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In most academic fields, editors and publishers play a gatekeeper function by vetting the articles that make it into their vaunted pages (whether paper or digital). These roles involve a lot of power and a lot of responsibility and discretion. New faculty’s careers may be made or broken based on their publishing records. Even those who have published widely and are long-term tenured faculty have a stake in their reputations with the public and their peers when they publish ...
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From the outside, having work embargoed seems like not much fun. It’s work that only goes to a small, limited and elite audience. It’s going to sit on “ice” for any number of years—because of copyright or security or ownership issues (usually). While a person may benefit from the intellectual property of that work, it’s not really there for the public consumption. There may be a release date of sorts, or there may not be any ...
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Our campus has an assessment conference earlier this month. The main message to faculty and administrators was the importance of assessing inputs and learning outcomes.
This endeavor is encouraged in part because of the upcoming accreditation visit for the university in a few more years, but program assessment has continuing value—to study and measure academic achievements, student learning, and even coincidental learning. This knowledge is not just for in-house use but for the requirement to publicly account for the ...
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The use of modules to organize a curriculum offers more than learning flexibility. For a recent project, modules now allow for co-building a curriculum for both credit and non-credit deployment.
The credit course is defined by the documents that have gone through Faculty Senate and been approved as a high-quality academic course. Those learning objectives are codified in the syllabus and other course materials, and the course description resides in the academic catalogs. The strategies here then come in sequencing ...
Continue reading Academic Credit and Commercial Non-Credit Co-Building
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Part of elearning course design involves thinking about the learners and their needs. This is not only a matter of pedagogical necessity but also financial and bureaucratic protectionism. I've been on projects where this wasn't explicitly considered until the modules for the course were fully built. In that case, the assessments had to be redesigned to fit the needs of the accrediting agency. Now that another project with accreditation needs has just started, it seems like a good ...