http://chrislorensson.com/design/hefce-kis/

I’ve always been keen to see data that engages more with ‘how did we develop this student from where they started from?’ rather than final grades, etc. so the new KIS are of concern – read more about them here:

I recently spent an enthralling Sunday morning renewing my car insurance via a price-comparison website. In the past, I’d always performed the insurance-renewal ritual via a series of telephone calls in which I’d asked patient and blameless call-centre workers whether the companies employing them were having a laugh. While this involved some cheery conversations and usually resulted in a decent outcome, it did take rather a long time.

The website I used allowed me to be precise in my search. But the process took as long as ever. I found myself having to compare seemingly similar products that were actually quite different. This was because, in the key information provided, critical data were missing. For instance, the website identified whether a product included legal cover and at what cost, but not the level of cover provided. In most cases the absent details could be obtained only by making a phone call …

Nonetheless, car insurance is fairly straightforward; and although we all wince at its cost, policies are far cheaper, simpler and easier to compare than the complexity of UK university courses. As we know, the idea that prospective undergraduates should be able to make informed comparisons between programmes and institutions is central to the government’s vision of market-orientated higher education. But its plans for the provision of vital data, via Key Information Sets, are inadequate and likely to be misleading and counterproductive.

Read full story, and read more on the HEFCE site. I also thought this story about ‘adding social value‘ was of related interest…  see, e.g.

Universities have long measured their financial value, for example the spending power of their staff or their total turnover, she explained. But the report recommends finding an economic price for all university “outputs”, including those not captured by financial analysis….

A “social weight” could then be applied to this economic value to reflect social priorities, for example by counting an activity as more valuable if it delivers to the poor rather than the rich.

Along with a global recession, Ms Mudditt also cites the challenges of “a rapid move to ebooks, the demise of independent bookstores and growing power of a few chains”.

Looking ahead, she sees a more limited trade programme, which puts less emphasis on “the research and scholarly mission of the university” and gives greater attention to “its equally important education and public service missions”.

“There is a great deal of important, relevant and potentially impactful work that takes place in academia but has a hard time connecting with the right audiences.

“Concentrating on this ‘translational’ connection would seem to be a good focus for our future trade publishing,” Ms Mudditt said.

So is all this good news for the early-career academics, particularly in the humanities, who are desperate to get their first monographs into print and have been distressed to see some university presses apparently chasing the next best-seller?

Ms Mudditt, who took up her new post in January, can offer only cautious reassurance.

“Monographs remain the primary mode of discourse in certain fields and scholars need to publish them for tenure and promotion.

“At the same time, these titles are ever more expensive to publish due to a continuing decline in sales, largely driven by dwindling library budgets – a problem that has only accelerated in recent years.

Read full story.

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/206403

So, is University about preparing students for work, or does it have a higher purpose? Either way does it work in the 21st Century environment?

About 100 years ago, higher education restructured to meet the needs of the industrial age. It has changed little since, even as the internet has transformed life. Another revolution is needed, says Cathy Davidson, to modernise universities and prepare graduates for a 21st-century working environment

Several times each week, well-groomed young men and women parade by my faculty office with a steely-eyed mien as premeditated as their business attire. They are in search of the university career centre, which is up a narrow staircase seemingly invisible to those looking too hard. “Can I help you?” I’ve learned to offer. “Please!” they practically whimper, their carefully planned confidence evaporating into thin air. “I’m lost.”

“Lost” is a good word for the graduate of today. Even at a prestigious institution such as Duke University, where the job placement rate is well above the norm, students feel unprepared for the workplace that awaits them. No wonder. Every survey of employers underscores the fact that higher education no longer prepares students for the changing demands of the contemporary workplace.

Whether the study is conducted by the CBI in the UK or by commercial for-profit educational providers drumming up business for their remedial post-baccalaureate job-training services, everyone seems to acknowledge that today’s students are good test-takers but lack the workplace essentials necessary for the 21st century. These include people skills (especially in diverse global contexts), communication skills, collaborative skills, analytical skills, networking skills, an ability to synthesise information across a wide range of evidence, and even the most elementary skills, such as how to write a great job application letter and curriculum vitae or represent their character and talent at a job interview. No wonder they face the career centre with such trepidation.

Read full article.

UUK president-elect foresees IT benefits among the coalition carnage. Hannah Fearn reports

Universities that are forced to get by on dwindling budgets will drive a revolution in information technology, the next president of Universities UK has predicted.

Eric Thomas, vice-chancellor of the University of Bristol, opened the Jisc annual conference in Liverpool this week by arguing that funding shortages would help to improve the use of IT within the academy.

He warned that state funding for universities would decrease faster than rises in tuition-fee income, but said this would encourage the sector to “do more with less” when it came to the use and development of new technology.

“This may well lead to important step changes in technology as we race to be even more effective,” he said.

Speaking to Times Higher Education in advance of the conference, which took place on 14 and 15 March, Professor Thomas said that universities had been the “driving force” behind advancements in IT in the past, and today’s challenges would herald a new era of innovation, particularly in technology used to facilitate academic research.

“Information technology will remain a key enabler in research, allowing us, for example, to carry out mammoth calculations in split seconds,” he said.

“We are now very firmly in a knowledge economy and that is based on the ability to interpret and manipulate information. This is now reaching another tipping point as the connecting ‘mash-up’ of information from various and multiple disciplines and sources gives rise to new applications and discoveries – many of which might not be driven by the originator of the initial data.”

Read full story.

Academics without the freedom to exercise judgement are not true academics. Frank Furedi explains why scholars must resist the rise of proceduralism

A couple of years ago, I was listening to a presentation about a new and apparently sophisticated anti-plagiarism tool. Throughout the talk, the speaker boasted of her software’s potential for detecting copied work and preserving “academic integrity”.

I was a little despondent about the notion that, henceforth, the value of academic integrity would be secured through computer software. Nor did I feel reassured when, towards the end of the presentation, we were told that “academic judgement” was still necessary to determine whether plagiarism had taken place. To me, the notion that academic judgement had become an adjunct to plagiarism detection software was even more disturbing than the association of this product with the upholding of academic security.

Since then, I have become conscious of a growing tendency to marginalise the role and devalue the status of academic judgement. Increasingly, the term “academic judgement” is used defensively in response to a complaint about a particular decision. In official documents, the term refers to decisions that cannot and should not be challenged by students.

Numerous university appeals procedures contain the statement “Appeals are not permitted against the academic judgement of the examiners” or something similar. Because in its current usage academic judgement is invariably used to protect lecturers and their institutions from complaints, it can come across as a mere administrative convenience.

Yet academic judgement lies at the heart of university life. Academics are continually in the business of making judgement calls.

Read full story

The e-reader cannot surpass the pleasures of the page, says Gary Day, where everything is illuminated

Let’s hear no more about Kindle, Amazon’s “Revolutionary Wireless Reading Device”. It looks like a roof slate. A moment of carelessness and it could be used to fix a leak. So what if it can store 3,500 books? Who is going to read that many in a lifetime? Who can read that many? That’s about 46 books a year, providing you start as soon as you pop into the world and carry on until you pop out of it.

And what if you leave it on a train? There goes your entire library. No, give me the hardback or the paperback. The one gives you gravitas, the other establishes your democratic credentials.

You can also write in the margins. Try doing that on a Kindle. In the 14th century they emblazoned their margins: great drapes of colour drawn back to let the words shine forth. Open a medieval parchment and you stare into the heart of light. Switch on a Kindle and you get 16 shades of grey. The Beauty of Books: Medieval Masterpieces (BBC Four, Monday 14 February, 8.30pm) was a joy.

The Luttrell Psalter and The Canterbury Tales were examined in turn. Adjectives like “earthy”, “whimsical” and “grotesque” abounded. The Psalter, bustling with images of daily life, was commissioned by a landowner, Geoffrey Luttrell. He tried to get on the right of side of God by being portrayed with Truth and Mercy. Dr Carolyne Larrington of St John’s College, Oxford ticked off the illustrator who gave Chaucer’s clerk a bow (“quite inappropriate”) before reading a racy excerpt from The Merchant’s Tale in a monotone. Quite inappropriate.

This story grabbed my attention, as although I love technology where appropriate, and I’m happy to read documents/research texts online, I really don’t enjoy reading fiction on my iPad… nothing better than curling up with a good book! Read full story.

When students of John Halpin, a chemistry professor at New York University, went online to express what they thought of him through the increasingly popular website Ratemyprofessors.com, he did not take it lying down.

Instead, Professor Halpin accepted an offer to make a video for the site responding to criticism of everything from his sense of humour to his tone of voice. He also addressed the “celebrity status” he has apparently achieved among students, and even dealt with an offer of marriage.

“You get these comments on Ratemyprofessors and you read them and you think, that’s fine, that’s your opinion, but there are reasons I do the things I do, and people who read these comments won’t necessarily understand those things,” he explained.

Read full story.

In May 1968 the old order was upturned by marginalised contract lecturers. Today, the proliferation of online courses offers slow-track academics a similar opportunity to seize the scholarly high ground, argues Paula Humfrey

In the history of the 1960s, mai ’68 is now seen as a pancultural turning point. France’s événements de mai started with a small, contained protest against the administration of the university of Paris-X Nanterre, sparked by a significant increase in student numbers that necessitated hiring lecturers on contract. By the time the strikes and rioting reached the Sorbonne, campus protests had opened rifts beneath the established social and institutional order of French academic life.

Lately, comparisons of May 1968 to 21st-century life have been much in evidence, occasioned in part by the recent 40th anniversary of the unrest. It’s not just the date correspondence, though. It’s the connection between a spirit of academic rebellion then and an emergent sense of scholarly rebellion now.

Perhaps it is not incidental that we are approaching a revolutionary moment in online education – a field populated by contract lecturers – that smacks of the conditions Pierre Bourdieu outlined in his sociological analysis of the university crisis of May 1968 in France. The present position of online lecturers in the academy resonates with Bourdieu’s depiction of the lowly faculty hired on contract who revolted in solidarity with the students during les événements.

Read full story… goes onto to discuss some specifics of online teaching.

But at last, a new device arrived that really seemed like a solution. The iPad is light, stylish and a dream to use. It will carry all the documents you need, yet despite its compact size it is really easy to read: you can enlarge the section you want, annotate it, make notes, pull it this way and that. It’s so neat and elegant and smart, it makes paper look like an embarrassment from an earlier, more primitive age.

At first, I had such high hopes for my beautiful, clever new toy. But like a seemingly cute new kitten, the iPad is insidiously beginning to take on a life of its own. It bleeps through the night, even when switched off. It’s constantly telling me what to do, even though it’s damned if it’s going to do what I want. Still, at least it recognises me and will grudgingly behave itself when I proudly flourish it at meetings. But no one else can borrow it because it simply refuses to accept their downloads, let alone their commands.

Read full story.

Do “too many tweets make a twat”, as David Cameron maintains? Are social media becoming an increasingly useful and powerful force in higher education, or, as Bill Gates predicts, will they cause the death of the academy?

The experts seem to be divided not only on social media’s future, but also on their present in terms of their use by academics, and the research that has been done has reached contradictory conclusions. A survey of UK institutions conducted by online consultants Jadu shows a high level of use among academics, with more than 70 per cent of respondents using social media in some way. However, statistics from the US Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, undertaken by Indiana University Bloomington in spring 2009, suggest that take-up is extremely low. Of the academics who responded, 79 per cent claimed never to have used collaborative editing software such as wikis or Google Docs, while 84 per cent said they had never viewed a blog, let alone written one.

Which survey gives the true picture? Can it really be the case that more than three-quarters of academics have had no exposure to or contact with the social-media explosion?

Read full story, and continue to read ‘Face Values‘ re: NOT oversharing on Facebook