Top Ten
May 15, 2007
According to the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, higher education in Ontario needs an additional $4.05 billion over the next three years. OCUFA is calling for $600 million per year for graduate programs and $300 million per year to cover expanding undergrad enrolment. Currently, $27 million is provided for maintenance; OCUFA says $450 million is needed to get facilities up to par. The provincial government has responded saying that there is a "great plan in place" and that it is already investing $6.2 billion over the next five years. The Peterborough Examiner | Canadian Press uSask wants young Saskatchewan residents to consider a career in agriculture. Grade 7 and 8 students are being taken on farm visits as part of the "Real Dirt on Farming" campaign. Prospective students tend to have a very limited view of agriculture, and the hope of the campaign is to open minds to the wide variety of careers possible with an education in agriculture. According to a representative from the university, there are far more jobs than there are students to fill them. Farm Scape Grande Prairie Regional College is collaborating with UNBC to offer its first masters program. A three-year master of education degree program is now available at the college; classes started last Friday. The program is unique in that students will meet face-to-face only one weekend a month for classes, making the program accessible for students holding employment or who travel from northern or rural areas to attend. Students will graduate with a UNBC degree. The Daily Herald Tribune The Kwantlen-SFU joint aboriginal university preparation program graduated its first class this week. The program is one of few others in BC that are designed specifically with First Nations student needs in mind. Almost 50% of students who signed up for the first class graduated, which is considered high for a program of this type. SFU and Kwantlen plan to offer the program again in September. Courses cover university-level reading and writing, math, science, study skills, stress management and indigenous knowledge in the modern world. (SFU Email News Release) According to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, community and technical colleges are the new grad schools. Post-secondary graduates in Minnesota are following up college programs by studying a trade. Community colleges were originally intended to be a step to university, but now they are being used by university grads as a way to get a job. The Star Tribune Online video ads are catching browsers' eyes, according to a report by AdTech. Standard banner ads have a 0.18% click-through rate, pop-ups see 0.6%, but video advertisements are achieving an astounding 4% click rate. In general, online ads are seeing less success in the way of user clicks, but this new report suggests that if you are going to campaign online, your best bet is in video format. Biz Report Students are being paid to blog about their lives, giving prospective students a window into what campus life might be like at a particular institution. Some schools give students free reign and promote the blogs regardless of whether all the entries are favourable. Others, particularly those that pay students, screen content before sending it "to print" (so to speak). Schools should use caution when deciding how heavy a hand to take with content and remember that there will always be independent blogs that will be used as comparison points to evaluate the validity of school-sponsored reports. CNN | The Washington Post US research says that official school .edu websites are the most heavily used source of information for prospective students, and that campus visits were the most trusted sources. The College Search and the Millennial Generation report found that less than 10% of high schoolers are using MySpace, Facebook or YouTube to find out about schools -- and that other new media trends such as chat rooms and blogs are also relatively un-used as well. Internship programs and program-specific reputation were reported as the most "interesting" factors to prospective students. The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription Required) | Eduventures Website Bill Gates feels that the future of advertising is online, and that marketers will see this shift within the next 5 years. In his speech given at Microsoft's annual summit, he estimated that traditional media will soon be replaced by online delivery systems -- newspapers are already using online delivery very strongly, and Gates says television will be completely online shortly as well (maximized by targeted delivery beyond what is capable by traditional cable or satellite methods). Biz Report While news was breaking about the mass shooting in Blacksburg , Virginia , online profit-hunters were quickly buying up domain names related to the massacre with the hopes of reselling them at a profit, or linking them to advertisers. Domain registration services saw the same virtual ambulance-chasing with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and other disastrous events. One domain provider shut down any domains registered that were named after Virginia Tech victims, as well as ones such as BlacksburgBloodbath.com and SchoolSlaughter.com. Another site that was accepting donations for the victim's families was shut down when the university said it had not heard about it. The International Herald Tribune | The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription Required)
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