With so much focus on the Middle East in the media today, it’s easy to minimize the political, geographical, social, and economic turmoil that’s happening right across our boarder to the south. How do we step up as good neighbors in the politically charged, economically driven hornet’s nest in Central and South America?
Ep 13: Fernando Casafranca and Latin America
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The first public article went live at midnight here:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0926biz-namingrights0926.html
It’s way too late for me to write too much that’s articulate, but I’ve been told that there’s a press conference at 10:00 AM PST to announce details and that we’d all know more then. I’ve got a chat scheduled with the folks who put the deal together tomorrow (today!) afternoon and will hopefully post more about how this came about then.
Capella University commissioned a study recently on the value of returning to school. The results lend support for just about everything we’re doing in the industry to figure out the rapidly evolving learning models. You can find the results site at http://www.degreesofopportunity.org. There’s also an interview with the head researcher on the page, Dr. Lyungai Mbilinyi from University of Washington.
Amidst all the brouhaha about quality of education, it appears that the number of people wanting to head back to school in a non-traditional fashion just keeps growing, fueling the fly-by-night programs and extending this sharks v. jets street fight between the traditionals. We need to move past this. From the findings:
- Only one-third of those who would like more education said that they would “probably pursue this.â€
- The top two barriers to pursuing higher education were:
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- Finding the time for school amidst work, family, and other commitments.
- Finding the money for school, including the need to provide for themselves and their family while attending school.
We need to launch a campaign that educates on the realities of education — not just the beyond-the-degree benefits. I was talking with Mark Alexander today about other student services organizations that exist specifically to support the extra-curricular needs of students. This one struck me: Student Resource Services.
What genius, right? With now a full 60% of attendance in higher education coming from a non-traditional age range (from the survey and interview), it should make perfect sense that this group begin to demand the same services they receive at work from their Employee Support Organizations. What are the biggest obstacles for colleges and universities to get into this sort of support business for their students?
On the heels of my last post, Joe Cockrell sends me this article from the AOL Research & Learn site. It mentions one of our students, but the sentiment is broader. Take a read — it makes me want to go to class…
And seriously… baby boomers are hitting 60 at a rate of one ever 7 seconds? I guess the more important question is for how long?
We have a development group under the Apollo Group umbrella called Apollo Publishing. The team there has mutated over the years a number of times from publishing house to licensing house to dev center. Today, it serves pieces of all of those, and more. The most interesting: it’s a skunkworks for projects in education technology that may — or may not — make it into the classroom.
I was there yesterday visiting Colin Smith, one of the developers there working on a side RSS project for me. We got to talking about Second Life, one of my all-time favorite time sinks, and he introduced me to Second life: Second Campus. It’s the Apollo Group foray into avatar based learning.
Technorati Tags: Second Life, Technology, University of Phoenix
