Posts Categorized: Technology

Will PWIs Embrace Change in a Nation at Unrest?

Ahmaud Arbery, February 23, 2020. A murder that was concealed and hidden away from this nation at unrest. Breonna Taylor, March 13, 2020. A murder, again hidden from a nation at unrest. George Floyd, May 25, 2020. A murder documented and mourned by all of America, not just those who are Black and American. As the protests began and stories began to change, this divided nation—Haitian, J...

This Recession Calls for New Playbooks

On May 11, the U.S. Department of Education released guidance for the $36 billion in emergency funding available to higher education institutions (HEIs). This new round of funding—authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act—makes $10 billion available to community colleges, $2.6 billion to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), $190 million to tribal colleges, and $6 billion to o...

Data, Decision-Making and Student Success

Which matters more, gauging the health of an institution or the success of its students? Recently, the project director and I submitted the Annual Performance Report for the second year of our university’s Title III grant, for which I serve as part-time consultant. The five-year award from the U.S. Department of Education is a competitive grant intended to strengthen the academic quality and ...

Access to What?

The current shakeout in higher education won’t necessarily leave a gap in terms of accessibility, since workforce demands will ensure some form of credentialing replaces it. But the value of what fills the gap is an open question. ... As the head of public system, advocating for funding to support greater access to higher education was a given. Postindustrial economies depend on a highly educ...

Truth, Education and Democracy in an Era of “Alternative Facts”

There has been a growing consensus among authorities, especially in the Trump era, that the U.S. is in an epistemological crisis that threatens our democracy. President Barack Obama, for example, in a recent Atlantic interview, said: "If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition, ou...

Teaching the Active-Shooter Generation

I’ve been teaching political science for about a decade now. I teach students about the international system, the functioning of government, foreign policy, national security. My teaching is based on my 12 years of higher education and shaped by my life experiences. I’m a Cold War kid. In grade school and junior-high classrooms, we had “duck and cover” drills for what to do in the case ...

Remote Courses Do Not Make an Online College

Remote learning was a key component of college strategies for addressing the COVID-19 crisis across the country. More than 1,100 colleges went entirely remote by March 2020, according to the education consultancy Entangled Solutions. The College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College indicated that 44% of institutions had developed fully (or primarily) remote instruction by September 2020. This mas...

Trauma, the COVID-19 Pandemic and Immigration

How these forces intersect at a community hospital focused on the underserved ... A year into the global pandemic, we are grappling with the scale of its impact and the conditions that created, permitted and exacerbated it. For those of us in the mental health field, tentative strides toward telepsychiatry pivoted to a sudden semi-permanent virtual healthcare delivery system. Questions of effic...

Racial “Reckoning” (Via Zoom)

Even in this time when people presume to be having a “racial reckoning,” signs of enduring racial inequity pop up everywhere. From nagging disparities in health—Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) die at higher rates than other groups from COVID-19 and are underrepresented in medical research (except in vile experiments such as the Tuskegee study) … to the steep declines in Black...

Practitioner Perspectives: The DOERS3 Collaborative on OER in Tenure and Promotion

In the following Practitioner Perspective, Andrew McKinney, OER coordinator at the City University of New York (CUNY), and Amanda Coolidge, director of Open Education at BCcampus in British Columbia, Canada, share the development of an adaptable matrix to help faculty include OER (Open Educational Resources) in their tenure and promotion portfolios.  A critical part of sustaining OER in higher...