Is College (Finally) Ready For Its Innovation Revolution?
via The Atlantic If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato’s Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.
That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don’t fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.
“The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking,” Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education.
Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea? [Continue Reading at The Atlantic]
Higher Education and the New Media Reality
via Campus Technology As a cultural anthropologist and researcher in the modern discipline of digital ethnography, Michael Wesch likes to ask the big, complex questions: How do we find meaning and significance in the digital age? How is technology affecting society and culture? How are social media changing teaching and learning practices? But as a teacher, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, he likes to ask his students one small, simple question at the start of each year.
“I ask, How many of you do not actually like school?” he said. “Almost invariably almost half raise their hands. Then I vary the question slightly. I ask, How many of you do not like learning? And I get no hands. These are people who like learning, but they don’t like it to be institutionally created for them. Clearly something’s wrong here.” [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]
Low-Hanging Fruit No. 1: Portability
via Higher Education Management Higher education in the 21st century is increasingly characterized by student mobility and flexibility. More than half of today’s college graduates, not to mention those who never graduate, attend two or more institutions on their degree journey. Yet most degree programs are written “from the bottom up”.
Faculty members craft the sequence of courses, from basic to advanced, as if the student were going to be in the same institution for his or her entire career. That curricular structure leads to heavy discounting of credit for transfer students with learning achieved in other settings. Specifically, institutional transfer policies and general-education requirements pose enormous obstacles to including all learning on one transcript and counting that learning towards the degree. [Continue Reading at Higher Education Management]
Teaching With the Cloud
via CampusTechnology Kuglin emphasized the ease-of-use of these tools and used them on the spot to assemble an ad hoc, cloud-based tutorial, complete with an audio file.
“These are tools that live outside the campus,” Kuglin said. “Where is all of this content? It’s actually in a data farm out in San Francisco. It’s not on this machine. I can go to any of your machines, and as long as you are connected, I could continue doing this presentation. I don’t need my laptop anymore, just a device that’s connected to the Internet. We need to get used to that idea.”
Kuglin lead his audience through several presentations created in the cloud with SlideRocket. “Those of you who are responsible for your online learning environments are already beginning to see a new model emerge here,” he said. “The cloud-based presentation package is surpassing and supplanting the PC-based, PowerPoint world. This is a huge, huge step forward.”
“Teachers need to stop saying ‘hand it in’ and start saying ‘publish it,’” he added.
To the inevitable question from his audience about objections raised by campus IT about the security of the cloud, Kuglin said, “I understand that it’s an issue, but we cannot continue to hide behind the safety issue, not if we want to offer competitive educational services. The old paradigm was university computer, university employee, university network. Boom, boom, boom; we’re secure. But the old days are gone.” [Continue Reading at CampusTechnology]
More Partnerships Between Colleges and Industry
via The Chronicle – More Partnerships Between Colleges and Industry Could Produce a Better-Prepared Work Force Despite years of talk, the higher-education and industry sectors of the United States still don’t collaborate enough to ensure that students are adequately prepared for jobs. And the mismatch between what employers expect and what students learn in college or vocational schools could have dire consequences for the nation’s economy, according to several speakers at the New Work Era Summit hosted here by The Atlantic.
To achieve what is considered full employment—a 5-percent unemployment rate—in 2020, the economy would have to add 21 million jobs. Participants in the summit, which included college and business executives, said that employers increasingly report that they have trouble filling some positions because they cannot find qualified applicants.
The event on Tuesday coincided with the release of a report called “An Economy That Works: Job Creation and America’s Future” by McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm. The report found that the U.S. labor force will grow steadily, reaching 170 million by 2020, but that “too few students will obtain college degrees, too many will have no more than a high-school diploma, and the number of Americans without even a high-school diploma will rise.” [Continue Reading at The Chronicle]
via OLLI: Louisianna Lifelong Learning Week
via Osher Lifelong Learning Institute National Resource Center The Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, signed a proclamation designating the first week in August as Lifelong Learning Week in Louisiana. Members of OLLI at Louisiana State University have been getting the word out by asking restaurants, churches, doctors’ offices, retail and industrial companies, etc. to post the announcement flyer at their places of businesses. The idea for such a state proclamation came from OLLI at the University of Denver who managed to get a proclamation made last year in the State of Colorado. Congratulations to Doreen Maxcy and all the staff and members of OLLI at Lousisiana State University! (Available for download: Louisiana Lifelong Learning week flyer.) [Continue Reading at OLLI National Resource Center]
Workforce Development Solution for Furman CPD
CampusCE will deliver its complete workforce development package to its third department from Furman University. Furman University Learning for You and the Furman University OLLI currently make use of the cloud technology offered by the CampusCE Education Management System. CampusCE will provide the Furman University Center for Corporate and Professional Development with a registration software management solution that allows the department to offer a comprehensive, uniquely branded, e-commerce site to its constituents.
The Furman University Center for Corporate and Professional Development responds to the needs of organizations by providing instructional programs tailored to meet the needs of various industries. Furman’s training options cover executive leadership, team development, project management, finance, accounting, and the many facets of business development, performance improvement, and corporate sustainability. To find out more about Furman University’s Center for Corporate and Professional Development visit www2.furman.edu/Sites/CPD
CampusCE Welcomes UGA OLLI
CampusCE welcomes the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Georgia to the CampusCE Lifelong Learning family. CampusCE also supports the OLLI at Furman University, Kennesaw University, the University of Texas Medical Branch, and Yavapai College. Our commitment to lifelong learning is stronger than ever. We will provide UGA OLLI with an EMS solution that enables web-based management of membership, registration, payment, and administrative services for their growing OLLI program.
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Georgia began in 1994 and has since expanded to offer approximately 100 courses to over 400 members from the Athens, GA metro area. The UGA OLLI provides an array of courses from a variety of disciplines. The OLLI programs are non-credit educational programs specifically developed for seasoned adults who are aged 50 and older. The Bernard Osher Foundation supports 117 Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes on university and college campuses across the country, with at least one program in each of the 50 states. For more information about the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Georgia visit www.athenslir.org
The State of Cloud Computing in 2011 [INFOGRAPHIC]
via ReadWriteWeb BitNami, Cloud.com and Zenoss have released the results of its 2011 Cloud Computing Outlook survey. You can request a copy of the report here. Only 20% respondents have no plans to develop a cloud computing strategy, but there was a clear preference for using dedicated hardware instead of public cloud infrastructure. Virtualization is very popular, and the biggest benefit respondents perceive in cloud computing was hardware savings. [Continue reading at ReadWriteWeb]
How Online Education Is Changing the Way We Learn [INFOGRAPHIC]
via Mashable Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it’s not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days. [Continue reading at Mashable]
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