Blogs

On January 16th at 9:06 AM, I liked the University of Phoenix Facebook Page. Because of my consulting practice, it makes sense for me to like a wide variety of higher-education-related pages on Facebook. Universities and colleges that I have worked with are in my list of likes as well as several other well-known schools and programs. I like seeing what they're up to on Facebook. When I liked Phoenix, I was doing it as a way to keep up on how they run their Facebook presence. Little did I realize at the time that my innocent "like" was going to be put to a use that I didn't expect.

Okay, I admit, this is crowdsourcing as a blatant attempt to save time. Researching this formally would be quite an undertaking, but I’m hoping that some of my wise and worldly readers have seen something like this.

Last week this document created quite a storm of controversy. Comments trended toward two themes: a growing backlash to all the attention that MOOCs are getting at the expense of so many on-going distance learning initiatives already in place and the thought that it is old wine in new bottles.

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

Everybody - but everybody - is over the moon about MOOCs. The latest thing is Tom Friedman and fellow biggies at Davos hyperventilating about them. UD has a MOOC, on poetry, and although it's relatively small (2,000 rather than 200 billion students), it has earned her a modest acclaim. She is currently preparing a new MOOC, on the novels of Don DeLillo.

But they’ve reached the level of satire. A little levity about serious subjects.

Last week a document circulated among some of my far-flung colleagues — maybe some of you saw it? Titled “Learning Outcomes are Corrosive,” by Frank Furedi, it was linked approvingly by folks in the humanities, many of them friends of mine. Its final sentence may be the one I most resonate with, as it expresses the kind of optimistic idealism about humanistic education that I think many of us share: “students should be treated as grown-ups who can be allowed to embark on a journey of discovery instead of directed to a predetermined destination.”

In my last post, I talked about how having to account for greenhouse gas emissions from off-campus behaviors started me on the path to realizing that you can't build a sustainable campus in an unsustainable city (or town, or countryside). Thus, while my official charge is to change the Greenback campus, my thought process focuses more and more on changing the Backboro metropolitan area.