By Joshua Kim. During his keynote address at EDUCAUSE 2013, Sir Ken Robinson reminisced about his own days at as a graduate student. He talked about hitting the library at the “crack of noon” for three or so hours of grueling work before hitting the pub.
Sir Ken may have been exaggerating somewhat the life of an academic in the 1970s, but his description of a typical day in the life of an aspiring academic conforms pretty well to my own graduate school experience circa 1992. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Every tech person that I speak with agrees that the problems with healthcare.gov were totally predictable.  
The basic lesson that the academic tech community seems to be taking from the healthcare.gov debacle is that something similar would never happen to us.
This is the wrong lesson.
We need to learn from healthcare.gov so as not to repeat the same mistakes that the federal government made in our new platform rollouts. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Every so often I’ll hear something that doesn’t especially resonate in the moment, but that won’t let go of my brain. It sort of sinks its claws in until I finally deal with it. That happened a little over a week ago at a conference at UMass. The topic of the panel was helping transfer students succeed. It featured a speaker from HCC -- Mark Broadbent, our transfer counselor -- as well as transfer counselors from several nearby four-year colleges and universities. Much of the discussion was pretty much what I had anticipated: the importance of aligning coursework as early as possible, helping students set reasonable and realistic expectations, and the like. Read more...