Innovations in Higher Education

The internet has been abuzz with all the innovations for teaching and learning, the free online learning platforms and different ways to teach students. Now it is research's turn to be overhauled...

Free universities?

In the age of increasing fees and sale of Higher Education , there has been another university set up that will offer courses for free as reported by the BBC ....

Refworks Vs Mendeley: The battle of the online reference managers

I have been using Mendeley for a while now, and I find it easy to use and a great way to organise and share research. But then my University released access to Refworks  and so I thought I would try it out and see if was as easy to use as Mendeley.  This review is based on my experiences in using both platforms to organise my references....

Teaching Exchange

Uclan  PRF and LDU  is hosting a Teaching Exchange, on Wed 13th June 12-3pm
The teaching exchange is open to anyone who teaches at Uclan or partner colleges and who is interested in developing their teaching skills...

Sharing Practice conference 2012

The call is out for posters around sharing practice around teaching and learning.  Deadline for abstracts 20th April 2012

Open access learning courses.The top 400!

Open access learning really is taking off, from the Open University  to  MIT OpenCourseWare, the OCW consortium  iTunes U and universities even having their own YouTube channels. Its a wonder where to start or stop.  One website has collated a group of good courses (mostly american) that are sorted by subject. http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses, but my recommendation is have a look around the various options available to see what takes your fancy. The OCW has lots of choice, many universities all over the world take part, including MIT and the OU, the courses are available in many languages and it has a good search facility, so that would be my starting point and move on from there.
Happy new year!
Edit: MIT are expanding on their successful OpenCourseWare and creating a not for profit, free interactive elearning platform which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.
You will not get a full degree but a official certificate from MIT instead. See link.

free books!

Here is a list of websites that give free access to a wide variety of books, both fiction and non fiction/ academic.
http://www.questia.com/publicdomainindex
http://www.questia.com/library/encyclopedia/  
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://www.archive.org/details/opensource (various languages)
http://oreilly.com/openbook/
http://www.free-ebooks.net/
http://www.freebooks4doctors.com/
http://www.onlinebooks4free.com/ (slow but links to full text via external servers)
http://www.rarebookroom.org/

Liverpool's free university

With the fee hike and general anger at the government, Plans are currently in motion for the establishment of a Free University of Liverpool (FUL). "This is explicitly framed as a protest against the government's tuition fees rise, but also evidences a longer-standing dissatisfaction with the current structure of higher education."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/31/liverpool-free-university-angry-government

what do you think? will it work? I am all for free access to education and learning to enrich your life rather than just for work. But you would need to get all sorts of courses running for it to work as a place of learning. If they offer courses part time so you can go around your job then it could work for people who are just interested in learning without the need for formalised qualifications, and I for one would welcome the opportunity. Education should not be for profit, it should be for the betterment of mankind. But with qualifications and training courses which need accreditation it is more understandable to charge for or subsidise these. I would rather my taxes were spent on education and training than war and obscene salaries/perks for government ministers and managers.

Impact of the social sciences

Podcasts of the sessions and panel discussions from the Investigating Academic Impact conference on 13th June 2011 are now available to download for free.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/podcasts/