A Global Online Land-Grant University?
Awhile back I stumbled on Ken Udas as I was exploring some thinking that John Gardner at WSU is also doing — what is the role of a land grant university in this century. Udas asks:
My experience suggests that western textbooks carry too big a price tag. How would we localize the learning environment and content? Would the organizational model be a network or a centralized institution?
I would answer that the localization would come from choosing authentic problems and assessments local to the learner’s context. Doing so moves the design of the course away from textbooks, and towards learner-collected sets of resources. Dave Cormier’s Feedbook proposes that the course “text” would be assembled from a collection of RSS feeds. This makes the text current and social and encourages that the learner interact with the community. Engaging community is to me at the heart of the land grant mission.