Message from the President

Placing MOOCs in proper context

By now, colleagues . . .

. . . you likely have heard about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), one of the many disruptive changes to higher education, and the subject of much discussion on this campus and elsewhere.

On this page, I recommend a number of resources and informative articles that can be found online. We will update the page continuously.

First, however, we must place such matters in their proper context, and to that end I again offer these thoughts by Eli Noam, professor of finance and economics at Columbia University, who published an article “Electronics and the Dim Future of the University” in 1995. Please note that the word “dim” in the title is used in the sense of obscured or uncertain.

“…technologies and economics…together with history and politics they lead to a set of institutions. Change the technology and economics, and the institutions must change, eventually.”

“...This suggests a change of emphasis for universities. True teaching and learning are about more than information. Education is based on mentoring, internalization, identification, role-modeling, guidance, and group activity. In these processes, physical proximity plays an important role. Thus, the strength of the future physical university lies less in pure information and more in college as a community. Less in wholesale lecture, and more in individual tutorial. Less in Cyber-U, and more in Goodbye-Chips College."

To the right is the link to Noam's article, included in a list of resources that you may find useful. In addition, please review the State of University Address, in which I shared a number of thoughts on this matter.

A NATIONAL CONVERSATION

Proenza: A shared urgency to develop
new content and assessment models

On Nov. 11, 2012, President Proenza led a conversation with 23 Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU) presidents at the Association of Public Land Grant Universities (APLU) national meeting in Denver.

As stated in his State of the University address, Dr. Proenza discussed new innovative models of educational delivery including his concept for an Integrator/assessor university.

According to the vice president for the coalition, this was an unprecedented number of university presidents willing to come together to focus collectively on a shared topic, which speaks to a growing interest among universities to lead and not just react to innovative disruptions in higher education.

At this meeting, Dr. Proenza discussed the shared urgency for universities to embrace and further develop new content and assessment models such as MOOCs while rethinking pricing and financing models for higher education. There was agreement among the presidents that since disruptive innovation is occurring and potentially impacting traditional models of education, than it is better to have these innovations driven by the academy and faculty rather than third party vendors. The presidents and senior staff of the represented universities identified the following areas for collective exploration, development and action:

• content aggregation,
• assessment and credentialing of learners,
• platform development for student-centric learning that incorporates game theory,
• regulatory and policy influence,
• research on innovative models,     
• financial models which reduce costs for students, and,
• funding – collective ability to obtain investment funding.

In part because of this meeting initiated by and led by Dr. Proenza, Urban Serving Universities and the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities are forming faculty work teams across universities to explore the topics above.