What makes these findings so interesting are the implications for pedagogy. If teachers wish to maximise the power of tablets and mobile devices, they should create contexts in which students are encouraged to be proactive in their study,
Beneath the surface though, higher education is set to be subjected to more state interference and bureaucracy as part of yet another attempt to create a market as the TEF is set to allow institutions to link fee increases to inflation. At present, with inflation at 0% and hardly projected to soar in coming years, will the TEF actually reward and incentivise good quality teaching, or just provide another drain on the resources academics need?
Proponents and practitioners of the open web also bear responsibility for the missed opportunities in higher education. In retrospect, temperamental preferences for DIY culture, relentless tinkering and experimentation, and indulging the delightful paradoxes of ill-structured problems has not served to promote the adoption of open online tools in the wider culture. Whereas innovators and early adopters tend to have a relatively high tolerance for chaos, higher education as a whole does not (and arguably cannot). Railing against the academy's failure to embrace a perceived risk can be dismal fun for many of us, but an honest appraisal of our own missteps has to be in the mix.
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A very capitalist take on moocs and open education. Yes a lot that is significant has happened very fast. But Bezos and Gates are not universally regarded as forces for good. Money is not everything.
A grassroots online newspaper exclusively for, and by, those who understand higher education best, The EvoLLLution is the only place where you can find detailed opinions, news and research about the impact of non-traditional programs on the higher education industry and society-at-large.
Higher education has never been primarily about learning actual things or actual skills. It has always been (and I mean all the way to the first universities) about peer acceptance for the graduates and meeting the requirements of the institution for the students. That’s not to say that a lot of people don’t learn lots of useful things while attending university. But if that was enough lawyers wouldn’t need the bar, doctors wouldn’t need their residency and university teachers would not have to learn everything all over again when they start teaching a new subject.
Mills continued his conscilience by saying that he is skeptical about a lot of university instruction. But I think that is the wrong approach to take. University instruction has always been just abominable. The vast majority of classes most university students have attended throughout history were taught by drones more or less competent in their subject sometimes reading out of a textbook sometimes cracking a joke. If that really mattered how would have we ever gotten to where we are now? Massive innovation and erudition as far as the eye can see. Even those we disagree with (like the neocons and creationists for me) cannot really be accused of a lack of intelligence or erudition. We talk about the need for better historical education but some of the worst political decisions have been taken by people who studied history meticulously (and it’s no good saying “if they had only read that one paper I wrote on that issue”). We talk about the need for better science education but some of the best innovations have come out of school drop outs who flunked the foundational STEM subjects. Why on earth would we think tinkering around with instruction would make a dent in any of that?
Despite so many fat years, universities have done little until recently to improve the courses they offer. University spending is driven by the need to compete in university league tables that tend to rank almost everything about a university except the (hard-to-measure) quality of the graduates it produces. Roger Geiger and Donald Heller of Pennsylvania State University say that since 1990, in both public and private colleges, expenditures on instruction have risen more slowly than in any other category of spending, even as student numbers have risen. Universities are, however, spending plenty more on administration and support services (see chart 2).
In this post I'm going to try to set down my current thoughts about the evolution of academic publishing. This is very much a work in progress so please excuse me if it's not entirely coherent. I came back from Science Online London fired up and this is the next stage in me grokking the tools discussed there such as Figshare and ORCID.
figshare allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner. All data is persistently stored online under the most liberal Creative Commons licence, waiving copyright where possible. This allows scientists to access and share the information from anywhere in the world with minimal friction.
The chance to get a degree is of course important, but the means of getting a degree (boring lectures, assignments, exams) often comes as something of a disappointment, and for many widening participation students an uncomfortable reminder of where they have failed in their education up to this point. Too often Universities repeat the circumstances which give rise to habits of failure. ....
But why is it that meaningful feedback about individual student's development rarely happens? Why is it that the work students engage in on their course is so often mundane and irrelevant to their lives? These questions boil down to the ways students are assessed. Yet, since the advent of modules and outcome-based education, all assessments are conducted against a set of learning outcomes. There is no reason why individual learners shouldn't produce work which is personal and meaningful to them, whilst also meeting the specific learning outcomes for each module.
The University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) could become the first mainstream higher education institute to become a private company.
UCLAN announced to staff last week that it is seeking to dissolve its corporate form to become a private company, raising fears among staff that the institution could become a for-profit enterprise
‘Private equity’s undisclosed business model is value capture through financial engineering focused on the enrichment of a managerial elite, with mass investors mainly involved in providing the cheap debt which makes the whole thing possible.’ Julie Froud and Karel Williams, Private Equity and the Culture of Value Extraction, New Political Economy, 2007
The Collaborative grant scheme invites proposals from two or more departments or other groupings within or between HEIs that support the enhancement of learning and teaching.
a popular series of articles that the British Medical Journal published in 2003. Full text for these articles is available free online. BMJ is available free online through PubMed Central.