Wednesday, January 07, 2004

The Collegiate Way: Residential Colleges and University Reform This is the third posting related to questions about the future of higher education. This issue may seem far afield from the main focus of the EduResources Weblog, which is online instructional resources, but it isn't because the growing availability of free online resources directly challenges campus sites to demonstrate that they can offer more than students can obtain for themselves through self-study. I was informed about this site by Robert O'Hara the creator of the Collegiate Way web site. "Greetings, Mr. Hart. Readers of your EduResources weblog might enjoy the material available on my site "The Collegiate Way: Residential Colleges and Higher Education Reform" (www.collegiateway.org). The Collegiate Way recommends the decentralization of large universities into small, faculty-led residential colleges as a means to improving the educational environment for students and faculty alike. It includes many pages of recommendations on how to establish residential colleges, answers to common objections, case studies, a picture of the collegiate landscape of the future, and more. A news page (www.collegiateway.org/news - not quite a blog, but almost) reports recent news about the residential college movement and has more than 350 people subscribed to its monthly bulletins. I hope you may find the site of interest." I did find the web site of interest and am passing the information along. Here's my reply to Dr. O'Hara, "Thanks very much for the email message. I was not aware of Collegiate Way and the residential college movement. I will post something in the EduResources article about the site. I'm convinced that higher education will be going through some drastic changes in the next ten to twenty years; it certainly seems to me that institutions will need to provide an extended relational environment if students are to gain more from attending college than they could obtain by taking distance education classes or certificate programs. My own educational experiences as a student and teacher have spanned very small institutions (Lewis and Clark College as a student), large institutions (Univ. of Wisconsin and Stanford University as a graduate student and UC Irvine, Univ. of Southern Calif. as a teacher, and Cal Poly as an administrator) and then back to smaller institutions (Univ. of Redlands and Eastern Oregon University as a teacher/administrator). I know from my experiences that undergraduate students can often gain more from attendance at smaller institutions, but graduate research is done much better at larger institutions. There is also the range dimension; students can gain a much wider exposure to the full scope of a field at a larger institution because the departmental specializations are very limited at smaller institutions. Perhaps residential colleges in larger institutions can provide a blending of opportunities." 10:01:29 AM    COMMENT []

What is Higher in Higher Education? These weblog citations from Weblogs in Higher Education and the Inside Learning Web Log continue the questions that were raised in Stephen Downes' forecasts for 2004 about higher education. What is higher education adding for students that they cannot obtain through self-study or guided distance education? Unless colleges and universities add a valuable dimension of personalized teaching through extended personal contacts and guided group interactions then students who attend large institutions are essentially engaged in nothing more than self-study programs in a campus context. Higher education must offer something higher educationally than a higher price. JH _____ The professor is dead. Brian Alger speaks up about his son being victimized by a university department that offers little more than videotaped lectures to hundreds of students, instead of credible teaching. This reminds me of a similar practice at my undergraduate institution in the 1970s: a very famous man was nearing the end of his life, so the department videotaped a semester of his lectures, and after he died they continued to offer his course with graduate students doing the grading. According to the lore... [Weblogs in Higher Education] 9:38:49 AM    COMMENT []