It’s been something of mixed week for Australian higher education – a good result in one area followed by a not-so-good result in another. In the good area, it was reported in The Australian Higher Education section that the “quality and depth of university research has...
The poet T S Eliot once observed that when it comes to studying and analysing Shakespeare all we can hope for is to be wrong about him in a new way (Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p2). But perhaps not, because recently we...
Tony Featherstone asked a great question in his blog this week: “If students could swing a giant wrecking ball through Australia's university sector and rebuild it from the ground up, what would tertiary education look like?” His point in posing the query was that in all...
This year’s NMC Horizon Report on shifts and currents in higher education spotlights a “long term impact trend” which it says will need governments to prioritize major education reforms to help universities “restructure themselves around increasing the employability of their students”. The report, now in...
She is no doubt some kind of genius but Coursera chief Professor Daphne Koller doesn’t inhabit some other-worldly dimension in which the enigmatic and the ambiguous are essential vocabulary. She talks common sense, and she talks it good. Coursera has been in the MOOC business since 2011,...
It’s been called “the challenge-driven university” – a new model of higher education that emphasises a different approach to student learning. Traditional methods such as lectures and exams are spurned in favour of team work focused on practical problems, with businesses often sponsoring projects and...
News from the UK of a proposal to allow new degree-granting start-up universities to compete against existing institutions had me thinking: what would you need to start a new university from scratch? Well, you would want a decent (or more likely indecent) amount of money; some...
Brains and Bloomsbury seem to go together. The bustling central London suburb is home to the British Museum, the University of London, and several leading medical institutions. Back in the smog-filled day Charles Dickens roamed its streets and later the likes of Virginia Woolf, John...
That higher education is in the grip of profound forces reshaping its role and meaning is a truism. The university as a cloistered centre “is a physical reminder of times past” writes Tom P Ables, but its function is no longer the same: “Not only is...
Many thousands of highly successful people are the proud owners of liberal arts degrees, majoring in subjects ranging from modern history to literature. The roll call includes CEOs of major companies, politicians, academics, journalists, actors, policymakers, TV and movie producers, executives across a wide range...