Parachutes are routinely used to prevent death or major traumatic injury among individuals jumping from aircraft.

However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.

OER provide instructors with free and legal permissions to engage in continuous quality-improvement processes such as incremental adaptation and revision, empowering instructors to take ownership and control over their courses and textbooks in a manner not previously possible.

College students spend an average of $900 per year on textbooks—26 percent of the cost of tuition at a public, four-year university.

Education Is Sharing

commitment to learner-driven education

Open Pedagogy is not a magical panacea for the crises that currently challenge higher ed. That being said, we both feel that Open Pedagogy offers a set of dynamic commitments that could help faculty and students articulate a sustainable, vibrant, and inclusive future for our educational institutions.

What are your hopes for education, particularly for higher education? What vision do you work toward when you design your daily professional practices in and out of the classroom? How do you see the roles of the learner and the teacher? What challenges do your students face in their learning environments, and how does your pedagogy address them?

Why? because it’s not information that was dumped on me. It’s not information that I was forced to regurgitate. It’s information that I voluntarily sought out and connect with my personal interests.

I have always been an outstanding student and I assumed, until recently, that it meant that I was a good learner (and under the conventional structure, I was).

Little did I know that being accustomed to this form of learning would end up being the very issue I had with learning.

a disconnect between classroom and everyday learning

“The federal Department of Health and Human Services estimates that only 17% of the US population is functioning at optimal mental health.”

Never neglect yourself, even if you think you’re being selfish.

in the long run.

One of your biggest priorities should honestly be your well being and how productive you are relates to how you are feeling at that time in your life.

Instead of graduating with a comprehensive understanding of a single discipline like anthropology or economics, they graduate with a smattering of knowledge, spread across many fields.

sometimes the structures across departments do not align with one another, making interdisciplinarity collaboration a challenge.

The communication barrier poses a unique challenge to interdisciplinarity

The first barrier facing interdisciplinary students is attitude.

Society needs people to be masters in specific areas because they contribute to the understanding of the world at large

Most, if not every, system in the world depends on interdisciplinarity to function.

If students are living their lives in preparation for life, when will they start living?

“Relevancy” is an essential component of interdisciplinarity. First, what does it mean for something to be relevant?

The relevancy of education is often overlooked by students, especially young students who have not yet graduated from high school.

Despite the clear benefits of interdisciplinary studies, many politicians and educators continue to cut resources to the humanities, arguing that an education should be skills-based and career oriented

If an applicant can’t work in a team, write a grant, or engage meaningfully with other people, he may be turned away from a job or his career may not flourish.

negative consequences of a specialized education are becoming more apparent

Specialized education was in high demand, changing the structure of many colleges and universities across the United States of America and the world.

Interdisciplinary studies, as a concept, would not be possible without the foundational structure of disciplinary studies

Students have been learning and teachers have been teaching since the beginning of human existence, probably often without even knowing it.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the higher education landscape was heavily influenced by economic demands.

The objective definition of “discipline,” and the disciplines themselves are continuously changing as time goes on, making the idea more difficult to define.

Universities of this time focused on faith because it was the foundation of their civilizations.

Socrates was skeptical about a teacher’s ability to transmit knowledge directly to a student.

religion and eventually evolved to where we are today.

would be the number one use for interdisciplinary study.

children’s mental health care

but it wasn’t their specialty, so they didn’t have the insight on potential impacts than an environmental scientist would have had.

in order to find solutions to world problems

The disciplines, where we find wealths of specific knowledge and, on occasion, narrow-minded specialists, are the very building blocks of interdisciplinary studies.

still make a social connection when in competition

It never really came to mind that teachers of the same subject were together during the school day simply to discuss developments in their field; I just thought it worked out that they were friends

part of individual social groups, kind of like cliques

The case for interdisciplinary education, it seems to me, is not as straightforward as its knowledge and research counterparts.

Even under the best circumstances, an interdisciplinarian is unlikely to gain as complete a mastery of her broad area as the specialists upon whose work her own endeavor is based.

Social Change: Although the modern university is rich in intellectual resources, it is only mildly effective as an agent of social change. One would expect a stronghold of professional thinkers to have a fundamental impact on politics, but it doesn’t: the academy enjoys little success in mobilizing its vast intellectual resources to improve society.

On the other hand, scientists in a divided culture provide a knowledge of some potentialities which is theirs alone.

Disciplinary Cracks: According to most interdisciplinary theorists, some problems of knowledge are neglected because they “fail to fit in with disciplinary boundaries thus falling in the interstices between them”

An outsider’s perspective, then, is particularly valuable at times of crisis.

Yet there is an unexpected quality about it

sanguine

charlatanism

dilettantism

esoteric

stranded in ever-shrinking islands of competence

The most widely cited attempts break down interdisciplinarity into components such as multidisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity

Humanity’s ever-growing store of knowledge

the ideal of the unity of knowledge–that a genuine scholar ought to be familiar with the sum total of humanity’s intellectual and artistic output–gave way to specialization.

As a consequence, the West lost even a pretense of common culture.

Some disciplines use a mix of these methods.

Disciplines are made up of many parts.

Both are very useful for interdisciplinarians, since breaking a problem or concept down may help us see the different disciplines that are involved, which will then allow us to organize our research approach.

novelty 

amalgamation

homely

“Interdisciplinarity” is more like a fruit smoothie, where the disciplines are blended together–integrated– to create something new.

17 The BIG Terms

She doesn’t always enjoy the highly disciplinary nature of her program.”

Today Stanford continues to offer interdisciplinary courses like “History, Literature, and the Arts,” and “History, Science, and Medicine.”

bring groups of students and faculty members together to work over a sustained period of time

The university’s lack of a meaningful liberal arts curriculum understandably sends many anxious students into the safer harbors of study that lead directly to positions in the job market.

Clearly we have to re-evaluate our entire system of education for what it is: an 18- year learning continuum that prepares citizens for a life of learning.

In fact, students have much less time than four years.

give coherence and meaning to life, they can feel a deeply unsettling emptiness in their lives.

“The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.”

with other experienced managers.”

When we ask to improve a situation, particularly if it is a public one, we find ourselves facing not a problem, but a cluster of problems … and none of these problems can be tackled using linear or sequential methods.”

requires us to have a better understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields that intersect and overlap

Colleges are becoming academic superstores, vast collections of courses, stacked up like sinks and lumber for do-it-yourselfers to try to assemble on their own into a meaningful whole.

the degree needed to obtain decent employment.

But a major failure of our higher-education system is that it has largely come to serve as a job-readiness program.

80 percent said it is “very important” for them to find work that “will make a positive difference in people’s lives.”

And that feels really good because unlike many other majors where it is easy to feel trapped or to feel stuck in this routine that everyone who has graduated with your degree has gone through- the same process; this study has me standing alone and in this case, that isn’t a bad thing.

Just think about it, if everyone just stuck to guidelines and tradition, the world would never grow and would never have the chance to become any better.

love of learning

For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged.

But that wasn’t progress.

Sometimes, however, progress means looping back to earlier ideas whose vitality and importance were unrecognized or underexplored at the time, and bringing those ideas back into play in a new context.

“I want to know where my ones and zeros are stored,” said Bryan Jackson, referring to the basic binary code in which computers ‘think.’ “And I want my students to know that that’s something they can ask about, and learn to manage for themselves.”

Even if students are encouraged to create online portfolios or to use services like Google Apps for Education in order to store all their work, they don’t actually get to take that work with them when they move or graduate

rarely do schools give students the opportunity to demonstrate the good work that they do publicly. Nor do schools give students the opportunity to decide what and when and how that public, online display should look like.

Having one’s own domain means that students have much more say over what they present to the world, in terms of their public profiles, professional portfolios, and digital identities.

that it is important to have one’s own space in order to develop one’s ideas and one’s craft.

the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.

need

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. Students have little agency when it comes to education technology – much like they have little agency in education itself.

arguments that restrictions on data might hinder research or the development of learning analytics or data-driven educational software.

It makes sense when students find ownership in what they choose to create, how they put it online, and how it engages a broader audience.

encourages a pedagogical shift.

They are questioning how their student’s ‘domains’ can engage broader audiences and promote high quality, original scholarship.

Can ‘ownership’ and ‘assignment’ go hand in hand?

How often do traditional ‘assignments’ misrepresent student interests, passion, and rigor?

The web is a network for conversations, and if students still see their audience as a teacher with a red pen, then nothing changes.

connected to a public dialogue?

Traditional assignments don’t necessarily empower students when they have to post them in a public space.

“To own one’s domain gives students an understanding of how Web technologies work. It puts them in a much better position to control their work, their data, their identity online.”

andrewrikard.com

Do I Own My Domain if You Grade it?