“To be absolutely blunt, it is time for individual faculty to give up, cheerfully and not grudgingly, any claim to sole authority over teaching methods of any kind.” – Former Princeton President William Bowen earlier this week at the “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow” conference at Rice University (via Jason Jones). That’s a pretty…
Last Friday, the Colorado Conference of the AAUP (for which I serve as co-President) held a one-day meeting at Fort Lewis College in Durango devoted to the topic of shared governance. Our thinking behind planning this gathering was that Colorado higher education seemed to be going crazy. So many weird things had been happening at…
Over on my personal blog, I write a lot about MOOCs. You might say I’m more than a little MOOC-obsessed, but I really am trying to develop other interests. That effort ran aground this week when a Massive Open Online Course at the University of Zurich basically imploded. It’s a confusing story (the Chronicle report on…
A few hours ago, Aaron posted a story about the situation at Northern New Mexico College. I’m told that this is a blog written by Northern New Mexico faculty. Here are some low-lights: 1. “In the last 60 days, Northern New Mexico College has removed or lost over 25% of its full-time faculty. In addition, 4 program directors,…
I vividly remember my exact reaction the first time I read about Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs). It was, “They can’t be serious, can they? How on earth can anybody teach 30,000 people at once?” Since I had already developed an interest in quality control for online education, I followed every new MOOC development…
If you’re on Twitter, you probably know about a ritual called “Friday Follow.” It’s a tradition in which people recommend to their followers other people whose Tweets might interest them. While I know this isn’t Twitter, I thought I’d bring the work of one of my tweeps to the attention of readers here because it’s…
Last week, the President of the University of Texas at Austin wrote a campus-wide e-mail. While such things usually do not make news, this time it did because of its subject. Both the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Education covered it because educational technology is not usually the stuff of Presidential attention. I…
If you haven’t read the letter from the San Jose State (SJSU) Philosophy Department to Harvard’s Michael Sandel about his “Justice” MOOC through MIT and Harvard’s edX program, you really should. I think it might become a classic document in the history of the long, slow decline of American Higher Education. For one thing, it’s…
As Aaron has noted, he and a group of other professors will be taking and writing about Coursera’s “E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.” I will not be one of them – not because I wouldn’t find it interesting, but because I’ve already been down the road, having taken a World History course last semester (and…