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With most critics of higher education focused on rising prices or on whether American colleges and universities are producing enough degree and certificate holders with sufficient skills to keep the U.S. economy vibrant and competitive -- the latter known in shorthand as the "completion agenda" -- a few analysts are homing in on the quality and rigor of what students are learning (or not) en route to those credentials. Last year's Academically Adrift set the tone, providing data suggesting that many colleges are imposing relatively minimal academic demands on their students and that, perhaps as a result, many students do not appear to gain in some measures of cognitive abilities as they move through college. The authors of We're Losing Our Minds (Palgrave MacMillan) add their own clamoring to the agenda focused on the quality of learning. Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, longtime scholars and administrators, describe themselves as "friendly critics" of higher education, and unlike many of academe's naysayers, they don't spend a lot of time trashing the faculty as overpaid and underworked or bashing administrators as fat-cat corporatizers (though they do complain that institutions have overemphasized rankings and enrollment growth and sports and research -- take your pick depending on institution type).

March 11, 2012 An Australian University Boosts Retention With Mentoring David Dare ParkerSamantha Saw (left), mentor-program administrative assistant, and Amy Hetherington, prospective-student adviser, help run Curtin U.'s mentorship program. The university started the program after discovering that 95 percent of students who dropped out had talked to no one. By David L. Wheeler Seven years ago, Curtin University administrators were unhappy to discover that their institution had middle-of-the pack student-retention numbers among Australia's 39 universities. They set out to change that. Now, with the addition of student-led mentoring and other programs, the university calculates that it prevents about 300 students a year from dropping out and thus saves at least $3.2-million (U.S.) annually in tuition and fees that would have been lost. The mentoring program also helps students "make connections and friends sooner than if they were left on their own," says Amanda Smith, the mentor-program coordinator.

Class Problem March 26, 2012 - 3:00am By Kaustuv Basu The YouTube video of a Florida Atlantic University student losing control last week in a classroom and threatening her classmates has gone viral, disturbing many who teach in college classrooms. Campus safety experts say that the clip reveals challenges faced by faculty members who are usually the first point of contact when it comes to disruption in the classroom -- and who sometimes may not be trained on how to respond.

March 29, 2012 No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month Tuition for Online Courses Matt McLoone Of his tuition pricing for New Charter University, the educational entrepreneur Gene Wade says: "This is not buying a house. This is like, do I want to get cable?"Enlarge Image By Marc Parry It's a higher-education puzzle: Students are flocking to Western Governors University, driving growth of 30 to 40 percent each year. You might expect that competitors would be clamoring to copy the nonprofit online institution's model, which focuses on whether students can show "competencies" rather than on counting how much time they've spent in class. So why haven't they? Two reasons, says the education entrepreneur Gene Wade. One, financial-aid regulatory problems that arise with self-paced models that aren't based on seat time. And two, opposition to how Western Governors changes the role of professor, chopping it into "course mentors" who help students master material, and graders who evaluate homework but do no teaching.

U21 Rankings of National Higher Education Systems A ranking of higher education systems based on resources, environment, connectivity and output. New research into national education systems gives the first ranking of countries and territories which are the 'best' at providing higher education. Universitas 21 has developed the ranking as a benchmark for governments, education institutions and individuals. It aims to highlight the importance of creating a strong environment for higher education institutions to contribute to economic and cultural development, provide a high-quality experience for students and help institutions compete for overseas applicants.

Bill Gates on Higher Education, Part 2 June 26, 2012, 6:31 pm By Jeffrey R. Young

June 25, 2012 A Conversation With Bill Gates About the Future of Higher Education By Jeffrey R. Young Bill Gates never finished college, but he is one of the single most powerful figures shaping higher education today. That influence comes through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, perhaps the world's richest philanthropy, which he co-chairs and which has made education one of its key missions.

July 9, 2012 Early Computing's 'Deal With the Devil' Victoria StoddenGeorge Dyson, son of the physicist Freeman Dyson and author of Turing's Cathedral, grew up playing with discarded bits of early computers at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.Enlarge Image By Marc Parry In 1936, the British logician Alan Turing imagined a universal computing machine. In the wake of World War II, at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, a team of mathematicians and engineers built one. The machine stood roughly the size of four refrigerators. People called it Maniac, for Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer. At its heart was "a 32-by-32-by-40 bit matrix of high-speed, random-access memory-the nucleus of all things digital ever since," writes George Dyson in a new book, Turing's Cathedral (Pantheon Books). How that computer came to be, he says, is the story of "a deal with the devil." Mathematicians built a machine that helped create the hydrogen bomb. In exchange, they got a new breed of computer that enabled incredible scientific progress.

'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas By Jeffrey R. Young The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market.

From Idea to Action: Promoting Responsible Management Education Through a Semester-Long Academic Integrity Learning Project Marc H. Lavine marc.lavine@umb.edu Christopher J. Roussin Abstract The authors describe a semester-long action-learning project where undergraduate or graduate management students learn about ethics, responsibility, and organizational behavior by examining the policy of their college or university that addresses academic integrity. Working in teams, students adopt a stakeholder management approach as they make recommendations for improvements to their school's academic integrity policy, its dissemination and enforcement. The authors detail their efforts facilitating this project at three universities. As students examine how an ethical conduct policy informs and is informed by individual and organizational behaviors, they come to more deeply understand the social processes through which all manner of responsibility-promoting outcomes are enacted. The approach to learning described in this project promotes students' internalization of ethical principles and accountability for responsible behavior that is consonant with the core aims and principles of responsible management education.

Publications and News Mapping Australian higher education Publication | 29 Jan 2012 | Andrew Norton Australia's higher education system is entering one of its most significant years in recent history. To meet a government goal to increase the number of young adults holding a degree, restrictions on undergraduate student numbers have been lifted. Yet despite the system's importance to Australia's economy and society, it is often hard to know what is going on inside it. Mapping Australian higher education, the first report from Grattan Institute's Higher Education program, puts in one place facts, figures and analysis relevant to understanding institutions, students, and outcomes.

But soon, introductory physics texts will have a new competitor, developed at Rice University. A free online physics book, peer-reviewed and designed to compete with major publishers' offerings, will debut next month through the non-profit publisher OpenStax College.

Meme-ifying Online Advocacy February 24, 2012 - 3:00am By Steve Kolowich The case for online education is often made like many other cases in higher education: in dense research papers with plenty of caveats. To wit, perhaps the most-cited document by advocates of online learning is a 2009 meta-study by the U.S. Education Department, which concluded that online education is probably at least as good as the face-to-face kind. That study has not appeared to have much pull with skeptical academic leaders and faculty. According to the Babson Survey Research Group, while student enrollments in online courses have increased 348 percent since 2003, the percentage of academic administrators who believe that learning outcomes in online courses are equal or superior to those of face-to-face courses has increased by only 10 percent during that time, from 57 to 67 percent. Those academic leaders estimate that even fewer of their faculty have changed their minds about online learning since early last decade. Now four lecturers at the University of Edinburgh are trying a different advocacy tack -- one more suited to the viral culture of the modern Web.  

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