Group items tagged

"I'm not opposed to disruption; rather, I'm skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise: "paradigm-shifting" technology that improves university teaching and learning. The truth is, many of these start-ups clearly have no idea what actually works in higher ed and know little about the direction university teaching and learning have moved in the last 10 years, because they're trying to take us backward, not forward. Start-up and commercial tech are certainly proving disruptive-just in all the wrong ways."

A very interesting article on the future of higher ed. I found this quote to be particularly interesting. "Colleges and universities have an abundance of intellectual capital; intellectual resources and assets that most companies would love to have in their R&D divisions.  Mathematicians, technologists, engineers, designers, marketers, anthropologists -- and the list goes on and on.  However, for some reason our collective academic culture does not encourage collaboration across the organization, and from what I hear from some colleagues, it can even be confrontational.  Yes, the needs of students, the needs of faulty, and the needs of the administration and staff can create competing priorities.  However, for most private institutions, and some public institutions, there is only one need that matters, and that is the need to survive long-term. "

"America is shifting from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. Our social institutions, colleges and universities included, were created for the former. Today they all seem to be broken. They work less well than they once did. Through either repair or replacement - more likely a combination - they need to be refitted for a new age. Higher education underwent this kind of evolution in the past as the United States shifted from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The classical agrarian college, imported from 17th-century England with a curriculum rooted in the Middle Ages, was established to educate a learned clergy to govern the colonies. This model held sway until the early 19th century."

survey shows that colleges (w.liberal arts in sample) that have more spending per students, part time faculty and higher faculty-student ratios, get similar results on the NSSE score. A NSEE variable is "good teaching with high quality interactions with faculty"

Some food for thought in here.

Many academics are saying this piece is totally off base. I'll include a couple of posts from Inside Higher Ed that challenge Friedman.

I found Shirky's keynote at Educase to be very interesting and the quote this article builds upon was one that I had made a not of as well.

Clay lays into the current higher ed model

"Amid the various influences that massive open online courses have had on higher education in their short life so far -- the topic of a daylong conference here Monday -- this may be among the more unexpected: The courses may be prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before." - this was something that administrators from Stanford mentioned in the Educause Learning Initiatives conference when discussing the biggest benefits they had seen from developing MOOCs