April 2015 archive

Excuses, excuses, excuses!

I have been pretty bad about not writing for the past several days. I have been very busy – what’s new? The Board of Trustees were here last week. I had to attend a retreat followup and several other meetings. Wellesley faculty did a great job talking about the MOOCs and other blended learning activities taking place at the College. Trustees were very impressed. I was so happy how the faculty acknowledged the partnership with LTS several times. Our staff members who are contributing to all of these collaborations deserve a lot of credit for their enthusiasm, creativity, hard work and patience.

I have been spending every waking moment of the past week thinking about a “competition” that I am part of. Well, it turns out that I was also dreaming about it and waking up in the middle of the night. As I may have mentioned, I am enrolled in a fantastic MOOC – The Analytics Edge. I have learned so much from it in terms of data handling techniques and statistical modeling. I have also learned the open source statistical programming language called R.  We have been given access to very interesting data sets for analysis ranging from Framingham Heart Study to data from Netflix as it related to the Netflix Prize.

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Change

I attended a gathering of several senior managers at the College as a part of a Leadership development effort. The topic of discussion is managing change. We had a very interesting meeting and discussed the challenges everyone faces in trying to affect changes at the institution. It was great to hear the different perspectives on the same issue. This also provided us an opportunity to interact with colleagues with whom we may not interact in the same fashion. I learned a few things about what is going on at the College.

It was apparent that each of us, because of a variety of reasons, including the position we occupy and the areas of our responsibilities, bring a different view point to  change management. Since LTS needs to deal with change on a regular basis, I wanted to share how we tend to implement changes.

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