Blogs

My own answer to the question posed in this post's title varies. As with anything related to the overall picture of Student Affairs, nuance abounds. Initially, I would say that if I were to generalize, I would vehemently say that we actively discourage large scale innovation in Student Affairs. However, because we exist in "the gray," I feel compelled to mention that there are pockets of innovation … although, finding them isn't easy. You know who you are.

I've watched the subscriber alerts pile up in my email to the point where I now have close to five hundred students in my MOOC on poetry. Okay, it's not the tens of thousands of people who enroll in Machine Learning. It's not MOOCzilla. But for a close reading of difficult twentieth century poems, it ain't bad.

If you haven’t seen Paul Fain’s piece in IHE about credit for prior learning, check it out. It’s a great introduction to a topic that it ready to break big over the next couple of years.

Ron Adner (a valued colleague at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth- full disclosure) did not set out to write a book about innovation in higher ed. I'm going to do my best to convince him to turn his considerable powers of analysis to our industry for his next book. The lessons of The Wide Lens are however essential for higher ed to grapple with, as we attempt to understand how to effectively innovate our industry to remain relevant and prosperous in the digital age.

Often there is a lot of discussion on protecting the identity of our subjects when we do our research. The IRB focuses on the protection of both the subjects and the institution to a great extent, but what about the researcher? In the Terry Arendell paper about the difficulties she found in her interviews men, the topic of safety in the field is discussed at length. It important to note that while this particular example discussed the dangers of women being alone while interview men, this does not mean that other gender interactions won't lead to dangerous situations.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum works at four institutes of higher learning at the same time. That's right, four.

TED brings us a tool to create our own video content, launched at the end of April: TED-Ed, “lessons worth sharing.” It seems like TED-Ed has successfully capitalized on an emerging ed tech formula of sorts – facilitating the production of content that is visually interesting, sharable, customizable, specific and engaging.

Educational technology is hot (finally!). Thanks to edX and Udacity and Khan Academy and Coursera and the Stanford AI course our world is getting lots of attention. Lots of people have lots of opinions about the growth of the massively open online course (MOOC), but as with most things a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. David Brooks' column The Campus Tsunami (5/3/12) is a case in point.