UVA, Rice, Duke and many more join Coursera: free online course platform

From Coursera's blog, 12 universities join the initial schools (Stanford, Princeton University and the universities of Pennsylvania and Michigan) to offer free online courses.


Coursera is a MOOC a Massive Open Online Course platform created by Stanford professors in late 2011.

You’ll be able to choose from more than 100 courses, from Professor Dan Ariely’s course on irrational behavior, to learning how to program in Scala (taught from the creator of Scala, Professor Martin Odersky from EPFL), to the legendary UVA course “How Things Work” with Professor Louis Bloomfield.

16 institutions have partnered with Coursera:

California Institute of Technology
Duke University
École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
Georgia Institute of Technology
Johns Hopkins University
Princeton University
Rice University
Stanford University
University of California, San Francisco
University of Edinburgh
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Michigan
University of Pennsylvania
University of Toronto
University of Virginia
University of Washington

Researchers of Tomorrow

Researchers of Tomorrow is the UK’s largest study to date on the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students (born between 1982 and 1994). JISC and the British Library jointly commissioned the three year study in 2009, which involved 17,000 doctoral students from 70 universities at various stages in the project.

  

Top 10 journals in Management, Finance & Economics

The latest edition (2011) of the Journal Citation Reports has just been released. Academics can use this tool to rank several journals in different disciplines according to various fields such as Total Cites, Immediacy Index, Impact Factor and more.
Top 10 Journals in Management by Impact Factor

1. Academy of management review
2. Academy of Management Journal
3. Academy of Management Learning & Education
4. Journal of  Management
5. Academy of Management Annals
6. MIS Quarterly
7. Journal of Operation Management
8. Organization Science
9. Journal of Applied Psychology
10. Journal of Management Studies

Top 10 Journals in Finance by Impact Factor

1. Review of Financial Studies
2. Journal of  Finance
3. Journal of Financial Economics
4. Journal Accounting & Economics
5. Accounting  Organizations and Society
6. Journal of Banking and Finance
7. Accounting Review
8. Journal of Accounting Research
9. IMF Economic Review
10. Review of  Accounting Studies

Top 10 Journals in Economics by Impact Factor

1. Journal of Economic Literature
2. Quarterly Journal of Economics
3. Review of Financial Studies
4. Journal of  Finance
5. Journal of Economic Perspectives
6. Economic Geography
7. American Economic Journal-Macroeconomics
8. Journal of Financial Economics
9. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity
10. Journal Accounting & Economics

The Journal Impact Factor is defined as the number of citations in 2011 to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of items published in those same two years. 

For more categories and variables INSEAD users can login here.
Note: once on the platform, Business, Management, Finance, Economics and Psychology related fields are within the Social Sciences Edition -- Operations Research & Management is within the Science Edition.

B-Schools and Social Media

Two researchers from the University of Massachussetts Center for Marketing Research have released a study on The Missing Link In Social Media Use Among Top MBA Programs:Tracking Prospects

Google's Knowledge Graph

Google's latest development on its search engine is explained in the video below and on this page.

2012 - Top 10 issues for IT leaders in Higher Education

Top 10 IT issues 2012 - Educause survey.

1. Updating IT professionals' skills and roles to accommodate emerging technologies and changing IT management and service delivery models
2. Supporting the trends toward IT consumerization and bring-your-own device
3. Developing an institution-wide cloud strategy
4. Improving the institution's operational efficiency through information technology
5. Integrating information technology into institutional decision-making
6. Using analytics to support critical institutional outcomes
7. Funding information technology strategically
8. Transforming the institution's business with information technology
9. Supporting the research mission through high-performance computing, large data, and analytics
10. Establishing and implementing IT governance throughout the institution

How's your life?

Check out the newly released interactive OECD Better Life Index. You can also create your own better life index and have it compared to the average index. The index compares well-being based on 11 topics - housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance - and integrates data on gender and inequality

New look for Google Scholar

Google Scholar has a new look, read all about the changes from the Google Scholar announcement.

To access the advanced search features, users must click on the arrow in the search box and can refine the search without leaving the result page.

Free online courses from Harvard and MIT

Harvard and MIT have teamed up to release edX an open source platform to deliver online courses worldwide.
The schools have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration. Here is an excerpt of their FAQs.

Who can take edX courses? Will there be an admissions process?
EdX will be available to anyone in the world with an internet connection, and in general, there will not be an admissions process. For a modest fee, and as determined by the edX board, MIT and Harvard, credentials will be granted only to students who earn them by demonstrating mastery of the material of a subject.

Is there anything innovative about the online technology?
Yes. It will move beyond the standard model of online education that relies on watching video content and will offer an interactive experience for students. And the technology will be open source; other universities will be able to leverage the innovative technology to create their own online offerings.

edX press conference:

Video streaming by Ustream

AAUP Faculty Salary report – 2011/2012

A Very Slow Recovery: The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2011–12

The AAUP released its annual review of faculty compensation, read the April 9, 2012 press release.

Average Salary for Full-Time Faculty, by Category, Affiliation, and Academic Rank, 2011-12 

Adapted from this Higher Education article: Slow Recovery