Ms. McGowan says, to help students prepare for a fluid business climate in which “within five years, they’ll probably be in a job that didn’t even exist when they started college.” That approach, she says, will require improvisational skills among instructors and students alike.

Philadelphia University plans to blend design, engineering and management into a new undergraduate program. Team teaching preparation is only part of the work that 12 faculty have undertaken over the past six months.

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Thirty ACU faculty and staff attended this exceptional workshop. It is exciting to imagine the hundreds or thousands of students who will benefit from Dee Fink’s leadership in helping faculty at ACU learn how to systematically design their courses and to ultimately create learning environments that are learning centered and outcome based.

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This documentary makes the argument that the college bubble is the next big bubble that is about to burst. Student debt is well over $830 billion dollars which exceeds the credit card debt in the US. Lots of information to consider and validate.

Jason Hiner of Tech Republic offers the following surefire ways to kill innovation:

1. Don’t give ownership of projects
2. Create too many layers of management
3. Ignore brainstorming rules
4. Rely too heavily on data and dashboards
5. Under-resource your hidden opportunities

While all five points are salient, I am particularly fond of the fourth “Rely to heavily on data…” All too often in Academia we are paralyzed by the pursuit and analysis of data. At some point someone has to make a decision and move forward–this often doesn’t happen quickly enough.

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Thanks go to my friend and colleague Tyler Wall for passing on this interesting story:

Nairobi School of Theology (NIST-IL) is using a mobile phone application called mLearning to allow students in the Leadership Training for Christian Leaders program to work on their courses from their mobile phones. NIST-IL has conducted two pilot studies of their mLearning program and found that mobile students had a higher completion that their face2face peers in the control group. Many face2face students busy schedules and heavy traffic prevented them from attending lectures and completing the required exams.

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