- Australia: Measuring Value of Research
- Library: Libraries of Developing World
- MOOC: New Classifications of MOOCs
- Russia: Indian Students Keen on Russian HE
When it comes to judging the value of publicly supported research, which measure is better: “quality” or “impact”?
Of course all research is designed to have impact, like generating new understanding of the universe or of our collective history, and developing new technologies. The challenge is that impact, as defined in this context, is always short term. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, with governments worldwide striving to balance budgets, there is a risk that a focus on demonstrating short-term impact will override more substantial considerations in research decisions.An approach based solely on impact fundamentally undermines the innovation system by removing the one player capable of making long-term, infrastructure-intensive research investments: universities. Business generally seeks return on investment over a period of a few years. If universities take a similar approach, there will simply be no other entities globally capable of supporting research on 20-, 30-, or 50-year time horizons.
Fresh light on how academic libraries in low and medium-income economies are contributing to universities has been shed in a new report.Library Value in the Developing World, released today and written by Nell McCreadie, group marketing manager of publisher SAGE, draws on surveys and interviews with librarians in 11 countries ranging from Honduras and Indonesia to Uganda, Ukraine and Zimbabwe
To date, MOOCs have been classified as either xMOOCs or cMOOCs. I want to argue that such a classification is too simplistic and in this section put forward an alternative mechanism for describing the nature of MOOCs. I want to suggest that a better classification of MOOCs is in terms of a set of twelve dimensions: the degree of openness, the scale of participation (massification), the amount of use of multimedia, the amount of communication, the extent to which collaboration is included, the type of learner pathway (from learner centred to teacher-centred and highly structured), the level of quality assurance, the extent to which reflection is encouraged, the level of assessment, how informal or formal it is, autonomy, and diversity. The last two are taken from Stephen Downes. MOOCs can then be measured against these 12 dimensions
With more universities offering English as a medium of instruction, an increasing number of Indian medical and engineering students are looking at Russia for affordable and high quality education.Russia is once again becoming a popular destination for higher education among Indian students, especially in medicine and engineering. The demand from Indian students has risen 10-fold over the last decade. The number has almost doubled in the last three years, the paper said, attributing this trend to the increasing number of universities in Russia offering English as a language of instruction
