By Marcelo Knobel. Unfortunately, my guess is that the answer to this question is a sound “NO”. Despite continuous claims of a revolution in classroom teaching strategies, the advent of massive on-line open courses, and the huge expansion in the use of technological devices (cell phone, computers, tablets, etc), in most higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world traditional lecturing endures. It will probably continue this way for many years to come, because to do otherwise requires a change of paradigm for hundreds of thousands of instructors, HEIs tradition and culture, and every aspect of institutional operation (research grants, hiring and promotion processes, etc). Read more...
01 mars 2015
Will Professors Teach Differently in 10 Years?
A Moment From the Daddy/Daughter Dance
By Matt Reed. The Agawam Daddy/Daughter dance was last night. The Girl and I attended, as we have for the last several years.
She’s ten now. Read more...
OER as Retention Initiative
By Matt Reed. “Free community college” would require major legal and financial changes, as well as some unusually farsighted political leadership. Free textbooks just require a little ingenuity. We can do this. Read more...
Make‘em Pay?
By Matt Reed. Community college folk often complain, when getting blamed for high remediation rates, that what’s really being measured is the performance of the local high schools. A state senator in Tennessee is proposing to base budgets on that. Read more...
Corporate Governance and Shared Governance
By Matt Reed. This should be a much bigger story.
IHE ran a story by Ry Rivard that should have set sociologists and economists running wild. It’s about several non-profit colleges, including one community college, that have made policy changes affecting students at the behest of bondholders. Read more...
Trying to Understand Alt-Acs
By Joshua Kim. The modern campus contains many more non-faculty educators than at anytime in the past. These are staff members who work directly on mission related, teaching and research, activities. Alt-academics will often partner with faculty on teaching and research tasks, tasks that were previously done by faculty alone. Read more...
Alt-Acs and Terminal Degrees
By Joshua Kim. One question I often hear from my alt-ac colleagues is, “should I go for my Ph.D.”? The desire for alt-acs to get the terminal degree seems to have less to do with acquiring a new set of skills, as skills can be picked up in a range of less onerous and time consuming educational environments. Rather, a PhD for an alt-academic is a signifier. It is the price of admission to full colleague status with the faculty. Read more...
Are Alt-Acs Underutilized?
By Joshua Kim. The thing to remember about us alt-acs is that we are academics with a different incentive profile than our faculty colleagues. Our career progression and promotion paths are different. Work that might be a detriment for tenure track faculty are a benefit for us alt-acs. Read more...
Change Your Default Meeting Times
By Joshua Kim. I’d like to make a modest proposal. We should stop scheduling meetings with zero time to go from one meeting to the next.
Does this describe your life? You have a meeting scheduled from 9:00am to 10:00am. And then another meeting from 10:00am to 10:30am. You have left yourself exactly zero minutes to get from the first meeting to the second. Read more...
Fun is Over-Rated
By G. Rendell. A recent item in Scientific American is titled, "Games Help Save Energy". But read it all the way through (a daunting 993 words), and you'll learn that there's less to this headline than meets the eye. Read more...
