New Fourth Level Education Announcement

New fourth level education proposal to create thousands of jobs

According to the Irish Independent

Wednesday March 11 2009

The Taoiseach has unveiled a major new initiative between the country's top two universities, aimed at creating thousands of jobs over the next ten years.

Trinity College and UCD are teaming up to create what has been described as a new fourth level academy, similar in concept to the IFSC in Dublin.

Up to one thousand graduates will be trained every year in specialised areas, in a bid to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

It is estimated that this will result in the creation of around 300 new enterprises in this country over the next ten years.

The winners & losers in course choices this year

In today's Irish Times, they have given a run down on the course choices students are making according to the CAO.

The big winner this year is science where demand for higher level degree is up by 20 per cent. The Government and business leaders will be delighted with this trend, which reverses years of steep decline.

The bad news for Leaving Cert students is that CAO points for science courses are set to rise because of the increased demand.

The other big winner this year is agriculture where demand for courses is up by almost 50 per cent, reflecting confidence about the long term security of employment in the food industry and in agriculture.

Physics for the leaving Cert

For those of you studying physics, here is a wonderful site with lots of notes and great advice from the physicsteacher.ie

According to his blog;

For each chapter I have included all past exam questions, which can be cross-referenced with the relavant marking-scheme which is also included. Also included is a copy of the associated extracts from the syllabus - this gives the students the responsibility of checking up on me to ensure I have everything covered before moving on to the next chapter.

There is also plenty of “extra-credit” material tucked in at the end to help address many of the conceptual difficulties which students (and teachers!) have; these also help to set the historical and social context of many of the discoveries. Science is after all a very human activity, dispite what you might think from the text-books and syllabus.

I would hope that students outside of my own school would find these useful, particulary those who don’t have a specialised Physics teacher should find it to be a useful resourse to help them help themselves.

Some would see the decision to allow the students to see their test in advance to be somehow ‘cheating’, but for me it helps overcome one of the biggest obstacles facing many students who may not be in the top bracket; they simply don’t know what to learn. I have found with this new approach that hard-working students who are of average ability have gone from 50% to 75% since I introduced the option. It doesn’t change those at the top; the A-students still get their A’s, while at the other end those determined to do as little as possible still continue to achieve results which reflect this.

But I’m delighted with this practice. We spend at least one class and maybe two going over these questions at the end of each chapter and before I give them the test. Then I simply pick ten questions from the list, while altering the numbers in the maths questions. After seven years of leaving-cert questions (2002 - 2009) there is a pretty comprehensive bank of questions there, so I don’t believe it is giving students an inflated sense of their own worth.

But as an incentive to prepare for class tests and greater student participation it is working like a dream. I’m not too proud to say that I’m thrilled with my work!

Courses.ie leading the way....again :-)

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

It is both a compliment and interesting to see sites older than ours recognise that we have raised the benchmark and are now incorporating features that we, Courses.ie, introduced and felt should be taken as standard.

Watch out for more as we start to introduce some of the changes and new features you have told us that you want to see.