Blogs

1. Copyright Reform balancing innovation with incentive. 2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act reform updating legislation technologically while retaining Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

I still remember the terror and thrill of having my own class to teach for the first time.

The fact that MOOCS and online courses have sparked new conversations on your campus about teaching and learning is a terrific development. We should be grateful whenever attention is paid to teaching. The problem is that neither MOOCS or online courses are, in themselves, a strategy to meet the challenges we all face in higher ed. MOOCS and online courses are a means, not an end, and should be understood as such.

Here are my suggestions for what higher education might resolve to do in the New Year. What are yours?

In the last year or two, many challenges have been made to lower the cost of earning a degree, create differential pricing based on major, or allow individual professors to set the cost of their on-line courses. A high quality blend of liberal arts and professional training will never compete with pressures for new, low-cost options if price alone is considered. When playing the game Let’s Make a Deal, many excellent institutions will lose out to these economic pressures unless they respond with much more than good economic arguments.

My fellow IHE blogger, Lee Skallerup Bessette, got a bit of a discussion going on Twitter over the break when she posted a real estate listing for an abandoned college campus. In the context of adjunct activism, she proposed pulling people together to buy the campus and start their own college.

Getting the year off...somehow.

The most important change in higher education is not the growth in online learning, the rise of the MOOCS or the mobilization and digitization of curriculum. Rather, it is the change from courses as the product of one (faculty) practitioner to a team approach, where faculty (as subject matter experts) collaborate with learning designers, librarians, media specialists, and technology professionals to design, deliver and evaluate the course.