Multilitteratus Incognitus

High School Hallway by Matt Dempsey CC BY-SA "You don't know what you're consuming!*"  It's a loose translation of what my grandmother used to say to me when I refused to eat something 'exotic' (in my view) that she had cooked, like rabbit stew or cuttlefish. My sophomoric response was "I know exactly what I'm eating" since I didn't want to even try what she'd cooked. I suspect that Grandma meant to say "You don't know what you're missing," but somehow Grandma's malaphor was always one of those things that we shared a tacit understanding of. Anyway, the other day I was reading a post on IHE on Online Classes and Conflicting Desires . The crux of the argument is a conflicting relationship with what people say and their actions (um, surprise?)... I’m seeing it in the push-pull of students wanting a more robust on-campus college experience while simultaneously crowding into online classes. The desire for a robust o...

This week I started a 2-week (online) workshop from the Sloan Consortium on Implementing the Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Education Programs . So far it's a pretty interesting course, and I've read through the reading materials supplied by the workshop facilitator.  One of the things that stands out, and this makes sense, is that an academic department can't go at it alone.  In order to implement a quality online program you need to reach out to many stakeholders, gatekeepers, and partners. In project management parlance, you also need a champion! One of the things that I've been thinking about over the past few years has been this tension between the online and the on-campus sides of operation.  In most departments there is an online person and an on-campus person.  In some departments there isn't that distinction, but in the minds of people there still is that online vs. on-campus  - this comes from discussions with people on my own cam...