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Intellectually rigorous work lives, thrives, and teems proudly outside conventional notions of academic rigor. Although institutions of higher education only recognize rigor when it mimics mastery of content, when it creates a hierarchy of expertise, when it maps clearly to pre-determined outcomes, there are works of exception - multimodal, collaborative, and playful - that push the boundaries of disciplinary allegiances, and don't always wear their brains on their sleeves, so to speak.

"Here's a thought, if you are spending all of your time worrying about a term no one can define, its time to get a different hobby.Thus, step three in Changing Gears 2012 is to stop using the term rigor, and to start to actually define what you want from education for your students."

"Postsecondary students in British Columbia may get a bit of a break when it comes time to buy their textbooks this fall. In the first move of its kind in Canada, the B.C. government said it will make available up to 20 free and open online textbooks for some of the most popular first- and second-year university and college courses. There's no guarantee that faculty will choose to assign the new textbooks, but proponents of the project are hoping that rigorous quality control measures and a little nudging from students will win them over. The textbooks also will be available to institutions, faculty and students across Canada to use at no charge."

Yes, I see that it is Canada, once again, leading the way.... :) If enough faculty adopt open online textbooks a new norm will be achieved! Of course, the quality must be equivalent....or, perhaps, better.

The state of Washington did it first. The Pacific North West leads the way.

"With this poorly articulated rationale in mind, I present first, some pros and cons to citing blogs within formal academic writing. Next, I put forth three main sub-questions that I think will help us-and by "us" I mean myself and the readers who grapple with the ethical and professional questions of rigor in standards of academic sourcing-organize our thoughts. "

"First, it has strategically developed its own resources-through satellite campuses, online instruction, and rigorous faculty development-to extend its internal instructional capacity. For the past twenty years, UCF has supplemented its network of physical campuses with a vast, virtual extension of its instructional reach through technology. Now, nearly 78 percent of all UCF students take online or hybrid courses and 38 percent of all credits are earned online."

" instead of professors and students, there's facilitators and participants, instead of one-directional lectures, you have discussions, and instead of tests and quizzes you create projects and artifacts. If it all sounds too squishy and feel-good, make no mistake, this is serious learning, tackling the amazingly heady topic of feminism and technology and created by bona fide, longtime professors in their fields. It's rigorous, complex and in San Antonio, you don't need to be a college student (past or present) or even own a computer to access it. That's the new international network FemTechNet in a nutshell, one of those ideas that seems to have suddenly arrived fully formed, like Athena springing out of Zeus' head. Obviously a lot more work went into it than that, but the actual creation timeline for the Network took a little more than a year-and-a-half according to co-creators Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, Dean of the New School's Media Studies program and professor of media studies at Pitzer College, respectively."

"After rigorous review, the National College Credit Recommendation Service (NCCRS, Regents Research Fund, USNY) has recommended six Saylor Foundation course exams for potential credit, bringing the total of recommended exams to nine. Students who pass proctored exams for these nine courses could earn up to twenty-eight transferable college credits."

"Ivory Tower takes a look at universities and their transformation from providers of education to business ventures that strive to be the biggest and the best providers of the "college experience". The competition among these institutions of higher learning has had an adverse effect on those they are suppose to serve. From less rigorous curriculums to higher tuition prices, the universities have changed the way Americans think of educations. Students are now consumers and university presidents are CEOs overseeing multiplexes of the college experience. In order to pay for that experience, students are taking out an average of about $30,000 in student loans. The overall student debt in the US has now surpassed $1tn."

"The university bans lectures and requires that students be actively engaged at least three-quarters of the time while in their seminar classes, meaning that they must participate rather than passively listen to an instructor. By incorporating the science of learning across the curriculum, Minerva strives to improve how its students think before they move on to the specific subject matter most colleges emphasize."