Monday, March 17College Admissions News

Author: Editor

Can Universities Have a ‘Normal’ Fall If International Students Can’t Get to Campus?
College Planning

Can Universities Have a ‘Normal’ Fall If International Students Can’t Get to Campus?

Can Universities Have a ‘Normal’ Fall If International Students Can’t Get to Campus?Though universities are hopeful that the vaccine rollout will return a sense of normalcy to the fall semester, a question remains about international students whose plans were curtailed by the pandemic. Will they make it to campus in time? Experts say that while students have been exempted from coronavirus-related travel restrictions, overseas U.S. consulate shutdowns and backlogs could leave them waiting for their visas until September. “Remember they’re not just processing visas for new students in the 2021-2022 academic year, but also our freshman class for last year. We’ve been told that once a consulate is up and fully operational, it’ll be several months before they work through the backlog,” says Sar...
3 Questions for EdTech & Publishing Expert, David Harris
Graduate Admissions

3 Questions for EdTech & Publishing Expert, David Harris

3 Questions for EdTech & Publishing Expert, David Harris David Harris is the Editor In Chief of OpenStax at Rice University. David graciously agreed to answer my questions: Disclaimer:  The views and opinions expressed here are those of David Harris and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of OpenStax. Q1:  How has the pandemic impacted the broader OER (open educational resource) movement, and OpenStax specifically? The pandemic has left no part of the education ecosystem untouched, and OER is no different.  A recent Bay View Analytics report suggests that overall faculty awareness of OER has grown during the pandemic. When the country went into lockdown in March 2020 we saw a massive migration online to synchronous and asynchronous learning experiences.  In the 9 months th...
Yearbook Photos of Girls Were Altered to Hide More of Their Chests
Online Colleges

Yearbook Photos of Girls Were Altered to Hide More of Their Chests

Yearbook Photos of Girls Were Altered to Hide More of Their Chests There had been rumors all day that the yearbook photos had been altered, said Riley O’Keefe, a ninth grader at Bartram Trail High School in St. Johns County, Fla. When she finally got her copy, Ms. O’Keefe, 15, opened the page to her photo and laughed in disbelief. A black bar had been added to cover more of her chest, she said. Then, Ms. O’Keefe thumbed through the rest of the yearbook. Dozens of other students — all girls — had similar edits, many of them clumsy alterations that covered more of their chests. Ms. O’Keefe said she had been confused at first, then furious. Other girls approached her and said the alterations made them feel sexualized and exposed. Many students and parents are now demanding an apology. Th...
With New Online Marketplace, Community Colleges Hope to Better Compete With For-Profits
Financial Aid

With New Online Marketplace, Community Colleges Hope to Better Compete With For-Profits

With New Online Marketplace, Community Colleges Hope to Better Compete With For-ProfitsCommunity colleges are staking a claim in the territory of online course marketplaces. They’re about a decade behind their university counterparts, who helped to found edX in 2012, the same year that startup Coursera launched its competing service, now worth millions. But leaders of a new platform called Unmudl say the time is right for community colleges to collaborate and make their workforce-training programs available more widely by marketing them through a shared website. It’s a vision quite different from the traditional mission of community colleges to serve their communities—the literal, physical ones that surround their campuses. “They want to serve in their own locales, but their markets need t...
Defending online internships (opinion)
College Rankings

Defending online internships (opinion)

Defending online internships (opinion)To the Editor: The article headlined “Online Internships Fail to Meet Expectations,” casts a shadow on virtual internships, but I have seen firsthand the many promising outcomes that have come out of remote experiences. NAF, a national nonprofit bringing together education, business and community leaders to transform the high school experience, has worked with its robust network to pivot in these challenging times and continue to offer students quality internships.  For example, during summer 2020, NAF academies and its network of employer partners hosted more than 500 virtual high school interns.  Contrary to the report, in a post-internship survey, NAF participants reported being satisfied with the 2020 virtual internship experiences (96 percent). Be...
Uncategorized

Operation Outbreak: Simulating a pandemic while living it

Operation Outbreak: Simulating a pandemic while living it Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox On one recent morning, the advanced biology class at the Utah County Academy of Sciences faced a grim assignment. Seated at folding tables and speaking through face masks, students at this STEM-focused charter high school tallied Covid-19 infection and death rates from one winter week — comparing national and statewide data with the virus’s toll at their school. Fortunately, the school’s disease numbers weren’t real. Led by Micah Ross, a biology teacher, the academy was piloting an app-based pandemic simulation, part of  Operation Outbreak, a platform of lessons on infectious diseases and the public health response to their spread. After lear...
Graduate Admissions

The local impact of foreign censorship laws

The local impact of foreign censorship lawsIt can be tempting to look at censorship in other countries and conclude that it’s troubling, but far away, and we should save our worrying for what happens here. Most people are, for good reason, much more concerned about the impact of the laws in the country in which they live. But this attitude can fail to account for how censorship functions, especially in an era in which the internet, digital surveillance, frequent international travel, and global industries have made some foreign laws less constrained by borders and more difficult to combat. For the last several years, FIRE has been covering the complex relationship between American higher education and global censorship, including the difficulties of protecting speech on satellite campuses ...
What civics education should really look like
College Planning

What civics education should really look like

What civics education should really look like— How do we navigate tensions between the powers and limits of federal, state, local and tribal governments to protect collective well-being, as well as the rights of people to assert their individual rights? This can include issues such as wearing a mask during a pandemic or requiring that children or adults be vaccinated. Published at Fri, 14 May 2021 10:00:52 +0000 Article source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/14/what-civics-education-should-really-look-like/
Financial Aid

Eight Steps to Patent Your Invention

Eight Steps to Patent Your Invention[unable to retrieve full-text content]Have you invented something new, useful, and non-obvious, and want to patent it? Patenting an invention can be challenging, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office can help.Published at Mon, 16 Mar 2020 19:20:14 +0000 Article source: https://www.usa.gov/features/eight-steps-to-patent-your-invention
How Texas Republicans Want to Recast History
Online Colleges

How Texas Republicans Want to Recast History

How Texas Republicans Want to Recast History In the Trump era, California’s Democratic-led state government emerged as a kind of resistance government-in-waiting. State lawmakers passed some of the nation’s strictest environmental protections, took steps to ensure universal access to health insurance and filed dozens of lawsuits against Trump administration policies. Now that the presidency has changed hands, the shoe is on the other foot. It’s now Texas — the second-most-populous state in the country behind California, and by far the largest red state — that presents the starkest contrast to the White House. On Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, announced that Texas would stop allowing its residents to receive federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits. That comes a few weeks af...
STUDENT VOICE: Why rural students like me are ‘meant to be here’ in college
Financial Aid

STUDENT VOICE: Why rural students like me are ‘meant to be here’ in college

STUDENT VOICE: Why rural students like me are ‘meant to be here’ in collegeDuring the spring of my freshman year of college, I was failing chemistry and met with a dean. As I sat across from her, she gestured to my college admissions essay setting on her desk: “Making your way to this institution from your community couldn’t have been easy. In case you’re having any doubts, let me just say this: You’re meant to be here.” That fall, I’d left my rural hometown in Nebraska to attend college in Boston. I’d traded my high school class of 18 students — the same 18 students I’d known my entire life — for a class of over 1,000. Although I’d nearly completed my first year of college, my conversation with the dean marked the first time anyone had acknowledged that my path to higher education was unu...
College Rankings

Teaching With Digital Archives in the First-Year Writing Classroom

Teaching With Digital Archives in the First-Year Writing Classroom When this semester started, I started exploring the possibility of incorporating the use of digital archives in my first-year writing course, titled Border Stories: Power, Poetics and Architecture. In ideal circumstances, I would have loved to take my students to the physical space of the archives, but I decided against it because it would have required more advance planning and coordination with archivists that I did not have the time or the scope for in a writing classroom. Although the class lesson on digital archives happened before universities shifted to remote learning, I think digital archives can be a useful tool for instruction during virtual learning. Besides, I was not too sure whether the physical archives in P...
Alabama Lifts a Nearly Three-Decade Ban on Yoga in Public Schools
College Planning

Alabama Lifts a Nearly Three-Decade Ban on Yoga in Public Schools

Alabama Lifts a Nearly Three-Decade Ban on Yoga in Public Schools For the first time in nearly three decades, Alabama will allow yoga to be taught in its public schools, but the ancient practice will be missing some of its hallmarks: Teachers will be barred from saying the traditional salutation “namaste” and using Sanskrit names for poses. Chanting is forbidden. And the sound of “om,” one of the most popular mantras associated with the practice, which combines breathing exercises and stretches, is a no-no. The changes follow the signing of a bill on Thursday by Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, overriding a 1993 ban on yoga instruction in public schools by the state’s Board of Education. Some conservative groups had called for the prohibition to be preserved, contending that the practice of y...
The movement to privatize public schools marches on during coronavirus pandemic
College Rankings

The movement to privatize public schools marches on during coronavirus pandemic

The movement to privatize public schools marches on during coronavirus pandemicAnd then there is the nonprofit Arkansans for Education Reform. Jim Walton serves on its board. In 2016, the Walton Family Foundation gave that organization $325,769 in addition to a personal donation from Jim Walton himself, tax documents show. That year, Trace Strategies, Lee’s lobbying firm, was paid $205,756 from that nonprofit. In 2017, the Walton Family Foundation gave an additional $350,000 to the same nonprofit with tax-exempt status, whose mission is clearly to lobby for “reform.” Published at Thu, 20 May 2021 15:50:12 +0000 Article source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/20/school-privatization-movement-marches-on-during-pandemic/
Graduate Admissions

So to Speak podcast: Comic book panic!

So to Speak podcast: Comic book panic!Rebellion! Crime! Juvenile delinquency! On today’s episode of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, producer Chris Maltby explores the rise of comic books in the early 20th century and the moral panic, book burnings, and censorship that followed. Show notes: You can subscribe and listen to So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.  Stay up to date with So to Speak on the show’s Facebook and Twitter pages, and subscribe to the show’s newsletter at sotospeakpodcast.com. Have questions or ideas for future shows? Email us at sotospeak@thefire.org. Published at Thu, 20 May 2021 13:48:26 +0000 Article source: https://www.thefire.org/so-to-speak-podcast-comic-book...