At Home: High Demand Programs Expanded at NAIT
Global News is reporting that the Northern Alberta Instituted of Technology (NAIT) has received 1.9 million dollars in “targeted enrolment collaborative intitiatives”, and is using this to open up 390 seats at the school in seven high-demand programs. NAIT currently serves approximately 8000 full time students, and 20,500 for continuing education and part time courses. The “High Demand Programs”, as dictated by the Alberta government are in various types of Engineering Technology, specifically, Chemical, Civil, Construction, Electrical, Instrumentation, Petroleum, and Waste & Wastewater.
By contrast, Athabasca University serves nearly 40,000 students, and received just over $655,000 in these initiatives.
Around the Globe:Study Miley Cyrus for Credit
Skidmore College, in New York State, has opened a new course titled “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender, and Media”, according to The Guardian. By the end of March, only three students had registered for the new course, but assistant professor, Carolyn Chernoff, has high hopes that enrollment will increase for the summer class, which will run in three 150 minute sessions each week.
Development of the idea started last summer after the controversial performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, spurred by a lecture written for the Skidmore Centre for Sex and Gender Relations, titled The Rise and Fall of Miley Cyrus. The course description looks at Ms. Cyrus as a “locus for discussions of appropriation, queerness, gender-stratification and the hyper-commodification of childhood. The course will also examine how the media retains a virgin/whore dichotomy, of which Miley Cyrus, who has had to hyper-sexualize herself in order to get away from the wholesome Disney image, is a prime example.
While there are no current plans to have Ms. Cyrus provide any sort of guest lecture herself, assistance professor Chernoff leaves the option open, “We’ll see what happens.”
