Comments on: Higher^2 Education

By: Kieran Mathieson

Kieran Mathieson — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 03:16:38 +0000

Another way to foment change takes advantage of academic freedom. It could have some effect at universities that won’t embrace change at the institutional level (and that’s most of them). There are individual faculty who, given a choice, would teach courses that are useful and pedagogically sound. If content packages like this existed, faculty could drop them into individual courses, with no approval needed from anyone in the institution.

Not broad change, no. But some change, slowly, course by course, is better than nothing. “Nothing” is what we’ll get if we rely on institutions’ hierarchies to change themselves.

Kieran

By: Cherie Frame

Cherie Frame — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 04:34:19 +0000

At our University, we have just introduced what we refer to as blended learning. The first cohort of students had to endure the new format complained bitterly, I believe it is mostly because they are in a transitional stage in their learning styles and do like having to read for themselves, they truly wish to be ‘told’ (and these are doctorate students). However, the studies are also telling us that through self discovery types of learning formats (like e-learning), adults exhibit a better synthesis of the material. What have you discovered in your travels?

By: David Glow

David Glow — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:37:23 +0000

Perfect summary of the issues behind the issue. We can’t solve tomorrow’s problems with yesterdays models and thinking: Yesterday’s models and thinking is what produced today’s results.

Yes, change is needed. And what makes this a larger challenge is the infrastructure itself. Education at all levels has to learn how to be nimble and keep pace to mirror the needs of this fast changing world. Yet, it seems the models haven’t significantly changed from the 1800s schoolhouse and textbook for the large majority of schooling (and even the online players often present the same model, they just put the text and speaker under a glass shield).