Learning Innovation

If you haven't had a chance to read about Noodle's acquisition of the Lore, please go check out Doug Lederman's piece from 3/15. Before we get to our questions for Noodle's founder and chairman John Katzman , I think we should first congratulate Joseph Cohen and his partners and colleagues at Lore. We need more people like the Lore founders to start edtech businesses.

So I need a new backpack. The world's best backpack for anyone that works at the intersection of learning and technology. Do you have any recommendations?

Everyone in higher ed seems to believe in the power of innovation, while very few of us know how to change how we organize ourselves to move from ideas to execution.

We have become spoiled for choice in the world of online meeting platforms for synchronous teaching and webinars. We can choose between Adobe Connect, Blackboard Collaborate, WebEX, GoToMeeting, Zoom, FuzeBox, BigBlueButton, Lync, Skype and I'm sure others (what am I missing?).

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are wonderful things. We should applaud MOOCS, participate in MOOCs, teach MOOCs, and encourage our institutions to participate in the MOOC movement. But what MOOCs may not do is lower the costs of higher ed. In fact, an argument could be made the the rise of the MOOCs will put new cost pressures on institutions, introducing new expenses over and beyond the direct cost of producing and delivering a MOOC. These additional costs incurred by the MOOC movement may show up in higher tuition prices.

This past week I had the opportunity to spend some quality time at the hospital. My younger daughter (8th grade) had her appendix out. Her loss of an appendix was my gain for thinking about some of things that higher ed can learn from hospitals.

My team is working to introduce improved collaboration tools for our online learners. We have concluded that the native Wiki and file exchange features in our LMS are insufficient for the sort of rich collaboration that our student teams need. Uploading and downloading files is too cumbersome and error prone.

Dr. Peter Stokes is currently the executive director of postsecondary innovation in the College of Professional Studies at Northeastern University. Many of you probably got to know Peter during his tenure (almost 14 years!) in various leadership roles at Eduventures.