Sure, it may elicit snickers when first mentioned, but the new "marijuana major" at Northern Michigan University is serious stuff. Called the Medicinal Plant Chemistry program, it's the first U.S. undergraduate major in the study of cannabinoids. Although a significant portion of the curriculum will be devoted to cannabis studies, the program will eventually encompass other substances […]
Giving to American higher education has enjoyed a significant increase over the last decade, far exceeding inflation. Despite the recession in 2008-10, giving to higher ed grew steadily from $23 billion in 2006 to $34 billion in 2015, a healthy increase that's highlighted by a significant and continuous stream of megagifts (more than $50 million). […]
Career center staff spend a lot of time encouraging students to access available supports, but they may need to work even harder to serve international students. A recent survey by World Education Services (WES) found that more than 40 percent of current international students had not yet used campus career services. Among international student alumni who […]
Gather stakeholders—including faculty, students, IT leaders and others—for honest discussion. In California, it was crucial to include student representation in the statewide committee that examined various LMS candidates, says Jory Hadsell, executive director of California Community Colleges' Online Education Initiative. That positive approach allowed college constituency groups to focus on the end goal of student […]
As colleges and universities find new ways to partner with each other to improve services and reduce costs, the idea of sharing an LMS is starting to gain traction. For instance, selecting and sharing a learning management system was key to an online teacher training and certification partnership established in 2017 between the schools of […]
Most students attend college to earn a degree—a respected credential that informs the world and the workplace that they have specific knowledge and skills, and the maturity and intellect to prove it. "Issuing and maintaining credentials is central to American higher education. Nobody can really compete with us on this. That's our crown jewel, in […]
The Lumina Foundation has been pursuing the goal of recognizing and accepting for-credit microcredentials and learning experiences for several years, through their Connecting Credentials effort and the proposed framework they launched back in 2015 (http://connectingcredentials.org/). This framework seeks to define an architecture wherein competencies can be defined in structured sets that can lead to microcredentials that […]
The University of Iowa adds narration in five languages to its online commencement videos so families from around the globe can experience their children's graduation.
The University of Wyoming now uses an augmented reality platform with a simulated class as part of its teacher education program. To use the program, a teacher-in-training faces a camera and teaches a class of digital students that's projected onto a screen. Offsite actors impersonate students with voices and digital puppeteering. Presenting a lesson in […]
Reaching students and families with social media posts in their native language is one way higher ed institutions can build engagement and drive traffic to the website.
