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Showing posts from November, 2014

Disrupting Clayton Christensen's Speech about Disrupting Education

Response to the talk by Clayton Christensen, sponsored by the UVU Faculty Senate (and, given those in attendance, by President Holland and by all the UVU Vice Presidents and Deans and by the UVU School of Business and by the BYU School of Business and by the BYU School of Law, etc.) As befits a professor at the Harvard Business School, Christensen’s basic question was how universities can teach their students more cheaply and thus make more money and avoid being “disrupted” or “killed” by private universities like the University of Phoenix. The short answer, according to him, is online and hybrid courses. MOOCs, for example. It would be much more efficient, he said, for a single MIT physics professor to tape a set of physics 101 lectures that all universities could use for their physics 101 course. Ditto economics 101, and so on. (No thought of the advantage of local professors in first-year classes to inspire and mentor and lead students to majors that match their interests

The AAUP Centennial Declaration

The AAUP issued its first statement about academic freedom and tenure in 1915. As the centennial of that beginning approaches, it has published this statement  (go to the link to read more and to sign the declaration): Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free expression -1940  Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenur e The university is a public good, not a private profit-making institution, and corporations or business interests should not dictate teaching or research agendas.   The life of a university should reflect all dimensions of human endeavor and be built on the full and open participation of diverse faculty and students.   The main aims of teaching are the dissemination of knowledge and the fostering of creativity; learning is not just about developing “job skil