By Barbara Fister. The other day, I bumped into an article in which some pundit was solving the problems of higher education. Unfortunately, I can’t link to it because it was one of those “nothing to see here, move along” moments. But one phrase from the article stuck like a burr. The pundit seemed to assume that “content delivery” was to a large extent the purpose of courses and majors, and that the problem we need to solve is delivering content more effectively and efficiently, which seems to me completely wrong. Read more...
Comparative Advantage in Our Tiny Department

Building a Bear

Course Development and MOOCs (Part 1): The Emergence of a Role
By Ellen Brandenberger. As MOOCs, or Massive Online Open Courseware, emerged over the last several years, the shaping of the industry has been widely influenced by a few large actors, such as edX, Coursera and Udacity, as well as the institutions whose content they distribute and repurpose--Harvard, MIT, and Rice among many. More...
The Future is Learning, But What About Schooling?
By Richard F. Elmore. I come to my fascination with learning and schooling, as most educators do, through deep life experience. I was a struggling learner in elementary school—a slow reader, a stutterer, a shy and diffident, rather dreamy, child who found school to be a scary and demeaning place. More...
“But My Kid’s School is Closed!”
By Matt Reed. They share something other than propinquity. Many students and staff are also parents of school-age children. When the K-12 schools declare a snow day, some are able to make alternate arrangements for childcare, but many can’t. For employees, that can mean needing to take personal days; early in the year, that’s usually not a crisis. For students, though, each individual professor sets her own attendance policy, so the risks of missing class when the college is officially open may vary from one course to another. Read more...
Farm Teams
By Matt Reed. Western Governors’ University is sending applicants who aren’t quite academically ready to enroll to StraighterLine to get themselves up to speed before coming back to WGU. Read more...
Class(es) Prerogative
By Matt Reed. Nerdiest lede ever: Is interdisciplinarity becoming a class prerogative?
January term had a distinct feel at my small liberal arts college. In that residential setting, intersession was a time for unusual, interdisciplinary, or otherwise unusual classes. My favorite was a class on Gay and Lesbian Politics, which I took in the late 80’s. Read more...
The Tap on the Shoulder
By Matt Reed. One night in my freshman year of college, several of us were hanging out in a dorm room. We had the stereo tuned to the campus radio station, and we were doing the urgent/overlapping conversation thing that happens at that age. At a pause in the discussion, one of my friends said, from out of nowhere, that I should be on the radio. Read more...
4 Quick Tips for Better Writing in any Discipline
By Shira Lurie. No matter what field you’re in, grad school will at some point demand a piece of writing from you. Kelly has provided an excellent “taxonomy," from dissertations to emails, that makes clear that the ability to write well is important to grad school success. With this in mind, I am offering a follow-up to Kelly’s post with some tips for improving your writing. Many of these are things we’ve learned in grade school, but have forgotten over time. More...