Online education becoming more credible: Study

A study, released by the DeVry Institute of Technology in Calgary, found that seven of 10 Calgarians surveyed think employers see online education as valuable.

Lara Dodo, regional vice-president of technology and creative services at professional hiring consultants Robert Half International Inc., said that while online education may never eclipse the traditional degree programs, it is becoming more prominent as a “blended approach to education.”

Instead of having to choose between going back to school or earning money and building a resume, professionals can choose to split the difference and earn credits, or even a whole degree online.

The survey, of 504 Calgarians, conducted online for DeVry by Montreal-based Leger Marketing, found that nearly half of respondents think online education has become more credible in the last five years.

Ranil Herath, president of DeVry Calgary, thinks the state of online education has caused this recent shift in attitudes. While earlier attempts, “going back to the days of CBT (computer based training), (weren't) interactive,” today, nearly all classes, regardless of where they're offered, have some sort of online component.

In fact, Herath thinks online students might have it a bit harder because, “online students have even greater accountability than the students who come on to the campus.” He said it’s mandatory for online students to “take part in discussions on a weekly basis,” which means you can’t just “wait until the end of the session to study.”

And, unlike first-year courses at many traditional universities, Devry has a strict professor-to-student ratio that is enforced even in online classrooms. Herath says Devry has structured online programs "(so) you still have the same student to professor ratio that we would have in a campus, which is 30 or less.”

Both Herath and Dodo agreed too that taking online courses for at least part of a degree can actually be beneficial in today’s market. For jobs in business, that require an MBA, for instance, having experience contributing to projects online and participating in Webinars and web conferences can be a boon.

Particularly when working for a multi-national, most collaboration is done through online portals that look a lot like an online classroom, Dod said.

"As a savvy hiring manager, you have to look at the whole package of an individual,” she said. While there a lot of factors involved in bringing on a new hire, “no one’s hiring one-dimensionally” anymore, she said.






NEWS BY:http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/online-education-becoming-more-credible-study/143602

The world's top 100 universities ranked for the social science disciplines

Harvard ranks highest for accounting, economics and law according to world rankings for social sciences. Get the full QS rankings

Harvard university has been ranked number one for economics, accounting and law amongst others in the latest world rankings for social sciences, featuring top for all apart from one of the disciplines.

It is another strong appearance for the American university which earlier this year topped rankings for biological sciences and for world reputation.

Stanford university come in top place for statistics and operational research, beating Harvard. The rankings show the best performers in the six disciplines; accounting and finance, economics and econometrics, law, politics and international studies, sociology and statistics and operational research. The Oxbridge universities are in the top ten for each subject.

London School of Economics (LSE) beat both Oxford and Cambridge universities for economics and econometrics in the rankings published by leading higher education and careers research company Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). LSE are also placed ahead of University College London (UCL) for all of the disciplines.

The social sciences rankings are good news for UK universities with Oxford and Cambridge featuring heavily in the top ten for all the disciplines. Oxford university beats Cambridge at accounting and finance, economics, law and politics and international studies but comes in two places lower for statistics and operational research.

As part of the survey to compile the rankings, global graduate employers were asked to identify the universities they believe produce the best graduates overall and within a selected discipline. The results showed that graduates in business, accountancy and finance, and economics were the most sought after.

With the continuing focus on universities to bring value to the education market along with their increasing fees, graduate employability has become a growing worry for future students.

"Employability is by no means the only benefit of a university education, but with £9,000 per-year fees and 83 graduates now competing for every job, it is inevitably at the forefront of many prospective students' minds", says John O'Leary, Editor of the Times Good University Guide and member of the QS Academic Advisory Board. "The reality is that students will be paying the same amount for degrees that in practice have vastly different market values."

We have compiled these rankings and all the QS rankings so far into a spreadsheet which can be downloaded below. The university rankings feature country they are in and show the full 100 listed. Below is a table showing the top 10 in all six social sciences disciplines by subject.


NEWS BY:http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/27/top-100-world-university-rankings-social-sciences

University support should be spent on students, not gimmicks

With university fee waivers the government is appearing to champion the disadvantaged – in reality, it is doing anything but.

There are a great many things wrong with the coalition government's higher education policies. The latest blunder – a focus on fee waivers over bursaries for poorer students – reveals a worrying contradiction. The government says that students should not be put off by higher fees but at the same time say that fee waivers are necessary in order to stop higher fees having a deterrent effect. The problem is this: fee waivers don't work.

When the government sledge-hammered through the rise in the tuition fee cap to £9,000 a year in December last year, it did so in the baseless belief that fees above £6,000 would be levied only in "exceptional circumstances". At worst, they said, the average fee would be £7,500. Moreover, they hadn't yet put together the rest of the policy that would ensure that the trebling of fees would protect access for poorer students to those few universities they thought would charge the full £9,000.

So it came as a surprise to almost no one when university after university said that their headline fee would be at the top of the range, with the implication that government spending on loans would therefore be far higher than expected. The government meanwhile told us to delay our judgment until the higher education white paper and the access agreements between universities and the access regulator, the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) had been published. When both the white paper and the access agreements arrived recently, the average fee, when all support was taken into account, was under £8,000.

Ministers said that this was a vindication of their faith in introducing a market into higher education, despite absolutely no evidence to support their position.

NEWS BY:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/28/university-fee-waivers-students