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…)
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…)
From Washington Post. http://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/12/03/Editorial-Opinion/Graphics/toles12042013.jpg%5B/caption%5D
Hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving with your family and friends. We had a fabulous time, celebrating with family and friends over multiple days. Lots of calories were consumed and now comes the hard part of trying to shed them. The incentives to go and exercise is proving harder and harder. I just came back from the second town hall meeting where we all got to hear about the plans for the facilities renovations and how paying for them will result in a serious belt tightening. It will not be easy, but this is the reality.
It is at these times that one should not forget that innovations are critical to what we do and that we should continue to find the strength to keep going despite the morale issue that will try to pull us down. So, what is innovation? Merriam-Webster says ” the act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods”. Wikipedia says “Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulated needs, or existing market needs.” The first definition is in the right spirit of innovation. You innovate without thinking about an end goal. The second one is more goal oriented. You innovate to meet some new requirements or existing “market” needs. For us, the market is our faculty, students, staff and alumnae.
By the second definition, I am proud to say that LTS has introduced several “innovations” in all areas that we support. Patron driven acquisition, creative and innovative use of the resources in special collections by faculty from all disciplines, the many ways in which we are collaborating with the faculty on the use of instructional technologies to enhance teaching, learning and research (such as digital storytelling, the use of maps, and multimedia annotations), many ways in which we have extended the use of Drupal to accommodate the needs of community as well as improve efficiencies (such as automating the feeding of data and eliminating manual updates), and a whole list of web applications that have simplified many of the administrative tasks, and the use of document imaging systems and data warehouses. The list is long and can go on and on!
(more…)