Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
We hear a lot about mentorship in the context of middle managers who aspire to be leaders. You can read more about Mentoring as an EDUCAUSE Special Topic. I thought this is a great time to talk about someone that I consider as my mentor – John Meerts, who was the Vice President for Finance and Administration at Wesleyan University until he retired on June 30th this year. John was the Vice President for Information Technology Services at Wesleyan from 1996 till 2006, when he became the VP for Finance and Administration. I reported to him from 1996-2009 before moving on.
No matter at what stage of your professional career you are, you always should aspire to be better and an important aspect of that is to have someone that you look up to for advice or from who you learn a few things. To me this loosely defines mentorship.
(more…)
Wintonbury Hills Golf Course, Bloomfield, CT
I decided to take a week off, but it is turning out to be more like “work from home”. This is life, I guess. No complaints. I did get a few rounds of golf in.
As we are going through the Workday implementation, it is very clear that Workday has a very clear and strict process for a reason. We all have opinions on the process itself, but what I see is that it imposes a level of discipline that we are all not used to. Especially, they have a concept of “In Scope” and “Out of Scope”. This therefore requires us to think very deeply about what we want in scope early on. There are slight variations on the theme that are always supported, it is just that the typical large variations that we are all used to that is not possible.
Why? Because, those of us who have been in this business already have experienced the pain of scope creep. In tech related projects, it goes like this – techies first want as complete a project plan as possible; it doesn’t happen, so they complain; then they deliver some initial prototypes; functional offices are thrilled to see it; their creative juices flow and they now want this and that; a lot of times some techies feed this by saying, “yeah this can be done but you should really see this cool stuff”; such back and forth then becomes the way the project is handled; the project crawls; the ex-enthusiastic techies are now disgruntled and say “I can’t wait to get off this project” because this has become a drag and they want to move to the next exciting project; finally, both the techies and the functional owners complain that the other party is not delivering.
Instead, how about saying “folks, we have a common set of goals. This requires discipline. Let us define what is important for day 1. You should really let the creative juices flow, because this is very important for us to construct a solid foundation, but remember, not everything you ask for will be possible on day 1. Just park the less important ones for later. And please don’t say that everything you come up with is equally important”. In other words, creativity is to be accommodated, but within bounds. If only we can all get to this point, our projects will be better and move faster.
I always feel that Higher Ed administrative projects are treated like research projects. They tend to be explorations. However, researchers set broad and general goals for a research project. This won’t work for administrative projects. We need to be more precise about the end game. The outcomes are not always predictable in a research project, and they typically tend to branch off in other areas. This is the nature of the research game. Unfortunately, the same exact method may not be suitable for administrative projects.
I am here at the Richmond International Airport waiting to get back to Boston after a fabulous conference. This year the CLAC (Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges) annual conference was held at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA. The campus is beautiful and the hosts were gracious and extremely helpful and the overall experience was just fabulous.
There is nothing better than a gathering of committed higher ed professionals who work in institutions that are very similar. All the member institutions are small liberal arts colleges and there is a lot of similarities in terms of what we are trying to accomplish and the challenges we face. And we are very open and are not afraid to share. So, it was a lot of fun.
(more…)
Diploma Names in Alternate Alphabets
In case you have not read this, I strongly encourage you to do so. We were asked by the students about the possibility of having their names printed in a language other than English, we agreed to explore and got it done. As is the case with everything, it is not trivial. We quickly developed an app where the students could copy and paste their name composed using a tool like Google Input Tools . We had them reviewed by faculty members and in a few cases volunteers from outside and then found a very cooperative printer in Scrip Safe who was willing to print them for us. We needed to purchase the fonts we needed. 32 students participated in the pilot and the names were in 9 languages, with Mandarin Chinese topping the list at 20. The diplomas will have their name in English as well as the alternate alphabet. We will be handing them over tomorrow after the commencement!
We collaborate with the Registrar’s Office, Student Life and the Provost’s Office on various things leading up to the commencement. The last couple of weeks leading to the commencement are pretty intense, mainly because of the compression of schedules and other complications. But everyone at the College put in enormous efforts to make sure that everything goes well.
(more…)
I am enrolled in a course being offered by Worldview in Stanford called “Behind and Beyond Big Data“. As a part of this I am learning a lot about how the big data is being used in various interesting ways. In addition, a couple of other things that I saw on TV or heard in the social media also has captured my interest.
Tweets predicting rates of heart attacks. https://goo.gl/2iInWM%5B/caption%5D
Predictive Modeling based on Facebook Likes
Michal Kosinskia, David Stillwella, and Thore Graepelb from the University of Cambridge and Microsoft designed an experiment to see if the Facebook Likes of a person is a predictor of “private traits and attributes” of a person such as age, intelligence and sexual orientation. They describe their research here. A very large sample of facebook users contributed voluntarily to the research by participating in myPersonality initiative. They also manually inspected the volunteers’ facebook profiles in some cases to infer additional information such as the ethnic origin. It is a fascinating experiment. If you are interested in checking how well the system predicts your traits and attributes, try it out at Apply Magic Sauce.
(more…)
With the easy access to data, metrics of all sorts have become common place. Similarly, valuation is something we hear constantly about and we ourselves live and breathe. I am writing about both of these now because, I am looking at staffing data for the members of Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges and also having to deal with annoying pricing issues with Adobe and SPSS software licensing.
Benchmarking is a very useful exercise in that it provides a first level comparison with those that we would consider peers. For example, we can use staffing metrics to justify additional positions (which has become a rare event in Higher Ed recently) or more importantly, we can use this to justify reallocation of existing staff. Of course, during difficult budget discussions, this can be used to reduce positions. The issue with data is that, even if it is done scientifically, the results tend to be in the eyes of the beholder. However, it is very important to treat these data for first level comparisons and not read too much into them for reasons I explain below.
Valuation is another problem. We hear that the cost of higher education is too high or that we argue that the cost of a software is ridiculously high. In most of these cases, the argument is based on how fast it is growing relative to CPI. As painful a question as it is, is this the right comparison to go by?
(more…)
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!
(more…)
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.
(more…)
I was at the NERCOMP Annual Conference last week. There were some really interesting presentations that I attended, but I should say that the first keynote by Gerard Senehi was less than optimal for a conference to open. Danah Boyd, on the other hand, was fantastic, talking about how even the younger members of our society care about privacy, contrary to the myth that they don’t.
One particular talk that I liked and want to follow up has to do with open educational resources. The powerpoint presentation is available along with the abstract, so please review it. Though some of the panelists are from institutions that are very different from us, we feel that there is something here for us to learn from and educate our community.
Artificial Intelligence has been in the news recently and frankly, trying to define it in clear terms is something I am not capable of. It has morphed over the years thanks to advances in computing. Is it possible for machines to emulate humans in the way we think? This is a loaded question as you can imagine.
Theoretically speaking, an artificial intelligence system must pass the Turing test. This test involves a party game where a man and a woman play with a third person who is trying to guess the genders accurately. The man provides all answers to convince the third person that he is a man while the woman provides tricky answers to convince the third person that she is the man. Turing proposed that if you switched one of them with a machine then the person needs to guess who is a human and who is a machine. If the person failed to guess correctly more than half the time, then the machine will be declared having passed the test (that it has enough intelligence on its own to fool the third person).
There are a lot more underlying details to this of course, because of the availability of massive amounts of data and the computing power, even the “brute force” computing can be confused with intelligence.
(more…)
As we are beginning our transition to Workday, yet again, the issues surrounding data integrity, definitions etc. which I am fond of writing about, are surfacing. Despite the fact that Chaos theory in itself is a huge field and I don’t necessarily understand all aspects of it, its vastly simplified definition struck a chord with me.
“Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior and condition of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. […] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[3] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.”
and
a quote from Edward Lorenz “Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
The take home lesson (a stretch, I understand!) from this is “We are beginning a major administrative systems project and we are essentially dealing with a lot of (deterministic) dynamic data and we have a golden opportunity to get our initial conditions right so that at least for a long time to come we can avoid divergence and chaos”. (more…)
