Higher Ed Innovations

Exploring Academic Innovation

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Ten years from now college might not look too different from the outside—the manicured quads, the football games, the parties—but the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.

Textbooks. Lecture halls. September-to-spring calendars. Over the next decade, technology may sweep away some of the most basic aspects of a university education and usher in a flood of innovations and changes. Look for online classes that let students learn at their own pace, drawing on materials from schools across the country—not just a single professor and a hefty textbook.

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Flipping the classroom isn't the answer -- let's scramble it (essay) | Inside Higher Ed

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Toby E. Stuart, a Harvard Business School professor who researches social networks and entrepreneurship, noted that virtually every government wants to replicate Silicon Valley’s university-driven system of innovation.

“But you can’t engineer it through policy means,” he says.

He thinks proof-of-concept centers would be more useful at universities other than the likes of M.I.T., Stanford and Harvard, which are already hubs in entrepreneurial clusters.

“But in any significant way, it will happen organically,” he says, “and not through some bureaucratic intervention.”

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http://www.edudemic.com/blended-learning-infographic-2/

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What Non-Profit Universities Can Learn from the For-Profits | Inside Higher Ed

Among the charges: That these institutions deploy unscrupulous recruiting practices, leave students with crippling levels of debt, award worthless degrees, and inflate job placement rates. Students at the for-profits are more likely to drop out, default on their loans, and be left unemployed than those who attend non-profit colleges and universities.

Nevertheless, there are six essential lessons that non-profits would do well to learn from the for-profits.

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We Need More EdTech, But Less Technology In The Classroom

Technology plays a primary role in my teaching, but I rarely turn on the computer that makes the classroom smart. Occasionally, I project the class tweet stream. I am an advocate of Twitter for higher ed. But generally, during class time, I try to avoid mediating my connection with students through [...]

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Ready or Not, Change is Coming | Inside Higher Ed

This shift in student values and expectations is real; yet serious systemic solutions for how universities at an institutional level can adapt to these changes has been largely missing from the conversation about higher ed’s future.

How, for example, are we going to more effectively serve and interface with student populations that...

attend, perhaps more than ever before, to the outcomes of their education; 

expect a return on their investment and increasingly demand internships, practical experience and direct windows into possible employment paths from the very start of their post-secondary careers;

value personalization that is embedded in their day-to-day experiences and that responds to both their weaknesses and strengths;

prefer optimized pathways that recognize and credit prior knowledge and experience and allow them to move at their own pace;

opt to work across multiple institutions and multiple instructional contexts to get to goal; and

demand a student experience accessible anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

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What 5 Tech Experts Expect in 2014

The momentum shows little sign of abating in 2014. New tools are shaping everything from in-classroom instruction to White House policy making. The Chronicle asked five education-technology experts to think about the year ahead and identify major themes at the intersection of education technology and higher education.

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How the Humanities Compute in the Classroom

Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takesto create a work of digital scholarship that will last.

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It's Time for a New Definition of Accreditation

It is time for the academic community to face reality and negotiate, not on the basis of long-held myths, but on terms that reflect today’s variety of educational offerings and the role colleges are expected to play in improving the social mobility of both groups and individuals. Lurking now as perhaps the greatest challenge facing accreditation is a reduction in traditional higher-education institutions serving as the primary authority for education offerings, credits, and degrees

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Blended learning entails more than simply replacing class time with online course elements or supplementing an online course with face-to-face meetings. To be successful, the online and face-to-face modes need to be integrated by taking into account the learning objectives and the affordances of each mode and deliberately linking what occurs in each mode.

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http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2012/12/rise-higher-education-buffet-infographic 

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The Future Is Now: 15 Innovations to Watch For

As a result, colleges must become more nimble, entrepreneurial, student-focused, and accountable for what students learn. I am a historian and far better at interpreting the past than forecasting the future. Nevertheless, I will go out on a limb and predict 15 innovations that will alter the face of higher education over the next 36 months

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Beyond the Hype: Have MOOCs Missed The Mark? - Edudemic

All in all, MOOCs have not been the disruption to the higher educational market that they were initially hyped to be. While they may hold promise for continuing education and educational outreach, the initial MOOC model appears to have limited potential for credit-bearing courses as part of degree programs. As new models emerge (such as the Georgia Tech and Udacity program), they appear to be converging more and more with traditional online courses. That is, they reduce the Massive and Open components to become less MOOCs, and more OCs: Online Courses.

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Students can earn the first 90 credit hours required for the degree through online modules, the coordinating board said, with the last 30 credit hours “offered in both a face-to-face and online format.” The degree emphasizes organizational leadership, the board said, adding that the program “will culminate with a digital-capstone experience where students will apply their knowledge and skills to real-world business problems.”

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We need to get smart.

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One of the essential goals of the flipped classroom is to move beyond the lecture as the primary way to deliver information and structure class time. A well-developed lecture can be effective, but instructors rely on it too heavily and often to the exclusion of other more meaningful teaching and learning strategies. A flipped classroom allows instructors to introduce new ways of doing things. Yet adding something new generally requires letting go of something old. In the flipped classroom, instructors need to let go of their reliance on the lecture and focus on other ways to enhance learning by introducing active learning strategies that put students in the center of the learning experience.