Higher education – Page 2 – Music for Deckchairs

Countable things

Kate Bowles November 3, 2011 2 Comments

Across so many realms of their operations, universities really like countable things. We like metrics and tables and charts and the sparkling virtuosity of key performance indicators marching across a spreadsheet. We like performance to be scored, we like impact factors and citation indices, and we really love rank. We even tabulate the emotional intangibles of workplace culture like “satisfaction”. Among other things, this leads to the slightly odd moment when university staff are surveyed to find out how they…

Change management, Higher education, Student engagement

Open is as open does

Kate Bowles October 20, 2011 1 Comment

Openness: everyone’s at it. All of a sudden higher education is a hive of managed promiscuity, and it’s only a matter of time before we’re all throwing our keys into the fruitbowl. First Pearson announce (and, at last, demonstrate) their new “free, open, easy, amazing” OpenClass. Now Blackboard have announced a more open approach to content developed by academics and hosted on Blackboard sites. As Audrey Watters points out quietly, the game-changing technology here is … a ‘share’ button. What…

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

To market, to market

Kate Bowles October 5, 2011 4 Comments

And then there are situations from which even the most sympathetic creative cross-sectoral partnerships with ed tech, big and small, can’t save us. University marketing, for example. Visual branding is a struggle between the obvious and the obscure, and this gets very tricky when universities are trying to decide how to represent themselves. Images of location and local environment score well, as do shots of students talking to each other animatedly, preferably in carefully selected groups that hint at a…

Being an academic, Change management, Higher education

Small is good

Kate Bowles October 4, 2011 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking back over the initial response I (and many other educators) had to Jarrod Drysdale’s heartfelt outburst about the story of his web app, Knack. He designed this to help teachers generate learner analytics that they might in turn use to agitate for change or demonstrate their accomplishments, and I’ve been engaged in a brief exchange of views on his blog on the way he reacted to its failure. First, I do think he’s right that in a culture that…

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

In the education space?

Kate Bowles September 28, 2011 3 Comments

“The education space” is an imprecise sort of street address that’s beginning to bother me. It seems to mean something more than itself: not the precise space within which teaching or learning actually occurs, but the larger territory of business operations that brings together all those with an eye on the profits to be had from the future of education as a peculiar hybrid of market and service. And this week, there’s been some agitation in the education space. Firstly,…

Change management, Higher education

Competitive advantage?

Kate Bowles September 19, 2011 9 Comments

It’s not really my business, but it seems to me that the promise that competition delivers consumer benefits is in the “If I had a dollar for every time … ” category of overuse. Mostly this proposition seems to be based on the assumption that if I’m selling lemonade next to someone else selling lemonade, we’re going to compete for the lemonade market either by offering superior or cheaper lemonade, and either way, the passing parade gets a better deal…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

Standards

Kate Bowles September 6, 2011 0 Comments

I’m struck by the coincidence of Jonathan Rees and Ferdinand von Prondzynski both writing, in different ways, about the significance to academics of being able to set their own compass. Not only do we hope to be able to research and teach in areas that are the best fit with our skills and principles, but we also prefer to work for institutions that are able to determine the best mix of features that suits their operating context. Whether you call this…

Higher education, Risk, Student engagement

Rankings

Kate Bowles August 20, 2011 0 Comments

One of the odd features of messages sent to us by our colleagues in administration is that their signatures are showing the work of some pretty committed corporate decision making to advance the brand in all circumstances, even in the very small print at the bottom of an email. It’s a bit like academic colleagues who have taken to listing their latest publication and leadership roles at the foot of every correspondence, a move whose target audience isn’t entirely clear….

Higher education, Rankings

Grumpy

Kate Bowles July 29, 2011 0 Comments

Australians love to win things, but we’re going to have to content ourselves with a silver medal in a sport that has yet to trouble the Olympics—we’ve come second to Italians in being grumpy customers. Apparently, we’re divided against ourselves on this issue. What makes some Australian customers grumpy is that other Australians are bad at giving service. According to this morning’s news report, Brett Whitford, the executive director of The Customer Service Institute of Australia—who must know a bit…

Being an academic, Higher education, Student engagement