Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them. Radical experiments in teaching carry no guarantees and even fewer rewards in most tenure and promotion systems, even if they are successful. In many cases faculty are required to assess their students in a standardized way to fulfill requirements for the curriculum. Nothing is easier to assess than information recall on multiple-choice exams, and the concise and “objective” numbers satisfy committee members busy with their own teaching and research.

In a world of nearly infinite information, we must first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there.

WGU constantly surveys both graduates and their employers to find out if they are lacking in any competencies so they can continue to fine-tune their programs.

So far, the open-education movement has been supported, to an astonishing extent, by a single donor: The Hewlett Foundation has made $68 million worth of grants to initiatives at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Rice, Stanford, and Tufts. Today, such foundation money is slowing, but new sources of financing are emerging. President Barack Obama has directed $100 billion in stimulus money to education at all levels, and he recently appointed a prominent advocate of open education to be undersecretary of education (Martha Kanter, who helped launch the 100-member Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources and the Community College Open Textbook Project)

Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions.

Based on the incredible investment of universities in social architecture: in quads, residence halls and lounges, it's ironic that most universities still do not see the internet as cost effective social venue, despite the countless examples online

Universities just couldn't see how to extend the old value and investment into connecting and learning, to the new field.

Universities are following along the same trends of the internet as a whole, with a bit of a lag. College websites are still mostly "web 1.0": characterized by static content, controlled by a centralized office.  Curriculum and learning is still centralized and controlled in learning managment systems like Blackboard. Where there are discussion features in Blackboard, the content stays centralized with the class and is lost at the end of the term. Where there are blogs on university websites, they tend to be written by selected and edited "brand ambassadors" - an attempt to put a real face on a preferred message.This year, often led by the admissions department, it has become fashionable for schools to use social media links on their sites. The thinking, however, is still mostly in the 1.0 paradigm: "follow the school on twitter" or "become a fan of the university on Facebook." In this paradigm, the university is still the focus, a one to many publisher in the center. Based on competition and financial pressures, businesses based on publishing models are scrambling to decentralize, lower cost structures, and move their models towards connecting and aggregating. When will the paradigm shift for the University?