Innovations for the Future

Another great article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Professor Steven Mintz, accurately describes fifteen innovations currently underway or in early stages of adoption in higher education including evidence-based pedagogy, collaborative instructional design process in course building, and specialty course sequences for certification. The author gets the future of education, disregarding how we feel about a changing landscape and instead choosing to focus on the virtue of collaboration among students, educators and policy makers to determine the best approach to fuse learning objectives with student demand. Budgetary constraints and the need for increasing revenues are a reality that many traditional professors simply underestimate. While it seems nice to attack the problem of politics in education, there is no escaping the fact that legislatures starve public institutions of funding, and the burden falls on the colleges to earn back the profits. If colleges of education focus on building technology infrastructure to meet students needs and integrate professional development with technology tools into FTE for faculty, then many of the tensions between technology enthusiasts and traditionalists may be subdued. The call for collaboration and cooperation of both parties is of paramount concern for the survival of higher education in the 21st century.