background preloader

Indiv colleges

Facebook Twitter

Business-school-disrupted. Photo If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School, whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it’s hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts: Competitive advantage.

business-school-disrupted

Disruptive innovation. The value chain. But when its dean, Nitin Nohria, faced the school’s biggest strategic decision since 1924 — the year it planned its campus and adopted the case-study method as its pedagogical cornerstone — he ran into an issue. Those professors, and those concepts, disagreed. The question: Should Harvard Business School enter the business of online education, and, if so, how? At Harvard Business School, the pros and cons of the argument were personified by two of its most famous faculty members. “Do it cheap and simple,” Professor Christensen says. Portmont College and Mount St. Mary's chart new territory with online associate programs. A small but growing number of private colleges are seeking to expand their reach by creating online affiliates, typically catering to students who would not be able to afford the traditional campus or meet the colleges' admissions standards.

Portmont College and Mount St. Mary's chart new territory with online associate programs

Mount St. Rutgers Graduate Faculty Rejects Online Degree Compromise @insidehighered. Graduate faculty members at Rutgers University at New Brunswick have once again rejected administrators' plans to create more online degree programs through a partnership with Pearson.

Rutgers Graduate Faculty Rejects Online Degree Compromise @insidehighered

Last October, faculty members in the Graduate School blocked any new programs from being approved, objecting to Pearson's share of tuition revenue -- 50 percent -- and an "obscenity clause" in the contract that Pearson later clarified. On Wednesday, administrators introduced a new resolution that, instead of blocking programs, tasked the executive vice president with producing a report on the partnership with Pearson.

The report "should address the effectiveness of Pearson in facilitating and delivering online master’s programs, the financial success of the agreement for the university, and any issues that have arisen regarding censorship of content. The report should also describe how faculty consultation will be implemented as we go forward," according to the resolution. Harvard Offers Health-Care Innovation Online Course. As business schools tiptoe into the world of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, Harvard has a plan to sidestep the isolation of online learning—a problem that keeps most students from sticking with the classes.

Harvard Offers Health-Care Innovation Online Course

Business education at Harvard will go online with “Innovating in Health Care,” a course beginning March 31 on HarvardX, the university’s online learning platform. More than 10,000 students have already registered, according to the school. It will be the first HarvardX class taught by a dedicated business school instructor: Regina Herzlinger, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. (Herzlinger is no stranger to firsts at the institution: She was also the first woman to be tenured and chaired at the business school.) Herzlinger has taught innovation and health care at Harvard in person for 43 years.

Herzlinger says MOOCs are suited to classes with objective, measurable outcomes. “Didactic courses are very adaptable to the Web,” she says. Howard U. and Pearson put plans for online degree-granting arm on hold. Howard University and Pearson have put on hold their partnership to create a flagship campus for distance education among historically black colleges and universities, after changing expectations and time constraints derailed a planned launch this fall.

Howard U. and Pearson put plans for online degree-granting arm on hold

The announcement comes amid reports that the university and its hospital will cut as many as 200 positions over the next several months. “Howard University and Pearson announce today that the university has decided to roll out its online course offerings in stages, rather than under the more aggressive timeline originally envisioned,” the announcement reads. “Because of this decision, the parties have agreed to set aside the current agreement in favor of a period in which the university will continue to build out its infrastructure for online course offerings.”

Roy L. “If somebody said to me, ‘Are you surprised that it collapsed?’ That attitude appears to be part of what halted a launch this fall. The Center for Excellence in Distance Learning at Wiley College. Director of U. of Florida Online resigns. The University of Florida finds itself without an administrator to head its online degree-granting arm, UF Online, after its director resigned after two months on the job.

Director of U. of Florida Online resigns

Elizabeth D. (Betty) Phillips, former executive vice president and provost of Arizona State University, joined Florida in January in time for a launch that capped a mad dash to to get UF Online up and running for its first 500 students. Her resignation was announced in administrative memo Wednesday night, and the news was first reported by The Gainesville Sun. Phillips, formerly Capaldi, was seen as a great fit to lead Florida's online degree-granting initiative. She had previously spent more than a decade there as a professor and provost before leaving for ASU, where she helped manage a similar entity, ASU Online. Until Florida can fill the position, W. That appears to be part of what Phillips hoped her time at Florida would involve.

Phillips did not respond to an interview request on Thursday. At Bowdoin and other colleges, online course credit gets a second look. Even as online education has become widely accepted, and many students take for granted their ability to mix in-person and online classes, some liberal arts colleges have a ban on awarding credit for anything online.

At Bowdoin and other colleges, online course credit gets a second look

But as more students learn online, even those colleges are reconsidering their policies. Bowdoin, a private liberal arts institution in Brunswick, Maine, does not allow students to transfer in any academic credit awarded from completing an online course, but the ban could be softened this week. Earlier this month, the college’s Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee proposed to give departments the power to decide whether or not to accept credits from such courses. SUNY Outlines First Degrees in Its New Online Initiative. SUNY Outlines First Degrees in Its New Online Initiative.