Blogs

Are today's MOOCs the netbooks of 2009? Remember the netbook craze? We were all going to replace are overly expensive and bulky laptops with cheap and light netbooks.

We recently revealed the results of one of our survey questions, “What Surprised You When You First Started Working in Higher Education” After the most common answer, “the politics,” next on the list was the slow pace of accomplishing change in higher education.

Now that I know how to run my peer-driven learning course, I need to figure out where is best to do it.

I’m writing this on Inauguration Day. Although I missed hearing the speech live, I did catch a stream of it a little later on, and I was struck by how, in a relatively short speech, the President managed to remind us of the needs of those who have too often been left out of “we, the people” — women who do not earn equal pay, homosexuals who do not enjoy equal rights, immigrants who are not afforded equal protection. It was a liberal speech in the best sense of the word, a speech open to possibility and progress, and while I could, as always, wish it had gone farther, I was glad I had a chance to read and hear it.

In which the NCAA implies giving up on an expectation of integrity, while paying lip service.

Inspired by Nick Bilton's NYTimes article Disruptions: Impulse Buys, Straight to a Screen, I decided to add up exactly how much money I sent to Amazon in 2012 for digital books.

Graduate school is a competitive, stressful and extremely demanding environment. We’re all continuously trying to live up to everybody’s expectations: our supervisors’ expectations, our perfectionism-induced expectations of ourselves, while trying to meet the demands of students, a family and friends. To stay sane in this pressure cooker, it’s important to come back to our senses regularly and regain focus.

Another overseas programs appears to be biting the dust. The University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) is not renewing its contract with the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT). This brings into question yet again why universities pursue these overseas ventures when they are rarely profitable and difficult to sustain.