Every once in a while I have too many interesting stories from overseas sitting in my bookmarks, so it’s time to share.

1. English UK, a body representing English language schools, have won a High Court battle over entry restrictions. The previous Labour government required people to have a higher level of English before they came into the country, seeking to deter immigration fraud. It seems that they didn’t follow due process and the regulations have been struck down. Obviously any restriction on English entry levels has a big impact on enrolment numbers and study length, so the schools had a strong motivation to challenge the rule, but some restrictions are probably still likely. We don’t have any such formal restrictions in NZ (unlike Australia) but it is hard to get visas for people from markets considered a high immigration risk (I can recall problems in India in particular, but also Turkey and other places).
2. There’s an academic in China who is still going strong at 110. His alma mater, the University of Ohio, just gave him a medal to mark his achievements since he completed his Master’s degree in…1931.
3. Last week, the NY Times had a story on cheating and the various technological fixes used to counter it. One of the most successful was actually an online tutorial upon enrolment educating people about how to avoid plagiarism. The best example of cheating was someone who was heavily tattooed and worked notes in between them! (HT Pauline La Rooy)
4. A few weeks back the Scientific American ran a piece on experiential learning, looking at whether experts’ practices could be picked up by viewing what they do, rather than do the thousands of hours that it can take to become proficient in some occupations. As a scientist says: “”We know a lot about how to educate people on facts, but we know almost nothing about how to educate people on acquiring perceptual skills other than lots of repetition, which can be very time-consuming and expensive”. (HT Dean Carroll)
5. In mid-June, the University of Pennsylvania was moving to cut 80 degree programmes across its 14 state-owned universities, and encouraging students to study in collaboratively-run programmes across campuses. The story is from the Chronicle of Higher Educationand goes over some pros and cons of the move. What interest me is that we’re entering a period of qualification consolidation in NZ, and states in the US have been doing this at community college and university level for decades – we can learn a lot from them about what works and what doesn’t. We can often get tunnel vision about looking to England for policy ideas, whereas the US has 50 different systems against which we could compare our proposals.