Darden Business School Rediscovers Its Right Brain
Plesae scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.
Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time. Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.
SCUP Link Darden finds a solution to teaching innovation and creativity by studying the programs in graphic arts and design schools, and schools of architecture. From Today's Campus: Design, story, leadership, symphony, play and meaning predominate. Pink says these qualities are the new business literacy, and the MFA is the new MBA . . . Darden chose not to change a reworked MBA to an MFA, but to complement the de rigueur of accounting, finance, labor law and management with a team-based, collaborative search for creativity . . . That makes sense at a university founded by an extraordinary man who – as a horticulturist, philosopher, politician, farmer, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, inventor, writer and U.S. president – used both sides of his brain quite well.
SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are: - May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
- July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
- October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
- January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III
Labels: academic planning, business schools, creativity, curriculum, Darden, innovation
Outsourcing, Insourcing–and Everything in Between
Plesae scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.
Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time. Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.
SCUP Link Can we keep up with the demands of Millennials? Is a broader variety of outsourcing part of the answer? From University Business: Today, nine out of 10 colleges are outsourcing a broad variety of non-academic functions including recruitment, admissions, financial aid, and, impressively, creating virtual communities of distance learners connected through laptops, PDAs, and, increasingly, mobile communication devices. These same students have increasingly accessed distributed student services for three simple reasons–convenience, timeliness, and interactive communication–read as engagement.
Though it may seem counter-intuitive for our generation, these millennial students find satisfaction in instantaneous recognition, feedback, and advisement. Unlike their older brothers and sisters, these students are seemingly intolerant of commuting, parking, and waiting in line for class registration. Instead, they want a virtual, convenient one-stop admissions, enrollment, and student support experience, delivered through the wonders of digital connections with the campus of their choice.
SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are: - May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
- July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
- October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
- January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III
Labels: academic planning, cooperative purchasingt, Millennials, outsourcing, procurement, resource and budget planning
Workshop: Linking Planning and Assessment in Higher Education: A Practical Guide
Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time. Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.
SCUP Link
You could not find a better presentation or a better, more-informed set of presenters on this topic. Audience: Planners new to the use of the assessment process in accreditation activities as a springboard to integrated planning Abstract: This workshop focuses on strategies for effectively utilizing information drawn from a broad range of assessment activities. It goes deeper into the content found in the SCUP volume, Integrating Planning and Assessment in Higher Education: A Practical Guide (2006). Participants will identify the information that should drive the strategic planning process at a college or university and that provides the evidence needed to make more targeted decisions in the allocation of human and fiscal resources. The presentation will also highlight the linkage between assessment and planning as a critical compliance criterion among all regional accrediting bodies in the United States. The workshop will use a series of exercises throughout the presentation to interactively engage participants and reinforce the concepts and principles being presented. Each participant will receive a comprehensive workbook containing presentation materials and a list of resources for use upon completion of the workshop.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: - March 24–26: Cambridge, MA - "Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats"
- April 5–7, San Diego, CA - "Smart Planning in an Era of Uncertainty"
- April 7, Houston, TX - "Sustaining Higher Education in an Age of Challenge"
Labels: academic planning, accreditation, institutional planning, integrated planning, strategic planning
Teach Online or Wither: Leveraging Technology to Increase Enrollment, Capacity, and Revenues
 Arthur F. Kirk, president of St. Leo University, writing in University Business magazine: "But you need online courses and online programs. Traditional and non-traditional students increasingly demand—and often require—them. The time may have passed for the "big growth" strategy, but if you want to protect what you have and hopefully grow it, you need to be online, now! Since 2002, online education grew by a compounded annual rate of 19.7 percent. It grew 12.9 percent in 2007, according to Sloan data. During that same period, overall collegiate enrollments grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate . . . What is required? The first component of success is institutional commitment. Far too many schools falter because of vocal pockets of faculty resistance and lack of strong leadership. Smaller private not-for-profit colleges remain the least likely to offer online classes or programs. Yet a majority of them embrace a mission to educate working adults and/or depend upon those students to balance budgets. While chief academic officers generally believe that faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online courses, fewer than half of private college CAOs believe their faculty do so . . . Those opinions ignore mountains of data that demonstrate no differences in learning outcomes between online and classroom courses. They also ignore the National Survey of Student Engagement, in which "distance education" students reported being more engaged than traditional students. Negative faculty opinions run counter to those of business leaders. According to Excelsior College/Zogby International's online survey of business executives, among those familiar with online programs, '83 percent strongly believe that degrees earned via online programs are viewed favorably compared with those earned in a more traditional way.'
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, for-profits, information technology, online learning, resource and budget planning
U Iowa Integrated Academic & Budgeting Planning Task Forces Reports
In early 2009 Iowa provost, Wallace D. Loh, formed six task forces to examine ways to shape the future of the academic programs at the university, in relation so the various external forces affecting university campuses. The final reports of each task force are now available as PDF. This web page lists the task forces and has links to their charge, membership, and reports plus appendices. Many SCUPers will enjoy learning from this work. The task forces were: - Task Force in Strategic Budgeting
- Task Force on Undergraduate Education and Success
- Task Force on Graduate Education: Selective Excellence
- Task Force on Research and Creative excellence
- Task force on Internationalization and Diversity
- Task Force on Public Outreach and Civic Engagement
Audrey Williams June has this brief article about the graduate education task force's report in T he Chronicle of Higher Education.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, institutional direction planning, integrated planning, N-C, resource and budget planning, University of Iowa
Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services
 Robert C. Dickeson has revised and updated his well-respected book, Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance. If you click here or on the image at left and purchase the book from Amazon, SCUP will receive a small percentage of the purchase price. Given the adjustments and realignments happening on campuses all around the world in the current economic recession, this is a timely update! A bonus in this updated edition is the inclusion of what Dickeson calls a "step-by-step guide to getting started with academic priority-setting" that was created by John Ball for SCUP to use in prioritization workshops.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, academic programs, Dickeson, prioritizing, resource and budget planning
Faculty 'Productivity': Charging for Quality
In the "Confessions of a Community College Dean" blog at Inside Higher Ed, Dean Dad notes, with links, an ongoing online discussion in a number of blogs about full-time faculty workload. Dean Dad's focus is on whether or not non-elite institutions can really charge for quality, or not: "A thrilled student doesn't pay any more than does a barely-contented student." He ends up asking: "Is there a sustainable way for colleges to charge by quality rather than quantity?"
A couple of his related thoughts that we thought were interesting: - What looks like a static workload over time has actually become more due to faculty "mission creep" and
- There's really a minimum limit to class size, below which quality can actually drop.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, faculty, productivity, quality, resource and budget planning, workload
Mobile Libraries Blog
The Mobile Libraries blog will be of interest to many types of planners: technology, academic, facilities, strategic. It defines itself as: [D]evoted to documenting any and all topics relating to services provided by libraries to patrons within mobile environments. Library mobile services are defined as any and all library services that are provided via mobile technologies. While the posts often dig deep into the technology of new hardware and functionalities, on February 6 the post was about a recent article by John Dew in The Futurist. That article requires a subscription or a $3 fee to download a PDF, but the blog author has excerpted much of it and describes it thusly: An educator and strategic planner outlines the trends leading to a long-forecast future for colleges and universities: Global standardization of education content and accreditation, greater diversity in the student body, and more options for where, when, and how learning takes place.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, environmental scanning, facilities planning, futuring, libraries, mobile, technology planning
Pursuing Needless Innovations
Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) argues for the value of "traditional" learning and matriculation, and wonders why America's elites don't seem to want the great education they got, for the rest of the population. (Here is the Zephyr Teachout essay that we think is the one he refers to. It's also worth reading. Ekman's essay is here, from University Business: Most Americans today don’t harbor resentments against their alma maters. Nor is the popular critique of higher education mainly a matter of outrage over high tuition. Rather, the public criticism of colleges is, to a surprising extent, aimed at the educational experience itself. Discarding the baby with the bathwater, Zephyr Teachout’s widely-circulated essay argues that the traditional classroom-based college will soon be replaced by online education, and that the differences in reputation among colleges will no longer matter. I don’t know where Teachout went to college, but her view—especially that a college’s prestige won’t matter—seems more wishful than realistic.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, innovation, institutional planning, learning, learning spaces, liberal education
Initial List of SCUP-45 Concurrent Sessions!
Preliminary titles, presenters, abstracts, and learning outcomes are available now on SCUP's website for SCUP–45 concurrent sessions. Higher education's premier planning conference has a set of concurrent sessions of value to every planner on campus. The current list includes: - "Free" Property - Look That Gift Horse in the Mouth
- "Rapid Conceptualization" Path to Scientific Funding...
- A New Vision for the Core Campus at Clemson University
- A Sustainable Campus? - Yeah, Right! More Hype and No Substance ?
- Academic Resource Management System: Introducing Centralized Strategic Resource Planning to Independent-Minded Faculties
- Access Mis-Management: "We've Met the Enemy and He is Us"
- Achieving Strategic Alignment
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- An Incremental Approach to Creating Technology-Enhanced Learning Spaces
- Assessing the Internal and External Variables that Contribute to Institutional Risk in Support of a "Risk Scorecard."
- Benchmarking Benefits for Energy/Water Use - 54 College Campuses in Minnesota
- BIM's Value in Pre-Design: Use of Information from Programming Through Occupation
- Bodies in Motion - Brains in Motion
- Campus Heritage Builders
- Carbon, Energy, and Water: Sustainable Planning Strategies for Indiana University
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- Connecting Alumni to Campus through Innovative Planning and Design
- Creating a 180-degree Turnaround In User Satisfaction With Home-grown Software
- Creating a Community College for the District of Columbia
- Creating New Collaborative Learning Environments
- Creative Project Funding When Your State is Strapped for Cash
- Cultural Competency for Educational Leaders
- Culture Shock: Managing Change in the Land of Academia
- Delivering on a Big Vision: Implementing a 75-acre Campus Expansion
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- Does Net Zero Design LEED to Zero Cost?
- Embracing Continuity and Change: Penn State Brandywine's Planning Approach
- Following Through on Strategic Plans: From Words to Deeds
- Friending Gr8 Ldrz: Leveraging Social Media on Campus
- Funding Higher Education Facility Preservation: A Streamlined Comparative Condition Framework for All State Facilities
- Funding the Future: Taking Advantage of Federal Grants
- Future Ready: How to Integrate Strategic Direction and Campus Planning
- Hardwiring Flexibility into a Strategic Plan’s Implementation: Strategies, Risks, and Rewards
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- HEASC Fellows Project Report
- Help! My Building Doesn't Have a Cavity: Re-cladding Solutions for Energy Inefficient Existing Buildings
- Hey! Where do you learn best? (Student Video Contest Winners Share their Stories!)
- Home, Classroom, Community: Creating a Comprehensive College House Residential Program
- How Do Smart Meters Make a University More Intelligent
- Implementing Academic Analytics: Promise and Performance
- Integrated Planning in Community Colleges: Current Realities and Future Possibilities
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- Integrated Project Delivery—A Catalyst for Collaboration/Planning
- Integrating Academic, Facilities and Community Needs at BCTC's New Campus
- Integration of Healthcare Education Across Disciplines and Departments
- Interaction Between A Community's Healthcare Needs and Coppin University's Academic Program as a Catalyst for Campus Transformation
- Inventing the Next Century of Living-Learning Environments
- Legacy System to Integrated Information System in Record Time!
- Lifecycle Cost Analysis of Campus Solar and LEED/Sustainable Projects
- Location Location Location: An Unlikely Approach to Sustainable Growth
- Making Your Strategic Plan a Bestseller on Campus
- Managing Space as a Campus Resource
- Master Planning for a Sustainable Marine Science Campus at UCSC
- Maximizing Land Utilization Through Creative Campus Planning and Development
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- Measuring the Impact of Enterprise Asset Management Programs
- Multi-faith Religious Space: The Solution to Diverse Campus Religious Pressures
- Multidisciplinary Learning, Sustainable Environments and Architectural Design = Positive Educational Experience
- New School Fogelman Library - Urban Case Study of the New Library Experience
- Notre Dame's Investment in the Future of Engineering
- Places for Collaboration: Art Buildings as Models for Collaborative Spaces
- Planning a Balanced Scorecard Approach at a NJ State College
- Planning for an Uncertain Future
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- Planning for Athletics and Recreation - Making Every Yard Count
- Planning for the Experienced Planner I (Session offered twice)
- Planning the Next Generation Library: User-driven, Technology-rich, and Resource-savvy
- Poly Canyon Village: Integrated Project Delivery Brings Sustainability Home
- Positioning for the Future During Uncertain Times'
- Presentation by the 2010 Excellence in Institutional Innovation and Integration Award Recipient
- Presentation by the 2010 SCUP Founders (Casey) Award Recipient
- Putting the Strategic Plan into Action: The Operational Plan
- Realizing The Impossible Dream: Developer-Led; Client Satisfaction; Architectural Excellence
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- Redefining Campus Boundaries: Strategies for Successful Student Growth
- Repurposing a Building - Morrill Hall, Sustainable in 1890
- Res Life Must Go On
- Revolutionizing Learning in the STEM Disciplines
- SCUP Excellence in Planning, SCUP Excellence in Landscape Architecture, and SCUP/AIA-CAE Excellence in Architecture Awards
- Simulation Centers - A New Model for Integrated Learning
- Smart Change: Tools for Strategic Planning and Adaptive Change
- Stalled, Squeezed, Shelved: Finding Project Momentum in a Wobbly World
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- Successful Public/Private Partnerships - A Case Study for Capital Funding & Development
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
- Sustainable Campus as Pedagogy: Opportunities For Enhancing the Curriculum
- Sustainable Residence Life "Flexible Living Unit" Design
- The Power of Community and Place - Medical Education in West Michigan
- The Young and the Agile
- Tools to Assess the Marketability of Your Academic Programs
- Utilizing Technology and Data in Strategic Planning
- Vision, Beauty and Fun: The Success of Embracing Collaborative Planning
- Click through to the abstracts and learning outcomes
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:
Labels: academic planning, campus planning, facilities planning, resource and budget planning, SCUP-45, strategic planning
Top Tech Trends from the American Library Association
The 'Top Tech Trends' session at a mid-Winter ALA meeting convened five experts to share the latest trends and observations about what they call issues "affecting patron access and services." Joshe Hadro reports on it in Library Journal. Almost anyone would find this report interesting, but it is especially useful for those who do variations on learning space design. The categories discussed included: - Discovery Systems;
- User Experience Across the Breadth of Library-Based Interactions;
- The Need to Embrace 'Mobile';
- Augmented Reality;
- End of Apps: "2010 is the year that the app dies."; and
- The Reinvention of the Book.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, ebooks, learning space design, libraries, mobile, technology
The Imagined Space of The Web 2.0 Classroom
Accommodating technology, that is, making it usable in a room, does require many changes: Rooms should be square or rounded instead of rectangular since sight-lines and visual display of information is now as important as the sound of voices; moving furniture for different ways to work with technology should not cause a sudden roar of noise, chair and table legs scraping on tile, but instead the soft rolling of table and chair on a soft surface. In other words, new classroom design is not based on unquestioned tradition but is based on new practices developed within the field of media architecture. Note that SCUP has a Lyris-based email Knowledge Community [smartc] with this topical focus. There are more than 500 practitioners who are members of that often quiescent discussion list.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, facilities planning, integrated planning, learning space design, online learning, Web 2.0
Are Senior Faculty Members Still Effective Teachers?
Writing in Faculty Focus, Maryellen Weimer takes a brief, balanced look at what is known about whether teaching effectiveness meaningfully declines with age. She says that most of the research is from 3-4 decades ago, and thus was measuring a very different senior faculty that those we now have. Weimer concludes that if there is a decline, it is very small, a perception matched by surveys of students. However, the time demands of being a professor that aren't directly related to the time actually spent teaching, can be difficult for senior faculty, especially if they are socially isolated in their practice of teaching. 
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, aging, faculty, teaching
Successful Admissions Prospecting Tips from Presidents
Today's Campus repackages 9 brief interviews with campus presidents who excel in one way or another at admissions prospecting. The combined ages of the nine campuses represented here may well approach a thousand years. Each shares a common characteristic--a hands-on president, who is intent on the school's remaining a strong competitor. Each knows the value of having a particular distinction. And each campus has mastered at least one admissions prospecting tactic. These are really brief quotes apparently taken from longer interviews. Each paragraph has a bolded key phrase, and those are: articulation agreements, simultaneous dual admission and enrollment at more than one school, external partnerships, internet advertising agencies, carefully refined leads, recruiter motivation tactics, referrals from alums, focus on sustainability, location and employment assistance, and welcoming unusual combinations of studies.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, admissions, enrollment planning, presidents, prospecting, recruitment
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s
SCUP members have shown themselves to be extremely interested, professionally, in generational differences in learning style. After all, if you are planning for the future of your campus, it's essential that it be ready to accommodate what the students bring with them, including the technology tools they use. And that's true not just for physical space, but for virtual space and functionalities as well.
In The New York Times, Brad Stone writes that his two-year old daughter calls his Kindle his "book," which gave him some pause. He's not even sold on the Kindle and she's going to grow up understanding that something like the Kindle is in fact a "book."
So, he looked around a bit and found what we at SCUP have been seeing: There are "mini-generation gaps" that are much smaller in terms of the years we traditionally think of as "generations." “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.” We really have our jobs cut out for us, trying to be appropriately prepared for the communications and learning preferences of young people when those preferences can change with every 2-4-year cohort, not just every generation.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, generations, IT planning, learning, learning space design, learning styles
'Credit Hours' or 'Chunks of Learning'?
Credit hours? Chunks of learning? The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk observes that the recent angst between the DOE's Inspector General and the North Central's Higher Learning Commission has given new life to the question of "credit hours." Are they outdated? A relic? Do they do more harm than good? Along the way, Blumenstyk mentions an interesting Lumina-backed effort to create a new college ecosystem ( DGREE, it has a conference going on this week), touches base with Carol A. Twigg at NCAT, and notes an internal Department of Education initiative to redefine "credit hour": Meanwhile, the Education Department may itself take that step. Last month, during negotiations with 16 representatives of colleges and associations over new rules to govern federal student aid, the department proposed its own credit-hour definition, based on the Carnegie Unit (one credit would equal one hour of class time or direct faculty instruction and two hours of out-of-class work per week for approximately 15 weeks; in cases where there was no formal class, the college, with the accord of its accreditor, could establish equivalents). It's uncertain if this proposal will be adopted. Negotiators are expected to vote on the credit-hour definition, along with other proposed rules, in late January.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:
Labels: academic planning, assessment, credentials, credit hours, credits, learning outcomes, quality
Rebooted Computer Labs Offer Savings for Campuses and Ambiance for Students
 Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.
 What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT. Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works. That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed. During a recent tour of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, we noted the plethora of 'breakout' rooms which resemble the spaces this article describes as being created from what used to be computer labs. More than 11 percent of colleges and universities are either phasing out public computer labs or planning to do so, according to this year's survey of college technology leaders by the Campus Computing Project, released last month. At colleges that have not pulled the plug on their labs, nearly 20 percent are reviewing the option. This is the first year the Campus Computing Project has asked the question.
UVa will phase out computer labs like this one, at Thornton Hall, and let students log in to the campus network on their own machines to use expensive software. Institutions agree that computer labs, much like student centers and libraries before them, are due for an extreme makeover. That is why several technology officials contacted by The Chronicle believe in creating work spaces that hardly resemble the computer labs of the past.
These new spaces might be lounges filled with modular furniture and plasma televisions; virtual labs that give remote laptops access to software; or bigger, better computer rooms with state-of-the-art machines and pleasing architecture that can act as de facto student centers. Fortunately for young caffeine addicts, nearly all officials interviewed said they planned to let students drink and eat while typing away—something that has long been forbidden in traditional computer Labels: academic planning, computer labs, facilities planning, learning spaces, technology
What We Found This Morning
Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.
What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT. Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works. That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed. NEW! Let us know what you think of this type of resource. Mini-poll below.
A quick look at our early morning sweep through the higher ed media on Monday, November 30, 2009. Our guess is that you'll especially like Today's Campus' new Campus Photos section and University Business' 35 Smart Building Ideas.
Your thoughts?
Labels: academic planning, campus planning, facilities planning, governance, leadership, resource and budget planning
Intellectual Entrepreneurship: An Authentic Foundation for Higher Education Reform
The "blurb" we wrote for this Planning for Higher Education article says "Our relationship with the traditions and purpose of a humanistic education, it appears, are at odds with the career environment most students inhabit after graduation." The authors, Gary D. Beckman and Richard A. Chewitz, provide case studies of innovative entrepreneurship initiatives at the University of Texas, Austin, as well as background and discussion of the concept of "entrepreneurship education" in academic programming. "From our perspective, entrepreneurship—broadly conceived—is an intrinsic human right to change the status quo, and intellectual entrepreneurship is a philosophy and pedagogy to exercise this act by educating citizen-scholars—agents of change who own, are accountable for, and put their knowledge to work for the betterment of themselves and society. As we collaborate in the development of campuswide efforts to bring entrepreneurial thinking to the arts and sciences, we have the opportunity to envision entrepreneurship education in an authentic manner that is sustainable across campus, relevant to communities, and, most importantly, empowering to stakeholders." Labels: academic planning, academic programs, entrepreneurship, learning, pedagogy
Reflections of a Failed Dean
Now SCUPers can connect on Facebook and on LinkedIn.
It's not working out. Is it the structure of the institution? Is it the faculty? Is it the president? Is it you? From The Chronicle of Higher Education: "They say they can't work with you." With those words from the president, my life as chief academic officer ceased. Oh, I stayed on the job for a long time after that, but my value as a dean was effectively derailed. My career at, let's call it Hogwarts College, had ended . . . I'm a failed dean. There are a lot of us out here, but since many of us want to continue working for a living, we don't reveal ourselves, and we don't say much . . . There's a great deal of advice given to chief academic officers, and ever since my failure, I've read it assiduously to get a sense of what I did wrong.
Labels: academic leadership, academic planning, CAO, chief academic officer, dean, failure, human relations
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