
Accessible Future Workshop: A Report

By Leslie Niiro. When I graduate from Duke University with a liberal-arts degree (hopefully of my own design), I will never have taken a physics class where I mastered Gaussian surfaces. I won’t have studied dehydrohalogenation of alkyl halides in organic chemistry or the life cycle of Lycopodium in biology. Even after looking up these terms in Wikipedia, I doubt I’ll remember what they mean by the time this post is published. More...
By Elizabeth Pitts. A couple of years ago, Lila McDowell wrote a piece for The Chronicle that described “critical friends” as an essential part of managing the division inherent in interdisciplinary research. Critical friends, she wrote, are the people who challenge us to reconceptualize the obvious—the colleagues and mentors we rely on most, the ones who pay us the courtesy of letting us know when our writing is fuzzy or our arguments are weak. I’ve remembered this phrase during recent discussions in Professor Davidson’s MOOC on the history and future of higher education. More...
By Matthew Clark. This week in “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education,” we’re discussing the topic of institutional change. Specifically, we’re considering key strategies that will help us make important changes at colleges and universities. As we consider the development of our own strategies, Professor Davidson encourages us to “make alliances with other change makers” and “take change personally.” Along these lines, I would like to provide a brief practical guide to how those suggestions might be carried out. More...
By Gregory Karp. Massive open online classes offer enrichment during down time, and the ROI is better than TV. Free entertainment online is nothing new, but what if you could access a form of entertainment and enrichment over the Internet that others pay thousands of dollars for and that keeps you occupied for weeks at a time?
That's one of the allures of MOOCs — massive open online classes. They're college classes taught online, some by the world's leading experts in their fields at famous universities. More...
By Vincent DeFrancesco. A photo campaign called “I, Too, Am Harvard” is causing a commotion on the Ivy League campus. The campaign, inspired by a play of the same name that will have its premiere on March 7, highlights “the faces and voices of black students at Harvard College,” according to the project’s Tumblr page. More...