Higher Education Innovative Projects

This book covers the topics such as online learning methodologies, case studies, new technologies in learning (such as virtual reality, augmented reality, holograms, and artificial intelligence), adaptive learning, and project-based learning. New technologies provide us with new opportunities to create new learning experiences, leveraging research from a variety of disciplines along with imagination and creativity. The Learning Ideas Conference was created to bring researchers, practitioners, and others together to discuss, innovate, and create. The Learning Ideas Conference 2021 was the 14th annual conference and the first under its new name (following on its predecessors, the International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace and the International Conference on Interactive Collaborative and Blended Learning). The conference was held online from June 14-18, 2021, and included two special tracks: The ALICE (Adaptive Learning via Interactive, Collaborative and Emotional Approaches) Special Track and a track entitled Building a University of Tomorrow, from the Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in China. The papers included in this book may be of interest to researchers in pedagogy and learning theory, university faculty members and administrators, learning and development specialists, user experience designers, and others.

In this book you will read stories told by faculty who have redesigned their university courses using the Decision-Based Learning pedagogy and the impact this powerful strategy can have on student learning. It should be of use to anyone teaching and designing curricula in higher education settings.

Ultimately, the authors make a compelling case not only for this turn to learning but for creating new pathways for nonfaculty learning careers, understanding the limits of professional organizations and social media, and the need to establish this new interdisciplinary field of learning innovation.

Imagining the universities of the future. How can we re-envision the university? Too many examples of what passes for educational innovation today—MOOCs especially—focus on transactions, on questions of delivery. In Alternative Universities, David J. Staley argues that modern universities suffer from a poverty of imagination about how to reinvent themselves. Anyone seeking innovation in higher education today should concentrate instead, he says, on the kind of transformational experience universities enact. In this exercise in speculative design, Staley proposes ten models of innovation in higher education that expand our ideas of the structure and scope of the university, suggesting possibilities for what its future might look like. What if the university were designed around a curriculum of seven broad cognitive skills or as a series of global gap year experiences? What if, as a condition of matriculation, students had to major in three disparate subjects? What if the university placed the pursuit of play well above the acquisition and production of knowledge? By asking bold "What if?" questions, Staley assumes that the university is always in a state of becoming and that there is not one "idea of the university" to which all institutions must aspire. This book specifically addresses those engaged in university strategy—university presidents, faculty, policy experts, legislators, foundations, and entrepreneurs—those involved in what Simon Marginson calls "university making." Pairing a critique tempered to our current moment with an explanation of how change and disruption might contribute to a new "golden age" for higher education, Alternative Universities is an audacious and essential read.

The inspiration for this timely book is the pressing need for fresh ideas and innovations in U.S. higher education. At the heart of the volume is the realization that higher education must evolve in fundamental ways if it is to respond to changing professional, economic, and technological circumstances, and if it is to successfully reach and prepare a vast population of students—traditional and nontraditional alike—for success in the coming decades. This collection of provocative articles by leading scholars, writers, innovators, and university administrators examines the current higher education environment and its chronic resistance to change; the rise of for-profit universities; the potential future role of community colleges in a significantly revised higher education realm; and the emergence of online learning as a means to reshape teaching and learning and to reach new consumers of higher education. Combining trenchant critiques of current conditions with thought-provoking analyses of possible reforms and new directions, Reinventing Higher Education is an ambitious exploration of possible future directions for revitalized American colleges and universities.

Higher education worldwide faces similar challenges—how to cope with globalization, the provision of access to underserved populations, and others.