Blogs

If you take a cruise the main thing you will notice is the sheer number of people that the ship employs.

The newest money-making scheme in China involves hiring professors from US universities to teach summer school so that Chinese students can earn US college credit in a short, cheaper class closer to home. These for-profit schools have been established by US-educated 20-something Chinese familiar with both cultures and both systems. Cheap US college credit without leaving home— a promising venture with large profit potential.

As the debate about climate change continues to boil, a new call is in the offing to persuade colleges and universities to divest endowment holdings in fossil fuel related companies. There is little doubt we must create a more coherent energy policy and reduce the burning of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change. How best to achieve that end is at present perplexing and void of sound strategy or agreement.

From being taught a novel to teaching it, in less than three decades.

It is undeniable that we are currently living in the time of the MOOC (Massively Open Online Course, just in case you were catching up on Downton Abbey and missed it). Every day new headlines pop up at Inside Higher Ed and The New York Times discussing the impact of MOOCs, who's joined forces with Coursera or Udacity or edX or some combination of the three, what Higher Ed thinks about MOOCs, what Silicon Valley thinks of MOOCs, who's doing well with MOOCs, and who isn't doing so well at MOOCs.

By now it seems clear that MOOCs can generate vast quantities of data, from course completion rates, to assessments, to student experiences.

On a recent trip to the UK, I visited a friend who works at the University of Birmingham. She took me on a tour of its really quite beautiful campus, ending at the Muirhead Tower, a brutalist monstrosity built in 1971. Its recent renovation has smoothed over some of the worst features of the original design, including the shards of concrete which had begun to fall off its exterior.

Would you take a vacation if you could not access the Internet? What would you pay per minute to get online? Having just returned from a week of vacation I can answer both questions.