International Professors Project

A worldwide organization focused on the long-term development of new International Professors as ambassadors of global education. On the web: internationalprofs.org / LI: International Professors Project / Twitter: @Intl_Professors / facebook.com/InternationalProfessors Project

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Offer Of The Day! University of New Haven Has a Free Tuition Offer For Prospective Students with Great Business Idea!

Four years of tuition at the University of New Haven's business school? About $120,000.

A chance to get it free? Priceless. Spread the word (or don't if you want to increase your chances of winning this great opportunity)

UNH's new business school dean, a former MasterCard executive responsible for its "Priceless" advertising campaign, has issued a challenge to the university's incoming freshmen: Bowl me over with your entrepreneurial idea and win free tuition for your undergraduate degree.

Details here

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School Education Gone Wrong: Racist White Teen Girls Goes On A Rant About Blacks

WARNING: the following video is disturbing, contains lewd language, and is NSFW.

Update: The girls are no longer at students at the school and has issued a formal apology after receiving death threats and public outcry.

[askingtherightquestions]

I believe he was wrongfully suspended. He was taking the moment to educate his students about something meaningful. It was a teachable moment. Thoughts?

[classroomchaos]

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The perception of a Teacher

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Whether you're a History buff, an aspiring Politician or star-gazing Astronomer, we have found free video lectures on a variety of subjects for your viewing pleasure.

Click on the title link for the videos

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10 Open Education Resources That Should be On Your List

P2PU: The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project in which anyone can participate. Volunteers facilitate the courses, but the learners are in charge. P2PU leverages both open content and the open social web, with a model for lifelong learning.

OpenStudy: OpenStudy is a social learning network where independent learners and traditional students can come together in a massively-multiplayer study group. Through OpenStudy, learners can find other working in similar content areas in order to support each other and answer each others’ questions. OpenStudy supports a number of study groups, including those focused on several MIT OCW courses.

NITXY: NIXTY is building a learning management platform that supports open education resources. Rather than an LMS that closes off both academic resources and academic progress, NIXTY is designed to support open courses so that schools, teachers, and students’ work is not necessarily closed off from the rest of the Web.

OER Glue: Still under development, OER Glue will be a site to watch. The Utah-based startup is building a browser-based tool that will allow students and teachers to “glue” together OER resources online. Rather than having to copy-and-paste resources into a new setting, OER Glue will reuse and integrate resources.

iUniv: iUniv is a Japanese startup that is building web and mobile apps to support and make social video and audio OCW content. Resources can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Evernote so that students can actively engage in discussions around OCW content.

OCWSearch: OCW Search is a search engine dedicated, as the name suggests, to helping learners find OCW content. The project is, unfortunately, no longer under development, but it does index ten universities’ OCW content, including MIT, Notre Dame, and The Open University UK.

Smarthistory: Smarthistory is a free and open multimedia website that demonstrates how very heavy, pricey, and obsolete the traditional art history textbook is.

CK-12: The CK-12 Foundation’s Flexbook platform provides free, collaboratively-built and openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12. Much of the content is standards based.

Flat World Knowledge: This is a college textbook publisher whose books are published under an open license. This allows professors to customize the books they order – edit, add to, mix-up – or use as-is. Students can access the books online for free or can pay for print-on-demand and audiobook versions.

Connextions: Connextions is a repository of educational content, containing over 17,000 openly licensed learning modules.

Courtesy of Audrey Waters of Mind Shift. For the full article please click here

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Ho autonomous are Europe's universities?

In order to be successful, universities need to be able to take their own decisions. The University Autonomy Tool lets you compare university autonomy in 28 European countries/systems. It focuses on four autonomy areas and ranks countries according to the level of autonomy they have in each of these.

Check out the useful informative website here

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The Biggest Challenges in Higher Education

Readers and members of The Guardian Higher Education Network voice their thoughts on what they think is the biggest challenges facing higher education professionals today.

See what they say here and let us know if you agree/disagree.

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Tackling Pakistan's Educational Problems With A Taste of Hunny

THE HUNNY SCHOOL, a private institution occupying two cramped buildings in Rawalpindi’s back streets, seems a happy place. The boys and girls packed into its little classrooms look pleased to be there. Some look much older than their classmates. They have a lot of catching up to do. Many were street children whose parents could not afford to send them to school. A future of illiteracy and perhaps crime and drugs beckoned.

Of the school’s 900 students, over 400 are financed by the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), a statutory body under the provincial government which in turn receives aid from donors such as Britain. It provides vouchers to pay the fees of approved schools such as Hunny, which range from 200 to 350 rupees a month.

It is an attempt to tackle one of Pakistan’s worst problems: the huge number of children who receive no education at all. One-tenth of the world’s primary-age children who are not in school live in Pakistan—7m of them, thanks to a net enrolment rate (after allowing for dropouts) of just 57%. According to UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, 30% of Pakistanis have received less than two years’ education. More than half of its women have never attended school. Literacy rates are low by any standards: 57% overall, and just 33% among women in the countryside.

It has not been plain sailing for Hunny. When it joined the PEF scheme two years ago it suffered an exodus of fee-paying pupils whose parents worried about their children mixing with the wrong sort, and about falling standards (justifiably at first, test results showed). And though it seems a nice place, the headmaster concedes that every single one of his teachers would leave if offered a job in a government school. Pay is better there, and teachers do not always turn up.

Optimistic Pakistanis speak of their country’s “demographic dividend” of a youthful population in which over two-thirds are under 30, nearly a third are under 14 and 25m are of school age (6-16). But it is a dividend only if the economy provides opportunities for a workforce growing at 3% a year, and if children are educated enough to take advantage of them.

The above report is courtesy of The Economist. For the full story please click here

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What's the Difference Between a Good Teacher and a Great Teacher?

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Projects We Like: The Future Project  - a national call to action that challenges young people to turn their passions into projects that change the world.

The Future Project launched in October 2011 with more than 500 Future Fellows and Future Coaches in four public high schools across three founding Future Cities: New York, Washington, D.C., and New Haven, CT. We aim to mobilize the rising generation of leaders, innovators, and humanitarians and build a movement of young people committed to transforming education and creating a world in which everyone is inspired.

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Visit Original Link

Karin Fischer, a Chronicle reporter, explains why China is growing more interested in the liberal arts. In a nation whose institutions typically teach to the test and leave little room for elective courses, general-education programs are starting to gain a foothold. 

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Check out these creative and ingenious ideas that has brought a new understanding to the concept of student housing. 

Check out the full slideshow featurette by clicking on the title link above

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For those of us who love to learn a new language but haven't got the time or money to enroll in a class, you're in luck!

Introducing a new start-up company Verbling - a language exchange community that allows you to instantly learn and practice a new language instantly with a native speaker over a web-cam chat style. We all know that the biggest hurdle in mastering a new language is finding the opportunity to practice and carry out a conversation with and like a native.  Practicing those grammar forms and sentence structure can only take you so far. This is where Verbling comes in. 

Providing a more cost-effective and time efficient choice, Verbling allows you to speak directly to a native speaker who speaks your desired language of choice.  Based on your native language and what language you want to learn, you are paired up with a fellow native speaker. So, if you're an English native speaker and want to learn Finnish, you would be paired with a native Finnish speaker who is interested in learning English.  Conversations last 10 minutes - 5 minutes of each language. Verbling even helps to break the ice with your chat partner by providing conversations starters.  Do note that Verbling currently only supports Spanish-English exchanges but plans for more language options in the future.

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The achievement gap between rich and poor children is double the gap between black and white children, according to a study by Standford University. 

Please click on the title link above for the full story.

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High school graduates from the class of 2010 weigh in on how high school prepared them for their first year of college-level classes.

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If the school's new effort is a success, the days of bored students checking Facebook during lectures could be over.