My advice to Baruch would be simple. Embrace technology and embrace those that do so. From students and professors to the outside companies Baruch does business with, they should encourage us all to integrate new media in our everyday academic life. Discussions on Blackboard shouldn't be limited to online classes. They shouldn't even be taking place on Blackboard. Facebook serves as a great way for many people to participate in a conversation and share ideas. We already demonstrated how twitter and blogging can be integrated in education. Well, now its time to make it happen.
Its not enough to just encourage this. You need to provide students with the tools to do so. There are laptops available for loan, many desktops for student use but that simply doesn't go far enough. Regardless of the platform, Mac OSX, iOS, Windows, Android, or even an open source platform every student and faculty member needs to be empowered with a device that is compatible with each others and shares similar formats. They can get the ball rolling by using free cloud services such of Google Docs.
While these devices aren't cheap they can certainly be purchased at a cheaper rate in bulk and paid off in our technology fee over time. For instance, if every student got a 16GB iPad 2 for $350.00 (assuming bulk education discount) that can be paid off in just under 4 semesters of our technology fee. The remains fees would go to creating an infrastructure to maintain these devices. Once everyone is on a similar platform, sharing and collaborating would become near effortless. The library could be replaced (rather complimented) by a digital library and interactive textbooks would bring learning into the 21st Century,
I think Baruch is definately resourceful, but they do need to have more educated blogs, or site which can support not only faculty but also stuents with guidelines and support to various softwares, regardless of the platforms.
ReplyDelete