attracted hundreds of thousands of curious learners.