Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

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How Higher Education Uses Social Media

Published on February 20, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Matt Silverman, Mashable.com

Schools are on a short list of organizations that have been notoriously slow to adopt emerging tech. But within the last few years, as social media becomes more integral to students’ lives, educational institutions are finally catching on, and catching up.

When it comes to higher ed, there are not only opportunities for digital learning, but digital marketing too. Some schools have taken the reigns on both sides, with mixed results.

The infographic below takes a look at how schools have fared with social media over the last few years — what platforms are best, where they’ve succeeded, and the challenges that lay ahead. Full Graphic.

What is Wrong with Global Inequality in Higher Education?

Published on February 16, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Elaine Unterhalter, University World News

Virtually all the discussion of collective good associated with the debate about the increase in university tuition fees in England has been framed by national concerns to ensure Britain’s universities remain ‘world-class’. The term ‘world-class’ denotes intrinsic achievement. But it also implies rank order and attendant inequalities.

What forms does global inequality in higher education take and what’s wrong with it?

Global inequality in higher education is enmeshed with wider dimensions of global inequality, particularly poverty and vast discrepancies in income. Common measures of poverty indicate that nearly two billion people live in conditions of grave inequality. More…

 

MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency

Published on February 12, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things—radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It’s called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained.

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together—free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­—and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they’ve learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. More…

Image: James Yang for The Chronicle

Sixth Annual World Universities Forum

Published on February 9, 2012 in Conference and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

We are pleased to announce the Sixth Annual World Universities Forum.

10-11 January, 2013
UBC – Robson Square
Vancouver, Canada

For more information, please visit our website.

Call for Papers

The Forum examines the role and future of the University in a changing world. It is ambitious in its intellectual and practical, agenda-setting scope, and broad in its themes.

Paper presentations begin with the submission of an abstract. For information on current deadlines, proposals, presentation types, and other options please follow this link.

If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to fully register for the conference in order to be scheduled into the program.

Registration

Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal.  Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2013 World Universities Forum, please see this website

Themes

Theme 1: In the Interest of the Academy: Perspectives on the Nature, Purpose and Working of the University

Theme 2: Academic Interests: Setting Intellectual and Practical Agendas

For more information on our overall themes, please click here.

Journal of the World Universities Forum, Volume 4, Issue 4 now available

Published on February 6, 2012 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

universities_frontThe final issue of Volume 4 of the Journal of the World Universities Forum has now been published.

Volume 4, Issue 4 contains:

Dissing the Dissertation

Published on January 25, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed

SEATTLE — The average humanities doctoral student takes nine years to earn a Ph.D. That fact was cited frequently here (and not with pride) at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers University’s main campus in New Brunswick, said that the nine-year period means that those finishing dissertations today started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles, iPads or streaming video had been invented.

So much has changed, he said, but dissertation norms haven’t, to the detriment of English and other language programs. “Are we writing books for the 19th century or preparing people to work in the 21st?” he asked.

Leaders of the MLA — in several sessions and discussions here — indicated that they are afraid that too many dissertations are indeed governed by out-of-date conventions, leading to the production of “proto-books” that may do little to promote scholarship and may not even be advancing the careers of graduate students. During the process, the graduate students accumulate debt and frustrations. Russell A. Berman, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, used his presidential address at the MLA to call for departments to find ways to cut “time to degree” for doctorates in half. More…

Image: Jomphong

M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All

Published on January 17, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

James Marshall Crotty, Forbes Magazine

M.I.T.'s Simmons Hall

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online material. According to the New York Times, in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body that will be created within M.I.T.

The new online platform will look to build upon the decade-long success of the university’s original free online platform, OpenCourseWare (OCW), which has been used by over 100 million students and contains course material for roughly 2,100 classes. The new M.I.T.x online program will not compete with OCW in the number of courses that it offers. However, the program will offer students a greater interactive experience. More…

Image via Forbes.com

Journal Axes Gene Research on Jews and Palestinians

Published on January 4, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Robin McKie, The Observer

A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal.

Academics who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them away.

Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma.

‘I have authored several hundred scientific papers, some for Nature and Science, and this has never happened to me before,’ said the article’s lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of Complutense University in Madrid. ‘I am stunned.’

British geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer added: ‘If the journal didn’t like the paper, they shouldn’t have published it in the first place. Why wait until it has appeared before acting like this?’

To Read More…

Image: jscreationzs

Announcing the Winner of the 2011 Award for Best Practice in Higher Education

Published on December 31, 2011 in Conference, Headline, News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

We are very pleased to announce that the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Integrative Arts (CAiiA) – Planetary Collegium is the 2011 recipient of the World Universities Forum Award for Best Practice in Higher Education. Each year, the Award recognizes some of the most significant higher education practices, including curricula and research.

Founded and directed by Professor Roy Ascott, the CAiiA – Planetary Collegium is a PhD research program located primarily in the School of Art and Media at Plymouth University (UK), with nodes at the Nuova Accademia de Belli Arte, Milan and Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich. The Collegium brings together a geographically and professionally diverse group of people, including artists, scientists, theorists, architects, and scholars, for doctoral and post-doctoral learning and research.   Meeting on-line, and face-to-face in research sessions, conferences and symposia, members of the CAiiA – Planetary Collegium focus on the intersection of emerging forms of art and architecture, new media, and technology, science and consciousness. This collaborative — and syncretic — approach, one nominator explained, “opens the exchange of ideas, where discovery, creativity and personal and professional development can flourish, with the support of the exceptional Planetary Collegium’s academic faculty.”

The Best Practice Award will be announced formally at this year’s World Universities Forum, which will be held at the University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece from 8-10 January 2012.  This marks the fifth year of the Forum, which was inaugurated in Davos, Switzerland in 2008 and was held subsequently in Mumbai, India (2009), Davos, Switzerland (2010) and Hong Kong (2011). The 2012 Forum will continue the discussion of the current role and future possibilities of the university. We are pleased that this discussion will include recognition of the CAiiA – Planetary Collegium, Plymouth University, and the inspiration it provides for reinventing the ways in which universities develop degree programs and conduct research.

MBA Diary: No Research Required

Published on December 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Andrew Pollen, The Economist

Should it matter to students whether a business school has a strong research base? Andrew Pollen, a first-year MBA student at ESADE in Barcelona, thinks not

A COUPLE of weeks ago, my economics professor introduced a new case study for us to mull over. It was dense and packed with historical background. We were split into groups and most of the class had only just finished reading it when we reconvened to wrap up the session. The professor explained some fine points for the case and suggested which tactics we should employ. Then he said he was very disappointed in us.

“I wanted you to work on the case in groups,” he said, “and instead you read the case individually. If you had worked together, I think you would have noticed that the first 10 pages of the case were absolute nonsense that you do not need to answer the questions.”

It was a powerful pedagogic lesson in using teamwork to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. I think ESADE emphasises the teaching ability of its faculty because it has never been a top research institution; faculty come from industry or consulting rather than academia. They view teaching as their motivation rather than an unpleasant side effect to their appointment. On the first day of my statistics class, the professor thanked the students and said, “Your being here allows me to do something that I love.” I felt that sentiment a lot less often during my time at a top American business school.

To Read More…

Image via The Economist