Tag: highered

Higher Education, Professional Development

Professional Development Options for “Tough Times”

Laura Pasquini

Financial crisis has hit the US, and this has impacted many fiscal decisions in higher education.  One of first areas to be cut in college & university budgets is professional development.  

Although it is critical to engage our faculty & staff in personal and professional growth, it will be our challenge to be more “creative” with how we go about it.  Instead of attending conferences, workshops & seminars far away we are suggested to look towards internal development or online cost-effective alternatives.

Since I am interested in further education & support in the higher education field I thought it would great to share some online professional development resources.  Some of these are free or a cheaper alternative if you connect with your department staff:

Feel free to add your 2 cents as to where to get free/inexpensive professional development.

Collaboration, web 2.0

Web 2.0 Goes to Work (for Education, Too!)

Laura Pasquini

The McKinsey Quarterly presented a great business model of 6 ways that web 2.0 technologies can go to work for managers:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.

2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.

3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.

4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.

5. The right solution comes from the right participants.

6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.

I would argue that these business practices can also support best practices in higher education. If we think about our students, faculty & staff in our “business model” this might be a few things to consider on how to get web 2.0 to work for education:

1. Students need to part of the development & process of education.

2. Go to where students are – use the technologies are being used.

3. Incorporate web 2.0 tools into current resources & services

4. Interact & provide feedback to activity online.

5. Target tech-savvy students & staff to help facilitate online learning initiatives among peer groups.

6. Encourage online contributions from students with some moderation.

blogs

Just Blog It, HigherEd!

Laura Pasquini

blog

For those of you in higher education who either blog or read blogs on a regular basis, you might be interested in learning more about BlogHigherEd

This is an excellent network that aggregate blogs from ALL over the realm of higher education, including faculty, webmasters, administrators, marketers, vendors, counselors, consultants, etc on their current blogroll.  It’s a great area to find people doing similar things and learn about new ideas going on all over the world.  Happy reading!