- MOOCs: The Arabic MOOC
- Singapore: NYU-NUS Stops Law Dual Degree
- PhD Issues: Mobility of Doctoral Students
- UK: New Type of Degrees ?
Taghreedat,the largest Arabic crowd-sourcing initiative in the Middle East and North Africa, has announced a partnership with Coursera, the world’s leading Massive Open Online Course provider, to translate major international university courses across multiple disciplines for Arab students worldwide, for free.Leading global universities, including Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Georgia, Duke, Northwestern, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Edinburgh, are offering a number of their courses for free on Coursera in English. With this partnership, some of the world’s top university courses will be accessible for free for all Arabic-speaking users.
The National University of Singapore (NUS) and New York University (NYU) will be ending a prestigious dual graduate law programme.The 10-month NYU@NUS programme – which was started in 2007 with an inaugural batch of 39 students – failed to become self-financing and would require a “significant diversion of financial resources” from the two partners if it were to continue, according to a circular recently posted on NYU School of Law’s website. The programme is taking in its last batch of 21 students this month and it will be discontinued from next year.The move comes after the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Asia announced in November that it will be shutting down its Asian campus here by next year due to financial woes.
In ”The Disposable Academic”, The Economist argued that “doing a PhD” was often a waste of time. However, this pessimism does not reflect the experience of all students, as evidenced by increasing numbers of doctoral students from the global South heading to the advanced economies of the North in the past 20 years.Two primary factors influence mobility and stay rates of international doctoral students: the comparative access to opportunities for doctoral training and professional advancement between their host and home countries. How is the mobility of international students at doctoral level likely to shift in the next 20 years? It will be shaped by the collision of two counter-trends enabling and limiting mobility.
Higher education funding should be reformed to protect universities from an ‘avalanche’ of government cuts, the Institute for Public Policy Research said today.Among the changes called for by the think-tank’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education is the creation of a new kind of degree, where students pay less for tuition but receive no additional state support. The eight-member commission, chaired by Warwick University vice chancellor Nigel Thrift, estimated that universities face a £1.2bn cut in Whitehall funding from 2015 to 2020.
