About this Blog

Are MOOCs going to replace the traditional classroom? Will states ever fund higher education like they did in the 20th Century? How do we adopt a monastery model to a society in which non-traditional students are the norm?

These are the kinds of questions that UVU faces as we plan for our future. This blog is a space for exploring them.

Part of my role as UVU's Assistant Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning is to serve as the institution's resident higher ed futurist. (I promise, the term wasn't my idea.) Thinking in the language of SWOT analysis, it's my job to look ahead and try to understand the opportunities and threats that the university may see in the near future. I see it as especially important that these ideas be subjected to critical investigation given the hype that accompanies so many of them.

This blog is part of that role, but not in the way some might expect. I'm not offering a definitive view of the future here. Partly, that's because such views are wrong a lot more often than they are right, and unlike pundits I expect to be held somewhat accountable for the substance of what I write, not just the number of pageviews. What's here is speculative, a rough draft or first take on issues confronting higher education. Expect to see a lot of the ideas in here abandoned later. Expect to see me happy, not heartbroken, to find that I was wrong.

In fact, I'm really not even intending for this site to be read regularly. My approach to prognostication is mainly curatorial. I follow a lot of really sharp people on Twitter (and try to avoid the idiots that have the media's attention). That's a pool of news and ideas being circulated about higher education. These blog posts draw on that pool to pull together the ideas about a topic, a place to systematize my thinking on them and bring some coherence to the ideas. Ultimately the posts themselves will be brought together in some bigger, more synthetic form to be presented to the campus community.

Needless to say with that kind of description, this is an unofficial blog. It certainly doesn't represent the views of the university or of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning, and may not even represent my own views. I may bat around ideas that I'm not really buying, giving them the most charitable presentation possible in order to figure out what I don't buy about them.

This being a blog, of course, I will say one other thing: Don't read the comments.