Mobility Really Matters

The Imperfect University: Staff getting on their bikes (an updated version of a post from a while back) One of the things professional services colleagues sometimes complain about is that whereas  academic staff can be promoted in post - and indeed can progress all the way from lecturer to professor in the same academic department …

Graduate Programme for University Leadership Now Recruiting

An outstanding programme for graduates looking to develop careers in university management. Recruitment for this year's round of Ambitious Futures, the Graduate Programme for University Leadership, has recently gone live: The university sector is one of the most innovative, vibrant and exciting environments in which to build your future career. If you're looking for a …

It’s started – the Nottingham professional services NOOC

The Changing University: Inside Nottingham is underway   The University of Nottingham professional services NOOC (Nottingham Open Online Course) is underway. Thanks to a great deal of work by many colleagues a first four week course is now open and over 400 members of staff have signed up. The NOOC has been designed especially for …

Launch of the university professional services NOOC

The Changing University: Inside Nottingham - a post just for University Nottingham (UK, China and Malaysia) colleagues An earlier post invited views on the possibility of a University of Nottingham professional services NOOC (Nottingham Open Online Course). Following much discussion and a great deal of work by many colleagues a first four week course is …

Chemical Reaction

Fire! Reflections on a major incident In the evening of Friday September 12 I received a call from our Deputy Head of Security to alert me to a major fire at the University's Jubilee Campus. The building ablaze was the unfinished GlaxoSmithKline Carbon Neutral Laboratory for Sustainable Chemistry and, during the hours that followed, it …

The Promise of Personalized Education

Is this the future of student support? There has been a lot of talk of late about learner analytics and the potential benefits in terms of tracking student performance and identifying and intervening where they are at risk of dropping out. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on a number of companies who …

Outsourcing student recruitment

Australian colleges trust to agents Very surprised by this piece in @insidehighered which notes that agents have expanded their reach into domestic higher education recruitment in Australia: When the Australian Skills Quality Authority examined 400 college websites during last year’s marketing audit, as many as 70 turned out to belong to brokerage firms rather than …

Urgent: save those emails

Do we need to preserve Vice-Chancellors' emails? A diverting essay in Inside Higher Ed has a call for the preservation of presidential email: ...boards of trustees should act – with a sense of urgency. They might begin by appointing a task force, composed of professional historians, lawyers, board members, and administrators, to recommend procedures for …

Jobs in .ac.uk

Some handy data on higher education employment trends HEFCE has published 'interactive' data on the trends in employment of staff in the higher education sector for the ten years, 2003-04 to 2012-13. The data is divided into two main categories: academic roles, such as professors and research assistants and then professional and support roles, including …

Spy kids

GCHQ accredits UK master's degrees for 'cyber spies'     Was very much taken by this thrilling news. Of course we have had Professional Body accreditation for many years and more recently courses supported by Asda and other supermarkets. But this is a little bit different. Not least in the sense that GCHQ is not …

A long list of management principles

Important maxims to live and work by? Or just a long and forgettable list? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a diverting piece on a set of rules the new president of the University of Akron has issued to his senior staff: If Scott L. Scarborough gets his way, the University of Akron will have …

From 007 to Registrar

A distinctive new approach to the campus novel Unlikely as it may seem this brief book offers the most exciting representation of a Registrar since Lucky Jim. Set in a real university (York) but with fictional (we hope) characters there is plenty to enjoy here: The present and past lives of James Kerr, university senior manager …

Graduation 2014: Latest

Updates from the Ceremonial Front Line I recently provided a summary of a series of posts related to graduation (reproduced below): A recent post on graduation challenges including Decanal difficulties with names and a failed graduand backflip. The surprising news that swimming was not part of graduation requirements any more for one US university. The …

Signs of the Times

Is university signage important for academic achievement? No. And I fear that this story rather overstates the significance of signage on university campuses. This piece was pointed out to me by Simon @GlobalHE (to whom many thanks) and covers the importance of signage in education. Whilst I really do want to take it seriously and …

Betting the farm

A very big gamble The Chronicle of Higher Education has an extraordinary piece about how one investment manager gambled away $13.1 Million of her university’s money: Over a series of three contracts, Ms. Prizevoits signed over more than $8-million of the 96-year-old university’s money in 2008 to a Florida-based company called Betts and Gambles Global …