Best Universities Adapt to Online Degrees Enrollments
The best universities are quick to adapt to the changing landscape of higher education. In the Fall of 2020, 44% or 7 million of all undergraduate students chose to enroll in online degrees. This number is 186% higher compared to 2019 figures (NCES, 2022). This signals a strong preference for the convenience and flexibility that online degrees offer. All over the world, postsecondary education online offerings are becoming a major part of every college and university program.
This shift is evident in university initiatives. Just this year, St. Mary’s University School of Law has become the first fully online J.D. program to be accredited by the American Bar Association (Pelletier et. al., 2022). In Europe, business schools have formed the European Common Online Learning (Ecol) group, which is composed of eight schools from Italy, France, and Switzerland, among others. Meanwhile, Portland State University (PSU) has introduced the “Attend Anywhere” model that intends to understand what a hybrid university might look like and also to reimagine the future of instructional modalities (Pelletier et. al., 2022).
Allison Littlejohn, an academic specialising in learning technology, says the blending of school and home is also likely to complicate the relationship between work and life, prompting students to demand more consideration of mental health and work-life balance from their future employers.
New book unveils faculty-led effort to chart concepts and competencies students should learn in six academic disciplines, with plan to create standardized tests. Will faculty members warm to this version of "learning outcomes"?
What makes these findings so interesting are the implications for pedagogy. If teachers wish to maximise the power of tablets and mobile devices, they should create contexts in which students are encouraged to be proactive in their study,
Proponents and practitioners of the open web also bear responsibility for the missed opportunities in higher education. In retrospect, temperamental preferences for DIY culture, relentless tinkering and experimentation, and indulging the delightful paradoxes of ill-structured problems has not served to promote the adoption of open online tools in the wider culture. Whereas innovators and early adopters tend to have a relatively high tolerance for chaos, higher education as a whole does not (and arguably cannot). Railing against the academy's failure to embrace a perceived risk can be dismal fun for many of us, but an honest appraisal of our own missteps has to be in the mix.
The aim of this article is to discuss some of the challenges and possibilities that librarians may face when engaging in faculty-library collaboration. The main objective is to present findings from two case studies of embedded librarianship at Gjøvik University College (GUC) and to compare these findings with results from a literature review. The literature review is concentrated around collaboration challenges, a possible role-expansion for librarians, team-teaching and assessment of information skills courses. Another objective is to present two pedagogical approaches that are in use at GUC; the tutor approach and the team-teaching approach. Findings from the case studies suggest that faculty staff were impressed with the librarian’s knowledge and they quickly became comfortable with team-teaching and/or leaving the librarian in charge of the students. However there were concerns from both the teacher and librarian about the time-consuming nature of collaborative work. This paper contributes to the literature through a literature review, two case studies and teaching approaches that highlight factors leading to success when collaborating with faculty.
Computer science as a field requires curricular guidance, as new innovations are filtered into teaching its knowledge areas at a rapid pace. Furthermore, another trend is the growing number of students with different cultural backgrounds. These developments require taking into account both the differences in learning styles and teaching methods in practice in the development of curricular knowledge areas. In this paper, an intensive collaborative teaching concept, Code Camp, is utilized to illustrate the effect of learning styles on the success of a course. Code Camp teaching concept promotes collaborative learning and multiple skills and knowledge in a single course context. The results indicate that Code Camp as a concept is well liked, increases motivation to learn and is suitable for both intuitive and reflective learners. Furthermore, it appears to provide interesting creative challenges and pushes students to collaborate and work as a team. In particular, the concept also promotes intuition.
J. Griesbaum, and S. Kepp. Proceedings of I-KNOW 2010, 10 International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies, page 415-426. Graz, (September 2010)