Risk – Page 4 – Music for Deckchairs

Extraordinary company

Kate Bowles July 19, 2011 0 Comments

Higher ed tech writers are chewing the cud over the not very surprising news that Blackboard is partnering up with major content publishers Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, John Wiley & Sons and (last year) McGraw-Hill, and that McGraw-Hill itself is now friending everyone in the LMS world. The language of this new set of deals is that of the soothing murmur: students will now be able to transition seamlessly from Anywhere U via their LMS to centralised content repositories managed by Big…

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

Suits and punks

Kate Bowles July 7, 2011 0 Comments

A few more thoughts from the world of LMS vendor demonstrations: A big LMS is now typically so big, and can do so many things, that a vendor with a two-hour timeslot has to make some tough choices. Which are the hero tools, the unique selling points, the defining parts of the proposition? Which are the has-been features that look like the other guy’s stuff? At the moment, the answer to the former seems to be content builders, assessment workflow,…

Edtech and online learning, LMS evaluation, Risk

Going forward

Kate Bowles July 5, 2011 1 Comment

One of the challenges facing a higher education institution trying to choose a new learning management system is the blind taste test that passes for product demonstration. Typically this involves being hustled through a demo site that’s been populated with made-up students in imaginary classes exchanging imaginary one-liners with each other via a discussion board, while imaginary academics set up imaginary course content, and the whole thing flows through to imaginary gradebooks or generates imaginary tracking reports. Because the number…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk, Student engagement

What we’ve got here …

Kate Bowles June 22, 2011 0 Comments

As the Chilean ash cloud wafts through Australian airspace for a second time, we’re all thrown back into the science of prediction. What will it do next? Nightly news footage of passengers sitting in grumpy heaps in airports has drawn an unusual degree of national attention to Darwin. It turns out that we have one of the world’s nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers right here in Australia, and they’ve been putting on their good shirts for the TV cameras night…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

Vertical thinking

Kate Bowles June 6, 2011 0 Comments

The “education vertical” sounds a bit more thrilling than it is. The first time you hear it, it seems to share the weird poetic syntax of “the body electric” and “the life everlasting”. It’s education, on an updraft. A bit of googling fishes up a turn of phrase that has more concrete aspirations. This vertical is both market and solution (“Callista cracks open education vertical“) and it continues intermittently to appear in the promotional talk of software vendors and government procurement….

Being an academic, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk, Student engagement, University marketing

Tablets, tablets everywhere

Kate Bowles May 27, 2011 0 Comments

Ferdinand von Prondzynski, VC at Robert Gordon University, is asking why universities have been relatively slow to mainstream the innovative teaching practices that will match the speedy uptake of mobile and tablet devices by their students. As he puts it, technology-enabled learning shouldn’t be “the preserve of nerds”. The need to break out of the nerd enclave is critical for any institution hovering on the brink of committing to an enterprise-wide LMS contract. This is going to cost so much that…

Edtech and online learning, Risk, Student engagement

Open all hours

Kate Bowles May 25, 2011 2 Comments

Ben Wildavsky has a message for Australian universities. He’s the author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World, just out from Princeton U. Press. He’s keen to promote the benefits of free trade in higher education, not least of which is that “knowledge is not a zero sum game”, and that if we create more of it in one country, we don’t lose it in another. Somehow this is calling to mind the joke about…

Australia, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Internationalisation, Risk, Student engagement

Letting ourselves go?

Kate Bowles April 30, 2011 0 Comments

A Canadian study of health issues affecting early career academics suggests that they may be sacrificing physical exercise in order to try to secure an inside lane position on the cinder track that leads to tenure. The study hints that if they’re doing this, they’re “letting themselves go”, and the point is touchingly made with an illustration of a bulging (male) waistline. Remedies include taking part in a charity fun run or “park[ing] your car far away to get a little…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Higher education, Risk

Bursting point

Kate Bowles April 24, 2011 0 Comments

There’s a conversation building about whether we’re wise to look at higher education through the lens of the economy, given that nothing much looks good through the bottom of that dirty glass. Markets achieve extraordinary results using the levers and pulleys of scarcity, rivalry and desire, but this volatility doesn’t always help the big public institutions that deliver other kinds of social and cultural benefits, like education. So we half-protect these familiar institutions of public life from the market in…

Being an academic, Casualisation of work, Risk, Student engagement

Universities are not very agile

Kate Bowles April 7, 2011 0 Comments

I’ve been in conversation with a number of colleagues about whether or not academics are “resistant to change”. This claim was included quite casually in a document written to explain to external stakeholders the kinds of characteristics they would expect to see in a university community. Students are experimental, technical staff are skilled, and academics are … resistant to change. Obviously, at one level this is just annoying.

Being an academic, Change management, Risk