ELI on Facebook

ELI Student Life now has a Facebook page! If you're a Facebooker, check it out--and "like" it!

Top 100 Education Blogs

Looking for a little light reading over the holidays, or some new ideas for your thinking about spring classes? Check out this list of the Top 100 education blogs, covering elearning, education policy, library services, teaching, learning, internet culture, and more.

Are we Netflix?

There's an interesting blog post up on Inside Higher Ed today, "5 Things Netflix Streaming Can Teach Higher Ed." It prompts us to look toward the future in considering what higher ed can and should look like, and to do that serious rethinking before, as the post puts it, someone else does it for us.

This call for broad rethinking seems to be the tenor of the discussion about higher ed these days, whether it's from philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation, which is encouraging designing education for the "Next Generation Learner," to Peter Smith's much-discussed book, Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning.

What do you think? Are we as an institution, or even as an industry, forward-looking enough? Do you, as a faculty member, feel engaged in these discussions and able to do work that participates in moving us forward? Do you think these visions are even the correct direction for higher education to be moving?

Quick Tips to Make Your Teaching Life Easier

Are you reading the ProfHacker blog at the Chronicle? Some interesting ideas and resources there...

The recent post about Google's Rapportive tool kind of blew my mind (what do you think of it?), and as someone with WAY too much email to handle, I liked the idea in another recent post of using "best by" dating in email requests.

Texting for student engagement?

Here's a blog post about some colleges that have tried pilot programs where faculty text students reminders, notes, updates, etc. According to the post, students find the text messages "more personal" than an email. What do you think? Can you see yourself texting your students?

Modular approach to online coursework

The Kentucky Community and Technical College System has started offering self-paced, on-demand online courses in a modular format. Each normal course is broken up into several modules focused on a discrete topic or skill set and students can opt to take just the modules they are interested in or take the full series to get the course credit. They can also spread out completion of a course over the long term if they want to--check out the example KCTCS gives at the very bottom of the page.

What do you think of this approach?

NOVA Q&A

I spend a lot of my time in meetings of various college groups, so I tend to know a lot about what's going on with different college initiatives that you as a faculty member may not have a chance to hear about.

So, let me share the wealth! What NOVA questions do you have? (I'm thinking of things like, "Hey, whatever happened to initiative xyz I remember from a few years ago?" or, "Why did we change to doing x this new way?" or, "When is xyz going to happen?")

And, if you want to learn a lot about where NOVA and the VCCS may be going in the next couple of years, don't forget to come to the Chancellor's town hall meeting in the CE Forum this Friday (the 17th) from 9:30-11:00.