Weather has been beautiful and I finally got out and played golf at the Nehoiden Golf Course a couple of times this week. Next week is an exciting week. One of our son is graduating after MBA and the commencement is on thursday, 24th May. Wellesley’s commencement is on Friday, May 25th. I have now been at Wellesley long enough that I know at least five of the graduating seniors. And I “know” a sixth one through twitter who thanked me for helping move forward the “lifetime” Wellesley email for the senior class. We had an exciting Drupal upgrade on thursday where our staff demonstrated how such a complex upgrade can be done without the site really going down. And then, we encountered some issues and going back to the previous version was also done very elegantly and quickly. Go team! Absolutely no comparison to the situation before!
It is also that time of the year when we all have to write performance reviews and attend to compensation recommendations. This is not an easy task for many!
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During the first week of May, I attended a couple of presentations by students. One was Digital Stories by students in an Education class taught by Soo Hong on topics ranging from bullying in schools to multicultural requirements. The reason why some of us from LTS were invited was because we assisted in providing technology support for the production of these stories and also the class used a software called Mediathread from Columbia University. We also attended a presentation by students from CS 349A taught by Eni Mustafaraj who demonstrated a course recommendation system which uses a cosine similarity function to compare past history of classes taken by students to suggest courses of interest to other students. Both were very impressive and as I mentioned to some of my colleagues, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the students collaborated to produce the course recommendation system so quickly.
I am sure that all of us have heard about edX by now, a joint venture by MIT and Harvard to offer online courses for enhancing teaching and learning all around the world. In addition, earlier, we all heard about Stanford’s online courses and to a lesser extent, Yale’s Open Yale Courses. In a recent article in the Chronicle highlighting the company 2tor is also relevant to this discussion in that they are looking to extend their offerings and are talking to a lot of institutions. So, I thought, it is probably a good time for me to express my views on this subject.
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