Resources for Higher Education
If you work in higher education, you need to keep up with what's going on in the field. What are the latest trends in tenure? How are academic institutions responding to external challenges? How much does your President earn? This page identifies resources that will be of interest to academic librarians who want to follow trends and developments in higher education. Sources covered on this page include:
Chronicle of Higher Education
Inside Higher Ed
Edupage
EDUCAUSE Online
HENA Online Newsletter
Advocate Online (NEA)
College Times
LeagueConnections
AcademicInfo
Campus Technology Newsletters
Technology Roundup
University Business Newsletter
CollegeNews.Org
.edu Trends
Society for College and University Planning - SCUP E-mail News
If you'd like to follow some academic/higher education web logs as well, I recommend consulting The Chronicle Of Higher Education's Academic Web logs list.
An obvious choice for following academia. A daily e-mail update is available to subscribers. While this is the best update service from CHE, there are many free stories available on the Web site.
Suggested Strategy: Use a Web page change detection service to monitor the URL https://www.chronicle.com/chronicle/ . This page provides the synopsis of each weekly Chronicle. It provides summaries of the major stories. Some are available to all; others require a password. This will at least identify stories you are interested in, and most academic libraries will have at least one subscription to the paper Chronicle (if so, find out about getting the password for access to the restricted stories). In the blog domain the Chronicle now offers a daily news blog and a wired news blog (for technology news).
In a Washington Post article this free e-mail newsletter (NOTE: IHE came out in BETA format in sprint 2005 and the newsletter is initially weekly but will move to daily) was described as the first serious effort to compete with the Chronicle of Higher Education. You won't find as much news or detailed reports with Inside Higher Ed but I would say this is a must read publication for anyone working in the higher education industry. It provides a summary of important weekly news events and the commentaries are excellent.
Suggested Strategy: Point your browser to https://www.insidehighered.com/sign_up to learn more about this newsletter and site.
Edupage is a free, e-newsletter from EDUCAUSE, an international nonprofit association dedicated to transforming education through information technologies. Edupage is distributed 2-3 times a week. It abstracts articles about higher education and library issues from publications in and out of higher education, reporting on trends in technology and other fields that may impact on higher education.
Suggested Strategy: To get to the "subscribe" page or to review past issues to determine if Edupage is relevant to your needs, go to:
https://listserv.educause.edu/archives/edupage.html
A companion publication to Edupage, and a better choice if you don't think you need something as frequent as Edupage. EDUCAUSE Online is also a free, e-newsletter and is published just once a month. The stories tend to be a bit longer, and the focus in more central to higher education than Edupage which also reports on technology developments.
Suggested Strategy: I would actually recommend getting both. To get to the "subscribe" page or to review past issues go to:
https://listserv.educause.edu/archives/educause-online.html
Higher Education and National Affairs (HENA) is a newsletter published on the Web by the American Council on Education. The news reported here tends to lean toward legislative and policy developments impacting on higher education. It also reports on the publication of studies of national education associations and governments, and provides links to any reports published on the web. It is updated approximately once a month, but more frequently to report fast breaking news. When HENA is updated, only members are provided with an e-mail notice, but you can use Mind-It to track page changes.
Suggested Strategy: The URL for HENA is:
https://www.acenet.edu/hena Use a Web page change detection service to create an alert for the HENA page. Whenever there is a change your change detection service will send you an email alert.
This is a newsletter from the National Education Association that focuses on higher eduation issues. It is free and is issued seven times a year. Interviews with prominent higher education leaders, stories on trends in higher education, legislative news and feature articles on topics such as assessment, part-time faculty and merit pay are included in each issue.
Suggested Strategy: Use a Web page change detection service to monitor Advocate Online; this publication offers no option to be alerted by e-mail, but you can send an e-mail request to highered@nea.org to request being added to an e-mail distribution list for this publication. You can view an archive of old issues at https://www.nea.org/he/advo-new/index.html
This may be a difficult site to include in a "keeping up" strategy, but it is worth looking into. It provides access to all higher education related stories that appear in the New York Times. Stories are organized by topical area or can be searched by keyword. The home page changes every day. There is no e-mail update available, nor is there a weekly summary of the headline. One approach could be tracking the page using Net-Mind, but if set to "daily" this could be burdensome. A once-a-week notification may work better.
For more information point your browser to: https://www.nytimes.com/college
This newsletter will help you stay in touch with ongoing activity at the League for Innovation, an organization dedicated to advancing technology among community colleges. It provides information on League programs, the latest conferences, new uses of technology among community colleges and other interesting news stories. It is free and is issued monthly
Suggested Strategy: You can go to https://www.league.org/leagueconnections and this will bring up the latest issue. Look for the link to a subscription form. You can also subscribe by sending an e-mail request to subscribe@league.org .
This is a somewhat different resource. It is not a newsletter. Rather AcademicInfo is a resource page that lists links relevant to all things "academic". It is wide ranging in its scope, but a good place to find great new web sites. The good thing is that the site will send you an email that will alert you to the newest sources added to the site each month. This makes it easy to keep up with the latest web sites related to higher education.
Suggested strategy: Go to https://www.academicinfo.net/new.html and on the page (which is the latest new update) there will be a link that says "send us a note" to subscribe.
The publishers of Campus Technology magazine offer a number of free newsletters that concentrate on technology in higher education for faculty and administrators, but it also reports on issues of interest to academic librarians. It is particularly good at reporting developments and new activities at individual institutions. There is an online archive of each of the past newsletters at the Campus Technology web site. The available newsletters are: News Update, IT Trends, Smart Classroom, C-Level View, and Campus Security.
Suggested strategy: Go to https://www.campustechnology.com/mcv/newsletters/newsletters/ to complete a registration form. You will then begin receiving the newsletter in your e-mail.
This might be more appropriately called Higher Education Technology Roundup as it focuses just on developments at colleges and universities. It is a free e-mail newsletter from the publishers of Converge magazine. It focuses on education technology, IT policy and management. It is also sponsored by the Center for Digital Education.
Suggested strategy: To subscribe to this bi-weekly e-mail newsletter send an e-mail request to converge@convergemag.com and put "subscribe" in the subject line, then add a first and last name in the message area. Alternately go to https://www.centerdigitaled.com/enewsletters.php and look for the link to submit a request to subscribe to Technology Roundup.
University Business Newsletter
This free, daily newsletter comes from the publishers of University Business. UB is among the more prominent publications devoted to the business of running higher education institutions, so it is geared to the interests of academic administrators. This daily newsletter will keep you updated on administrative - and some instructional - activity as campuses worldwide (but focusing on domestic institutions). There are direct links to all the stories that are digested in the newsletter. There are typically fewer than 10 stories per newsletter, so it isn't particularly overwheming.
Suggested strategy: To subscribe to this newsletter go to: https://universitybusiness.com/newsletter/subscribe.aspx?listid=9 and complete the subscription form.
The web site is sponsored by the Annapolis Group, a nonprofit alliance of the nation's leading independent liberal arts colleges. This site offers multiple resources, one of which is some up-to-date news from campuses across the country, as well as commentary on issues confronting the nation and higher education. The news is updated daily, and there are probably more stories here than you can read on a daily basis (click on the "more" link on the home page - under the "news" categories - to see they offer quite a list). This one is worth a weekly visit and quick scan.
Suggested strategy: The URL for this source is https://www.collegenews.org. It doesn't yet offer an e-mail alert, so use a Web page change detection service to create an alert for this page. Set the update of your frequency alert to at least seven day, or more frequently if you find this site valuable.
This free monthly newsletter is from a commercial provider of web site services called OmniUpdate. This publication is described as a best practices newsletter that is intended to showcase the latest trends in web development and communication. Past issues have covered RSS technology, designing for web accessibility, and profiled web sites of distinction. If you can accept that occasionally you'll get a plug for this company's services, the newletter can actually be an informative source of information.
Suggested strategy: To subscribe to this newsletter just point your browser to https://www.omniupdate.com/contact/subscribe/ and complete the registration form.
Society for College and University Planning - SCUP E-mail News
If you have a particular interest in planning in higher education then you should probably be finding out what is happening at SCUP. It is the premier association for higher education planners and planning conferences. This is a free weekly newsletter.
Suggested strategy: To subscribe to this newsletter go to https://www.scup.org/pubs/sen/nonmem-sub.html and complete the form to register for SEN (as a non-member of SCUP - there is a different form for members).