TWILIS

Headline of the Week: MOOC-based Graduate Degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech

It was only October of last year I first mentioned MOOCs in a TWILIS headline. Luther’s Board of Regents had expressed interest and I had the opportunity to research the topic and share some thoughts.

Headline of the Week: Electronic Books as Class Texts

Yesterday I came across an interesting article. It seems Coursera has struck deals with a number of textbook publishers. The deal enables electronic versions of the publishers’ textbooks to be used for free during the course of the MOOCs. Right to access materials has been a challenge with MOOCs. It’s one thing to specify materials for a course and another for those taking the course to get access to them. Free courses, free materials; funded by venture investments and experimentation dollars.

Headline of the Week: Why Do They Offer MOOCs?

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were spent at a conference with approximately 50 higher education CIOs. Some were from smaller schools of Luther’s size and others were much bigger. It was an interesting and valuable event. Initially it was interesting because of the unique conference model. Start-up firm Consero hosted the event. Consero hosts conferences that bring together industry specific, like kind leader groups. In this case it was their first offering for CIOs in higher education. To the CIOs the conference was free.

Headline of the Week: StrengthsFinder

Last year during the planning for our Strategy Days the recommendation was made that we look at leveraging the StrengthsFinder instrument and process as a tool for us to learn more about ourselves and our relationships to our work and to our colleagues. At that point we had already chosen the True Colors tool. We kept the StrengthsFinder idea in the file.

Change is not easy. Change requires extraordinary communication and collaboration and above all trust. Relationships are the key to trust.

Headline of the Week: Teaching What You Are Just Learning

One upside of attending conferences is that there is a lot of time involved in travelling which can provide opportunity for reading and studying. The American Airlines shutdown on Tuesday provided even more!

This week I read an interesting book called, “Teaching What You Don’t Know”. It is a book written by a person in a faculty development position.

Headline of the Week: Change to What?

Very early in my career IBM began holding department and area meetings on “change.” Information was presented about how the status quo was unsustainable. Statistics and evidence were presented to help staff understand the dynamics of the environment and the nature of competition. These meetings were generally effective at getting some folks fired up and motivated to be part of “change.”

Usually there was a second part that focused specifically on the nature of change itself and the nature of people as they consider change. Change is hard.

Headline of the Week: Stanford U. and edX will Jointly Build Open-Source Software to Deliver MOOCs

News and conversations on MOOCs continue. The hype is rampant and the term is so overloaded that it would not be surprising to soon see key participants invent new language to characterize their offerings and to describe their value distancing themselves from MOOCs. Those in the fray are struggling to communicate their unique value and differentiate themselves from the others – even as the juries remain out on the premise. That said, the topic should not be dismissed out of hand.

Headline of the Week: Digital Technology Helping the Liberal Arts?

The Midwest Regional Educause conference was held in Chicago Monday through Wednesday (March 18-20, 2013) this week. The ACM IT and Library Leaders meeting was scheduled to leverage those attending Educause for a meeting Wednesday afternoon.

It is always encouraging and inspiring to get to know others with similar concerns and additional ideas and points of view and alternative perspectives.

Headline of the Week: MOOCs as On-Ramp/Demand Relief for Students (that start in California)

A very interesting leap occurred this week along the MOOC maturity vector. Proposed legislation in California (Senate Bill 520) would require California’s state colleges and universities (University of California, California State University and California’s community colleges) to accept credits earned via a subset of MOOCs. Presumably they would be a set of MOOCs whose quality had been vetted a priori by a faculty council, targeting current scarce general-education courses.

Headline of the Week: What if Employers Change What They Value?

One of my favorite professors is Clayton Christensen. He is at Harvard Business School. Clayton has popularized the term “disruptive innovation” in a series of books beginning with “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. He was interviewed by Mark Suster, an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist and blogger.