I’m glad that you came and found the discussion entertaining! The Null curriculum is really hard to address when we don’t know it’s there, but having folks even be cognoscenti of it’s impact can instantiate little changes that eventually build up! Or they take it back to the dinner table and tell their family/friends everything they were taught about sex and gender was a lie…

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My opinion about open access is similar to yours. I believe that our role as researchers and educators is to benefit the public. The public needs US to solve their wide range of problems from health, to transportation and sustainable development. We need to hear the public, and conduct research according to their needs, and provide them with our results. Unfortunately, what is happening now is the opposite, faculty conduct research for their own benefit, and not for the publics benefit, and whether it addresses the publics’ need or not, is not the main concern. Thanks for sharing!

[…] to change the way we are educating our future engineers. I talked about this a little bit in my final blog for Gedi but it is such an important issue that I would like to discuss it further here. We have had […]

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Interesting. Learner-centered education, where students are placed in the center and the focus becomes on facilitating teaching procedures from which they can gain knowledge is important – as a substitute to the teacher-center where faculty teaching is merely involved with passing on their expertise-.

I think you make a fair point on the content, but I think the idea that so many people are exposed to material in these courses is still pretty amazing. Even a 2% completion rate for 226,000 students still means 5,200 people getting exposed to new ideas in that 12-week span. Given the right context (eg courses that don’t claim to be all-encompassing, but serve as a gateway to further knowledge) I think it makes for an excellent starting point that might get people excited about pursuing further knowledge. I agree though, that these shouldn’t be used to supplant traditional courses, but they might make excellent stepping stones to even online-only smaller courses for the people who come out and truly want to learn more.

I enjoyed reading your blog! It was very informative and some how mind opening. I like you mentioned that we should make higher education “a two way street.”

Wow! This blog looks exactly like my old one! It’s on a completely different topic but it has pretty much the same page layout and design. Excellent choice of colors! eakcfkbedafbfeda

As a librarian, I am zoning in on item #3, the open mix. Yes, yes, yes, use the library-provided resources for all the reasons you list AND add to that the hope that students might see that some information is only available with certain privileges, in this case their tuition dollars and current institutional affiliation. As you say, the mix of sources you include, open and proprietary, points to this privileged access versus access for all. And we could take it a step further to point out that your students at a state-funded, large, research institution have access to resources that students at a small private institution like mine do not. Mix away!

“What I’ve learned” from this is complicated for me as well, and not all of it is coherent enough to put out here. I am both inspired by and concerned about the prospects of liberal learning, which makes it hard to come up with a cogent precis of where I’ve been and where we all might be headed.
But with so many partially-written posts on my dashboard I decided it was worth at least putting something out there. As you say, it’s a place to start. The real challenge ahead, to my mind is how to fulfill the charge of the collaboratives project to “build capacity and a network of faculty.” Potential abounds.Easy answers, not so much.
Thank you, Gardner for asking me to join this project. I’ve learned so much and hope to carry the experience forward to wherever the next adventure leads us. Thanks so much for your vision and leadership — it’s been absolutely essential and I’m counting on you to carry the beacon for the foreseeable future.

What a thoughtful, detailed, and inspirational set of takeaways! Thank you. I hope to write a similar post soon, though “what have I learned from this experience?” is a very complicated question for me. But one must start somewhere…. I can only hope to create half the resource you’ve created here. I’m very grateful for all your contributions to this learning experience. I know I am not alone in feeling that way.