Substantial Top quality On the internet Understanding: A Discussion with USC’s Karen Gallagher
Karen Symms Gallagher, Dean of USC Rossier School of Education, caught my eye for two reasons.
First, I read a couple of opinion pieces in which she argued that we need to look beyond MOOCs to the potential of providing extremely high quality and intimate for-credit degree programs that leverage new options in technology and new opportunities in non-profit / for-profit partnerships. These columns, including Higher Ed Leaders Must Lead Online and Rethinking Higher Ed Open Online Learning stand apart for their combination of a progressive call for innovation in online education and skepticism that the locus of this innovation is limited to the world of MOOCs.
The second reason that Karen ended up on my radar screen was her designation as a Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow. This prestigious fellowship, which is given to only two dozen educators a year, is designed to "support extraordinary entrepreneurial leaders who are committed to transforming public education."
The fact that Karen is a strong voice for innovation in new online learning models within the context of high quality degree programs makes her selection as a Pahara-Aspen Fellow a noteworthy development. Discussions about online education have largely bifurcated around the MOOCs or the for-profit world, with too little attention paid to advances in the quality of online and blended programs offered at highly selective institutions. The Pahara-Aspen Fellowship may prove to be an ideal platform in which to introduce new ideas and models into the larger conversation.
Karen graciously agreed to participate in an e-mail discussion to explore her ideas around how higher ed leaders can advance both our thinking and our models around online education.
Question: Can you briefly describe what USC has been up to with online education?
When USC President Max Nikias announced that online education must be a priority for graduate programs, we saw the rest of the university catching up with us. Every school has been charged with moving forward with an online program, and I’m proud that the USC Rossier School was three years ahead of many others. We launched our online Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT@USC) in June of 2009, and believe me we had our skeptics at the time! How can you possibly teach teaching online? But we are mission-driven: all our work is designed to further our mission to improve learning in urban schools locally, nationally and globally. Our vision is that every student, regardless of personal circumstance, can learn and succeed. We are not a boutique school with a few students and faculty; true impact in education requires thoughtful scale.
The only way to scale up was to take the program online. That’s one difference between us and most of the other schools at USC. The need in this country for more high quality teachers has never been greater. Besides receiving the masters degree from USC, students also earn a California teacher credential. This is important to note because we have to meet the high standards of both USC and the California Commission for Teacher Credentialing. So, students must not only meet every week via live classes using such tools as Adobe Connect, but each student is placed in a school in his or her local community from the beginning of the program Since the online MAT started, we have graduated over 1200 students living in all 50 states and over 40 countries. We have partnered with over 1400 school districts. And we are expanding with new online programs this year.
Question: What was your rationale to partner with 2U rather than do everything internally?
The issue was capacity. We knew the content and curriculum, we had the best faculty, and we had a track record of preparing high quality teachers, but we also knew knew we did not have the expertise to build and maintain the type of Learning Management System (LMS) that would adequately support our program. We were not going to shortchange our students in any way. We wanted a robust, interactive, synchronous, live experience for our students and we also wanted the back-end infrastructure to be maintained by experts, so that the functioning of the technology was always sound. John Katzman and his team at 2U (then 2Tor) worked with us hand-in-hand until we had a platform that we knew was worthy of our quality program.
Question: You have been somewhat skeptical of MOOCs in your writing, and I gather that this is not the strategic direction that USC is going. Can you elaborate?
I am actually taking a MOOC course myself right now through Coursera. Me and 260,000 of my closest friends! I wanted to experience for myself what all the hype is about. And as I’ve said before, I can’t help comparing them to The Great Courses, audio tapes of wonderful classes from top universities, which my husband and I always enjoyed. I’m absorbing information, but I’m certainly not interacting in any meaningful or face-to-face discussions. Now there is a certain amount of interactivity with my MOOC experience, I’ll admit. You can post comments through many different social media during the MOOC course which, because of the number of participants, is a bit like drinking through a fire hose. If you think of the credits rolling by at the end of a movie, that is how fast comments roll by while reading content or watching UTube videos. I find it almost impossible to gain anything of substance from my fellow students’ postings because they are coming so fast and furiously, and often superficially.
The kind of robust interactivity and quality demanded by a hybrid degree program like Rossier’s Master of Arts in Teaching does not come cheaply, and it certainly doesn’t come for free, like the MOOC I’m taking.
This is the difficulty with a broad term like “;online”. We’re talking about apples and oranges. But the language we use currently to categorize online education is not refined enough to differentiate experiences or signify quality.
Question: Tell us about the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship. What will this designation allow you to accomplish? What are your goals to leverage this honor?
It was a true honor to be selected for this Fellowship, and I’m eager to meet with my new colleagues and begin this two-year experience. We will meet for the first time next month, so our goals as a group will be formed then. It is flattering that for the first time they brought a dean from a School of Education to this prestigious table. I think that programs like our online MAT and our new LAUSD charter school, USC Hybrid High School, speak loudly about us. Our work is bold. It can be risky. Our mission demands that of us. Or as I like to say, the Rossier School of Education is not your grandmother’s school of education.
What questions do you have for Karen?
Simsbury Library announces February packages
Simsbury Library announces February applications
Marcia LaReau, PhD, will examine exploration findings on occupation negotiations and current employing practices. In this plan, you will: Analysis investigate statistics Unearth out what is negotiable and when to negotiate Study how to evaluate salary questions Unearth …
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Educating youngsters the history and humanity of science
"I went to public college right here in Manila, I went to UP Diliman, and when you're rising up you [suppose], 'I want to be a scientist' and what do you do, you have to get state-of-the-art degrees but now there's a great deal of possibilities. We have PhD programs by now …
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Prophetic Debate Takes Us Into 2013
Prophetic Debate Takes Us Into 2013
Prophet Uebert holds a PhD in Theology, but says that theology does not educate spirituality, and properly-respected American preacher, Kenneth Hagin, mentors him. He also says that he is not a prosperity preacher, but a preacher who is prospering. Based in …
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Forced Choices Can Lead to Unethical Selection-Creating
“One of the most strong equipment to combat high-threat or unethical selection-creating may possibly merely be providing managers the alternative not to decide on,” explained lead researcher Theodore Noseworthy, Ph.D. The investigation also underscores how psychological mechanisms …
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Lastest Nonacademic Careers News
Advisers Should Ban the Word 'Placement'
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Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP
We look for people with interesting achievements and those who've made the most of their other non-academic opportunities. Candidates should be adaptable, capable of thinking on their feet and problem solvers. A range of work/life experiences …
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9 Factors We Learn About Understanding From Fitbit
This Hanukkah/Christmas my wife and I gave each other Fitbit Ones, a wearable digital activity tracker that measures steps, distance, calories burned, stairs climbed and sleep.
Since 12/12/12 I have walked 334,176 steps, climbed 550 floors, and covered 172.19 miles.
What can we learn about learning (and teaching) from the Fitbit?
1. Learning and Exercise Are Hard: Perhaps the biggest inhibitor of improving our own performance is the belief that other people are "naturals" at a given task. We say that someone is naturally good at math, or that they have a runners body. We can never be as good as they are, so why even try? The truth is that learning and exercise are hard. Nothing good comes easy. We all need some help. The Fitbit helps me exercise. It motives me to take more steps. Recognizing that exercise, and learning, are difficult tasks can help us look for methods that might help. We need to think about how we can use technology to encourage learning beyond what is possible with traditional methods.
2. Nudging Towards Better Habits: What the Fitbit does is provide external rewards that hopefully nudge us to adopt better exercise habits. I run those extra minutes on the treadmill, or take the stairs and not the elevator, in order to reach my daily goal of 10,000 steps. Eventually those actions should become habit, I'll do then without thinking. How can we use technology to nudge students towards better learning habits? Can we find ways to provide rewards that foster both internal motivation and better study habits? If the Fitbit is truly successful at creating better exercise habits (something that I think needs verification from experimental research), can we translate the Fitbit's fitness technology to learning technology?
3. The Power of Instant Feedback: The Fitbit provides instant feedback as to how many steps, miles, stairs climbed and calories burned that I've accomplished. All of these data points are tracked in real time on the device, and captured on my own personal web based Fitbit dashboard. I don't need to wait a day or a week to see the results. And Fitbit sends me badges, in the form of e-mail and on the my Fitbit Dashboard, for every time I reach a goal (say 10,000 steps) or a particular milestone (like 500 floors climbed). Fast feedback motivates behavior. We need to set our courses up so that we can provide fast feedback and periodic recognition of milestones. We all know that a grade at the end of a class, or a week after an exam, is too late. What is less obvious, and what the Fitbit teaches us, is that we may be better off creating smaller assignments and deliverables in which we can provide fast feedback and turn-around. We should also be liberal in creating formative computer graded assessments where learners can get instant feedback on their progress.
4. Setting Goals: The Fitbit allows me to set my own activity goals. The default is 10,000 steps a day (and we know the power of defaults), but we can set that goal for anything that we like. Goals can be for calories or miles, steps or stairs. Setting our own goals is vastly more effective than having someone set them for us. We have done a good job in our course designs of including learning objectives and goals for individual modules. Have we done enough to figure out what our learners' goals are, and then to measure their performance against those individual goals? We talk a great deal about adaptive learning and personalized learning environments, but in my experience these methods remain infrequently practiced.
5. Tracking the Data: We don't improve what we don't measure. The Fitbit is one example of the emerging Internet of things and a source for all that big data we keep hearing about. Every minute of every day that I where my Fitbit I'm creating vast amounts of fitness related data that can be tracked, measured, indexed, and I'm sure sold to advertisers and marketers. All this data is effective in motivating my behavior, as I can see days when I did reach my goals and try to adjust future behaviors to avoid low activity days. We are doing a better job of tracking learning (or at least assessment) data within our courses, but we are only at the beginning of connecting and aggregating learning data for the entire length of a students' higher education career. (And forget trying to connect K-12 with post-secondary data). The digitization of learning will help us track things like time spent reading, watching course lectures and simulations, participating in collaborative platforms, and of course taking formative and summative assessments. Will we make all this data available to our students? Will it run longitudinally across courses? Will employers or graduate schools want to see this data?
6. The Social Element: Learning is social. Every edtech company is trying to turn their learning platforms into social learning platforms. Fitbit lets me see the activity levels of my Fitbit friends via the web based dashboard. If your friends or family buy a Fitbit, and give you permission, you can see how many miles they traveled each day. So far, I have 3 Fitbit friends at work, my wife and her sister in my network. Getting crushed each day by these (apparently incredible active) colleagues and family member is amazingly motivating. Social learning may be effective if classmates can share (can opt-in) to display learning inputs. Time spent interacting with online presentations. Numbers of course blog or discussion postings. Utilization of online, computer graded formative assessments. A Fitbit community tends to set norms around levels of activity, just as a social learning community could set norms around levels of learning effort and time.
7. The Potential of Mobile Devices: The Fitbit works to improve fitness (if it works, again we need some experimental verification), because it is a mobile technology. Clip it on and forget about it. The data syncs automatically to my web based Fitbit account. No need to plug and download anything. The Fitbit device both tracks and displays my activity, so I can check my progress as I go through the day. The potential of mobilizing our learning is that our students will have their courses and course materials wherever they go. A set of readings, lectures, videos, collaboration opportunities and assessments on a smart phone will be available whenever a learner has a few free minutes. Our existing digital learning platforms have, for the most part, been born on the web – not on the smart phone. Do we have a learning management system that was designed first as an app, and then secondarily as a website? What would a born mobile learning platform look like?
8. Ecosystems and the Danger of Lock-In: The Fitbit is not only a souped-up pedometer. It is a website. It is a smartphone app. It even includes a WiFi scale (for $ 129.95) that lets up to 8 people in your household track their weight, BMI, and body fat on the Fitbit dashboard. (I've lost 5 pounds so far!). The value add for the Fitbit is not the little device, but the way that the ecosystem hangs together and the manner in which all the data populates the Fitbit network. The danger is of course lock-in. My Fitbit data (as far as I know) is not portable, if I switch to say the Nike FuelBand I'll lose all my fitness history. We need to learn how to build our learning ecosystem while avoiding locking our learners in to one platform. Personalized learning data should be accessible across learning platforms, exportable, and ingestible in other platforms. We need to follow Amazon Kindle and Fitbit in creating a valuable ecosystem for learning, but avoid the sins of these companies in making the data (whether e-books or fitness data) proprietary.
9. The Need for Better Devices: As much as I love the Fitbit ecosystem, I worry about losing my Fitbit device. A clip on Fitbit is sub-optimal for my lifestyle, I think it will get knocked off, lost or left behind too easily. What I want is a Fitbit watch. Waterproof. Something I can wear all the time and forget. Something that charges by the natural motion of my body. I'm betting (hoping) that Fitbit has this device in development (does anybody know?), until then I live in fear of misplacing the gadget. We also need better mobile e-learning platforms. I dream about Apple or Google or Microsoft putting learning at the core of their mobile operating systems. The potential to bake in learning applications at the mobile OS level, rather than leaving these apps to the application marketplace, seems to me like the smartest long-term strategic bet that any of these company's could make. Can we imagine what an iPhone, Android, or Windows phone would act like if it was purpose built for learning?
What do you think we can learn about learning from Fitbit?
Are any of you also Fitbit devotees?
The creating of a MOOC at the University of Amsterdam
Editor's note: The guest entry beneath was written by Arie K. den Boon (PhD), visiting professor of the Department of Communication Science and organizer of the first MOOC of the University of Amsterdam. Arie K. den Boon (pictured to the correct) is also founder of StartupPush (with Paul Eikelenboom), GfKDaphne, and June Methods. My thanks to Dr. den Boon and the senior leadership of the University of Amsterdam for enabling our readers to greater understand some of the developmental dynamics of MOOCs outside of the US. This entry need to also be viewed in the context of nascent debates about the uneven international geographies of MOOCs — a theme dealt with in GlobalHigherEd by means of 'Memo to Trustees re: Thomas Friedman&rsquos &lsquoRevolution Hits the Universities,&rsquo 'Are MOOCs turning out to be mechanisms for global competitors in international greater ed?,' 'On the territorial dimensions of MOOCs,' and 'The MOOCs fad and bubble: please tell us yet another story!'.  See, as nicely, Elizabeth Redden's 'Multinational MOOCs' and the Observatory on Borderless Larger Education's 'Would you credit score that? The trajectory of the MOOCs juggernaut' (though the latter is behind a paywall).
You can see the MOOC discussed beneath by way of this site and adhere to the linked Twitter feed by means of https://twitter.com/UvAMOOC. 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The making of a MOOC at the University of Amsterdam
by Arie K. den Boon
The sun is coming out from behind the clouds and tends to make the lake blindingly white. Skaters have come out in huge numbers on the very first tour of the year on normal ice, commencing uneasily but finding out swiftly with developing self-confidence. Skating is 1 of those things you only find out by performing.
Although I am enjoying the gorgeous landscape and concentrate on staying away from the sudden fissures in the ice, my mobile is obtaining mails from the MOOC crew, some 13 people functioning feverously to get their 1st MOOC out to the audience. We started out with two: Rutger de Graaf, lecturer of the course Introduction to Communication Science and me, lobbying and attempting to get individuals help the notion of an MOOC. We never ever anticipated we would have so several colleagues operating on the venture. It appeared very straightforward to set up a program with video.
When I did the Artificial Intelligence program of Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvik in late 2011, I was immediately conscious that this was much more inspiring than any online or offline college I had before. This was so rich, so demanding and gratifying, that I knew this was going to alter the planet. The movies were basic and therefore feeling intimate. They were taken in their garage and Sebastian and Peter had been clumsily shuffling pieces of paper to right handwritten formulas and photos. It looked like they spoke to you personally in a very straightforward set up. But later on I grew to become aware that it took plenty of energy and time to produce the video. Sebastian&rsquos voice was giving away and later on he was absent for a handful of lessons, and I understood he was exhausted of getting ready the MOOC at evening in his garage with standard classes and other obligations in daytime. Now I also saw that the program video clips and quizzes have been nicely orchestrated and followed a cautiously created path that ultimately brought me and my tens of thousands of fellow college students to the last exam. I obtained the certificate and could not cease talking about it this was some thing we had to do at the University of Amsterdam too. My expectations were quite large. It could carry us a lot higher high quality in our education, with a significantly richer experience simply because of the student&rsquos interaction that presented added feedback, with new explanations, examples and references on something in or associated to the course. Maybe it would also be considerably much more efficient, liberating lecturers to do far more analysis and give any amount of men and women around the planet with a browser accessibility to increased education. It would do some very good branding as properly, showing Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam is innovative in education and study.
Quickly I discovered that it was not so simple right after all. We started in Might 2012, with almost no price range, only the believe in that the concept of a MOOC would be so compelling that we would win fans and spending budget holders along the way. And, really, we did the Graduate College, the University, the Faculty and also the best level decision makers at the University of Amsterdam liked the idea and managed to get us funding. The preparing was to get the course out in September, Okay, probably October. We bought a graphical tablet, some computer software and started experimenting. The 1st 30 seconds of the introduction took us a total day just to get proper. The program was a replicate of the off line course Rutger was providing, but a MOOC is various, considerably more compact, and in require of a distinct narrative. It took us several months to find out how to produce a relative efficient process. Peter Neijens, director of the Graduate College estimated we would be working the MOOC in January. I believed that was ridiculous, be I kept silent. Boy, we had been going to present we had been a lot quicker. But quickly I learned far better. Creating a MOOC is like moving a mountain. We now have a production group of 4, an editorial board of four, designers and PR men and women, venture managers, personnel of the College of Communication and the Graduate College, the IT crew with Frank Benneker our MOOC guru, etc. We have inner folks on the job, but also some external people, which I feel is quite healthful for both velocity and thoroughness. We have opened registration and plan to start off with the program on February 20th. I promise: we will. Soon after attending AI and a Statistics course, I now use the MOOC of Steve Blank on Udacity to coach and train pupil startups in a flipped classroom setting. The type of flipped classroom performs very properly, and employing other MOOC&rsquos assists to determine the very best ways to setup a MOOC. 1 essential part of the electrical power of MOOC&rsquos would seem to be the volume of interaction amongst students, not among students and teacher. So what a MOOC should do, especially with smaller sized numbers of students, is stimulate the interaction amongst students. The far more MOOCs we get and the fewer college students per MOOC, the a lot more essential that becomes.
We have made a decision to see if we can join forces with Coursera, but at the identical time create on Sakai as well. Sakai is an open source environment that is produced by a huge group of universities. It has some outdated fashioned quirks, but also some new developments that make it suitable for a pilot like this one particular. Apart from, it is not however clear in which the American ventures like Coursera, edX, Udacity and other people are heading to. What is their business model? What takes place to the information of &lsquoour&rsquo students, how nicely are their private information protected the way we Europeans want it? Probably it is smart to organize a European platform as well a little bit of choice for college students and some competitors would not be hazardous. On the other hand it is clear that the greatest platform will attain the largest audience and will get the most college students. Coursera is developing faster than Facebook and seems to have closed its gates for new universities due to the fact of its tremendous development, at least temporarily. So we are content to produce on our personal platform. The fire is on, other faculties and other universities are interested and want to join the platform and find out from our experiences. The UvA MOOC crew is extremely energetic and dynamic, they know they have some thing new and exciting and want to make it perform. So I really feel a little bit guilty to be on the ice and end now and then to solution mails and hold the speed and spirit up. All goes well. Do I now have distinct expectations from MOOCs? No, except that it is a great deal of operate to make 1. Strange, why is generating a video still so complex and so considerably operate and feels so primitive? Probably this is an chance for a startup. Some 17.000 individuals have joined me on the lake, all understanding to skate again for the very first time this 12 months. It feels like a enormous open outside course!
Adobe Connect and the Limits of EdTech Outsourcing
This post is intended to open up a dialogue with the leadership at Adobe. I hope that people at Adobe read this post in the context of a larger discussion that is going on about the merits of outsourcing, a discussion that The Economist captures really well in its recent Special Report: Outsourcing and Offshoring.
Please do not mistake these concerns about outsourcing e-learning product development and support with any negative arguments partnering with colleagues from India. As I've written in other places, I very much believe that India is positioned for a source of strength in e-learning in the years to come.
Further, my experience has been that Adobe Connect is a fine synchronous collaboration / teaching platform, and that the people working in the Adobe Education Division are highly skilled and service oriented professionals.
However, my years of experience with Connect has caused me to develop serious concerns about Adobe's strategy toward, and investments in, this platform. This concern is largely driven by my experience with the Connect product and support team, a team that has been outsourced to India.
I would recommend that any of my higher ed colleagues who are looking to adopt a web / mobile synchronous learning platform include an evaluation of the parent company's product and support strategy. In other words, potential customers should ask Adobe leadership questions about the points that I raise below.
Adobe Connect is our platform for synchronous web based (and increasingly mobile) virtual teaching and collaboration. We chose Connect because it most closely meets the following requirements:
- Works through a browser, with no software download requirement. (Connect does have an add-in built on the Flash 11 player that needs to be installed for full meeting tools to be utilized.)
- Supports multiple webcam views, as we run classes with up to 30 participants.
- Integration with a landline phone bridge and VOIP for meeting recording and management, with full international toll-free calling support.
- Meeting room persistence, where uploaded content stays from one session to another.
- Dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android.
- Features such as breakout rooms, polling, whiteboards, and meeting recording.
At this point I have not found another synchronous collaboration platform that meets all these teaching and learning needs.
We are confident that our students are receiving a premium synchronous learning and collaboration experience with Adobe Connect.
I am, however, actively looking (and would be happy to speak with you if your platform does meet these requirements), as a result of the challenges experienced with Adobe around this platform.
These challenges include:
Poor Communication Around System Downtime and Product Bugs: Over the past two years we have experienced a number of occasions where our Adobe Connect service degraded (we are on a hosted instance), or that key features (such as video feeds) stopped working. In each case these problems were eventually resolved and corrected. The problem is that Adobe Connect team, based in India, has been less than proactive in communicating when technical problems are occurring. Nor has the Connect product team adequately communicated about server or application issues with Adobe's support professionals or U.S based sales force or solutions engineers. In my experience, the Adobe Connect team is slow to report problems, and reticent to offer a full technical accounting of the root causes of the issues or steps taken to guard against future issues. This has not been a one-time event, but has occurred multiple times, most recently around the upgrade to Connect 9.
Inadequate Investment in Product Evolution: The fact that Connect still most closely meets our synchronous e-learning and collaboration needs is testament to the amazing work performed by the original Macromedia Breeze team (which Adobe acquired and re-branded as Connect). I've been using this platform (first Breeze and now Connect) since 2004, and the platform change has been at best evolutionary. Connect is surely a much better platform than it was five years ago, but the full potential of this synchronous learning tool is nowhere near realized. Connect remains overly complicated for inexperienced users, with audio controls and troubleshooting still way too complicated and fragile. Adobe has not invested enough resources in simplifying the user experience, or in making meeting running and management more robust. Nor have basic features, such as the ability for meeting hosts to record and export meetings from within the meeting UI been implemented, and the meeting recording is only available in a less than useable flash (FLV) format. The location of the product team in this instance, whether in the U.S. or India, is less of an issue than the level of corporate commitment for R&D for the platform. I wonder, however, if a product team that is closer to both its customers (at least its US educational customers) and the company's leadership team would be better able to understand the market challenges and opportunities.
Lack of Ability to Collaborate with the Product Team: The lack of communication and collaboration with the Connect product team is I think the most significant cost for sourcing this platform to India. Adobe has not provided any channel (or at least one that I've been able to take advantage of) to enable direct feedback and dialogue with the Connect designers and engineers. It is not clear to me that the Connect product team participates in edtech conferences or events. Nobody that I know from the Connect team is providing any leadership around learning innovation.
Adobe has enormous strengths to build on with Connect. Adobe has a dedicated, experienced, and highly skilled services and sales team. Adobe has a very strong core product with Connect in which it can innovate. Adobe has been a long-term trusted partner within higher education, with products that are widely used by faculty, staff and students. Adobe has considerable resources and a large number of talented engineers.
What Adobe needs to do, in my opinion, is signal a strong commitment to higher education via decision to invest significant resources in its synchronous learning platform.
It may be possible to make these sorts of investments with its existing product and support team in India, as I am sure they are also dedicated professionals. That sort of investment, however, would need to be accompanied by a commitment to greater openness, platform upgrades, and tighter collaboration with customers.
I question the feasibility of accomplishing these goals when the product team is 8,000 miles away from the majority of its education customers.
Adobe, and other edtech firms, should be asking themselves if the savings realized by moving product and support positions outside of its main customer base are worth the costs in communication with customers, innovation, and agility.
Is anyone in Adobe's leadership interested in examining these challenges, and perhaps working with our community to address opportunities to improve both the platform and the support model?
Ready…set…slow?
We lately uncovered the final results of 1 of our survey queries, “What Stunned You When You Initial Commenced Doing work in Increased Education&rdquo   Following the most widespread response, “the politics,&rdquo following on the checklist was the slow pace of accomplishing adjust in higher education. 
This sentiment was pointed out by respondents across the board: people new to increased ed, veterans, and by folks in distinct positions. Some responses incorporated:
&ldquoIt is collaborative to a fault, major frequently to paralysis by analysis.&rdquo
&ldquoEven when new techniques/suggestions are proposed for expense reductions, adjust is painfully slow, if at all.&rdquo
&ldquoHow every thing is negotiated and has to be mentioned ahead of a decision is produced.&rdquo
Right here are some adjectives used to describe the unhurried atmosphere:
The reasonably slow fee of change inside of larger education could not be surprising to most inside greater education. It looks that the culture has always been this way.  However, how has the far more competitive surroundings influenced this culture, if at all?
On the 1 hand, some say the rise in administrative positions in response to enhanced competitors may possibly add to the bureaucracy. This Wall Street Journal report cites US Division of Education data displaying that, “the quantity of employees employed by colleges and universities to deal with or administer people, plans and regulations increased 50% more quickly than the number of instructors among 2001 and 2011.&rdquo 
On the other hand, competitors has led to more dialogue about obtaining efficiencies, cutting through bureaucracy, encouraging innovation, and decreasing expenses.
Offered these trends, what is the net impact on the pace and culture?
Four Georgia districts strike out today in Race to the Leading
4 Georgia districts strike out these days in Race to the Top
Other goals are to make confident 85 % of seniors are competitive for admission to colleges in the University System of Georgia and a hundred percent of seniors are profession-ready when they graduate. To achieve these objectives, the district has set forth …
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The best day of the year
The best day of the year
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Lauren Laverne: My family values
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