Archive for February, 2012
It’s good to start the new year with a posting on NOVA, the Community College of Northern Virginia. NOVA is a multi-campus community college, with seventy-five thousand full- and part-time students. It is the largest institution of higher education in Virginia, and the second largest community college in the country. Located on campuses and sites from Alexandria to Woodbridge in the greater Washington, DC, area of northern Virginia, NOVA faces many of the leadership challenges confronting large multi-campus colleges: How to keep faculty and staff on the several campuses and sites connected? How to manage communication when campuses and sites have different programs and serve different populations, including large numbers of international students? How to bring about shared work on student learning outcomes and student success? Among many things to admire about NOVA is their success in keeping the curriculum united. By that I mean uniting the liberal arts transfer and the career and technical education (CTE) programs—certificates and associates’ (AA and AS) and applied associates’ (AAA and AAS) degrees, all together.
Not to say it isn’t hard work. NOVA has made an investment in learning across the curriculum, in liberal education across the curriculum. They’ve made it a priority to “look both ways,” to work with local schools and with George Mason University through an innovative program called Pathway to the Baccalaureate. They see the AAA/AAS not as “terminal” because NOVA and the Virginia Community College System have partnered with a number of universities to create transfer pathways for students in CTE programs. They’ve been working for years with student learning outcomes for all programs. To keep things together, they’ve put responsibility and authority for the curriculum in one office, led by Sharon (Sheri) Robertson, associate vice president for academic services.
By: Rebecca Frost Davis, Program Officer for the Humanities, National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education
Wednesday night Ken O’Donnell opened the AAC&U 2012 Annual Meeting by telling us that the road connecting civic and commercial activity is “collected work toward a common purpose.” He backed that up in part by citing the no. 1 answer on the National Association of Colleges and Employers survey of what employers are seeking: “ability to work in a team structure.” I’ve been promoting collaborative projects (usually between different institutions) for almost ten years now, and I routinely work in a distributed team with colleagues at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. But, after hearing O’Donnell speak, I wondered, how do we teach that skill to students?
This is not an idle query for me; in fact, it’s a homework assignment of sorts. I’m currently part of a working group (collaboration again) that is collectively brainstorming a curriculum for digital humanities pedagogy workshops, and collaboration is one of the topics we see as key. As those who attended the Digital Humanities for Undergraduates panel on Thursday know, collaboration is one of the practices that differentiate the digital humanities from traditional humanities studies.
