Prognostications on the 21st century and higher education

I was reading a number of posts last week on Change11 on the topic of the 21st century University. Given how far things had progressed in the previous century it's hard to prognosticate on anything that's more than 10 years away...so in lieu of a guess or prophecy of what is to come, here's more of a wish: let's all just learn to work together!

This past year I had attended a few conferences, both in person and virtually, and I've met colleagues that have been in situations that are similar to my own: their online and face-to-face sides of the institution are different, with different funding lines and different organizational charts. This type of organizational behavior does have adverse reactions in the teaching and learning realm in that more innovative teaching and learning opportunities are hampered by campus politics and funding lines. In our institution for example, face to face courses are offered through the "regular" university; while online courses, as well as hybrid courses are offered through University College (formerly the division of continuing education).

This means that degree granting programs may be left traversing the political waters of the institution when they want to offer more than one delivery mechanism to their curriculum. Variety, they say, is the spice of life, so a course can be offered as face to face, hybrid, HyFlex, or online depending on the student demographic and the reach of the course, but institutional structures may prevent having something offered as anything other than face to face.

I hope that in the next few years these barriers can come down and the modality of the course will be chosen based on factors other than the college through which it is offered, this way everyone can benefit from the delivery method that is best suited to the course. :-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the
Read more