These thoughts came to me while I was listening to Carol Smith at the Kenyon 06 conference talk about the ‘FITS’ and ‘STARTS’ programmes at Depau which were started up with Lilly funding (361° programme). It occurred to me that there’s a window of opportunity for grant funding to start innovative new approaches but after a while when more institutions are doing these things they are not so innovative any more and the institution then bears the whole cost. With this in mind:
A leader in a recent issue of the Economist (March 9th, 2006) entitled “Remember Detroit” starts with this assertion:
“America rules the academic roost. It boasts 17 of the world’s top 20 universities, employs 70% of the world’s Nobel prize winners and attracts the best and the brightest from just about everywhere.”
“Are American universities in this position because they are so good, or because their competition is so bad? The evidence, overwhelmingly, is that the latter is the case—especially when you look at Europe.”
And ends with :
“Put simply, many American universities treat their undergraduates shabbily.”
While this may be true of the Harvards and Yales on the US educational landscape one could argue (and we should be arguing forcefully) that this is not the case for small undergraduate, liberal arts colleges. Quite the contrary. One could argue that liberal arts colleges lead the world in quality of educational experience for undergraduates.
Moreover, I believe that there is currently a window of opportunity for us to establish world leadership in online pedagogy . Rather than following others and picking up scraps of funding, we should be taking the lead with inter-institutional collaboration and pushing the envelope of online pedagogy, all this lubricated by grant funding.
The obvious platform for this effort is the Open Source course management system, or rather Learning Environment , Moodle. Moodle is the pre-eminent unsurpassed vehicle for pedagogical innovation (forget Blackboard, WebCT, uportal, etc Moodle is the platform with a future). We should be putting effort into moulding Moodle in our image, that is, in the way that we see educational processes occurring rather than other agendae such as High School, Community College, large University. Thus far, there has been little in any significant input from the small college sector. We want to shape the Moodle project to be consonant with our core values, with our college missions:
We are less interested in control of student behaviour, enforcement of norms, moderating conversations, preventing outside access.
We are interested in a student focused learning environment:
Moodle has become / is rapidly becoming the default umbrella (portal if you like) for all the user authenticated activities listed above.
Customise Moodle to the needs of small colleges — begs question — what are our pedagogical needs ? Are they qualitatively different from other educational institutions? Needs / areas where Liberal Arts colleges could influence and provide input into the Moodle system:
Issues:
| Albion College | http://courses.albion.edu/cw/ |
| Beloit College | https://pasta.beloit.edu/moodle/ |
| College of Wooster | https://woodle.wooster.edu/ |
| Colorado College | https://prowl.coloradocollege.edu/ |
| Cornell College | http://webwork.cornellcollege.edu/moodle/ |
| Earlham College | https://moodle.earlham.edu/ |
| Hope College | http://courses.hope.edu/ |
| Lake Forest College | http://moodle.lakeforest.edu/ |
| Lawrence University | http://thor.lawrence.edu/moodle/ |
| Macalester College | http://moodle.macalester.edu/ |
| Pomona College | http://moodle.pomona.edu/ |
| St. Olaf College | http://moodle.stolaf.edu/ |
Comments?
Posted by markp at March 16, 2006 06:03 PM