SRHE Blog

The Society for Research into Higher Education

Paul Temple


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‘Alternative’ they may be, but ‘providers’ …?

By Paul Temple

Not that many SRHE members – I’m guessing here – will have called in on the London College of Business Sciences in Dock Road, E14. If you were planning a visit, you’d need to be sure that you hadn’t confused it with the London College of Business Management. Other traps for the unwary could be the London College of International Business Studies, not to mention the London College of Business Management and IT. Or indeed any one of a long list of for-profit colleges with the words ‘London’, ‘College’ and ‘Business’ in the title. The QAA has the thankless (and it seems to me pointless) task of inspecting these places. The London College of Business Sciences, to make a random choice, was established in 2010 and has changed ownership every year since then. It’s not then particularly surprising that the QAA in a report this year found that ‘The College’s…management of academic standards…is not fully effective’.

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Two information revolutions

Gavin Moddie

Gavin Moodie

by Gavin Moodie

As mooc mania approached its peak, the president of edX Anant Agarwal claimed in his video launching the platform on 2 May 2012 that ‘Online education for students around the world will be the next big thing in education. This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press’.

The claim was repeated many times and indeed had been anticipated 15 years earlier in 1997 by the management guru Peter Drucker who claimed: ‘Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It’s as large a change as when we first got the printed book.’

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0310/5905122a.html

That seemed improbable since university lectures have been as important in the five and half centuries since the invention of printing as they presumably were for the three and a half centuries before Gutenberg. Continue reading