Good evening,
I wanted to share a bit of information with you all about tomorrow’s UGC meeting. During the
first hour of our meeting we will be joined by Doug Blandy, Senior Vice Provost for Academic
Affairs. Doug is not giving a formal presentation but the plan is to have a more informal
discussion of issues related to online education at UO. He is particularly interested in
sharing with us, and getting our feedback on, a project that he has been working on with a
small group of deans to develop a “pink paper” on education and technology.
I provided him with a brief overview of our discussion of online education and I suggested a
few areas that I thought would be particularly useful to discuss in tomorrow’s meeting:
1) The oversight of online courses, and how we best make this review process efficient and
consistent with that of traditional courses
2) How we best promote best practices for online courses and education
3) The vision for future growth of online courses at UO, including those offered by
departments and those through the self-support Academic Extension model
4) His perspective on whether UO or individual faculty at UO should contribute to online
consortium efforts such as edX or Coursera
5) His thoughts on MOOC courses at other institutions and whether we should be giving credit
for (some of) these courses, as is being considered by OUS
I’m looking forward to the discussion and to hearing all the questions that you have for him.
Also, I wanted to pass along a few articles and links. These are just for general information
and are not necessarily specific to tomorrow’s meeting. I’ve attached two recent articles
from the NY Times on MOOCs.
These types of courses are getting a lot of attention and I think it would be useful to think
through the implications for undergraduate education at UO.
Second, Ian McNeely passed along a policy document from UCSD regarding remote and distance
education. I think this is something we should definitely talk about, perhaps at tomorrow’s
meeting.
Finally, after the last meeting a few of us spoke to Yong Zhao and his group about getting a
demo of Oba. We’ve scheduled that demo for the last meeting of the term (Nov. 30). The plan
is to have a 20-30 min.
demo followed by 10-15 min. for Q&A. It seemed to Karen and me that the low hanging fruit for
using Oba is the FIG program since it blends the academic and social. I’m looking forward to
seeing the demo and thinking about whether it could work for some (or all) of the FIGs. In
case anyone wants to get a jump on things, here’s a link to the Oba site:
https://www.obaverse.net/welcome/
See you tomorrow.
Josh
-J. Josh Snodgrass, Ph.D.
Chair, Undergraduate Council
Williams Fellow, 2012-2013
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology University of Oregon
E-mail: jjosh@uoregon.edu
Homepage: http://www.pinniped.net/snodgrass.html