WCET is the national leader in the practice, policy, & advocacy of technology-enhanced learning in higher education.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced colleges and universities to move their face-to-face courses to remote and online formats. Instructors heroically worked to ensure continuity of learning for their students. Considering this shift online, Mark Porcaro, the Executive Director of Online Learning at Wichita State University and WCET Steering Committee member, reflected that learning isn’t all about […]
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In Harold Ramis’ 1993 classic, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray portrays a television weatherman sent to cover Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day who ends up repeating the day over and over again. At first, Murray’s character, Phil Connors, uses the time loop to his advantage—binge eating, having one night stands, committing robbery, and manipulating local residents […]
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The WCET team enjoys planning our two live events each year. Our goal is to provide an opportunity for our community to come together to network, discuss new ideas, learn from each other, and bring important promising practices back to our organizations. This year, in the “Age of COVID-19,” we were unable to host our […]
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Even before the COVID-19 global pandemic, higher education was struggling to make sense of what David La Piana and Melissa Mendes call a VUCA world in The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution: Real-Time Strategic Planning in a Rapid-Response World. Originally coined by the US military to describe a post-Cold War world, VUCA stands for: Volatile– The world […]
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Institutions have juggled many issues to maintain educational continuity during the pandemic. WCET has addressed accessibility, Veterans benefits, crisis coordination, Open Educational Resources, the U.S. Department of Education’s ability to exercise enforcement discretion for Title IV eligibility , and more! However, we must now address the issue of institutional management of state licensing board requirements […]
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Today’s installment of What’s Next comes from Katie Carroll, Assistant Director of Admissions from the University of Wyoming. Katie shares with us how Wyoming is using Cowboy Joe, the institution’s chatbot, to help students, faculty, and staff navigate many of the challenges resulting from the pandemic. As the need for answering questions and providing information […]
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I have long marveled at how quickly and effectively WCET pivots to support its members when we most need assistance. Remember the announcement of new guidelines that regional accreditors were going to use to evaluate distance education (CRAC-2001)? State authorization enforcement by the Department of Education? WCET helped us navigate around those icebergs. The Coronavirus […]
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I don’t know about you, but the last few weeks (months?) have felt surreal. Not only on a professional level, but on a personal one as well. That uncanny feeling I have about ‘these times’ has continued as our local and state leaders and our federal governments are discussing what it will take to start […]
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As an ongoing part of WCET’s efforts to help faculty and staff respond to the pandemic, today Tanya Spilovoy, our resident Open Educational Resources (OER) expert, takes a look at the role openness and OER can play as institutions move away from rushing to deliver remote instruction to more deliberately designed online courses for the […]
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Today we provide our second installment of the “What’s Next” stories, featuring the experiences of colleges and universities moving from the initial rapid deployment phase to the next phase of planning for how to deal with the reality of medium-term impacts of COVID-19. Using Russ Poulin’s metaphor, just as we have just finished bailing out […]
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