Leadership & StratEDgy

A couple of months ago, I invited people to join me in “The MOOC Challenge.” Now that I’m half-way through my MOOC – A Crash Course in Creativity, taught by Tina Seelig through the Venture Lab at Stanford University – I’ll give you a mid-term report on the course.

It seems we may have another big, unpredictable storm close to home – MOOCs. They have been getting a lot of press this year, including another recent article from the New York Times.

Last week’s StratEDgy post focused on Social Media and Teaching. Faculty reported that one barrier preventing them from using social media was a concern about privacy. As a counterpoint to that perspective, here our attention is on student use of social media. Most students have the opposite problem – a sort of apathy toward privacy issues.

I had the opportunity to attend a session last week, hosted by Pearson, on how higher ed faculty use social media. Much of the content was quite interesting.

Google Trends, released back in 2006, is Google’s free tool that allows you to see the interest over time for any search term you choose. What can we explore about higher ed trends using this tool?

After watching the debate last night, it made me think that colleges and universities should be more actively engaged in encouraging – including making it easier – for students to vote.

A recent NY Times article by Cal Newport caught my eye. Entitled “Follow a Career Passion? Let it Follow You,” it hinted at an interesting take on career decisions.

Teaching a class in Strategic Management and consulting in this area to colleges and universities and companies in the higher education space, I’m asked a lot about various tools and techniques that can be effective in diagnosing problems and generating ideas/solutions, and the answer is that there are many. Perhaps too many.