The latest amendment to the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA) will apart from allowing students to have political affliations, pave the way for them to enrich their attributes and facilitate their personal development.

STUDENTS can be actively involved in politics off campus and in peaceful rallies without worrying about getting into trouble with their universities, in the weeks ahead.

Paving the way for this change of landscape is the latest amendment to the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA) which the ministry said was an attempt to add more elements of natural justice to the Act known by its Malay acronym AUKU.

The amendment was passed by the Dewan Rakyat via a voice vote on April 19, and will be tabled at the Dewan Negara on May 10.

Over the last four decades, students have not been able to take part in politics or rallies and faced a multitude of actions such as suspensions or even expulsions.

Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin had agreed that previously, public university officials had to carefully scrutinise and check if their students were involved whenever there were rallies.

However, there is a caveat though. All students are expected to be mature enough to understand that they would be subjected to natural legal process if they were to commit offences such as acts of crime, sedition and defamation, among others.

A Higher Education Ministry official explained at a briefing to editors last Wednesday, that it was meant to clear the air over amendments to the UUCA which is often seen as a touchy issue.

The official confirmed that the university will then naturally have the power to act upon the students who were found guilty by the courts.

However, the officials said, even those who are holding positions as student leaders in the university could stand as a candidate in either a state or parliamentary election.

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Changes for the better

attleboro

healing services: National Shrine of Our Lady of LaSalette Reconciliation Chapel, 947 Park St., Sunday, May 6, 2:30 p.m. with the Rev. John Sullivan, M.S. (Spanish); and Sunday, May 13, 2 p.m. with the Rev. Almir Urbano, M.S. (Brazilian Portuguese).

DARTMOUTH

mosque prayer service: Masjid al-Ehsan, 2 Cove Road, Fridays, 1-2 p.m. Contact Sherif El Wakil for more information.

east taunton

a day with mary: Holy Family Parish, 370 Middleborough Ave., Saturday, May 5, 7:50 a.m.-3:15 p.m. A day of instruction, devotion and intercession based on the message given at Fatima in 1917, event includes Fatima video presentation in Parish Hall; Entry Procession of Our Lady of Fatima statue into the church, Angelus, Crowning Ceremony, Sung Litany of Loreto, Five Joyful Mysteries; Mass of Our Lady with main celebrant the Rev. Kevin A. Cook, pastor, and consecration of the parish to Our Lady; Exposition and Procession of the Blessed Sacrament; Sermon on Our Lady by the Rev. Martin Mary Fonte, FI and Silent Adoration; Meditations on the Via Luic (Meditations on the Resurrection); Five Glorious Mysteries, Act of Consecration, Benediction; Enrollment in the Brown Scapular, Investiture of Miraculous Medal, and Farewell Procession. Bring a bag lunch. Book store with Catholic books and religious articles for sale. Join them for all or a part of the day to celebrate this and every day with Mary. For more information, call (508) 824-5707.

fairhaven

coming of age Sunday: Unitarian Memorial Church, 102 Green St., Sunday, May 20,10:30 a.m. The youth will offer their religious beliefs and their thoughts about the world at this time in their lives, as they move into young adulthood.

connecting for change film series: Unitarian Memorial Church Parish House Auditorium, 102 Green St., Thursday, May 24, 7 p.m. "Journey of the Universe" is the final film in the series. Narrated and co-written by author and evolutionary philosopher, Brian Swimme, this film takes us from the Big Bang theory to the epic impact humans have on our planet today. In a period of growing environmental and social crisis, "Journey of the Universe" is designed to inspire a new and closer relationship with the Earth.

NEW BEDFORD

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Religious services

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKwfXkCM1zc

04-05-2012 20:49 CCTV does a story about online music lessons from featuring a student of fingerstyle guitarist Martin Taylor, classical guitarist Jason Vieaux, and ArtistWorks founder David Buter.

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ArtistWorks Featured on China Central Television - Video

Harvard and MIT jumped to the front of the free online education movement this week with edX, a $60 million partnership that promises online coursework to the masses from two leading academic brands.

The venture illustrates both the limits and limitlessness of online higher education.

On the one hand, the collaboration looks like an unprecedented gesture of intellectual largesse an altruistic giveaway, as Mary Carmichael put it in the Boston Globe. Or, as Harvard President Drew Faust noted in Wednesdays news conference, Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access. The Chronicle of Higher Education termed it part of an online education revival, following the collapse of earlier efforts that proved financially untenable.

It remains to be seen how many citizens of edXs vast global education community can walk away with credentials for completing a course, or what it might cost.

The venture will create access, starting this fall, for literally hundreds of thousands of potential students to some of the greatest minds in academia. There will be no admission gateway and thats a significant point, considering how hard it is to get into either Harvard or MIT. (The new undertaking is actually an outgrowth of MITx, a free-to-the-masses online education initiative announced by MIT separately last year.)

But no one taking edX courses will gain access to a credential issued in the name of Harvard or MIT, and that, too, is significant; the online platform will not allow students back-door access to those prized brands. Online learners who demonstrate mastery of subjects could earn a certificate of completion, the universities said in a statement, but such certificates would not be issued under the name Harvard or MIT.

Such credentials would also cost something the exact sum is yet to be determined. And its not clear that every student who wants a certificate from edX will be able to get one.

Herein lies one of the key limitations of online higher education: when it comes to grading papers or tests, and to assessing whether a student has mastered a course, human graders typically must be involved, and suddenly, the universe of students who can be served shrinks to a finite and very modest number.

University leaders say they will leverage the venture to spawn research on how students learn, and on how best to educate people online. These two schools and other national universities that have dabbled in online education tend to be picky about the online platforms they choose, and to differentiate fairly or not between the quality of their online coursework and everyone elses.

Originally posted here:
Free Harvard, MIT classes for all? Yes and no.

Opinion: GUEST COLUMN: edX is freeing education

This could revolutionize the way we learn

May 4, 2012

This Wednesday, MIT President Susan Hockfield and Harvard President Drew Faust announced the edX platform for online education. I have been taking the pilot edX course 6.002x this semester, but it wasnt until I saw these two women speak that I realized just how big this initiative could be. 6.002x is already an incredible technological achievement that accurately replicates an introductory Course VI class on the Internet. After the announcement this Wednesday, this revolutionary online experience of MIT classes made the leap to become a multi-institutional platform that could transform the delivery of education worldwide.

edX is not the first foray into online education. Last fall, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun opened up his introductory AI class to thousands of students around the world. He then left the university to found Udacity, which offers a series of CS courses. There is also Coursera, a company started by Stanford professors, which has already partnered with Princeton, UMich, and UPenn to offer courses ranging from Mythology to Cryptography. However, these two products are both creations of for-profit companies. Perhaps the one resource most closely aligned with edX is the non-profit Khan Academy, started by Salman Khan 98 (commencement speaker for the class of 2012!). By staying non-profit, edX can honestly claim to make an MIT or Harvard education available to anyone with the will to pursue it.

The current model for post-secondary education is far from ideal and is often inefficient. Most course material is distributed only during lecture, which is limited in both time and place. The material remains largely unchanged from semester to semester and can even worsen if a weaker professor makes changes to a class. Similar classes use similar material from institution to institution, yet it is disconnected rather than synthesized into one best-in-class course. Most significantly, this education is limited to the select group of students admitted to colleges around the world. In many cases, this group represents only the students with the support and resources to win the college admissions game, despite ongoing efforts to the contrary.

What is stopping us from bringing the worlds best education out of the ivory tower and into the commons? One might propose that it is infeasible to teach all the worlds population at once. However, technology has made this a trivial obstacle. Lectures can be recorded with incredible fidelity and streamed to any connected machine in the world. Books, tutorials, and problem set solutions can all be served up on the web. Scripts can be written to generate unique homework problems and grade them in real time. Web applications are as dynamic as anything written for the desktop. The technology we have built over the last few decades not only makes online education feasible, it makes it the next logical step in improving the way we learn.

The other, more sinister, objection is that only the select group admitted into the worlds best institution deserves its education. If edX advances to the point where there is no distinguishable difference between an online education and a brick and mortar education, it may be that an online certification gains the same significance as an MIT degree. Laws of supply and demand tell us that a saturated market dilutes the value of each individual unit. However, it may be time to consider an entirely new paradigm for education. Rather than treating college degrees as credentials for future employment, lets treat them as foundations of knowledge that transcend any piece of paper. Let everyone have access to the same training, and let people be judged by the merit of their work rather than by the name of an institution.

This, of course, is a radical change. Colleges and universities around the world will need to rebrand themselves as something other than gatekeepers of education. Students might no longer need to proceed through the educational system in lockstep grade levels, but instead learn new things as soon as they are ready for them. Education might no longer be limited to a set curriculum of courses taken over four years, but could become a lifetime of learning in all kinds of different fields. Most importantly, education may finally become a resource as freely available as air or sunlight. And education deserves to be an open resource. The knowledge steadily accumulated by years and years of experimenting, failing, discovering, and learning belongs to all people.

Traces of the revolt against the current model of education can be seen around the world. In the U.S., primary and secondary educators desperately search for a better solution. The value of college is questioned in the face of tuition costs rising faster than inflation and federal loans being cut by the government. Successful entrepreneurs, such as Peter Thiel, are paying MIT students $100,000 to drop out to pursue their true ambitions. Successful students, such as my roommate, are leaving MIT to become successful entrepreneurs on their own. Perhaps the traditional four-year college experience is no longer necessary in our modern society. Perhaps there is room for a new way of thinking.

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GUEST COLUMN: edX is freeing education

Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007.

But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.

This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, "There's a tsunami coming."

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?

If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost gesture, mood, eye contact when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?

The doubts are justified, but there are more reasons to feel optimistic. In the first place, online learning will give millions of students access to the world's best teachers. Already, hundreds of thousands of students have taken accounting classes from Norman Nemrow of Brigham Young University, robotics classes from Sebastian Thrun of Stanford and physics from Walter Lewin of MIT.

Online learning could extend the influence of U.S. universities around the world. India alone hopes to build tens of thousands of colleges over the next decade. Curricula from U.S. schools could permeate those institutions.

Research into online learning suggests that it is roughly as effective as classroom learning. It's easier to tailor a learning experience to an individual student's pace and preferences. Online learning seems especially useful in language and remedial education.

The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper.

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Viewpoints: Elite universities envision their future with online courses

Originally published May 4, 2012 at 11:10 PM | Page modified May 4, 2012 at 6:01 PM

Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007.

But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, "There's a tsunami coming."

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?

If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost gesture, mood, eye contact when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?

The doubts are justified, but there are more reasons to feel optimistic. In the first place, online learning will give millions of students access to the world's best teachers. Already, hundreds of thousands of students have taken accounting classes from Norman Nemrow of Brigham Young University, robotics classes from Sebastian Thrun of Stanford and physics from Walter Lewin of MIT.

Online learning could extend the influence of U.S. universities around the world. India alone hopes to build tens of thousands of colleges over the next decade. Curricula from U.S. schools could permeate those institutions.

Research into online learning suggests that it is roughly as effective as classroom learning. It's easier to tailor a learning experience to an individual student's pace and preferences. Online learning seems especially useful in language and remedial education.

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Brace for the online education tsunami

MIAMI, May 4, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Dade Medical College launches its new online campus as the college continues to expand its offerings of specialized allied healthcare and nursing education programs for the community.

The college launched their new Bachelor's of Science Degree in Nursing (BSN) program and their Associate of Science Degree in Medical Billing and Coding program to their online education students on Monday, April 30.

The college's Bachelor's of Science Degree in Nursing comes at a time when many healthcare institutions are requiring more advanced degrees from their nursing staff. "The best part about offering our BSN program is our ability to address a driving industry need and further help the community by offering the working healthcare professional the flexibility and convenience of earning their advance degree online," says Enrique J. Lopez, Dade Medical College's Dean of Continuing and Online Education. "And with major reform set to take place in 2014 when all hospitals will be required to switch to electronic medical/health records, the Medical Billing and Coding program will be essential to finding and hiring qualified coding specialists," continues Lopez.

Online classes will be taught by the same fully-licensed and certified faculty currently teaching the accredited, on-ground programs at the college. The students' computers will serve as their virtual classroom as they interact with their instructor and fellow students in completing their course work, assignments and examinations. Special metrics will be used to ensure and measure class participation and attendance, two key factors in maintaining a quality program and producing the outcome-based results the college is known for.

"In order to meet our mission of giving access to a quality, outcome-based education to each and everyone, we felt it was important to enhance our program offerings and grow into the online education revolution," says Ernesto Perez, President & CEO of Dade Medical College. "It's the wave of the future and as our tag line reads, at Dade Medical College, your future begins today!"

About Dade Medical CollegeWith close to 400 full-time employees staffing Dade Medical College's six Florida campuses and corporate office, the school features a fully-licensed and certified faculty whose commitment to excellence in education are unmatched by other area colleges and institutions. A majority of the faculty and administrative staff originates locally, with many having been educated at other prestigious local and national institutions. The college offers Associate of Science and Bachelor's degrees in nursing and Associate of Science degrees in other programs such as radiology, diagnostic cardiac sonography, medical billing and coding and more. Classes start every four weeks. Online course offerings also available.

Dade Medical College is accredited by the Accrediting Bureau of Health Education Schools, the Joint Review Committee on Education in Radiologic Technology (Miami and Hollywood Campuses) and is licensed by the Florida Commission for Independent Education. Dade Medical College has also been approved by the Florida Board of Nursing and the Florida Board of Massage and is a member of the Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools and Colleges and the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association.

For more information, visit http://www.DadeMedical.edu, like them on http://www.facebook.com/DadeMedicalCollegeor call 305.644.1171.

Media Contact: Elizabeth Martinez Dade Medical College, 786-374-4997, liz@dademedical.edu

News distributed by PR Newswire iReach: https://ireach.prnewswire.com

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Dade Medical College Launches New School of Online Education

With a quiet fountain bubbling in the corner and a few more adornments, the MyMindEmbody studio will offer those interested in either pilates or yoga a peaceful place outside of the gym at Embody Fitness to enjoy these classes.

The idea for the studio was developed by Embody general manager Katie Paris who wanted a relaxing space for the classes as well as a larger space.

When we were first at the Kingwood Athletic Club, the pilates and yoga classes were in a very small area, so when we decided to start hosting these classes, we all wanted to hold them in its own space, Paris said.

Embody, which is located at 1574 Kingwood Drive, is celebrating the opening of the new studio May 12 with pilates and yoga class demonstrations being held intermittently throughout the event which runs from 9 a.m. until noon.

The MyMindEmbody studio features several reformer pilates machines which allow for participants to go through a range of different exercises.

The studio also has a spacious area in front of the reformer pilates machines to allow for numerous mats for the yoga class. The studio will also offer a hot yoga class during the week.

A lot of the people who take yoga and pilates class are not typically gym people. With the new studio, those who do not like the gym atmosphere or are looking to relax with these classes will have a quiet space and do not have to step in the gym if they do not want to, Jo Elaine Philips with Embody said.

There are still a few additions Embody is working to put together before the grand opening including a couple of other pieces of furniture and draperies which will hang from the ceiling to add to the zen feeling of the MyMindEmbody studio.

The pilates classes are taught by instructors Sandy Brady and Rhoni Marple Kirshner while Carol Lloyd will teach yoga.

We are very excited to start our classes in the studio and hope more people will come to check out our classes and see what all we have to offer, Paris added.

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Embody Fitness opens yoga, pilates studio

Ontario Evelyn Burton turned 96 April 25, and the water aerobics group at the Ontario Aquatic Center planned to celebrate with her that day but had to wait until April 27 because she went golfing on her birthday instead.

Most people hope to be half as active as Burton when they turn 96, but she doesnt let age slow her down.

Burton, who has resided in Ontario since 1945 and is a widow, still lives at her home and gets out in the yard. She does have a son who checks up on her, but she said she isnt dependent on anyone and still gets out and drives on her own.

Along with water aerobics, in which she takes part three to four days a week, she also regularly bowls, which she has done for more than 20 years, and golfs, sometimes both in the same day.

I feel water aerobics does the most good, that some stuff is just easier in the water, Burton said.

To keep her mind active she is a regular bridge club player, Burton said.

She said church also keeps her busy, and she is an avid traveler.

Evelyn should be a role model for senior fitness and for everyone, Kathy Daly, Ontario Recreation Department director, said.

Daly said water aerobics is good exercise because the water cushions the joints, and people have a better range of motion in the water.

Several other members of the water aerobics group are 80 years of age and older, and one is 90 years old.

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Age no barrier for 96-year-old Ontario woman