The Redgate Read On Online Learning

I ran across a decent article today on online learning and time management. In fact, this is one of my mantras that I preach to the students who I instruct online. Here is an excerpt: Read the rest of this entry »

The latest scrutiny in the for-profit education space comes from one of the regional accreditation bodies and their attention directed toward  ”accreditation shopping.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/01/hlc

There is no argument that earning a degree increases what a person will earn over his or her lifetime.  However, with increased scrutiny from the Department of Education and regulatory bodies on whether or not a specific degree from a specific institution provides the opportunity for the recipient of that degree to be “gainfully” employed, we have to ask ourselves  if the paradigm is skewed.  Is education slowly falling into the trap of promoting consumption rather than measuring if that education prepared a person to “do well?”  What would it do to our existing paradigms and assessments if we based our model on this — “neither self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you consume or own.”

This is an interesting PBS investigation of for-profit education -

 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea”

Remember — two sides to every story!

In reading the mission statements of many institutions of higher learning, whether brick and mortar or online,  one will generally find a reference  to “leadership.”  I guess that producing leaders is an expected outcome of the educational process, or so I have been told.   I just have to wonder how institutions define leadership and how integrated a model it is. 

The best model I have seen is the MIT Sloan one which describes four core capabilities needed for effective leadership: sensemaking – the ability to make sense of ambiguous situations; relating – developing key relationships within and across organizations; visioning – creating compelling images of the future; and inventing – turning visions into reality.

Wouldn’t it be revolutionary if some facsimile of these four core capabilities were consistently integrated into a learning process?