Posts Categorized: Technology

How To Bring Back Higher Education This Fall: A Guide for 2020 Reopeners

Whether and how campuses will reopen in fall 2020 has emerged as the key story in higher education. On Wednesday, Trump administration officials spoke via teleconference with higher education leaders on how to get students back to campus this fall. During a pandemic, we need to recognize that the risk assessment and risk tolerance among individuals and organizations varies dramatically. Those d...

Disastrous Job Loss Must Prompt Creative Measures to Protect Workers and Consumers

Friday May 8 saw the release of the most disastrous monthly jobs report in American economic history. In its monthly Employment Situation released last Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported: Payroll employment levels declined by 20.5 million between mid-March when the COVID-19 lockdowns began in earnest and mid-April—a decline that is more than two orders of magnitude greater...

Reframing the Humanities: COVID-19 May Flip the Script on Overshadowed Human Experiences

The emphasis on humanities has swung like a pendulum through the years, particularly in the world of higher education. Many perceive it as a discipline of the elite that attempts to connect us to distant places from times long ago that are mythical, historical or hypothetical, and somehow more important than today. Simply stated, humanities has the connotative power to scare people away from i...

Practitioner Perspectives: A NEBHE Q&A with Heather Miceli on How OER Promotes Hands-On Learning While Saving Students Money

In the following Q&A, NEBHE’s Fellow for Open Education Lindsey Gumb asks Heather Miceli, an adjunct professor at Roger Williams University (RWU) and Johnson & Wales University (JWU), about her integration of OER-enabled pedagogy in her general education science course, which has helped push the narrative of Open Educational Resources (OER) beyond cost savings to include more engaged and...

As COVID-19 Batters Higher Education, a Proposal to Move Online Fast

The opening of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities in fall 2020 will present a challenge due to the absence of a vaccine for COVID-19. Healthcare professionals and politicians have been warning us to get used to a new normal based on COVID-19 being with us for quite some time until an effective vaccine is introduced. In the meantime, all governments can do is slow the pace of infection t...

COVID-19 and the Gap Year

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused elected officials to shut down large segments of the U.S. economy, within 30 days of President Donald Trump’s National Emergency Proclamation in mid-March, putting more than 26 million American payroll workers out of work and shuttering countless small businesses, thereby shutting down the self-employment option upon which workers frequently rely in times of econ...

A Distance Learning Guru on COVID-19 Changes … Plus Other Quarantine Bits from the NEJHE Beat

A few items from the quarantine … Wisdom from Zoom. COVID-19 has been a boon for Zoom and Slack (for people panicked by too many and too-slow emails). Last week, I zoomed into the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Leadership Series conversation with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc and HGSE Dean Bridget Long. LeBlanc notes that the online programs ado...

What’s “Open” During COVID-19? In Global Pandemic, OER and Open Access Matter More than Ever

Residential college and university campuses across New England abruptly closed their doors last month during the COVID-19 outbreak, and while some schools were in session and students were asked to vacate, many others were on spring break and students were asked not to return. In both situations, students found themselves at home or in new environments where they waited to see how their education ...

The Amazing Generation

As a nation, we are taught to understand that it is sometimes necessary to send soldiers into harm’s way to fight for values and principles we believe are worth sacrificing for.  Today, and throughout our history as a nation, young men and women have been called upon to fight in foreign lands for the advancement of democracy and to secure and preserve the religious rights and political freedom...

Addressing COVID-19 in the Workplace: Some Legal Tips for Higher Education Institutions

As COVID-19 rapidly changes the economic landscape throughout the country, higher education institutions (HEIs) are facing new, constantly evolving challenges. To address these challenges, federal and state governments are quickly drafting laws and regulations that are impacting colleges and universities, and their employees. Wage and hour challenges As HEIs grapple with COVID-19 fallout, in...