Learning Innovation

This post is intended to open up a dialogue with the leadership at Adobe. I hope that people at Adobe read this post in the context of a larger discussion that is going on about the merits of outsourcing, a discussion that The Economist captures really well in its recent Special Report: Outsourcing and Offshoring. Please do not mistake these concerns about outsourcing e-learning product development and support with any negative arguments partnering with colleagues from India. As I've written in other places, I very much believe that India is positioned for a source of strength in e-learning in the years to come.

This is how I used to work. During the weekly meeting with my team I'd create an agenda (shared by e-mail ahead of time when possible), attaching time estimates to each point, and move the discussion down the agenda. I'd be sure to include everyone in the discussion, listen more than I spoke, start and end the meeting on time.

Whenever I tell people that I've decided to practice "inbox zero" they say one of four things (or some combination of all four):

The success of an academic IT department depends largely on that unit's alignment to the culture of the larger academic organization. Actions, behaviors, and a general outlook that may be appropriate for another industry (and in fact may be recognized as "best practices" within the larger IT world), may result in complete failure within higher ed.

Academic Partnerships this week announced MOOC2Degree, a new program designed to put a sustainable revenue model behind massively open online courses. The program, which so far has 8 schools signed up for the first round of courses, underwrites the development of MOOC courses and then takes an (undisclosed) revenue share for students who enroll in the teaching institution upon completion of the free online course.

For years we have been print Newsweek subscribers. Now that Newsweek has abandoned print and gone to all digital I have abandoned Newsweek.

This week I wrote about how much money I sent to Amazon in 2012 to support my digital book (audio and e-book) habit. The grand total was just shy of a thousand bucks.

Are today's MOOCs the netbooks of 2009? Remember the netbook craze? We were all going to replace are overly expensive and bulky laptops with cheap and light netbooks.