Access: We believe that institutions need to do a better job helping students to complete college when they face barriers. We believe that many of these barriers are academic issues, despite generally being quarantined into “student life” sectors of the university. Textbook costs, food insecurity, transportation costs, childcare challenges: research shows that these are some of the main barriers that prevent students from affording college; because we know this, we actively seek solutions within our program to ameliorate these challenges for our students, even as we advocate nationally for free college. I am particularly focused now on accessibility, and trying to do a better job with our textbook and my syllabi to make them universally accessible to all learners. Basically, everything we do as we design the program starts with a fundamental question: how can we make education more accessible to everyone? This connects to #2 above.

Our office is open weekdays plus one evening a week (and generally on Sundays as well). Unlike most academic departments, students can walk in anytime and get help directly from us (from me, our Program Support Administrator, our paid Peer Mentors) on technology (ePorts, annotation tools, Twitter, etc), writing, class assignments, program applications, general advising, etc. Everyone who works in our office– faculty, staff, and students– are qualified to assist students with all of the components of being a part of our major. This drop-in ethos has been hugely helpful to keeping our retention levels high, since it’s harder to slip through the cracks when there is near-constant support available. We also have a commitment to replying to student emails within 24 hours (generally within 30 minutes) and the ability to use low-tech videoconferencing (usually through appearin) to accommodate commuters and online students more easily.

Students work with three faculty members (me and two disciplinary advisors) to design their contracts and craft a program statement

students who find new passions late in the game

By collaborating a variety of fields, the researchers have been able to close gaps and gather more information that will lead to future research and development in the field.

Overall, it takes many different disciplines in order to successfully fly a group of people around the world.

Because at the end of the day, your opinion and your thoughts matter, and you need to make those important to you before they are important to anyone else.

In today’s world one of the top aspects an employer will look for when hiring an individual, is creati

very tile plays a role in the outcome of a mosaic, but the mosaic wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t an artist, or group of artists, to put the tiles together.

We see the roots of interdisciplinarity beginning to show in society; now we need it to grow and show its potential

 In 2011 the idea of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) was created allowing hundreds of thousands of people to take a single course at once.  For instance, Stanford University created a MOOC in the fall of 2011 that had 160,000 students in attendance.  Distance learning started with being sent a single chapter, but now allows students to complete a bachelor’s degree in two years from an accredited institution.

Harvard began with a single house and a single acre of land, but has now grown to an astounding 5,083 acres

When Plato was 40, he created the open-air “Academy” just outside the city of Athens in 387 B.C.  A majority of the students, approximately nine-tenths, traveled from other cities in order to attend the lectures

In academic discourse, interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory. Interdisciplinary knowledge involves familiarity with components of two or more disciplines. Interdisciplinary research combines components of two or more disciplines in the search or creation of new knowledge, operations, or artistic expressions. Interdisciplinary education merges components of two or more disciplines in a single program of instruction. Interdisciplinary theory takes interdisciplinary knowledge, research, or education as its main objects of study.

Interdisciplinary educator Allen F. Repko suggests that “multidisciplinarity” is like a fruit bowl, where different disciplines are represented by the different fruits that are placed together in a bowl but which do not mix much or change shape themselves. Interdisciplinarity (Photo CCBYNCND Anna Wyrwol) “Interdisciplinarity” is more like a fruit smoothie, where the disciplines are blended together–integrated– to create something new.

Instead of helping students learn and grow as individuals, find meaning in their lives, or understand their role in society, college has become a chaotic maze where students try to pick up something useful as they search for the exit: the degree needed to obtain decent employmen

If students experience their domain as a graded extension of the classroom, then their ownership is over ‘assignments.’ How often do traditional ‘assignments’ misrepresent student interests, passion, and rigor? Giving a student ownership over data means nothing if it doesn’t allow them to determine that data. At that point the student once again loses agency in relation to the institution. Promoting digital ownership is different than assigning work in publicly accessible spaces.

but until students see this domain as a space that rewards rigor and experimentation, it will not promote student agency.

But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity

Over the course of the first year, in a set of lab seminars facilitated by instructional technologists, librarians, and faculty advisors from across the curriculum, students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. They would experiment with server management tools via graphical user interfaces such as cPanel or other commodity equivalents. They would install scripts with one-click installers such as SimpleScripts. They would play with wikis and blogs; they would tinker and begin to assemble a platform to support their publishing, their archiving, their importing and exporting, their internal and external information connections. They would become, in myriad small but important ways, system administrators for their own digital lives.3 In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career — and beyond.

Best of all, faculty could bring students into these environments without fear that they would be embarrassed by their lack of skill or challenged by students’ unfamiliar innovations.

It isn’t simply a blog or a bit of Web space and storage at the school’s dot-edu, but their own domain – the dot com (or dot net, etc) of the student’s choosing. The school facilitates the purchase of the domain; it helps with installation of WordPress and other open source software; it offers both technical and instructional support; and it hosts the site until graduation when domain ownership is transferred to the student.

But almost all arguments about student privacy, whether those calling for more restrictions or fewer, fail to give students themselves a voice, let alone some assistance in deciding what to share online.