Articles: Teaching & Learning

In the movie “Idiocracy,” the world has degenerated to garbage-filled state where people don’t know basic farming. Could this fate be avoided by maintaining support for the liberal arts?

Gene Wade is making it his goal to provide quality education at a low cost. As cofounder and CEO of UniversityNow, which combines an online learning platform with on-campus partners, Wade offers an easily accessible college education that most people can afford without loans or financial aid.
“I became an education entrepreneur because the current system fails far too many people,” he says.

The readers have spoken and for the first time ever, University Business magazine is honoring higher education products and services, in this first annual Readers’ Choice Top Products for 2012. Earlier this year, campus leaders and administrators from across the country had the unique opportunity to nominate what products they and their peers around the country are using, and voice how these products contribute to the success of their schools.

Flipped classrooms are more of a strategy than a specific collection of technologies and room configurations. As long as
students have the ability to access lecture materials and other online elements in their non-class time, a professor can flip the course. However, there are two components to room setup that tend to work better than others:

By now, most of us have heard the term “flipped classroom” and learned that the concept is not as aerodynamic as its name. But it is becoming a movement. In this type of learning space, lectures and other traditional classroom elements are swapped out in favor of more in-person interaction, like small group problem solving and discussion.

Business school is a laboratory for problem solving where aspiring executives are trained to make organizations more efficient, manage risk, and develop new ways to meet society’s needs. They are trained to manage a wide variety of business tasks such as introducing better detergents or MP3 players, running a theme park, bringing life-saving medicines to market, or establishing micro-lending to improve living standards in the third world.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Richard Baraniuk for our continuing series on “Education Innovators.” Baraniuk, a professor at Rice University (Texas), is the founder of Connexions, an open education resource project, and its offshoot OpenStax College.