Chief Academic Officer Blog
Teaching in the Time of COVID-19
March 19, 2020
Dear Faculty,
As you all transition your classes to an exclusively online environment, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and dedication and share a few words of encouragement. You all know how rapidly this situation is evolving and how often we are exposed to new decisions, from the global down to the local levels including how our own institution is responding.
Disruptive Methodologies in Academia – Take 2
April 16, 2018
In the previous installment, I discussed the potential benefits of moving from expert thinking to a design thinking model for curricular review and defining the learning outcomes we are aspiring to provide students with. At some level, the same benefits could be obtained from intentionally applying design thinking to research and creative processes in academia. Researchers and creative scholars should favor risk taking in developing innovation. In fact, I’ll argue that during the mid-20th Century that design thinking approach was formalized and institutionalized, but then lost somewhat in recent decades.
Disruptive Methodologies in Academia – Take 1
April 12, 2018
In my recent reads about influential trends that affect society and Higher Education in particular, design thinking and disruptive technology seem to take the lion’s share of discussions around how to plan systems of tomorrow, whether these are technological processes or social ones. Academia falls predominantly in the latter and in spite of seeing it’s fair amount of disruptive technologies in last decades, its evolution seems to have remained relatively linear, and may need a major rewrite in coming years to remain relevant to society’s needs. But before I explore the notion of circularity vs. linearity, let’s discuss disruptive technology.