Categorising international students

The Guardian has a report on an exciting new piece of market research. In what is undoubtedly a totally altruistic piece of work for the benefit of UKHE and not at all any kind of attempt to get free publicity and drum up loads of new business, a particular firm has: gone for an anthropological …

Interpreting science through the medium of dance…

Entertaining report about a recent "dance your PhD" contest. This interesting idea could be extended to offer a new form of assessment at undergraduate level too.

Now it’s “music that makes you dumb”

Follow up to post about books that achieve this end. This site does the correlation with music and SAT scores. Looking at Facebook for University of Nottingham today it seems the following represent our top 10: 1 Muse 2 The Killers 3 Oasis 4 Jack Johnson 5 Snow Patrol 6 Coldplay 7 Bloc Party 8 …

Outsourcing Student Services

Interesting and slightly scary blog post in the Chronicle on the opportunities for outsourcing student services in US higher education. As one person interviewed puts it: "It's almost taking the people out of it". Some of the wonderful products on offer include: Rave Wireless lets students set cellphone timers that alert campus police if they …

Newcastle goes Medical in Malaysia

Report here of signing of an agreement by the University of Newcastle with the Government of Malaysia to establish a medical programme in Johor: The new international branch campus in Johor, Malaysia will be named Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia (NUMed) and will deliver and award the University’s degrees in medicine and biomedical science. Interesting that …

Books “that make you dumb”

Interesting piece of work - a website which shows the correlation between favourite books on Facebook and average SAT scores for particular US institutions. The five highest-scoring books (and Average SAT scores): 1. Lolita (1317) 2. 100 Years of Solitude (1308) 3. Crime and Punishment (1307) 4. Freakonomics (1275) 5. Catch-22 (1233) Someone, with more …

Exploitative?

It is possible to mount some form of defence of the companies supplying (at a price) essays to students who, for whatever reason, would rather not write them themselves. It's a pretty lousy argument though (simply meeting a market demand just doesn't seem good enough) and there is really nothing about this sordid business that …

A new vision for HE?

A wide-ranging speech by the Minister, John Denham, seems to have been received in a rather low key way in the UK. It does get some coverage in the Guardian and the Chronicle is on the case. Denham looked to be indicating a fairly wide ranging review prior to the fees review next year: We …