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Should Universities be learning from Supermarkets?

March 14, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

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Universities are encouraged to learn from Supermarket consumer-led strategies:

He recommended that institutions should embrace social media as a feedback tool and to enable “two-way communication” with students because traditional methods of complaining were out of date.

“If I am unhappy about something, I don’t write a nice letter and wait for a reply. I start broadcasting to my 8,500 followers. Everyone is their own broadcaster, with their own listeners,” he said.

Meanwhile, Peter Slee, deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, told the conference in London that joining a gym was a good analogy when discussing student-institution relations.

Although gyms – and universities – could provide classes, facilities, staff and guidance at a certain cost, success and happiness with the price paid were ultimately down to the commitment of an individual, Professor Slee said.

“You get out of a service what you put into it. Motivation and commitment to study is the biggest factor in whether students are happy.”

Read full story. I’m wary about the idea of universities being ‘consumerised’, but I definitely think we should be listening to the students, and helping the students understand that they have a responsibility to put the effort in.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Consumerisation, Feedback, Higher Education, Twitter, University

Open Courseware: No Fear?

March 13, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Many universities are discussing the possibility of putting lectures, etc. openly online (most already do this through VLEs), but most are nervous about whether that will impact the number of students likely to come to physical universities, and are unsure how to capitalise on it:

Universities should not be afraid to put their course material online because wider exposure will improve their global standing, the head of Europe’s open courseware movement has argued.

Only a handful of UK higher education institutions – the University of Nottingham, The Open University and parts of the University of Oxford – have set up freely available educational collections since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pioneered the idea in 2002.

But Anka Mulder, president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium Europe, said it was time for universities and nations to embrace the learning model and reap its rewards.

European universities have been reluctant to open up their resources to all comers. Of the consortium’s 260 members, only 53 are European (of which 35 are Spanish universities).

“We have the infrastructure and everyone is online, but it has just not taken off in Europe yet,” said Dr Mulder, secretary general of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Read full article, and read more about Open Education Week.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With OER, Open Courseware

Digital Delivery of Resources in the Developing World

March 12, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

Purchased from iStockphoto

Whilst universities in the UK consider how to survive in “the current economic climate”, digital technology and Open Educational Resources is making a huge contribution to the developing world:

Widening access to higher education is one of the great global challenges of the 21st century. Higher education is the key to creating the educated and skilled workforces that developing countries need to grow their economies and to ensure a better life for their citizens, but existing higher education systems and institutions effectively exclude large numbers of the world’s population.

Given the scale of the demand, it is not logistically or economically feasible to build and staff enough traditional bricks-and-mortar universities to bring one within the reach of every aspiring student in the developing world. So we need to make a radical shift and move away from the current model of higher education, which we have inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries, and towards new systems that reap the benefits of 21st-century technologies.

To get an idea of what the future could be like, we can look at what is already happening. In Africa today, a revolutionary programme called Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (Tessa) has been made possible by the internet. Operated by a consortium of national and international educators, at its core is a bank of teacher education resources, created by a team of specialists and made available online as open educational resources that support teacher learning in the classroom. Tessa has reached more than 400,000 primary school teachers in nine African countries since 2005.

Read the full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With OER, Online Learning, Social Action

More debt, less alcohol? @timeshighered

March 11, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

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It’s interesting to see how debt is affecting student decisions on spending:

The fifth biennial Sodexo-Times Higher Education University Lifestyle Survey is the last to quiz students under the lower tuition fees regime – and it reveals some telling views on the changing nature of the sector. Worries about debt have fallen as the current cohort realise what a comparatively good deal they have, yet it is clear that the dire state of the economy is affecting lifestyle choices. However some things – such as the paltry time spent in the library – never change. Jack Grove reports

Financial considerations: impact of £9,000 annual tuition fees

A quarter of students (26 per cent) would not have gone to university if they had had to pay £9,000 tuition fees, the poll reveals.

Although higher fees have not stopped sixth-formers applying to university, according to January’s application figures, the Sodexo-THE survey shows that many current undergraduates would have baulked at the prospect of taking on greater levels of graduate debt.

However, more than two-fifths of students (41 per cent) said the tuition-fee hike would have made no difference to their choices.

Students from newer universities were far more likely to say they would not have undertaken a degree course if they had faced increased charges – 35 per cent said they would not, compared with 16 per cent of students at older institutions.

Medics were the least likely to reconsider their selection in light of higher fees – 60 per cent said they would not have chosen differently.

Read full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Costs, Funding, Student Choice

Humanity 2.0

March 4, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

This book looks interesting – what has techno-scientific progress done to our humanity, from a theological perspective:

As its title indicates, this book is an attempt to unravel what it means to be human in the past, present and future. Its ambition is to provide “a comprehensive set of historical, philosophical and sociological resources” for readers to ask their own questions and draw conclusions. In exploring the origin and fate of our biological roots as a defining human feature, Steve Fuller weighs our attempts to transcend biology via humanism and egalitarianism, and our divine aspirations to make the transition from animals to gods. He considers the origin and history of the sciences, and how today’s converging technologies promise enhanced individual and social well-being – not to mention enhanced humans.

Finally, he draws on theological perspectives to argue that human and divine minds overlap sufficiently in their intelligence and creativity for the former to take full control of a techno-scientific (re)creation of the entire world, thereby permitting us to evolve into “humanity 2.0″, which is, he says, a step closer to a divine standpoint. In other words, our intelligence and creativity is on a continuum with that of God, and we cannot do without faith in this deity if we are to cultivate enough enthusiasm in young people to inspire them to attempt techno-scientific conquests of the world and of ourselves.

Read full review. See also this article in The Guardian/Observer.

Filed Under Christianity, Digital Living, Times Higher Education Tagged With Book Review, Humanity, Theology

Alternative & Activist New Media

March 3, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

George McKay, professor of cultural studies, University of Salford, is reading Leah A. Lievrouw’sAlternative and Activist New Media (Polity, 2011). “Despite inevitably being instantly out of date on publication – no WikiLeaks, no social media in the Arab Spring – I find this book to be quite the best on the subject. My final-year alternative media students like it for its theoretical clarity and spot-on balance of accessibility and difficulty – and so do I. A great textbook. I wish I’d written it!”

From Times Higher Education.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Book Review, Digital Media

Plagiarism

February 25, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/461616

Means to combat plagiarism? Technology? Learning? What is likely to be more successful:

David Matthews reports on debate about whether claiming students’ IP rights could halt plagiarism

A senior figure at Oxford Brookes University has suggested taking control of undergraduates’ intellectual property rights to stop them selling their essays on the internet.

John Francis, director of research and business development, said that the market in essays was “quite difficult to control” and that the university currently had no “formal rights” to stop it.

The idea has sparked a debate on how to stop the sale of essays and has also drawn claims that any blanket ownership of students’ intellectual property (IP) could be illegal.

Writing on JISCmail, an academic email discussion forum, Mr Francis said that an increasing number of students were selling their essays and that this could potentially damage the university’s reputation.

“We have been considering ways to strengthen our position on the practice to prevent it,” he wrote. “One way could be to claim ownership of all undergraduate and postgraduate IP. We only claim IP from PG [postgraduate] research students at the moment.”

Read full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Cheating, Plagiarism, Students

Digital Library?

February 24, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

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Having watched a lecturer at the University introduce tablet PCs and seen engagement with the materials increase, an interesting story on digitisation and access:

South Korea plans to digitise all its school curriculum materials by 2015. The paper textbook will be replaced by a digital equivalent. No more heavy backpacks and students can learn wherever and whenever they wish. Simple. Universities, on the other hand, are not so simple. We don’t spoon-feed; we expect students to collect, sift and evaluate information from a wide range of sources. We equip our libraries with print and electronic materials. We also provide guidance to students on how to navigate core and background reading by providing them with reading lists.

Unfortunately, in too many cases, the reading list system does not work. In the National Student Survey, an all-too-common complaint from students is that “there were never enough copies of the books I needed”. Each time we librarians read this we have a feeling of deja vu – compounded by the fear that next year there will be less money and the situation will be worse. It will be, of course, because this autumn students will begin to wonder why, when they pay up to £9,000 in tuition fees a year, they cannot access the books they have been told are “essential”. If scientific experiments are a vital part of a course, the university will ensure access to labs – what is the difference?

Read full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Digitisation, E-Books, Reading

Open Courseware?

February 24, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/710597

As the US has an increasing amount of courseware freely available online, what does that mean for universities? Will they go the same way as the music industries, and how do we adapt to what IS happening…

Ever since the open courseware movement was launched in the US almost 10 years ago, traditional universities have deployed a powerful weapon to prevent students from using it to earn degrees.

That so many universities now make their teaching materials freely available online has allowed US and international organisations such as Peer-2-Peer University (P2PU) and University of the People to gather up and organise the content into entire programmes – and to offer these courses to students at little or no cost.

But conventional universities have refused to award academic credit to people who complete them.

So these students have been unable to apply their work towards degrees unless they take – and pay for – the same course again on a bricks-and-mortar campus or via an established distance-learning provider. And that has kept them away in droves.

University of the People, for example, which charges an application fee of only $10 (£6.30) to $50 for any of more than 40 online classes culled from open courseware, has enrolled just 1,100 students in its two years of operation. Meanwhile, some 6.1 million Americans now take (and pay for) online courses offered by conventional and for-profit universities.

Critics contend that the universities fear being undercut the way newspapers and the music industry were when their content was made available for free online.

Read full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With Online Degree, Open Educational Resource

Online Texts

February 16, 2012 By drbexl Leave a Comment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPad_2_Smart_Cover_at_unveiling_crop.jpg

The possibilities of digital texts… just trying to work out how the publisher “wins” on this, but good to know that the saving that students could make on textbooks would pay for an iPad. Should we be asking students to bring their own electronic tools?

Lecturer’s agreement with publisher gives first-years core psychology texts for free. Matthew Reisz writes

“Lectures are for enthusing and directing students more than just transmitting information,” said Phil Gee, associate professor in psychology at Plymouth University.

“In the past, some of my students couldn’t afford to buy textbooks and some didn’t bother – although I often felt that the ones who didn’t buy them needed them most. I want to give a lecture knowing that all the students have the textbooks.”

It is this that led Dr Gee to set up an innovative deal with publishing firm Cengage Learning, which means that all first-year undergraduates studying psychology at Plymouth receive free digital copies of 12 core texts for the whole of their university careers.

The students’ digital texts are automatically updated whenever a new edition of the book is published. All can be downloaded to laptops, iPads and iPhones, and the saving to students amounts to over £500.

Read full story.

Filed Under Times Higher Education Tagged With E-Publishing, E-Texts, iPad, Teaching
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