With roots going back to the 13th century, the modern system of academic degrees functions as one of the most important ways to signal mastery of knowledge. The degree serves as a currency for accessing opportunities.
Yet as new areas of knowledge and demand for particular competencies expand, traditional ways of measuring mastery may fall short of fully capturing the learning that happens in t...
NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed Forever
MOOCs claim to make education accessible to everyone, but institutions offering MOOCs have yet to define best practices for accessible design. For many, universal design efforts end when course video material has been captioned. Captioning is important, but the idea that you can just caption course video and call a MOOC accessible belongs on the ...
A recent report by the College Board might be an indicator of how fast the sands of higher education are shifting. The prices that most people actually pay for college, which had remained stable for several years, are on the rise again, as tuition and other cost increases outpace financial aid awards.In its latest annual survey, the College Board reports that after rising swiftly since the 1980s, ...
The first online course from MITx titled 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, offered earlier this year, had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university. Indeed, that number is not far from the total of all the students enrolled there since the 19th century.
MIT reports that 155,000 people registered for MITx 6.002x and of those, approximately 23,...
When I first started as interim director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies (INENAS) based at the University of Massachusetts Boston, I was given three studies that broadly identified specific needs and disparities of Native people in the region. These studies looked at demographic data provided by the U.S. Census, tribes and surveys of regional tribes and Native American non...
MassBay Community College was awarded a five-year, $2 million grant under the U.S. Department of Education's Strengthening Institutions Program, which aims to help campuses serve lower-income students by enhancing academic quality, institutional management and fiscal stability.
The Wellesley, Mass. college also won approval of a three-year Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPS...
The U.S. economy added 882,000 jobs in the first six months of 2010, and 593,000 of them were in the private sector, according to the "Economic Snapshot" for July 2010 authored by Christian Weller, senior fellow at the D.C.-based Center for American Progress and associate professor of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston.The report attributes some of the private job growt...
A Massachusetts board's decision to use only union labor in a $750 million renovation at the University of Massachusetts Boston has become a hot issue on the state's campaign for governor.The University of Massachusetts Building Authority voted 9 to 2 to approve use of a Project Labor Agreement, a contract under which companies bidding on state projects pledge to use union workers and the w...
With roots going back to the 13th century, the modern system of academic degrees functions as one of the most important ways to signal mastery of knowledge. The degree serves as a currency for accessing opportunities.
Yet as new areas of knowledge and demand for particular competencies expand, traditional ways of measuring mastery may fall short of fully capturing the learning that happens in t... 
The first online course from MITx titled 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, offered earlier this year, had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university. Indeed, that number is not far from the total of all the students enrolled there since the 19th century.
MIT reports that 155,000 people registered for MITx 6.002x and of those, approximately 23,... 
When I first started as interim director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies (INENAS) based at the University of Massachusetts Boston, I was given three studies that broadly identified specific needs and disparities of Native people in the region. These studies looked at demographic data provided by the U.S. Census, tribes and surveys of regional tribes and Native American non...