Group items tagged

"Working 24/7 is not the only way to achieve success in academia. There, I've said it. A recent article described the working week of people across academia. This included the science professor who "compensates for the time he spends with his young children in the evening and at weekends by getting up before they do", and the early career researcher who "tries to take at least a half-day off a week". While many colleagues have similar working patterns and are happy (or at least not unhappy) working in this way, I am meeting increasing numbers of promising academics who reject it."

"After conducting this small study we have come to think about academic blogging in two ways. Firstly, many bloggers are talking together in a kind of giant, global virtual common room. Over at one table there is a lively, even angry, conversation about working conditions in academia in different parts of the world. In a different corner another group are discussing their latest research projects and finding common themes. Another table houses a group of senior and early career academics discussing how to land a book contract and write a good CV. There is also a meeting going on about public policy, and this involves a number of public and third sector people, as well as academics, who work in the area."

"Unfortunately, we had to take down your paper," the notice reads. "Academia.edu is committed to enabling a transition to a world where there is open access to scientific literature. Unfortunately, Elsevier takes a different view." It also mentions that more than 13,000 researchers so far have signed a petition "protesting Elsevier's business practices."

n this class, we will briefly cover the history and development of MOOCs. Participants will engage in discussions about why institutions offer these courses, and the possible benefits to both schools and students. This four-week course will examine MOOCs from four perspectives: as a designer building a course, as an instructor, as a student, and as an institution offering and supporting a course. Cost: Free Dates: April 15-May 12, 2013

"Held April 11-12, 2013, The Saylor Foundation's invitation-only Digital Education Conference (#DigEdCon) 2013 brought together a range of stakeholders in funding, philanthropy, technology, academia, and open education. These diverse friends of digital education convened over one of education's largest looming issues: how innovators must collaborate-and cooperate-to provide the highest quality education to all."

"Academia has lots and lots and lots of systems in place for assuring that credit is always given where credit is due. If you're writing a paper, there are particular ways to cite internet sources-- even tweets and Facebook posts. But what about on the internet? We know we're supposed to cite sources, but a standardized system hasn't developed, and in the meantime, you could face a lawsuit if you steal someone else's work, even by accident."

Students could use some financial relief. According to an American Enterprise Institute analysis, the cost of textbooks has risen 812% since 1978, compared with a 250% increase in the consumer price index. As a point of reference, medical costs (often described as "spiraling out of control") are up 575% in the same period, according to AEI. The burden is significant enough that 7 in 10 students say they have skipped buying a textbook for a course, trying to make do without it because of the cost. OpenStax adopted a conventional editorial process because that was required to win acceptance in academia, Baraniuk said, but the books are still published in the same modular fashion. That means instructors have the option of creating their own versions, perhaps introducing their own edits or swapping in content from a different source, and assigning that remix. At last count, there were 41 altered versions of OpenStax Physics available in the Connexions repository.

"There's little reason for typesetting to be such an expensive bottleneck in both time and money when we have better solutions in place. Academia will have to adopt new methods of producing text-based content. This was true when scholars moved from typewriters to word processors like Microsoft Word. Word enabled new capabilities like saving documents and editing them over time, rich text formatting, and the like. Unfortunately, Word arrived in a world before the internet and has never been adapted to work with the internet. As a result, it takes months to get an article into a format that can communicate with the web. Keep in mind that once we have the text in a web-communicable form the innovative things we can do with it are endless in terms of presentation, analytics, and more. We can't reverse that scholarship is moving to the web so we might as well learn how to speak with the web, today."

"By outsourcing digital education services -- by partnering with a massive open online course provider, for example -- Hilton and Wheeler argue that universities "shift control and economic power to entities outside of academia that develop and own technologies and services at scale." As a result, "long held faculty and student rights regarding control of intellectual property and privacy might no longer be decided in the academy.""

"ReCon is designed to raise and discuss current issues to do with research communication in academia and beyond. These issues range from the use of metrics for evaluating research, access to publications, how to share and store data, government policy to how this affects careers and incentives for researchers. ReCon includes speakers from government agencies, academics, publishers, people working in outreach and founders of startups working in the research space."

" With a degree in creative writing, she's been working short-term teaching jobs since her 30s, often skirting poverty, never achieving the job security traditionally associated with academia. Now in her 60s, approaching retirement age modestly in a compact mobile home, she's helping build one of Vermont's few adjunct unions to help colleagues gain the respect on the job she has long been denied."

"This month's episode of the Pulse podcast presents the keynote address from Bryan Alexander at this month's USciences eLearning 3.0 Conference. The talk was entitled "Academia Beyond Millennials: The Next Generation of Higher Education," and examined topics such as globalization, defunding of public universities and the role of artificial intelligence."

"Regardless of the goal of MOOCs - be it for profit or idealism - there are genuine educational concerns that need to be closely monitored. A course with 10,000 (or even 1,000) students enrolled cannot foster any significant discussion. Yes, teaching assistants (TAs) can be employed to groups of 100-200 students for online questions etc, but that may not be so simple. About 100 TAs would be needed for a modest-sized MOOC of 10,000 students. Even for the lecturer to organise 100 TAs would be a Herculean task. Another serious concern is evaluation. How can one evaluate 20,000 students taking a course? Yes, electronic quizzes and multiple-choice tests can be given to monitor progress - if the material is suitable for such types of questions. But what about material in the social sciences and humanities that might be harder to evaluate (than science) without essay-style answers? I've already seen that companies are attempting to write computer programs that will grade essays. But as one educator put it, how can a programmer include wit and style for evaluation in such a program?"

"The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of the academic workforce are now tenured or tenure-track.  Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival. "

Your application package will determine whether you make the shortlist, and you are the one who controls what it looks like

"With this poorly articulated rationale in mind, I present first, some pros and cons to citing blogs within formal academic writing. Next, I put forth three main sub-questions that I think will help us-and by "us" I mean myself and the readers who grapple with the ethical and professional questions of rigor in standards of academic sourcing-organize our thoughts. "

"I'm not a radical, or anti-establishment - I've loved and respected working at every university I've joined. I just happen to have moved into a different learning delivery model because I knew it would give me greater flexibility to continue with my academic interests and spend more time with my family. It's a model that fits around my life. That's something I share in common with my students. They aren't unusual either. They just choose to study online because the flexibility suits them. Online higher education means students can combine education with employment - often fast-tracking their careers as a result - or fit study around family commitments."