Learning Innovation

The highlight for me of Super Bowl XLVII (which I watched by streaming online) was when the power went out in the Superdome. This was a perfect tech failure because it makes us feel so much better about all of our tech failures.

Before I started blogging I never really spent time with people that work in public relations (PR).

CourseSmart is the world’s largest platform for eTextbooks and digital course materials. CourseSmart has over 40,000 titles from more than 50 publishers and over 3.5 million student and faculty users. CourseSmart Analytics provides faculty with a platform to develop insight into how students are interacting with the digital texts that they assign. Robust analytics seems to be the logical next step of the move from print to digital in curricular materials.

This post is intended to open up a dialogue with the leadership at Adobe. I hope that people at Adobe read this post in the context of a larger discussion that is going on about the merits of outsourcing, a discussion that The Economist captures really well in its recent Special Report: Outsourcing and Offshoring. Please do not mistake these concerns about outsourcing e-learning product development and support with any negative arguments partnering with colleagues from India. As I've written in other places, I very much believe that India is positioned for a source of strength in e-learning in the years to come.

This is how I used to work. During the weekly meeting with my team I'd create an agenda (shared by e-mail ahead of time when possible), attaching time estimates to each point, and move the discussion down the agenda. I'd be sure to include everyone in the discussion, listen more than I spoke, start and end the meeting on time.

Whenever I tell people that I've decided to practice "inbox zero" they say one of four things (or some combination of all four):

The success of an academic IT department depends largely on that unit's alignment to the culture of the larger academic organization. Actions, behaviors, and a general outlook that may be appropriate for another industry (and in fact may be recognized as "best practices" within the larger IT world), may result in complete failure within higher ed.

Academic Partnerships this week announced MOOC2Degree, a new program designed to put a sustainable revenue model behind massively open online courses. The program, which so far has 8 schools signed up for the first round of courses, underwrites the development of MOOC courses and then takes an (undisclosed) revenue share for students who enroll in the teaching institution upon completion of the free online course.