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Sunday, November 20, 2011

University Business: Tulane, Mexican College To Establish Joint Programs, Student Exchanges


Tulane Unviersity and a Mexico City college will sign a memorandum of understanding on Friday in New Orleans that will lead to joint academic activities and exchanges of faculty, students and other school personnel. The signing of the pact with El Colegio de Mexico will occur Friday at 5 p.m. as part of a two-day conference sponsored by both schools.



"Mexico at a Crossroads: Learning From History, Facing the Future" will be held on the second floor of Tulane's Lavin-Bernick Center on Thursday from 8:45 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. and on Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.


While the conference sessions are free and open to the public, admission to the luncheon keynote address is $10 for students and $20 for everyone else. The speaker will be Ambassador Julian Ventura, under secretary for North American affairs in Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.


The Times-Picayune
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The Chronicle of Higher Education: More Colleges Use Facebook to Recruit Students




November 16, 2011
By Lacey Johnson


More colleges are using Facebook to recruit students, according to the results of a recent survey of college admissions and marketing staff that was released on Wednesday.


Nearly 80 percent of the institutions reported using the social-networking site for admissions purposes, a 13-percentage-point increase from last year. This is the second survey of Facebook use in admissions conducted by Varsity Outreach, a company that helps colleges with online promotion and networking.


More than half of the respondents said they considered Facebook to be a “very important” admissions tool, rating it above YouTube, blogs, Twitter, and other social-media networks.


Sixty-three percent of the colleges described Facebook as an integral part of their marketing strategy, and more than half said it had had a significant impact on recruiting students. The effectiveness of colleges’ Facebook pages were primarily measured by counting “likes,” “followers,” group members, and comments, according to a report on the survey results.


The number of admissions and marketing professionals who said they were comfortable with Facebook has also grown, with more than a third considering themselves “experts,” and only 6 percent saying they are “not too familiar” or “novices.” Nearly three-quarters of them reported using a combination of pages, groups, applications, and personal profiles to promote their colleges to prospective students.


According to Varsity Outreach, 150 colleges completed and returned the online survey out of roughly 2,000 colleges solicited. The company did not calculate a margin of error for its findings.
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The National Teaching & Learning Forum


The National Teaching and Learning Forum began publication in the fall of 1991 as a joint venture with the ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education. ERIC/HE already published a series of short books reviewing research literature on various higher education topics, and it embraced the idea of The National Teaching and Learning Forum warmly as an extension of its mission.



By 1993 the publication had become big enough and successful enough that it needed a new home. It found one in the Oryx Press which, in 1992, had replaced Macmillan as publisher of the American Council on Education's Series on Higher Education. Then, in 2000 after 25 years in publishing, Oryx was acquired by the Greenwood Publishing Group, a well-respected publishing company with many imprints and a long history of serving the higher education market. Nothing stays the same for long in modern publishing, and beginning in 2003, the Forum ended its partnership with Greenwood and took over all operations at its home office in Madison, Wisconsin.


From the first, I wanted The National Teaching and Learning Forum to be a different sort of newsletter. I gained a lot of experience with newsletters, having created or had a major hand in creating: Academic Leader, The Teaching Professor, and a number of others. I recognized that we live in an age pressed for time, but felt that that fact only increased the need for good writing. Repeated surveys reveal that faculty care deeply about teaching and work hard at it, but it's not something they talk about with their peers. Why? One reason, I thought, might be the lack of a serious, but not ponderous, forum. Why keep giving readers 500 word teasers? "Quick fixes" and "short takes" don't reflect the seriousness faculty bring to teaching, nor do they invite conversation; actually, they imply that complex challenges have simple solutions. Teaching is taken seriously only when the conversation becomes more interesting, and faculty begin talking to each other about it.


It was around 1990, through the leadership of Russ Edgerton and Pat Hutchings at the American Association for Higher Education, that the idea of "a conversation about teaching" began to gain currency. The metaphor of a conversation fit closely with what I wanted The National Teaching and Learning Forum to be. As one thinks of a conversation among intelligent people discussing matters of real importance to them, one quickly understands the kind of discourse the Forum strives to create. The talk ranges from citations and addresses, the kind of useful facts and access keys friends scribble out for each other, to anecdotes that make a point, to serious arguments for a particular point of view, to familiar essays in which a faculty member distills wisdom from experience. I saw a banquet table, and I wanted to fill it with the full range of rhetorical nourishment. I would offer the things a good host offers in the way of guiding and contributing to the conversation, but I would invite as many faculty as I could to speak up and contribute their ideas.


In its first 12 years, The National Teaching and Learning Forum has achieved critical acclaim and popular success with this approach. The contents range as widely as good conversation. Topics embrace a wide diversity of cross-disciplinary concerns. The Forum's pages cover the latest findings of cognitive psychology on attention span and their practical implications for teaching. They talk about seeing the relevance of Dante, Shakespeare and Milton to the lives of today's more gender-aware and ethnically diverse students. They are open to a variety of faculty viewpoints, each of which offers the gift of insight to colleagues both in this country and abroad.


The National Teaching and Learning Forum has quite a number of foreign subscribers. Perhaps that is because the publication has taken an increasingly international perspective. Much valuable research into what actually works well in teaching and learning has been done outside the United States, and the Forum has introduced this important work to many of its American readers.


The conversation grows and changes, but the mission and focus of the publication hasn't changed at all. Indeed, from the very beginning I envisioned an on-line version that could offer readers expanded, interactive access to the best information and discussion of teaching possible. Now, thanks to the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web and the success of the print version of the Forum, an on-line presence has become a reality.


In a world of fast-food encounters and breathless busy-ness, The National Teaching and Learning Forum has managed to create a sustained and sustaining conversation about teaching and learning. I hope you'll join it.






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University Business: Would-Be Engineers Hit Books the Hardest, a Study Finds


Business majors spend less time on course work than other college students, but they devote more hours to nonschool duties, like earning money and caring for family members. In contrast, engineering students spend the most time studying and the least on outside demands.



Those are among the findings released on Thursday from the annual National Survey of Student Engagement, a project that tries to measure how hard, and how effectively, students are working. This year’s results are based on forms filled out last school year by more than 400,000 undergraduates, all of them freshmen or seniors, at nearly 700 colleges and universities in the United States.


Grouping students into seven academic disciplines, the study shows wide differences in the number of hours they put into schoolwork outside the classroom. Among students concentrating in engineering, 42 percent say they spend at least 20 hours per week on such study, well ahead of any other group.


They are followed, in descending order, by students studying physical sciences, biological sciences, arts and humanities, education and social sciences. Business majors ranked last, with 19 percent saying they spend 20 hours or more each week on schoolwork.


The New York Times
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University Business: Tuition Discounts Lure Students Out of State


Megan Pritchard decided an MBA with an international focus would get her closer to landing her dream job. After managing sales at a winery for almost two years, she wanted to move on to a French company in a U.S. operations function. Because none of the MBA programs in her home state of Alabama offered an international track with a language component, she started looking at private—and more expensive—schools like Tulane and Thunderbird.



Ultimately she enrolled in the business program at the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business. Why Moore? In the midst of her MBA search, she learned an exchange agreement between Alabama and South Carolina qualified her for in-state tuition. “It was a huge incentive,” she says of the discounted tuition status, which reduced the cost she would have paid as an out-of-state student by nearly $55,000 over the course of the program. “Without question, I will be able to afford to go to France to look for jobs.”


Such exchange arrangements exist in 46 states and have been around for decades as a way to give students wider access to higher education resources that may not be available in their home states. Several specialized degree programs—ranging from an MBA with a concentration in logistics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to a master’s in hotel administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to a bachelor’s degree in insurance and risk management at the University of Georgia—are eligible for similar out-of-state tuition discounts based on a student’s residency.

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Dillard University Classroom Space List Fall 2011


https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9_KwJdDOiGrN2M4MDBjNjItNmZkMi00NGM1LWI2ZWEtZjRhZTFkNjY5YzQ5

Please check the attached list for accuracy specifically noting the number of students each room is supposed to accommodate. I’d like to know if the number is correct or if chairs are needed and if any room is missing from this list. Please highlight changes and forward your list to ccarter@dillard.edu  by Thursday, December 1st, 2011.
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