University Master and Postgraduate studies and positions

Dear Editor, Nationally, more students are participating in doctoral education than ever before. In particular, doctoral education has benefited from dramatic increases in enrollments of international students, minorities and women. Yet, at U.S. institutions, 63 percent of Ph.D. students in the field of economics (60 percent in engineering, 45 percent in physical and mathematical sciences), are foreigners.

Les than 4% of students pass the final at MIT online courses:

http://qz.com/23591/less-than-4-of-students-in-an-mit-online-course-passed-the-final-why-investors-in-education-are-throwing-their-money-away/

Ed-Techie interview with the MOOC boys:

http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2012/11/

Are we under a MOOChisteria????:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markdroberts/2012/11/15/college-credit-for-moocs-a-great-possibility-or-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-college-education-as-we-know-it/

Coursera offers free, online courses to people around the world, but if you live in Minnesota, company officials are urging you to log off or head for the border.

The state’s Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there. It’s unclear how the law could be enforced when the content is freely available on the Web, but Coursera updated its Terms of Service...

This same New in Spanish:

http://alt1040.com/2012/10/minnesota-intenta-bloquear-coursera

Don’t believe the hype?

There has been an extraordinary level of hype in higher education (and beyond) about Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. Vice-Chancellors and their senior management teams up and down the country have been fretting about the developments and whether they need to get on board with one of the big players to avoid missing out. Two UK universities have recently announced their membership of a MOOC consortium with both Edinburgh University and the University of London signing up with Coursera. Meanwhile in the US the governance chaos at the University of Virginia where the President was forced to resign by governors and then reinstated two weeks later was prompted, at least in part, by differences of opinion on institutional strategy in relation to MOOCs.