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— from BizDean’s Talk
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Booz & Company’s hypothesis:
Companies that can craft a tightly focused set of innovation capabilities in line with their particular innovation strategy —and then align them with other enterprise-wide capabilities and their overall business strategy — will get a better return on the resources they invest in innovation.
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Wharton, Rebooted — from InsideHigherEd.com (emphasis below from DSC)
The nation’s oldest graduate school of business is adopting sweeping changes to its M.B.A. curriculum that come with a unique acknowledgment: two years of study alone cannot prepare graduates for decades of future unpredictability.
The changes at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which were supported by 87 percent of its faculty members in a vote last week, call for a more flexible menu of core courses, a greater emphasis on ethics, and new requirements designed to make students better communicators and judges of risk. They also promise future training — free — to graduates every seven years.
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Wharton’s solution is to offer tuition-free executive education training to future graduates of its master’s in business administration program, in what it dubs a “radically new vision of business education as a lifelong ‘knowledge partnership.’ “
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“In higher education, we generally think of degrees in the front-loaded sense: here’s everything you need to know and then we wish you the best,” he said. “This commitment they’ve made to career-long executive education is not only something that has changed the competitive landscape in business education, but also fits perfectly into our belief that management education is not something you can manage in just two years or one year.”
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From Michelle Rhee
Our mission is to build a national movement to defend the interests of children in public education and pursue transformative reform, so that America has the best education system in the world.
America’s schools are failing our kids. On this point, the data is clear. While some people blame the kids, or simply want to throw more money at the problem, we know that real change requires a better system — one that puts students’ needs before those of special interests or wasteful bureaucracies.
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Also see:
Hopes and challenges of virtual education: 5 questions with Julie Young — from The Journal by Natasha Wanchek
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| Florida Virtual School’s Julie Young: “… [A]s leaders in education, we need to create educational experiences that mirror life beyond the schoolhouse.” |
Julie Young began focusing on technology initiatives as a classroom teacher and elementary school administrator, but she found her direction in 1995 when she joined a team to explore the concept of online learning. That project aimed to provide high-quality courses to students in rural and high-minority districts. Two years later, Young continued this path when she founded Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the country’s first state-wide, Internet-based public high school.
Now president and CEO of FLVS, Young said her interest in virtual education started at a time when her family was just starting out and she was considering how technology advancements were changing the world.
Also see:
A National Primer on K-12 Online Learning — iNACOL
The National Primer on K-12 Online Learning provides a comprehensive overview of online learning by examining the basics about online teaching and learning, evaluating academic success, professional development, technology and other topics.
The Coming Golden Age of Open Educational Simulations — from Mike Caulfield
From DSC:
Thanks Mike for sharing this information, these lessons and reflections. Although your posting stopped me in my tracks, it was good to reflect upon. It made me wonder about such things as…
Enrollment in online courses increases at the highest rate ever — from The Chronicle by Travis Kaya
Despite predictions that the growth of online education would begin to level off, colleges reported the highest-ever annual increase in online enrollment—more than 21 percent—last year, according to a report on an annual survey of 2,600 higher-education institutions from the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group.
In fall 2009, colleges—including public, nonprofit private, and for-profit private institutions—reported that one million more students were enrolled in at least one Web-based course, bringing the total number of online students to 5.6 million. That unexpected increase—which topped the previous year’s 17-percent rise—may have been helped by higher demand for education in a rocky economy and an uptick in the number of colleges adopting online courses.
— from Morgan Stanley by Mary Meeker; original resource from George Siemens
Question Focus Areas
— resource from StraighterLine.com’s blog
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CONCLUSION: THE IMPERATIVE FOR CHANGE
After centuries of excellence and decades of cyclical recessions, higher education has developed some bad habits. When facing budget shortfalls, colleges and universities have not always adequately addressed underlying cost drivers and have instead pursued short-term solutions. Today, the need for fundamental changes is inescapable. The demand for highly skilled workers is unavoidable, the economic effects of a better-educated nation unequivocal—the United States needs more college-educated workers than ever.
A half century ago, higher education helped transform America’s World War II fighting force into a powerful labor force. In unpredicted and unprecedented ways, colleges and universities expanded and met the challenge of educating millions of returning GIs. They responded with heart and innovation. Today, higher education faces another challenge. The road ahead can become a deep plunge into a fiscal morass, a financing disaster that results in severely limited opportunity — or it can become an invigorating time of innovation, strategic cutting and reinvestment, with a laser focus on student completion. Through your leadership, we can work together to reinvent higher education and ensure continued progress toward the Big Goal.
Teaching strategies that help students learn how to learn — from FacultyFocus.com by Sara Coffman
From DSC:
I have it that higher education has reached the point where we need teams of specialists to create and deliver the content. (This is probably also true for K-12 as well.) If we want to engage the (already developing) new type of student these days, things have become far too complex for one person to do it all anymore.
Often, for complex endeavors, we need teams of people.
To be fair…given that we use textbooks created by publishers, I suppose that we already employ teams of people to a significant extent…but it is not enough…at least not yet. This point was brought home to me again while reviewing the article, Online Education: Budgets, Leadership Changes Drive Restructuring by David Nagel. David states that “the vast majority of online program managers claimed in a recent survey that faculty resistance is a significant hindrance to the expansion of their online education programs.”
This should not come as a surprise for several reasons (at least):
1) Faculty may not have taken a course online themselves yet. They may not have personally experienced this manner of teaching and learning. They may not have seen how effective it can be (if it’s done well and properly).
2) Secondly, it must be very difficult to invite other people to the table or to let others bring their chairs up to the table.
3) Thirdly, and more of my focus here, is that learning how to teach online is a new ball game — requiring a variety of skills and interests — of which few have all of the skills and interests involved and none have all of the necessary time required. Teaching an effective online course requires a great deal of time and work to understand what’s possible in that particular teaching and learning environment, and which tools to use when, and to pull together the resources needed to create effective, engaging, multimedia-based online-based materials for the first time. Heck, we instructional technologists struggle to keep up here, and it’s but one piece of the puzzle.
The problem is, with this new environment, a whole new set of skills are necessary, as captured in this graphic I created a while back:
In citing why restructurings are so prevalent, the following caught my eye:
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Now that “coordination of instructional resources” probably covers a variety of needs, requirements, and goals. But one of those goals/needs, at least in my mind and based upon my experience, is the need to create a team of specialists.
No longer can we expect to be able to put everything on the plate of one person. Because rare will that faculty member be who has the all the new prerequisite interests and abilities and software and hardware. And if they are that good, they won’t have the time to do it all anyway.
