One of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a prof is to start building my classes to start with 1 week of onboarding followed by just 12 weeks of content. Last 2 weeks are just catchup and reassessment. Course is basically over at Thanksgiving.
— Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert) November 28, 2022
From DSC:
With a shout out to Beth McMurtrie’s Teaching Newsletter for pointing this Tweet out from Robert Talbert. Nice work Robert and Beth!
2023 Higher Education Trend Watch — from educause.edu
Also see:
2023 Strategic Trends Glossary — from educause.edu
Excerpts:
How to Communicate with Brevity — from qaspire.com by Tanmay Vora; with thanks to Roberto Ferraro for this resource
We live in a world of information overload. In such a world, communicating with brevity is a gift to others.
10 Must Read Books for Learning Designers — from linkedin.com by Amit Garg
Excerpt:
From the 45+ #books that I’ve read in last 2 years here are my top 10 recommendations for #learningdesigners or anyone in #learninganddevelopment
Speaking of recommended books (but from a more technical perspective this time), also see:
10 must-read tech books for 2023 — from enterprisersproject.com by Katie Sanders (Editorial Team)
Get new thinking on the technologies of tomorrow – from AI to cloud and edge – and the related challenges for leaders
How the University of California Strike Could Reshape Higher Education — from news.yahoo.com by Katie Reilly
Excerpts:
“To have this many workers on strike is really something new in higher education,” says Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers, who is also president of the union for graduate workers and faculty at her university. “The willingness of these workers to bring their campuses to a standstill is demonstrating that the current model of higher education can’t continue, and that the current system really rests on extremely underpaid labor.”
…
The striking workers argue that their current pay makes it challenging to afford housing near their universities, in a state with one of the highest costs of living in the country. Jaime, the Ph.D. candidate, says he makes $27,000 per year as a teaching fellow and pays $1,200 in monthly rent for an apartment he shares with two roommates. (Median rent in the Los Angeles metropolitan area is about $3,000, according to Realtor.com.) “We are the ones who do the majority of teaching and research,” he says. “But nevertheless, the university doesn’t pay us enough to live where we work.”
Also relevant/see:
Hundreds of UC Faculty Members Stop Teaching as Strike Continues — from chronicle.com by Grace Mayer
Excerpt:
The strike is shining a spotlight on a longstanding problem within higher education: Today, tenured, full-time faculty members make up a smaller percentage of university employees than they did 50 years ago, in part due to the financial pressures facing universities amid funding cuts. The proportion of other university employees, who receive less job security and lower pay, “has grown tremendously,” says Tim Cain, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education, who studies campus activism and unionization.
“There’s such stratification between the tenured full professor and a graduate student employee or a postdoc or a tutor,” says Cain. “They’re doing a great deal of the work, and the work that they’re doing in the classroom is often very similar to the work of others who are getting paid substantially more.”
Speaking of schools in California, also see:
Learning in the brain — from sites.google.com by Efrat Furst; with thanks to 3-Star Learning Experiences for this resource
Excerpts:
Think of working memory as the reception counter to a huge archive.
To summarize, working memory processing resources are highly limited, and yet meaningful processing is essential for storage in long-term memory. It is therefore important to use these resources effectively when learning. There are many tested and proven effective teaching strategies, but a question that often comes up is when to apply each strategy for the best results?
Learning in the brain- not new, but newly updated:
long-term memory, working memory, interactions, and related strategies –https://t.co/mtxr74egz4 pic.twitter.com/oPC6sUYlXy— Efrat Furst (@EfratFurst) March 6, 2022
Table of Experts: Trends in Higher Education — from bizjournals.com by Holly Dolezalek. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal held a panel discussion recently about trends in higher education.
Excerpts (which focus on law schools/the legal profession):
Anthony Niedwiecki: The legal profession and legal education are very conservative. Covid showed they can, and we as institutions can, change. At Mitchell Hamline, we were the first law school in the country to offer a partially online JD degree. We’ve had that experience since 2015, which has really helped us through Covid. But I think the biggest thing I’ve learned from our students through this process is the need for flexibility. We thought students would want to go back into the classroom at some point and be around people. No! They voted by the classes they signed up for: They signed up for the classes that were online. Some students want to be on campus, some online. So we’ve had to develop our program around different types of modalities we may not have given any thought to before. The students in the online program range in age all the way up to 73 years old. They’ve been in careers, they’re accountants, they’re doctors, they’re health care professionals, elected officials. The other thing is office hours — students like online office hours because it’s convenient, and they can be in an office where other people are talking and learn from it.
The lesson I take from that, in some ways, even applying it to the law school, is having that partnership with people who want to hire students to make sure that they’re actually involved with the students. We’re finding they help mentor those students, help us make sure we have the right courses in place, and give them opportunities to do internships and externships. So we’ve been starting to partner with some national professional organizations that are attached to the law.
Can a Group of MIT Professors Turn a White Paper Into a New Kind of College? — from edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young
Excerpt:
A group of professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropped a provocative white paper in September that proposed a new kind of college that would address some of the growing public skepticism of higher education. This week, they took the next step toward bringing their vision from idea to reality.
That next step was holding a virtual forum that brought together a who’s who of college innovation leaders, including presidents of experimental colleges, professors known for novel teaching practices and critical observers of the higher education space.
The MIT professors who authored the white paper tried to make clear that even though they’re from an elite university, they do not have all the answers. Their white paper takes pains to describe itself as a draft framework and to invite input from players across the education ecosystem so they can revise and improve the plan.
IDEAS FOR DESIGNING An Affordable New Educational Institution
The goal of this document is simply to propose some principles and ideas that we hope will lay the groundwork for the future, for an education that will be both more affordable and more effective.
…
Promotions and titles will be much more closely tied to educational performance—quality, commitment, outcomes, and innovation—than to research outcomes.
Best Webcams for Teachers and Students — from techlearning.com by Luke Edwards
Get the best webcams for teachers and students to help with hybrid learning and more
Best Wireless Keyboard and Mouse for Teachers 2022 — from techlearning.com by Luke Edwards
The best wireless keyboard and mouse for teachers keep you connected to devices while staying mobile
2023 Higher Education Trend Watch — from educause.edu
Excerpt:
This report focuses on the workforce, cultural, and technological shifts for ten macro trends emerging in higher education in 2023. Across these three areas of shift, we report the major impacts and steps that institutions are taking in response to each trend. Some trends overlap with the 2022 Higher Education Trend Watch report. However, while some topics and issues remain consistent, significant shifts have occurred across many of the trends for 2023.
You want your students back in the classroom? Give them a good reason! — from educationalist.substack.com by Alexandra Mihai
Excerpt:
Right now what I would like to do is turn things upside- down and bring the physical classroom and the in-person teaching and learning into the spotlight. After almost three years of doing things differently, for better or worse, I believe this is a crucial exercise that will help us calibrate our practice moving further. Ironically, despite our expectations that students will happily rush back to campus, many of us noticed a different reality: low attendance levels and in some cases also low engagement.
So, a few questions we could start by asking ourselves are…
So the next time someone asks “why should students come to class?” let’s try to answer anything else than “because they have to”.
