April 2016 archive

15
Apr
2016

An update on some of the things we are doing…

categories: Uncategorized

As always, we are engaged in a lot of exciting things and I thought I would touch on a few items here.

MOOCs – Two of our self study courses that opened in January are drawing to a close. Italian Language and Culture: Beginner  and Personal Finance, Part 1: Investing in Yourself have been very well received. They have had much higher engagement percentages going into last couple of weeks (between 9 and 12%) than the typical MOOCs. And the learners are loving the courses. Please see here for several additional courses that are opening up in the next few weeks. A couple of them have been run before, but are redone to be shorter ones which seem to be more appropriate for this medium. Enroll yourself and enjoy!

Blended Learning – We are doing really great in this Mellon funded project. We continue to receive requests for support and experimentation. I strongly suggest that you view this website, especially the embedded video. Talking about blended learning, a second jointly taught course between Davidson College and Wellesley is going great by the reviews we have received so far. Van Hillard from Davidson and Justin Armstrong from Wellesley have been co-teaching a first year writing course. These are truly collaborative projects involving faculty members, students, staff members from Research and Instructional Support and Library Collections. For example, Helene Bilis is planning to jointly teach a course with a faculty member from Smith for which they are working on a project on making a digital clickable edition of an 18th-century almanac that once belonged to Marie-Antoinette. This book was acquired by special collections and a member of RIS team is assisting with digitization and the creation of clickable online version of this book!

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08
Apr
2016

Higher Ed or Higher Eds?

categories: Uncategorized

Every single time I have conversations with my colleagues from other institutions, it is so apparent that we all operate so differently, sometime unnecessarily. Carnegie Classifications is a commonly used classification which groups institutions in a broad sense. However, deep down, every single institution is different in significant ways that it would be impossible to find two institutions that are similar. So, I find the term “Higher Ed” to be emphasizing similarities way more than highlighting the differences. So in reality, we are the Higher Eds.

I want to clarify that having such differences amongst the institutions is healthy and I would say that the students and parents like it that way generally (not exclusively) for the differences in academic offerings. Of course there are other factors such as alumnae network, residential experience and athletics that are significant differentiators.

But, how many students and parents choose a College because it has the best learning management system or ERP, or the best helpdesk ticketing system or even the best wireless coverage? Or even other campus services (I won’t name them!!)? Why is it that we are reluctant to work together to find a common ground and collaborate on these non-differentiators? It is not as if we don’t collaborate. In fact we are excellent at sharing information and best practices in so many areas. It is just that we are reluctant to take that last step of shared services across institutions.

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