By Steven Mintz. The idea is half a century old. But implementation has lagged far behind. During the early 1960s, the educational psychologist Jerome Bruner called for discovery learning, which he contrasted with the standard pedagogy of the day, knowledge transmission. An updated version of John Dewey’s vision of an education that is social and interactive, discovery learning emphasizes inquiry, problem solving, and team work, as opposed to the passive absorption of information. Read more...

By Margaret Andrews. Throughout the years I’ve taught a variety of courses and short programs and have collected a relatively short list of favorite films and videos that I use to illustrate certain lessons and behaviors.  Here are some of my favorites:
Milkshakes:  This four-minute video showcases Clay Christensen talking about how you get the most creative insights into a situation/problem by making sure you ask the right questions. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Nick Kristof, at the New York Times, set off an explosion on Twitter with his piece Sunday about the seeming disappearance of college faculty from larger political discussions.  Quoting famous people from Harvard, Princeton, and Harvard again, Kristof concluded that the marginalization of academic voices is a result of hyper-specialization and rampant liberalism. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Has anyone out there seen a reasonably elegant solution to the issue of mandating technology for part-time students?
My campus is starting to make actual, discernible headway towards more widespread use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in place of commercial textbooks. It’s still a small movement, but it’s growing quickly, and it has enthusiastic support across faculty, staff, administration, and students. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Every so often, when watching something on tv, I’ll sort of recognize an actor.  I’ll know it’s someone I’ve seen before, but won’t be able to place where. I’ve been known to lose entire evenings trying to figure out who it is.  That feeling of knowing that I know, but being unable to call up the specifics, is a special kind of frustration. It happens with actors, songs, or even famous quotations in unfamiliar contexts. Shazam and Google sometimes help, but I try not to resort to them too quickly.  It feels like cheating. Read more...

By Matt Reed. In a discussion recently about the demographics of our online students, I realized that I’m not entirely sure what an online student is.  We have students in each of the following groups:

• Students who take nothing but entirely online classes
• Students who take most classes online, but who come to campus for a few
• Students who take most of their classes on campus, but who regularly take one or two classes online to make their schedules cleaner
• Students who take “hybrid” classes (also called “brick and click” or “surf and turf”) in which some of the regular class meetings are held (or replaced by other activities) online
• Students who take traditional classes that have fairly robust online materials, and who have to work with/through our LMS in the course of what they’re doing. Read more...

By Susan O'Doherty. In 2006, I was working at a job I thought I would keep until I retired. I loved what I did. I was the assistant director of a psychotherapy center that helped crime victims, and I was responsible for supervising a staff of gifted and dedicated therapists and for introducing traumatized clients to the process of therapy. It was stressful but highly rewarding work, until the social service agency that oversaw our center decided that there was more money to be made out of us, and brought in a consultant to do an efficiency analysis. The result was that the center's executive director, the clinical director and I were all let go, and the therapists, who had been on salary, were changed to fee-for-service, which meant that they got paid only if the client showed up. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. Labor Economics talks about a type of unemployment in which the jobs available are not the jobs that workers are looking for. This “mismatch” can occur because of geographical issues (as when the jobs are in California but the unemployed workers are in New York), or because of other issues. One such reason might be a mismatch in the skills possessed by workers and the skills desired by employers in search of employees. I found myself thinking of this recently when I read an article about a new type of high school that has captured some people’s attention, including the attention of the President of the United States. Read more...