URI freezes tuition
The University of Rhode Island announced Monday that it will freeze tuition rates for all students and increase the financial aid budget to a record-high amount for the 2013-14 school year.
The move will maintain in-state annual tuition rates at $10,878 and out-of-state rates at $26,444. URI President David Dooley called the freeze “an important step forward in addressing affordability and access to higher education” in a URI press release.
The financial aid budget will increase from $77 million to $88 million next year, ABC 6 News reported.
The announcement comes after Gov. Lincoln Chafee ’75 P’14 released his fiscal year 2014 budget proposal in January, which will allocate an additional $6 million to Rhode Island’s public colleges and universities to prevent tuition hikes if approved, The Herald previously reported.
Questionnaire solicits feedback from MOOC instructors
A new Chronicle of Higher Education online survey of professors who have led massive open online courses found that most instructors believe MOOCs are “worth the hype” but do not foresee students taking them for credit in the future, the Chronicle reported Monday.
MOOCs — which are free, open to anyone and not for credit — have attracted significant attention in higher education since Stanford launched the first such course in 2011. Brown will pilot three courses on Coursera this summer, the University’s first MOOCs on a major platform.
In the Chronicle survey, slightly under half of instructors deemed their MOOCs as academically rigorous as the in-person versions of the courses, but 79 percent agreed that the courses were “worth the hype.”
About one-quarter of survey respondents said they believe their institutions should grant credit for MOOCs, and about one-third said they expect their institutions will do so in the future.
The majority said they expect MOOCs to ease tuition costs in higher education in the long term.
The Chronicle’s survey was not scientific and had a sample size of only 103 respondents. The Chronicle’s article also cautioned that the most enthusiastic professors might have been the most likely to respond.
Former UCF student kills self after planning campus attack
The University of Central Florida averted a potential campus-wide attack Monday when it was revealed that a former student who shot himself had originally planned to kill many others on campus, several news outlets reported.
James Oliver Seevakumaran had intended to use guns and explosives to kill classmates leaving his dorm after he pulled a fire alarm, a checklist he left behind indicated. Instead, he killed himself and injured nobody else as police arrived at the dorm, the Washington Post reported. He was not enrolled at the university this semester but was still living on campus.
Seevakumaran planned to get drunk and “give them hell,” according to the checklist discovered alongside his body, news outlets reported. At the campus mailroom, several packages containing ammunition and firearms training materials were waiting for Seevakumaran, the Post reported.
His roommate called 911 when the fire alarm was pulled and he encountered Seevakumaran brandishing a gun.
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