Blogs

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.

I am sure you, or some of your fellow trustees, noticed Thomas Friedman’s op-ed (‘Revolution Hits the Universities’) in this weekend’s Sunday New York Times. There are some major caveats, though, to factor in when it comes to the Thomas Friedman/Moody’s/et al, argument; the one buzzing and humming through the system right now, propelled as it were by people, firms and organizations with vested yet often unstated interests in making you feel concerned, if not agitated.

Are more expensive colleges better? Working at a community college, I’d have to say “not necessarily.” They could be, and sometimes they are, but it depends on how they use that money. That’s why this piece -- about a study of liberal arts colleges showing little relation between cost and value -- didn’t especially surprise me.