After several days of coordination and preparation, we successfully announced the first four Wellesley courses to be offered in WellesleyX, our grand MOOC experiment. They are:
- Introduction to Human Evolution, taught by Adam Van Arsdale, Fall 2013
- Was Alexander Great? The Life, Leadership, and Legacies of History’s Greatest Warrior, taught by Guy Rogers, Spring 2014
- Introduction to Global Sociology, taught by Smitha Radhakrishnan, Fall 2014
- Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance, taught by Yu Jin Ko, with Diego Arciniegas as a partner teacher, Fall 2014
After our announcement in Dec 2012, the Provost created an ad hoc WellesleyX committee and invited proposals from the faculty. When the process closed on March 1, we had several excellent proposals that the committee reviewed and presented their feedback based on which these four were selected as the first four courses. As you can see from the description of these courses, they are excellent choices with a diverse set of topics. These faculty are excited to be experimenting with this new medium and have great ideas for the students. We are excited to offer support and also learn through this process.
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I have been attending the NERCOMP Board retreat at Water’s Edge in Westbrook, CT. Since it is close to home, I have chosen to come home and attend all the meetings and hanging outs. The weather was not that great early on, but has been gorgeous since thursday afternoon. One of the major themes at the retreat is, yes, you guessed it right – how to improve communications. This is exactly what we have been talking about at Wellesley. In fact, we are going to discuss this amongst ourselves in LTS and chart a plan for the upcoming year. Though we have done an excellent job by centralizing all communications, bringing a simple and common vocabulary, there are many in the community who complain that they don’t hear about many of the things we communicate.
To me, this is a major unsolved problem. Whereas many unsolved problems in the sciences have been documented, such as the famous protein folding or “Do any odd weird numbers exist?” (hmmm.. i thought all weird numbers are kind of odd), communications is not listed as an unsolved problem. In my mind, it is a huge unsolved problem. There are plenty of free advice on fixing communication problems involving relationships. And this interesting advice from the office of HR in University of Minnesota on “Communicating to Solve Problems“. Obviously these are generalizations and don’t necessarily work across the board. What I am interested in the narrow slice – how do effective organizations communicate with their audience. In other words, what should we do to communicate effectively with our faculty, staff, students and alumnae. Or, what should NERCOMP do about effective communications with its members?
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Another academic year is coming to an end and these are mostly happy times. Our commencement is still a few days away, but, when I noticed that a friend was off to his son’s graduation at Penn State last weekend, it dawned on me that we are in that season already! I am sure that all those first years who made their college choices are the happiest bunch, dreaming about the college while preparing for high school graduation. I remember those days vividly though it has been a while with our two boys. It is pretty hard for me to believe that this is the third summer for me at Wellesley. Sometimes I feel like I am still settling in – people still have to explain to me certain terms and traditions 🙂
I was invited to go to a gathering of Higher Ed CIOs organized by a company called Consero. I was pretty skeptical about the whole thing. In the end, it was fun and useful. We met for a couple of days in San Diego to discuss various topics that the Higher Ed CIOs are interested in. In many cases, this turned out to be what many Higher Ed CIOs are worried about. Of course there are some who worry more than the others and the worry spectrum is highly influenced by local issues and the type of person the CIO is.
Frankly, though there are some common thread to discussions, the term “Higher Ed” is increasingly appearing to be as challenging as the term “American People”. Private College issues are different from public, large universities are different from small ones, liberal arts colleges seem to worry about completely different things than the rest, so on and so forth. In fact, someone even began making a distinction amongst the liberal arts colleges based on the endowment! The challenge therefore is to pick and choose ways in which you can benefit from these discussions as well as contribute to them in ways that they don’t appear to come from the CIO from a “wealthy”, highly selective, women’s liberal arts college from the state of Massachusetts (and therefore not applicable to the others). Despite all these challenges, we all had one thing in common – we had a lot of fun!
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