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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I had committed to be with my colleagues at the campus center a couple of days ago to welcome the first years’ and their parents. For reasons we don’t need to go into here, it was not on my calendar, so I was able to go there only for a few minutes. The place was buzzing with the usual excitement with the first year students, parents and relatives and it did cross my mind that I probably read some of their applications! Though there was a lot of activity, my colleagues told me that though our “stress phish” was very popular and were gone mostly by the time I arrived, there were not that many questions at our table. Phishing has become such a big problem that we are spending inordinate amount of time resolving them and we are out there to increase the awareness.
How times change! There was a time when questions like “How do I get connected to the network?” brought so many of the students and parents to our desk. But, thanks to the advances in technologies as well as the hard work by our staff of planning ahead and being prepared has made many of these to be non-issues. We vastly simplified the wireless guest access and we saw a significant increase in the number of guest wireless connections and to the best of our knowledge, no one needed help. That’s pretty good!
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The new academic year began last week and the College is full of activity. The Clapp Library is looking busy and alive. One knows how busy the Library is just as you enter – the exterior door has some issue (wear and tear) and the next set of doors are typically left open (patrons are too busy to close them; they really think that they are swing doors that should close automatically, but they don’t!). Sorry, the doors are my pet peeve and my attempts to get them fixed permanently have always resulted in the answer of how costly it would be! I even suggested an old style cord of sorts for the interior door that the student or the staff at the service desk can pull to shut them. But then we have insurance liability to worry about because some may trip over the cord. All kidding aside, we are on a mission to get these fixed soon (Hope is everything)!
There are some days that you never forget – the landing on the moon (I was here listening to tamil translation of a BBC broadcast on radio), the Challenger disaster (Watching TV here ) and of course 9/11 (I was at work at Wesleyan where we all gathered to watch the horrible scenes on TV). I found this op-ed in NY Times on 9/11/2012 to be interesting (though we have heard many of these before, when you look at it collectively, it sheds a different light on the problem). Of course, this is just one version of the events preceding the horrible tragedy. Hearing some of the survivors of the tragedy recount their loved ones even now makes one feel so sad. On to other things.
We are in the process of developing a short term strategic plan. One question we are interested in the question is the future of networking. It is the most fundamental technology we rely on 24/7/365 (or 366 every four years) and take for granted. Whether it is cloud computing or Mobile First, all of which we will incorporate, having a reliable and fast network infrastructure is critical. Note that I said reliable first! (more…)