Opinion

Over the break, I had a welcome chance to catch up on my reading. Through the miracle of Twitter -- which I think of as an annotated bibliography that self-updates in real time -- I ran across these two articles, and couldn’t help noticing how they crash into each other.

Michael Feldstein is "an educational technology consultant and a lifelong educator," with previous gigs as "senior program manager of MindTap at Cengage Learning and principal product strategy manager for Academic Enterprise Solutions (formerly Academic Enterprise Initiative, or AEI) at Oracle." He is also a terrific speaker (recommend Michael for any keynote you need keynoted), an excellent and prolific writer, and someone who seems to know everybody else in edtech.

As most readers of IHE probably already know, there’s been a little bit of a controversy over the past few days about a “study” purporting to find that the job of university of professor is the least stressful job in America. Scott Jaschik usefully summarizes the original study (by Career Cast), the piece in Forbes that seems to have drawn the most ire, and the various responses—and, of course, his piece has generated even more responses in the form of comments on his article. I’m struck, as always, by the widespread misconceptions about what it is, exactly, that university professors do—even, apparently, among readers of IHE.

“A year ago, I could not have imagined that we would be where we are now,” she said. “Who knows where we’ll be in five more years?” ask Ms. Koller, a representative of Coursera, the most utilized of the MOOC options so far.

Professors can change attitudes, but only by thinking about educational values, and not just grading policies, writes Cathy Davidson.

When a father is the one balancing work and family duties, not everyone in academe is supportive or even understands, writes Matt Fotis.

I don't know about you, but when I come back to my work after the holiday break I get a serious case of the winter doldrums. Being in the throes of the Michigan winter, what I really want to do is snuggle up in some warm fleece and read murder-mysteries in between episodes of Downton Abbey. I long for the wide-eyed optimism I had going into the fall semester when everything seemed possible, but now I'm lucky if I remember what day it is, what exactly it is I have to do, and what in the world I was thinking when I was working on this draft of my dissertation proposal a few weeks ago.